You have to appreciate their position. It gets harder and harder to dispute the data, therefore their only option is to stop the collection of the data in the first place.
Thanks, I’ll check those out.
I’ve been listening to Sam Harris’s podcast a bit lately. He’s not a conservative in the traditional sense (he’s an atheist) but he does have some positions that align more with conservatives regarding gun control and immigration, particularly Muslim immigration. He’s one of the most articulate and well-reasoned people I’ve ever listened to.
Conservative Woman often has interesting articles.
Pravda?
[Eva Gavor]
Prada my darling, Prada.
[/EG]
It’s useful to recognize that the opposite of “conservative” is NOT “liberal”; it is “radical.” Trump, the GOP, and thr alt-right wing are NOT conservative; they are radical/extremist.
The SDMB is thus a better source of conservative opinion than any GOP organ.
It’s hard to find good conservative websites these days, for the simple reason that conservatism has been split and rocked by Trumpism. Now they’re trying to find their footing again, and the quality of what I’m seeing has declined dramatically. Way too much pro-Trump/anti-Trump name calling back and forth, along with too many flakes making to the editorial pages.
I used to love Reason and subscribed to it, but libertarianism seems to have lost its way as well - it’s been infiltrated by Alex Jones infowars loons on the right and the extreme globalists on the left (there should be no borders!). The result is incoherence.
I can offer a couple of sites of consistently high quality, which should have appeal to even those on the left:
Marginal Revolution two George Mason Economists, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, link to various stories of interest.
The Library of Economics and Liberty. This is a group blog site run by largely conservative/libertarian economists, but they treat all academic viewpoints fairly.
For my money, the star of that bunch is Russ Roberts and his Econtalk podcast. Roberts is a fantastic and very fair interviewer who does long-form interviews with famous economists, politicians or other interesting public figures. He himself is basically an Austrian-influenced center-right economist, but he treats his guests fairly and as a result has had some of the best debates on modern issues I’ve heard."
He’s had several guests on to talk about Climate Change. He usually brings on either lukewarmers or people who believe a catastrophe is coming, and then asks them pointed questions from both sides of the issue. Here’s one with Harvard climate scientist Martin Weitzman that’s worth a listen. Another good podcast on Climate change was this debate between John Christy and Kerry Emanuel.
It is by no means just a collection of interviews with right wingers. Here are some of his interviews with people generally associated with the left or at least with the ‘mainstream’:
Cass Sunstein
Christopher Hitchens on Orwell
Freeman Dyson
Jonathan Haidt
Nassim Taleb
Famous or in the news economists:
Garrett Jones
Gary Becker (Nobel Laureate)
Bob Lucas (Nobel Laureate)
Eugene Fama
Greg Mankiw
James Galbraith
Jeffrey Sachs
John Cochrane
John Taylor
Joseph Stiglitz
Milton Friedman (Nobel Laureate)
Mike Munger
Paul Romer
Robin Hanson
Ronald Coase (Nobel Laureate)
Scott Sumner
Thomas Piketty
Tyler Cowen
Vernon Smith (Nobel Laureate)
If you want to get a good snapshot of what serious conservatives/libertarians think, you could do worse than to just listen to the podcasts above featuring the various Nobel winners in economics.
Roberts is also the guy behind the “Keynes vs Hayek” rap videos, which you can see here. It’s very well done. And has almost 6 million views. There’s also a sequel: Round Two. The videos are quite fair to both sides.
The economists behind these videos have their own website: Econstories.tv. It’s basically interesting short videos looking at popular culture through a general classically liberal point of view.
And if you want the classical liberal point of view, away from all the current nonsense about Trump and current politicians, you really should go to the source and one of the most influential economists of the 20th century, Milton Friedman. His “Free To Choose” PBS program is streamed for free online. There are two versions: The original that aired in 1980, and an updated version that aired in 1990 and in which each episode is introduced by someone famous at the time and followed by a rountable discussion in which Friedman is put in the middle of a collection of generally hostile/skeptical questioners and has to defend the ideas in the video. I recommend this version.
The debates at the end are interesting, if no no reason than to show just how badly public discourse has degraded since then. But I highly recommend all these episodes as they cover the gamut of conservative/libertarian thinking on economics.
Thanks for that, I’m subscribing to econ talk. I could always use more podcasts on my commute. I’ll start w/ the Weitzman one. Free to Choose is my favorite gift to give people taking an interest in politics and government.
I also found them before and I do think I did use them before as cites too.
They lose some points for giving time to nowadays many times clueless Freeman Dyson and Judith Curry though. But get them back for also giving time to more serious researchers.
No doubt someone has already pointed this out, but if you’re looking to understand the surprise upset of the 2016 election, “good sources of conservative opinion” had very little to do with that.
That being said, I read ‘The Economist’ as a truly balanced source that will fairly treat some of the more right-leaning ideas and stories. Be advised they do use the terms ‘liberal’ and ‘neoliberal’ as being pro-trade, pro-capitalist, and anti-regulation, which can be very confusing for Americans.
Instapundit is a really good blog to get a quick check of the conservative zeitgeist. He has lots of short posts and links to conservative writers.
It really depends what you mean by “good sources”. I would argue that good sources of conservative thought aren’t going to help burst your bubble anymore than the mainstream media, if your “bubble” is the bubble of reality. The only way to burst your bubble is to read a whole bunch of Breitbart, Fox News, and Inforwars, and continually remind yourself that a large percentage of the American populace believes that viewpoint is the true one, and your reality is a lie.
I listened to this episode and thought it was good. Very quickly they articulated many of the issues I have with the current presentation of information in more main stream sources. I especially liked Weitzman’s characterization of the dangers of climate change as one of risk management. Rather than convey certainty, he clearly stated the magnitude of the unknowns, while at the same time pointing to evidence about what is known. Both the host and Weitzman were critical of presenting information as if the outcome is known and certain, inferring that this unsupported certainty has been detrimental to accepting the science. Perhaps because I agree it resonated.
There was also discussion about timelines, cost, different approaches, etc. The part about risk bands and the tails of risk, and potential outcomes was particularly good.
It is clear to me that Weitzman does talk about uncertainty of some items, but it is virtually the same as what Richard Alley points over here:
BTW Richard Alley is a Republican, still.In essence, scientists should not be confident on some items like: what will happen to hurricanes; but the overall picture is not one that should leads us to be confident that we should not worry about it; far from it. In the end there is agreement, even in the podcast, that:
Yes, I agree with that synopsis. In particular, the part about risk management, that described potential outcomes in temperature increases over some time period of a range, with different levels at different percentages, I think is a better way to express the idea than I’ve seen in most other places.
Weitzman described a scenario where increases in a level of carbon at a certain level would have certain types of outcomes, and increases above a certain level would have much more severely bad outcomes. He then talked about the chances of the very bad outcome coming to pass around the 10% mark, so not probable, but too high a percent chance to be comfortable with doing nothing. Using the risk management and insurance analogy seemed particularly apt - the potential bad outcome is rare, but the result of the rare outcome would be catastrophic. So when the discussion is about mitigating risk that I think is a more informative way to have the discussion - one that weighs risks, costs, and potential benefits. This was very different than the typical sky is falling rhetoric that I generally ignore.
He also talked about the weakness of pricing carbon is extremely model dependent and the sausage that was used to make the rate selection that was used. In any event I enjoyed it and have started searching through the archives.