You’re a Tea Partier because… you don’t believe in anthropogenic climate change? That’s a new one.
…Or paragraph breaks, apparently.
Bill, you’ve got to format your messages better. That was painful to read. And your rant about Global Warming has a lot of holes in it - and I say that as someone who is very skeptical of the catastrophic AGW claims and the policy fixes that go with it. I’d truly love to believe a lot of those ‘facts’, but I strongly believe in trying to be as objective as possible, especially when evaluating evidence that conforms to your own biases. I’ve looked at every one of those arguments, and found that they are generally either wrong or over-stated despite how much I’d like to believe them.
There is certainly some truth in there, but you have to careful to understand scale and scope and understand what really matters and what doesn’t. I think that applies to the ‘other’ side as well. For example, the cosmic ray connection is real, but still poorly understood and what the best evidence currently shows is that its magnitude doesn’t appear to be great enough to invalidate CO2 driven warming.
But I’m sure GigoBuster will be along shortly to explain the details to you. I swear he must have a daemon that auto-notifies him whenever the words ‘global warming’ are used on the internet. And in my opinion, he’s got a fairly good handle on it and his opinion should not be ignored, at least on the basic science of it.
He hasn’t logged in since an hour after his (only) post, so I doubt he’ll be back to read your (good) advice. Or the inevitable reaming from GIGO (I also wonder how the hell he pops up an hour after every global warming denial post).
Tea Partiers don’t have time for message boards…OR paragraphs! 
-Loup Garou
That’s what you get when you let werewolves play with antimatter!
This may be U.S. specific. I don’t know of a single person on the anti-GMO side that isn’t on the left. All of the protests I’ve seen are clearly left-wing protests. They teach anti-GMO stuff in my kid’s school right alongside their teaching about the evils of big multinational corporations and how ‘profit’ debases people.
But that’s a Canadian perspective - I wouldn’t be surprised at all if anti-GMO sentiment is more bipartisan in red states that heavily depend on agriculture, as special interests abound. But that actually goes to my point: a lot of these debates are merely proxies for the real divides which split us along partisan or self-interest lines.
I didn’t mean to make it partisan at all - just pointing out that we’re all very good at justifying our own beliefs, and that includes the immediate acceptance of ‘facts’ that conform to those beliefs and heavy skepticism of ‘facts’ that don’t.
For example, consider the typical reaction to the ‘Laffer Curve’. If you’re on the right and believe tax cuts are a good thing, someone tells you that an actual economist published this theory that says cutting taxes increases revenue. What’s your response? You go “Awesome!”. Then maybe you google it, and find some sites that confirm what you want to hear. Perhaps even respected, academic sites. Oh, they may qualify it, but that doesn’t matter - the basic concept has validity! And to cap it off, the simple thought experiment regarding taxes at 0% and 100% resulting in 0% revenue seems obvious and irrefutable.
So now you start using it in your own arguments, and each time you do you become a little more invested. When people refute you, you go back to your cites or you use your simple thought experiments to ‘prove’ your case. You declare yourself the winner (even if the other side doesn’t), and the notion gets even more cemented in your head. Now it’s not even a theory - it’s established fact, and you’ve proven it to people many times, and no one will convince you otherwise.
Now approach it from the left. Someone tells you that raising taxes lowers revenue. That sounds counter-intuitive, so you call bullshit. You get the canned simplistic argument, and your intuition tells you it’s more complex than that. So you go to your favorite cites and read up, and sure enough your guys point out that while it may be true in extreme cases, it’s certainly not true now for a whole bunch of reasons. So you write off your opponents as cranks, and you satisfy yourself that their argument is crap and that your intuition that higher taxes is a good thing is even more firmly established. And so it goes.
In the end, both sides are equally dug in. Both may have started out with the same amount of economic literacy, but their biases pulled them in different directions, and their biases were confirmed by their biased research and their natural ability to downplay the arguments that don’t fit and over-emphasize the ones that do. The smarter you are, the more clever you can be in fanwanking reality to conform to your own biases.
