Cool story, bro. Remind me, what was that “damaging info” from the laptop you said had been validated?
I do like. On the right we have Tucker Carlson, and on the left we have Rachel Maddow. And the conclusion you can draw is…?
Victory?
One side literally killed a million Americans because of a hissy-fit regarding mask wearing, all while pursuing a 50-year economic program which has impoverished middle-class Americans with a $50 trillion wealth transfer to the top 10% since 1975 via voodoo economics, all while teaching hatred of their fellow citizens.
The other side has a laptop with a porn cache.
Decisions, decisions…
Joe Biden’s pretty boring if his biggest scandal was that his son left a laptop at a repair shop,
I bet he’s never even worn a tan suit.
Well, in reality, searching for “Russian milk” will probably also pull up porn sites, of a very particular kind.
As I said before, Sam only believes he’s a scientist. That explains his nonsense in this post re climate change. He also believes he’s fair. that explains the rest of the nonsense.
This kind of complete and utter bullshit really undermines your credibility, Sam. The glaring problem here is not about the general falsity of “bothsides-ism”, it’s about the simple fact that this is complete bullshit.
Conservatives as a political group have long been rabid climate change deniers, and they’ve done so on behalf of their biggest donors. US Republicans are perhaps the most egregious offenders, but we’ve seen it in Canada, Australia, and the UK. We see it in grossly misleading op-eds in the Wall Street Journal, in the blatherings on Fox News, in James Inhofe bringing a snowball into the Senate chamber, in total fabrications in the Daily Mail – climate change denial is endemic to conservatives, and it practically defines the Republican Party. When Mitt Romney was seeking the nomination, he had to furiously backpedal on comments he had made suggesting that gee, the science might be right.
And progressives? There’s always going to be someone who misunderstands or exaggerates a specific issue, but what progressives have typically done is point to the actual science. Unlike conservative ideologues, they trust the science.
And the science does not say anything like what you claim it does. I’ve read thousands of pages of the IPCC reports, and the “bias” they have is toward an exceptional degree of scientific conservatism – a great degree of caution in climate change projections and risk assessment, and a careful emphasis on uncertainties. They have never made the kind of claims that you seem to be accusing them of, and indeed, because of the scientific conservatism, a number of their projections have turned out to underestimate the severity of climate change.
I’ve tried in my own small way to defend you here, Sam, but this is a pretty good illustration of what others have been saying – that you tend to see the world through an ideological filter so biased and extreme that much of your view of reality is completely lopsided.
I sincerely appreciate you taking the time to write such a long reply. And I really do mean that, obviously in a written medium that is necessarily obvious. I agree with you in some sense, because I think the news media in general is pretty awful (see my previous post). However, where I simply cannot agree with you is in the both sides. It simply isn’t accurate. And for me, the one where this is most evident is climate change. On one side (the right), you have liars. On the other side, you have at worst an exaggeration, but honestly, not even really that. Scientists have for decades been saying we need to act now, and if we don’t act now, and act later then the actions we’ll need to take then will be more extreme. So as time has passed and more extreme action has been recommended the right screams “See! Alarmism!” but this is precisely what has been predicted.
Ultimately, though you have once again answered my question. And I appreciate it. In my view, the scales are nowhere near so balanced. The degree of misinformation coming from the right is orders of magnitude more prevalent and more damaging than that which comes from the left. It isn’t even close. And I find the so-called “enlightened centrist” view to be frustrating because it seems to blindly assume that both sides have a point. But this isn’t necessarily true. One side can have a point, and the other side can be simply lying (see climate change). But so-called centrists seem incapable of actually doing the critical analysis to recognize this. It seems to me, that the “enlightened centrist” is itself a blind ideology. The notion is to give both sides their due regardless of whether it is earned. I blame the media for this because they give both sides equal time which creates the illusion of debate, when in reality there isn’t one (see climate change).
I think you misunderstood me. I have no problem with the IPCC’s science. They have been my source for global warming information for a long time.
