Different topics, but yes. Al Gore is apocalyptic about different matters, but just as wingnutty. And it is not that he’s getting geology wrong - hell, many people don’t know anything about geology. It is that he has supposedly dedicated himself to this “green energy” thing and claims to have researched it at length, and seems to not know elementary things about it. Then he proclaims that apocalypse is coming - based on that ignorance. That’s what makes him a wingnut.
If you mean this:
Given that she was not wildly off the map, knock yourself out. There appears there may be some merit to an assertion to that effect.
Let’s clarify. Are you comparing Gore’s ignorance of geology to
(1) Cruz’ bizarre remark about Galileo and a flat earth, or
(2) The demands by Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-SC) and other Congressmen to open investigations into Obama’s birthplace.
It is malicious willful stupidity like (2) that bothers me. I don’t expect politicians to be history or geology experts.
ETA: And, even if we focus on earth science, how do you compare Gore’s lapse to Imhofe’s snowball?
Yeah, honest or maybe less than honest misstatements of fact happen to both sides. This thread is about the seething insanity that characterizes the GOP.
As for hot rocks at 2km, they’re what 50°C? So at 4km they’re at 100°C? It seems to me, that it starts getting incredibly hot before long.
This strikes me as someone who isn’t an expert fumbling numbers. It’s not the same thing as mewling about anchor babies, or thinking that FEMA camps are getting ready to house GOP voters.
Well, your own cite asks us to “put aside conspiracy theories of crack peddling”, so it’s not really the endorsement you think it is (emphasis added):
But if the new rules are that we can distort the statements of politicians along those lines, then this will become quite an interesting thread.
I should be noted, though, that Maxine Waters’ actual statement is, perhaps, even more ridiculous than my proposed hyperbole. From your cite:
You don’t dig down a kilometer and you don’t use fans. You dig down about 20-25 feet where the temperature is a nice constant 20 Celsius or 68 Fahrenheit. You don’t pump out the air (I don’t think there is a meaningful amount of air down there). You run a convenient liquid (like water) through a pipe and let it absorb the heat in the winter or dump the excess heat in the summer, then pump the water back up and run it through your radiator to move the temperature in your room closer to 68 Fahrenheit.
Politicians constantly distort and exaggerate. It seems like they are dickering for the compromise that favors them, or trying to get people’s attention in a world where accomplishing that can be no mean feat. When there is actual substance behind the rhetoric, I can see it as tolerable.
What substance lay behind the assertion that Putin might attack the US by flying planes into Alaska? That Obama might be marshaling the army to conquer Texas? That the President can ignore Supreme Court rulings? I think you may be reaching for false equivalencies here, playing right into the theme of this thread.
When your only argument is to attack an obviously paraphrased figure of speech for not being a direct quote, and then going one gigantic step further in assigning it some other-worldy nonsensical interpretation that no native English speaker would ever make, then you don’t have any facts. What you have is failed pedantry or, in more common parlance, grasping at straws.
My paraphrase conveyed the essence of Palin’s ridiculous implication that she had foreign policy expertise because Alaska was close to Russia, and if there was the slightest doubt about whether she could actually mean anything so incredibly stupid, she cheerfully confirmed it in the subsequent interview with Couric. End of story. Had I known that the conservatives here, desperate to win an argument, would have attacked my use of an obvious figure of speech, I would just have taken an extra couple of seconds and provided direct quotes from the Couric interview and it would have constituted exactly the same argument. Do you get that?
Second point: you’re also wrong about why Palin was ridiculed for responding to the question about what periodicals and newspapers she reads by saying “all of 'em”. It wasn’t the “all” that was the problem – again, clearly a figure of speech – it was the fact that she couldn’t name a single one! If she had said something at least semi-intelligent like:“I read x, y, and z, and often a, b, and c – I try to keep up with the news by reading all of 'em” some may have questioned whether it was true, but none of us native English speakers would have had a problem with her actual choice of words.
ElvisL1ves was right. John should have just let it go.
I think I’m pretty much done on the Gore vs. Palin argument. The point I was making which ought to be abundantly clear by now is that the allegation that conservatives believed about Gore was substantially wrong (and a deliberate distortion), while the allegation that liberals (and just about everyone) believed about Palin was substantially true. So the attempt at equivalency fails.
Good idea! 
(emphasis mine)
Can you offer us a citation for those remarks?
Now that would be a cite for sore eyes!
It started back in the 50s when the Republican Party got in bed with the religious whackjobs to get their votes. If the party doesn’t start getting a whole lot of gone between it and the whackjobs, they will turn it into a laughingstock. Hell, they’re doing it now.
Well, we have a disagreement. One that could easily have been circumvented if you had taken the simple step of correcting yourself when asked to do so. Why you didn’t do that, but instead insisted you were correct is beyond me since it was quite obvious what Deeg was asking for and why he was asking for it. At least it was obvious to me as soon as I read his post.
Just to be clear, I’m not defending Palin. I told you exactly what was wrong with her take on this issue-- I think BobLibDem did the same. And it’s not even that you paraphrased it the way you did, at first. It was that when you were asked specifically to correct the paraphrase to make it more accurately portray reality, you refused to do so. Which was the point Deeg was trying to make, and which you illustrated perfectly, unfortunately.
