Except that it IS a bill of attainder. It's specifically targeting one individual a senator disagrees with. I'm extremely liberal and have a huge amount of distaste for this kind of evasion, but choosing to punish a choice after its made is wrong. It's absolutely wrong, regardless of whether it's the revocation of a privilege or assigning of a punishment, it falls into the category of judging via law.
No person should EVER have to fear that a choice they are making will be illegal in the future. One is accountable only to the laws that exist when decisions are made and one's own ethical principles. Saverin has no ethical principles; that's still his choice.
Expatriates from every country have family, friends, and historical ties to the country they came from. Denying visitation for that reason is morally wrong. Moreover I'm universally opposed to bills of attainder and ex-post-facto laws. They were stupid and contemptible back during the ACORN stupidity, and they're still an unreasonable abuse of legislative power now. If this act applies in any way to Saverin, it would be an undermining of the rule of law.
There's an extent to which the bill of rights can't properly be applied in the modern world, and we've addressed that by allowing certain variations of things to be allowed(e.g. High yield explosives, and chemical weapons don't count as arms for the second amendment). We should rewrite the thing and actually put into the constitution the things we think are protected and the ones we don't.
That's the only way this is getting better. And since Americans consider the constitution, and the bill of rights in particular, to be the divine word of god, we won't fix it.
We've allowed too much of the changes to our rights be by fiat instead of acknowledging them in the constitution.
Now, where are the weak links in there? Where are the points at which there'd be a paper trail, or inexplicable meetings? Let's go fetch you some evidence.
I think you don't know about the reply limit, actually. Thanks for being a hypocrite, and refusing to actually clarify your point in any meaningful way. A terrible analogy, capped with a terrible "I win" statement. I imagine you can't even consider that some people argue to be more informed, not to be right.
Yep, you sure can make up character traits for me. I'm sorry you're so far behind the science that you honestly believe there is any way, shape, or form that global warming could not exist. That's painfully misinformed. The rest of your post jumps off from their into a bed of tangent.
Who's doing the throwing back in their face? Why is it 100% of the time? How can scientists pass peer review when they've faked their results?
You've alleged corruption without a shred of evidence. Why? You've invented a narrative, but that's not the same as legitimate argument. It's all based on psychic understandings of free money for doing something where ostensibly the free money would be available either way. No one ever overtly tells anyone it's this way, there's no societal expectation it's this way(how about all the republicans who disagree?) You just believe everyone involved has some secret understanding with everyone else.
It's paranoid. It would be plausible IF there were evidence pointing that way, or people who stood up to such a system out of ignorance of it, and fell along the path you describe.
I'll tell you the same thing I told someone else in this thread. Make a flow-chart of decision making. Who's telling who what to do, and how, until you get back to someone with a clear, direct financial interest in the results of a paper. Look at the length of said flow chart, and all the possible points of leakage, and tell me there can be complicity there. And be specific. Identify the real people who are making the manipulative decisions you allege, and why.
If you do, I will happily help you find evidence of your claims. The reality is you probably are too afraid of self-examination to even do the simple step of examining what you are saying in detail.
Right, there's your problem: What makes you think skeptics don't accept the possibility that atmospheric composition affects planetary cooling rates? The main disagreement at this point is over things like feedbacks - whether they are (and will continue to be) net-positive, how high they might be, how much harm that might cause over time interval X, how certain we can be about all this, what alternatives we have available to us, whether the cost of pursuing these alternatives outweighs their benefits (both now and in the foreseeable future), and basically whether we should be panicking yet or whether we can reasonably afford to wait and learn more.
You also don't need to posit a "monstrous conspiracy" where mere publication bias suffices: scary results are easier to publish and make for better press releases than non-scary ones. "It's worse than we thought!" makes a good headline; "It's not quite as bad as we thought" does not.:-)
That is not what "skeptics" have been saying and you damn well know it. I don't feel up to dealing with a flagrant liar right now. If the debate were actually centered around such useful details, there'd be a hope for progress, but no, it's "accepting global warming makes you a serial killer". Remember the subject of the thread? No?
bigger government --> bigger raises, promotions, staffs, budgets to play with for government workers. Again, not claiming conspiracy here, everyone's just working for their own self-interest, which coincides with bigger government.