But one thing I have noticed. I’ll read the actual science, and it will say one thing. Then the IPCC will put out a ‘summary for policy makers’, and they will strip out the error bars and present tentative findings much more strongly, and exaggerate or mischaracterize some of the science (the summaries are not written by scientists). Then the media takes that, and exaggerates it even more. Then the partisans and political people take the media reports, exaggerate them even more, then claim it’s science straight from the IPCC.
So we’ll get the IPCC science saying that it appears something may cause more warming, but it’s low confidence. And that gets reported ad, ‘scientists say global warming will be even worse!’ And activists then take that and say, ‘global warming could destroy the Earth!’ It’s not the IPCC science that’s the problem, it’s the hysterical amplification of it in the media that bothers me.
But what really bothers me is that stupid Republicans have responded to this with denialism, which excludes them from the debate entirely, letting the left define the issues and solutions. So now to fix climate change we apparently need global technocratic socialism and lots and lots of wind and solar, and we have to do it right now and destroy our energy grids because they have no baseload solution but don’t care.
In the meantime, real solutions like moving to nuclear and even more fracking for natural gas for peaking power (which you need more of with more wind and solar) are not allowed simply because they don’t fit into the left’s view of what our future should be.
So, we are condemned to continue with stupid plans that won’t work, like offering a $7500 rebate on electric cars when we are already selling them faster than we can make them, adding more wind and solar in northern countries that can’t make use of it effectively, and hand-waving away grid storage issues that are absolutely critical to making their plan work.
But let’s not turn this whole thread into another debate on global warming, I’m just giving you my perspective. I could put it another way: The right is full of global warming deniers. The left is full of engineering issue deniers. The result is what’s happening in Europe right now, and what may happen this winter.
huh.
Is there another group of significant and powerful leftists that you’re talking about–leftists capable of making sure that nuclear is “not allowed”? Or is this a, “The Republican mainstream on one hand, and a few powerless activists on the other” situation?
(If you just didn’t realize that Democrats are now supporting nuclear, that’s cool, just say so)
Earlier you mentioned that it was a mistake for the Germans to rely on Russian gas rather than domestic nuclear plants. But, as I said earlier, half the uranium used in the US in 2021 was from Kazakhstan or Russia. Isn’t that similarly a bad idea? And it takes years (decades even) for the US to build new nuclear power plants. And we still haven’t figured out the long-term storage issue.
I wouldn’t expect anyone on the left to believe that the scales are balanced in the same place as someone on the right. And that’s okay. If it weren’t true, we wouldn’t have a right and left. If we were all in lockstep and didn’t have one side arguing with the other, we would make worse mistakes.
I used to do a lot of requirements discovery and management, It’s extremely hard to figure requirements for some things, because each stakeholder has their own goals, their own experiences, their own biases and their own perspectives. Even within a single company it can be hard to get agreement on what their basic needs and desires are.
Let me give you an example using an issue maybe a little less contentious than global warming: I am lukewarmly in favor of harm reduction policies in health care: safe injection sites, etc. But I can see three different perspectives on this.
First, there is the perspective of someone who works directly with people in the community; health care workers, social workers, volunteers, etc. They see people dying of overdoses, shooting up drugs in back alleys and becoming crime victims, used needles littering the street, etc. To them, providing a safe space for people to take drugs, monitored by someone who can administer naloxone if someone ODs is an obvious good. It saves lives, gives people a little dignity, and is an obviously good idea. The left would sympathize with this view. So do I.
But then there is the perspective of someone looking at the systemic effects, who points out that one of the things that limits drug use is the risk and the stigma, and if we normalize it and make it safe we’ll just get more of it, which will ultimately harm more people. Conservatives are more sympathetic to this view. It may, however, be correct. Or it might not be. Hard work, science, and debate are needed to sort through this.
Then there is a third perspective: people living in the area of a proposed injection site who worry that its presence in their neighborhood will bring in an undesirable element, cause crime to go up, and make the neighborhood less safe for their children. They may also be right, or they might be wrong.
All three could be right, in which case the job of politics is to weigh their varying concerns and come up with a compromise. Or they could all be wrong in some way, or some right and some wrong. that’s where you need the free exercise of ideas and public debate and democracy.