In political terms, which side is more ‘reality based’ totally depends on what the current political debates are with respect to the real science.
And pretty much everywhere else, you know; he’s only a villain to a tiny crank-fringe.
See Engineers and woo.
Oh, I see opponents out there who are both honest and intelligent – some Libertarians, e.g. Of course, neither “honest” nor “intelligent” automatically translates to “right.”
As for the TPers, they are by and large more intelligent and less honest than others generally assume.
There are leftists in Alberta?!
I’ll guess that if you select some fringe group – truthers, or people who worry about the Illuminati – they’ll outscore the average American in knowledge!
The average American knows little science. People who peruse science (and even pseudo-science!) are seekers of knowledge.
One of the more intelligent (and likable) expats in my corner of rural Thailand is, believe it or don’t, a birther/Sandyfaked/anti-Illuminati-style Libertarian! (When we meet, I try to steer conversation toward a fringe topic that interests me, e.g. Ark of Covenant.)
Never heard of the TP taking any position on it anyway. Climate-change-correction measures might gore the oxen of the 1%; of the local elites and bizcritters who lead the TP, not so much.
And the hypersegmentation of today’s media only reinforces that effect; it can shield you from dissenting views without your even being fully aware of it.
“Sandyfaked” is a new one on me. What’s the hypothesis? I mean, how do you fake a hurricane?
Sneak into houses and leave all the taps running?
Well… not daemons, unless many posters of the SDMB are :p.
Just joking, in reality many other posters PM me when posters like Bill F. appear. Guys, everyone can do it. There is a reason why sites like Skeptical Science that are recommended by conservative scientists like Barry Bickmoreexists, it is easier to check how many myths are debunked already:
The use of Al Gore by Bill F. is just classic personification to dismiss the science as Myth #19 reports, then there is the myth about the planets warming, one can click on myth #43 to see that "Mars and Jupiter are not warming, and anyway the sun has recently been cooling slightly.
And so on… the problem I have with posters like Bill F. is that there is no excuse to not be aware of what the science and most experts agree on, resources like Skeptical Science link to the published science, and even in academic settings the published science is already offered as lessons at university level, the point here is that many of the contrarians of today that are not experts in the field even refuse to acknowledge that the controversy that they think that there is among the scientists is not really there. And the reality is that the few remaining skeptical climate scientists are getting it wrong.
Sam, meet Sam Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, who certainly is not on the left. In California we just had an initiative calling for the labeling of GMO foods (got defeated, fortunately) and Mackey and Whole Foods put lots of money and ads behind it. Perhaps it was a marketing ploy, but he is sure anti-GMO.
I think there are reasons for some to be suspicious of GMO stuff, like not letting farmers replant their seed and genetic diversity while not thinking your eggplant is going to eat Chicago. But I’m with you on those who don’t want us to tamper with “natural” foods while eating their cauliflower.
I meant “Sandyhooked.” But anyway, thanks for picking a nit while ignoring my point.
While I think there are risks associated with GMOs, I’ve never been all that concerned with them as foods. Here’s what the Washington Post had to say a couple of weeks ago. The lead in to the following was a careful review of the expert sources to determine which could be considered relatively unbiased. Quote is from page 2.
In my RL observation I have noted that many Tea Partiers are educated deeply but narrowly in some technical/vocational discipline. Certainly not all of them, but enough that I certainly would not generalize them as being dumb. Perhaps unhinged, bigoted, blinder-wearing, selectively informed, dishonest, and sociopathic, but not dumb. Not all of them, anyway.
I cannot help but see the parallel that has been discussed at some length in the years following the September 11th attacks how frequent it is for extremists to hail from engineering and other vocational disciplines, deep but narrow fields leading to a worldview free of nuance and compassion, rich in black-and-white opinions on how things ought to be. To me, the parallels are striking.
So, yeah. Extremists can be highly educated and there seems to be some correlation with certain types of education.
“A little learning is a dangerous thing.”
– Alexander Pope