I'm imagining myself in the role of a grant-awarding bureaucrat. I ask myself "would I get a raise from my boss if I chose to give funding to A or B". A is a grant proposal that describes building a long term climate model improvement based of temperature readings in the Atlantic, cross-referenced with atmospheric carbon levels. B is the same proposal, but is by a person who had previous published a paper proposing a stronger correlation to stellar output to global temperature. If I am looking to move up the ladder in DC, do I choose A or B?
The correct answer, as I see it, is choosing the one that will get the most useful results fastest and cheapest, regardless of anything else, because my promotion depends on doing my job well, not on the outcome of the paper. Choosing who to fund on any other criteria doesn't seem like it would influence my chances at all. Being a skilled employee(at least a masters in an appropriate field so I can understand the proposals I'm given) my workload is not necessarily lightened by more co-workers. Please correct my scenario so I can be in the mindset of a selfish auditor who can somehow benefit from the fraud you allege.
Do scientists live off one grant? Where does their next one come from? Same place? oh...
Tenure or not, they're getting cash from Uncle Sam to do research, so are inclined to support bigger government. No bribes or "directed" research (or conspiracy) needed.
And again, I repeat a challenge, now for the third time in the thread. By what mechanism does "uncle sam" communicate this dependency between research results and grants. Other than republicans telling them this is what they do, why would a climate scientist go "oh better agree with everyone else"? The point is, the way you put it, there must to be a conspiracy involving just about everyone in the field. There is no other way. And they literally have to repeatedly as a universal group decide over and over again that the next grant in a specific sub-field, from one particular source(believe it or not there are lots of private foundations that support general research too, not enough, but some), is worth more than their credibility, ethics, and legacy. Not only that but they have to fake data that looks realistic and is consistent with the other fakers out there. It's just not possible. Just from the government->scientists part. Then you require a beneficiaries->government grant givers path too.
The only demonstrated example of the government interfering with climate research I've ever heard of was when Bush administration specifically had NASA reports redacted by non-scientists to remove references to Global Warming research. That's a demonstrated example that was well documented, so the kind of meddling you mention does leak from time to time, but we've never heard in the other direction. I think you need to build yourself a flow-chart showing exactly who tells who what to do, and by what mechanism they convince the counter-party to do it, all the way from the beneficiaries(particular people in particular roles) to the scientists who publish particular papers on the subject. Draw it out, with lots of specifics on paper, and then tell me you think it's still credible.
If you do that, I'll help you track down evidence to support your claim. If you don't do that, you're afraid of (or too lazy to)critically analyzing your own beliefs and there's nothing I can do to change your mind.
Do we cheer on the Black Plague in the 1300s then because it had been warming for a couple centuries? "Must've been those pesky human's fault. That's gotta be why it cooled for a couple centuries afterwards. Wait, there were more people in 1700 than 130
Clarify, please. By what mechanism could you possibly propose that climate scientists are similar to migrating rodents? An analogy works by common factors. This one sounds more like "lemmings are stupid(which as I indicated is a false assumption) therefor any other group in general agreement with itself is stupid". Was I misreading the claim because it was too minimalistic or off-topic?
Yes, that's true. I do not in fact have the qualifications to make a final assessment of the data. Regardless, I can answer crazy conspiracy theories directly.
To clarify, this is an allegation that is easy to make and is never demonstrated through historical examples. The only justification I ever hear is by means of hypothetical examples.
I don't mean to speak for the parent poster, but here's my 2 cents:
Never hurts to hear another perspective.
"Tell me who benefits from "bigger government" as a completely abstract concept." - Government employees, government funded researchers, politicians, and the businesses they write earmarks for, etc. Pretty simple really...
Except they don't. Politicians benefit from being reelected, employees benefit from raises and promotions. Those don't mesh at all with the concept of bigger government. Not even a little, so I'll move on to...
Businesses that get earmarks, while the most plausible, don't do better from more regulation, they do better from more spending, and those are not the same. None of that fits the concept I was referring to. Furthermore we're getting even further separated from the people who are presenting the so-called false information, creating an even vaster conspiracy. The chain would be: businesses that get paid by the government have an unclear investment in the concept of a bigger government, so they buy law-makers, who instruct(by what means? laws? comitees? very public record here) the grant givers, who give grants to complicit scientists, who publish false information. Look at that chain of responsibility, and tell me it's robust and able to engage in both secrecy and efficacy all the way down.