But what actually happens is that our shitty class of politicians of all stripes demagogue it, our politically fractured, shitty media ramps the heat up to 11, partisans and advocates trade insults on Twitter or the SDMB, and in the end, the first group decides that the second group is a bunch of monsters who don’t care about people dying, and the third group is a bunch of NIMBYS who shouldn’t be listened to. The second group thinks the first is a bunch of out-of-touch simps who are destroying neighborhoods. The third group thinks everything is going to hell and gets more angry.
You don’t have to agree with me. But it would help everyone if partisans on all sides would look past mere disagreement and try for understanding why their opponents think the way they do. If we all better understood why we take the positions we do, we’d have a better chance of not only coming to an acceptable middle ground, but of convincing the other side to think about their own biases and maybe come around to your way of thinking.
One of the reasons I think the pit is counterproductive is because it short-circuits that process and allows people to simply call each other names rather than engage in a debate that might actually fight ignorance. The pit merely hardens positions or causes people to flame out and either leave the board or get kicked off it. It’s great for activists trying to punish the other side and push them out of the debate, but itKs lousy for people who seek understanding and maybe some compromise.
Not true as pointed before, of course it is comvenient to ignore that democratic senators like Kelly in Arizona did not oppose nuclear power, that you ignore how the right played you like a fiddle with the climate gate emails, pointed to you that the storage amount of energy is increasing at an accelerated pace but like one poster that ignored how much down the cost of solar panels are, it is better to ignore the acceleration and the rate of change.
It was also pointed that you are cherry picking engineeres like other deniers do, and finally, your Gish gallops are not impressive when others very recently pointed at evidence that should at least tempered your gallop here, as it is, it is just evidence of more bad faith.
A Democratic government in New York shut down Indian Point. Democrats in California are trying to shut down their biggest nuclear power station (and yes, I’m aware that the government is reconsidering, but only because of a power emergency). Greens in Germany shut down their nuclear industry by pressuring Merkel.
Yes, I was aware that Democrats are kinda sorta allowing nuclear now. Trudeau in Canada says nuclear is part of a future solution. But support is tepid, they have no timeframes and not much funding, and aren’t doing the kinds of regulatory reforms needed to make it happen quickly. In the meantime, the Democratic party itself is very split, with a very loud anti-nuclear faction.
For example:
The three largest reserves of uranium in the world are Australia, Kazakhstan, and Canada. Canada has more uranium than Russia, and Australia has more than Russia and Canada combined. Canada’s CANDU reactors (and other modern reactors) can burn spent fuel from American light water reactors. Reprocessing spent fuel is done in France, but not in the US. Thorium reactors are also a thing, and there is plenty of thorium.
On the other hand, solar and electric power will directly tie us to the Chinese supply chain, and to extremely unpleasant cobalt mining using children in the Congo.
Also, modern reactors have waste that is dangerous for a much shorter time. The waste from a CANDU has a dangerous lifespan of around 800 years, as opposed to tens of thousands for spent LWR fuel.
The pit in real life is furnished by the likes of Fox news, OAN and many other unhinged actors in “social” media that percolate to emails coming from the “friends” one has.
There is dogma there that not only advises you to not conpromise, but also to ignore the evidence that contradicts their “lessons”
BTW, acknowledging that your rants are ignoring that democrats and liberals are not quite as you painted, right away after posting a gish gallop that you just made, does not take away the bad faith used there. Usually, in the near future you will not acknowledge it, again. That is what makes a post to be a bad faith one.
Well, this was a waste of time.
I dont see that, I post for others and to learn too, learning that you post in bad faith is a good tip for others.
Indeed. We’ve tried, over and over again, to explain to you how the Hunter’s laptop story is right-wing nonsense, with no relevance, no scandal, no nothing at all. Even your own cites reflect this! We’ve tried so many times, and you just ignore it. So what’s the point? You’re going to believe some fantasies, like that there’s a reasonable likelihood that Hunter’s laptop has damaging info on it, no matter the factual evidence.