"possibility that atmospheric composition affects planetary cooling rates." - We can acknowledge this without accepting with 100% certainty that current models that statistically fit old data can accurately predict future temperatures. We can also disagree about the potential effects, and politically what to do about it.
"How do you come to the conclusion that the government is bribing scientists?" - They're funding most of them. Not bribes per se, but grants flow to those the government approves of.
Yes, but you're missing an important characteristic here. The money comes first, the results second. What prevents the researcher from, you know, publishing their actual results? Many of them have tenure, therefore a well paying job-for-life, with benefits. There's just no liability there to make them dependent on creating favorable results. Besides that, most climatology research grants aren't even for global warming. There's no compelling reason to "play ball". Moreover, how do the researchers know that they're getting grants on the basis of positive results? Who would let them know?
Again, the only explanation is a conspiracy in which every researcher is a part. Which is crazy. Like, very crazy.
I believe most of the scientists (and most of the believers or "shills") are not part of a conspiracy, or getting paid by the government to create propaganda. But they are "jumping straight to" the "easy conclusion" that because the Earth has warmed for a couple decades, "it's all humans fault, and we need to tax somebody right now to avoid Armageddon".
Except it's 1.5 centuries of directly measured warming, with a clear trend towards acceleration. Not a couple decades. And the availability of ancillary data(thousand year old glaciers disappearing) is quite large. I think you'll find that taxes are not the only proposed plans for dealing with the problem, and there's a wealth of proposed actions, only a small subset of which are needed to be implemented to halt the problem within 50 years.
I again see nothing but broad-stroke conspiracy allegations, with nothing in the way of supporting evidence. As for me "jumping to the easy conclusion", I've studied meteorology, a dash of climatology, and the relevant data. No alternative hypothesis(I've looked at "Natural cycles", "stellar output", "bad measurements", and "alternate carbon sources") for current temperature trends has even a lick of correlation, nor do they have any substantial theoretical backing that could be called scientific in nature. The problem isn't that it's the easy conclusion, it's that it's the remaining one, ruling out the impossible.
How do you keep getting modded up? I really don't get it.
Not a thing you've said makes sense. Governments don't benefit from AGW or even belief in it. Here's a hint for you: governments rule by fiat, by and large, and if they have a thing they feel they need or want to control, they can. You simply allege a conspiracy and motives and move on. How, exactly does a government benefit from climate change research? Be specific. If you just say "it lets government get bigger" you're only buying further into your own delusions rather than actually answer the question. Tell me who benefits from "bigger government" as a completely abstract concept.
Should the underlying motive for proving AGW exist, you've still alleged a monstrous conspiracy including every scientist who's worked on the subject in any meaningful way. Does it not give you pause to say "Not one of these scientists has enough ethical principles to publish their actual findings instead of made-up ones"? Think about the scope and scale of what you're talking about. I honestly can't get into your head where it's easier for everyone disagreeing with you on every forum on the planet is part of a massive conspiracy being easier to accept than the possibility that atmospheric composition affects planetary cooling rates.
How do you come to the conclusion that the government is bribing scientists? How do you arrive at the notion that scientists are complicit? How do you decide people agreeing with them are shills?
Those are not easy conclusions to arrive at, but you jump straight to them without any of the in-between parts.
How about the still-quite-alive-and-American(thus subject to American copyright rulings) Donald Knuth, who is the quite demonstrated owner of a very large selection of API designs?
The "Global Warming Alarmists" will say it's a plot to prevent the study of of anthropogenic climate change by the "Deniers" and prove just how bad it is.
No, I don't think they will. It might be a side-effect of anti-science zealotry in general, but I don't think there's a compelling need to allege a conspiracy to explain this happening. The argument you present from the other side also seems implausible, as the satellite data has been some of the most damning. On the other hand, who am I to guess at the motives and behaviors of a group I am not part of.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that it IS a bill of attainder. It's specifically targeting one individual a senator disagrees with. I'm extremely liberal and have a huge amount of distaste for this kind of evasion, but choosing to punish a choice after its made is wrong. It's absolutely wrong, regardless of whether it's the revocation of a privilege or assigning of a punishment, it falls into the category of judging via law.
No person should EVER have to fear that a choice they are making will be illegal in the future. One is accountable only to the laws that exist when decisions are made and one's own ethical principles. Saverin has no ethical principles; that's still his choice.
Expatriates from every country have family, friends, and historical ties to the country they came from. Denying visitation for that reason is morally wrong. Moreover I'm universally opposed to bills of attainder and ex-post-facto laws. They were stupid and contemptible back during the ACORN stupidity, and they're still an unreasonable abuse of legislative power now. If this act applies in any way to Saverin, it would be an undermining of the rule of law.
It was a program by one Robert Tappan Morris, as I recall.
That didn't go over so well with everyone.
Except that's not a data driven examination, but, instead, a stereotype. If you can't see the difference there, that's a serious problem.
Seductive? That's creepy. They sounded like small children.
Last time I had an issue with a virus intrusion attempt, t was acrobat, not flash, that was the vector.
There's an extent to which the bill of rights can't properly be applied in the modern world, and we've addressed that by allowing certain variations of things to be allowed(e.g. High yield explosives, and chemical weapons don't count as arms for the second amendment). We should rewrite the thing and actually put into the constitution the things we think are protected and the ones we don't.
That's the only way this is getting better. And since Americans consider the constitution, and the bill of rights in particular, to be the divine word of god, we won't fix it.
We've allowed too much of the changes to our rights be by fiat instead of acknowledging them in the constitution.
Ok, fair enough.
Now, where are the weak links in there? Where are the points at which there'd be a paper trail, or inexplicable meetings? Let's go fetch you some evidence.
I think you don't know about the reply limit, actually. Thanks for being a hypocrite, and refusing to actually clarify your point in any meaningful way. A terrible analogy, capped with a terrible "I win" statement. I imagine you can't even consider that some people argue to be more informed, not to be right.
Then why did their billboard not say so? I think you know why.
Yep, you sure can make up character traits for me.
I'm sorry you're so far behind the science that you honestly believe there is any way, shape, or form that global warming could not exist. That's painfully misinformed. The rest of your post jumps off from their into a bed of tangent.
Who's doing the throwing back in their face? Why is it 100% of the time? How can scientists pass peer review when they've faked their results?
You've alleged corruption without a shred of evidence. Why? You've invented a narrative, but that's not the same as legitimate argument. It's all based on psychic understandings of free money for doing something where ostensibly the free money would be available either way. No one ever overtly tells anyone it's this way, there's no societal expectation it's this way(how about all the republicans who disagree?) You just believe everyone involved has some secret understanding with everyone else.
It's paranoid. It would be plausible IF there were evidence pointing that way, or people who stood up to such a system out of ignorance of it, and fell along the path you describe.
I'll tell you the same thing I told someone else in this thread. Make a flow-chart of decision making. Who's telling who what to do, and how, until you get back to someone with a clear, direct financial interest in the results of a paper. Look at the length of said flow chart, and all the possible points of leakage, and tell me there can be complicity there. And be specific. Identify the real people who are making the manipulative decisions you allege, and why.
If you do, I will happily help you find evidence of your claims. The reality is you probably are too afraid of self-examination to even do the simple step of examining what you are saying in detail.
But hey, political speech exemptions to CAN-SPAM, because we care about freedom of speech (for politicians).
Also, if we didn't have pointless bureaucracy at airports that does no one any good, she'd be ok too.
Right, there's your problem: What makes you think skeptics don't accept the possibility that atmospheric composition affects planetary cooling rates? The main disagreement at this point is over things like feedbacks - whether they are (and will continue to be) net-positive, how high they might be, how much harm that might cause over time interval X, how certain we can be about all this, what alternatives we have available to us, whether the cost of pursuing these alternatives outweighs their benefits (both now and in the foreseeable future), and basically whether we should be panicking yet or whether we can reasonably afford to wait and learn more.
You also don't need to posit a "monstrous conspiracy" where mere publication bias suffices: scary results are easier to publish and make for better press releases than non-scary ones. "It's worse than we thought!" makes a good headline; "It's not quite as bad as we thought" does not. :-)
That is not what "skeptics" have been saying and you damn well know it. I don't feel up to dealing with a flagrant liar right now. If the debate were actually centered around such useful details, there'd be a hope for progress, but no, it's "accepting global warming makes you a serial killer". Remember the subject of the thread? No?
bigger government --> bigger raises, promotions, staffs, budgets to play with for government workers. Again, not claiming conspiracy here, everyone's just working for their own self-interest, which coincides with bigger government.
I'm imagining myself in the role of a grant-awarding bureaucrat. I ask myself "would I get a raise from my boss if I chose to give funding to A or B". A is a grant proposal that describes building a long term climate model improvement based of temperature readings in the Atlantic, cross-referenced with atmospheric carbon levels. B is the same proposal, but is by a person who had previous published a paper proposing a stronger correlation to stellar output to global temperature. If I am looking to move up the ladder in DC, do I choose A or B?
The correct answer, as I see it, is choosing the one that will get the most useful results fastest and cheapest, regardless of anything else, because my promotion depends on doing my job well, not on the outcome of the paper. Choosing who to fund on any other criteria doesn't seem like it would influence my chances at all. Being a skilled employee(at least a masters in an appropriate field so I can understand the proposals I'm given) my workload is not necessarily lightened by more co-workers. Please correct my scenario so I can be in the mindset of a selfish auditor who can somehow benefit from the fraud you allege.
Do scientists live off one grant? Where does their next one come from? Same place? oh...
Tenure or not, they're getting cash from Uncle Sam to do research, so are inclined to support bigger government. No bribes or "directed" research (or conspiracy) needed.
And again, I repeat a challenge, now for the third time in the thread. By what mechanism does "uncle sam" communicate this dependency between research results and grants. Other than republicans telling them this is what they do, why would a climate scientist go "oh better agree with everyone else"? The point is, the way you put it, there must to be a conspiracy involving just about everyone in the field. There is no other way. And they literally have to repeatedly as a universal group decide over and over again that the next grant in a specific sub-field, from one particular source(believe it or not there are lots of private foundations that support general research too, not enough, but some), is worth more than their credibility, ethics, and legacy. Not only that but they have to fake data that looks realistic and is consistent with the other fakers out there. It's just not possible. Just from the government->scientists part. Then you require a beneficiaries->government grant givers path too.
The only demonstrated example of the government interfering with climate research I've ever heard of was when Bush administration specifically had NASA reports redacted by non-scientists to remove references to Global Warming research. That's a demonstrated example that was well documented, so the kind of meddling you mention does leak from time to time, but we've never heard in the other direction. I think you need to build yourself a flow-chart showing exactly who tells who what to do, and by what mechanism they convince the counter-party to do it, all the way from the beneficiaries(particular people in particular roles) to the scientists who publish particular papers on the subject. Draw it out, with lots of specifics on paper, and then tell me you think it's still credible.
If you do that, I'll help you track down evidence to support your claim. If you don't do that, you're afraid of (or too lazy to)critically analyzing your own beliefs and there's nothing I can do to change your mind.
Do we cheer on the Black Plague in the 1300s then because it had been warming for a couple centuries? "Must've been those pesky human's fault. That's gotta be why it cooled for a couple centuries afterwards. Wait, there were more people in 1700 than 130
Clarify, please. By what mechanism could you possibly propose that climate scientists are similar to migrating rodents? An analogy works by common factors. This one sounds more like "lemmings are stupid(which as I indicated is a false assumption) therefor any other group in general agreement with itself is stupid". Was I misreading the claim because it was too minimalistic or off-topic?
Yes, that's true. I do not in fact have the qualifications to make a final assessment of the data. Regardless, I can answer crazy conspiracy theories directly.
To clarify, this is an allegation that is easy to make and is never demonstrated through historical examples. The only justification I ever hear is by means of hypothetical examples.
The good old "argument by analogy to fictional events".
Guess what, that doesn't happen. Next you'll tell me the free market is amazing because of how well Galt did.
I don't mean to speak for the parent poster, but here's my 2 cents:
Never hurts to hear another perspective.
"Tell me who benefits from "bigger government" as a completely abstract concept." - Government employees, government funded researchers, politicians, and the businesses they write earmarks for, etc. Pretty simple really...
Except they don't. Politicians benefit from being reelected, employees benefit from raises and promotions. Those don't mesh at all with the concept of bigger government. Not even a little, so I'll move on to...
Businesses that get earmarks, while the most plausible, don't do better from more regulation, they do better from more spending, and those are not the same. None of that fits the concept I was referring to. Furthermore we're getting even further separated from the people who are presenting the so-called false information, creating an even vaster conspiracy. The chain would be: businesses that get paid by the government have an unclear investment in the concept of a bigger government, so they buy law-makers, who instruct(by what means? laws? comitees? very public record here) the grant givers, who give grants to complicit scientists, who publish false information. Look at that chain of responsibility, and tell me it's robust and able to engage in both secrecy and efficacy all the way down.
"possibility that atmospheric composition affects planetary cooling rates." - We can acknowledge this without accepting with 100% certainty that current models that statistically fit old data can accurately predict future temperatures. We can also disagree about the potential effects, and politically what to do about it.
"How do you come to the conclusion that the government is bribing scientists?" - They're funding most of them. Not bribes per se, but grants flow to those the government approves of.
Yes, but you're missing an important characteristic here. The money comes first, the results second. What prevents the researcher from, you know, publishing their actual results? Many of them have tenure, therefore a well paying job-for-life, with benefits. There's just no liability there to make them dependent on creating favorable results. Besides that, most climatology research grants aren't even for global warming. There's no compelling reason to "play ball". Moreover, how do the researchers know that they're getting grants on the basis of positive results? Who would let them know?
Again, the only explanation is a conspiracy in which every researcher is a part. Which is crazy. Like, very crazy.
I believe most of the scientists (and most of the believers or "shills") are not part of a conspiracy, or getting paid by the government to create propaganda. But they are "jumping straight to" the "easy conclusion" that because the Earth has warmed for a couple decades, "it's all humans fault, and we need to tax somebody right now to avoid Armageddon".
Except it's 1.5 centuries of directly measured warming, with a clear trend towards acceleration. Not a couple decades. And the availability of ancillary data(thousand year old glaciers disappearing) is quite large. I think you'll find that taxes are not the only proposed plans for dealing with the problem, and there's a wealth of proposed actions, only a small subset of which are needed to be implemented to halt the problem within 50 years.
I again see nothing but broad-stroke conspiracy allegations, with nothing in the way of supporting evidence. As for me "jumping to the easy conclusion", I've studied meteorology, a dash of climatology, and the relevant data. No alternative hypothesis(I've looked at "Natural cycles", "stellar output", "bad measurements", and "alternate carbon sources") for current temperature trends has even a lick of correlation, nor do they have any substantial theoretical backing that could be called scientific in nature. The problem isn't that it's the easy conclusion, it's that it's the remaining one, ruling out the impossible.
How do you keep getting modded up? I really don't get it.
Not a thing you've said makes sense. Governments don't benefit from AGW or even belief in it. Here's a hint for you: governments rule by fiat, by and large, and if they have a thing they feel they need or want to control, they can. You simply allege a conspiracy and motives and move on. How, exactly does a government benefit from climate change research? Be specific. If you just say "it lets government get bigger" you're only buying further into your own delusions rather than actually answer the question. Tell me who benefits from "bigger government" as a completely abstract concept.
Should the underlying motive for proving AGW exist, you've still alleged a monstrous conspiracy including every scientist who's worked on the subject in any meaningful way. Does it not give you pause to say "Not one of these scientists has enough ethical principles to publish their actual findings instead of made-up ones"? Think about the scope and scale of what you're talking about. I honestly can't get into your head where it's easier for everyone disagreeing with you on every forum on the planet is part of a massive conspiracy being easier to accept than the possibility that atmospheric composition affects planetary cooling rates.
How do you come to the conclusion that the government is bribing scientists?
How do you arrive at the notion that scientists are complicit?
How do you decide people agreeing with them are shills?
Those are not easy conclusions to arrive at, but you jump straight to them without any of the in-between parts.
Except heartland shilling for the oil industry is a well documented fact, and you can check their funding sources and output very easily and see it.
You, on the other hand, are just blindly insulting a stranger on the internet. We're all impressed with your debate skills.
How about the still-quite-alive-and-American(thus subject to American copyright rulings) Donald Knuth, who is the quite demonstrated owner of a very large selection of API designs?
No, I don't think they will. It might be a side-effect of anti-science zealotry in general, but I don't think there's a compelling need to allege a conspiracy to explain this happening.
The argument you present from the other side also seems implausible, as the satellite data has been some of the most damning. On the other hand, who am I to guess at the motives and behaviors of a group I am not part of.