It’s much more than that. Religious wackjobs are part of what afflicts the Republican constituency, but there is also a disturbing disconnect from science and reason. That’s a much bigger problem. And that’s not even getting into some of their nutty economic dogma. And even then that’s just mainstream Republicans – out on the fringe you have birthers, Obama conspiracy theorists, gun-nut survivalists, etc.
I guess it depends on your neighborhood. Where I grew up, in the '60s~'70s, we had Republicans like Mark O. Hatfield, Dan Evans, Bob Packwood and Tom McCall, contrasted with the lamentable “Democrat” Dixie
Lee Ray. Those Republicans would all be to the left of Barack Obama. Washington and Oregon have, neither, had a Republican governor since the mid '80s, because, well, somehow the later crop of PNW Republicans have gone over the edge (Cathy McMorris Rogers, sheesh).
By contrast, I do not believe Idaho has elected a Democrat to statewide office since Frank Church. The partisan divide in this part of the country pretty closely matches that push by Jerry Falwell, about 35 years ago. It seems like they dragged Jesus of Nazareth into the party and he has been giving them trouble ever since.
What you characterize as a request for “correction” I’ve already addressed as being a ridiculous attempt to move the goalposts and suddently try to interpret my casual paraphrase as if it was supposed to be a direct quote. I’ve already said, not once, not twice, but three times that a direct quote carries essentially the same meaning, as you yourself just admitted (“And it’s not even that you paraphrased it the way you did, at first. It was that when you were asked specifically to correct the paraphrase to make it more accurately portray reality, you refused to do so.”).
Herewith my three times, all of which you seem to have missed:
In #120:
So you don’t like my casual phrase “claimed that she knew all about Russia” because claimed she could see it? How about I substitute “claimed that it enhances her foreign policy credentials with regard to Russia”? Because that’s precisely what she told Katie Couric.
#124
I’m quite happy to withdraw it and substitute “claimed that being able to see Russia on a clear day enhanced her foreign policy credentials” and my entire argument remains exactly the same.
#168
Had I known that the conservatives here, desperate to win an argument, would have attacked my use of an obvious figure of speech, I would just have taken an extra couple of seconds and provided direct quotes from the Couric interview and it would have constituted exactly the same argument. Do you get that?
Give this one up, John. It’s good advice.
(My previous post #173 was obviously in response to Clothahump)
John Mace has responded to the Palin side-thread more eloquently than I could and so I have nothing of substance to add.
But you guys keep giving me good examples of confirmation bias:
I give you the left-wing Second Vermont Republic where, according to the wiki page: “* thirteen percent of eligible voters in Vermont supported secession.*”
(More snipped for brevity.) This was thoughtful and I had to take some time to mull it over. I think that it’s impossible to make a judgement of good/bad, smart/dumb, or sane/crazy on such a broad attribute of conservative/liberal. It would be like saying that people who like action movies are dumb and those who don’t are smart (people who don’t like action movies are all nodding their heads). Indeed, since conservative/liberal leanings are strongly correlated with rural/urban, calling conservatives more stupid/crazy is tantamount to calling rural people stupid/crazy. That just isn’t a characterization that I’m willing to believe without some decent objective evidence.
You used the Nazis as an example, perhaps because they are considered right-wing. But the two most brutal regimes in the 20th century were both left-wing: USSR and Communist China*. What do we do about that? It seems to me that there are enough counter-examples to show that trying to make any general characterization on con/lib is groundless and we need to be watchful of all wing-nuts.
(* - To Elucidator: I left off North Korea even though they are on my shitlist because–while they started out as a left-wing government–they have become even more bat-shit insane than PETA and no longer fit the con/lib paradigm.)
Nope, and I can’t be bothered to. Citing such examples just leads to arguments about what side of the fence you come down to on global warming. Im a GW minimalist, plenty others on here exaggerate the problem. As well as global warming Democrats can be counted on to spout allsorts of nonsense about other issues close to their heart: gender equality, class equality and racial equality amongst others. As I implied earlier, being passionate about such issues is not in itself wrongheaded, but you can be sure many Democrats will say an awful lot of outrageous stuff about these issues. Some of the recent Ferguson riots being just one example. Being concerned about police violence does not give you a free pass to unhesitatingly repeat wrong facts and circumstances around specific events.
Im generally a libertarian free marketeer. However, I think I can recognise the fact that many on my side spout rubbish on specific events and issues. Its all part of politics. Just as its all part of politics to demonise the other side, just as this thread is attempting to do. Human nature of the Right is basically the same as human nature on the Left. We can all be cunts at heart.
You make a good point about some of those nasty brutal regimes of the 20th century. Plenty on the American Left supported such regimes. Thats a whole lot of the American intellectual Left who were basically wrong about the most major issue of the 20th century, plenty who turned a blind eye to it’s horrors, plenty who convinced themselves of the goodness of the USSR. I dont believe natural selection has progressed so far as to wipe out these types of shysters from academia or politics in less than a century. You can be sure these types still exist today.
So, just to clarify, you feel you can post the statement “Al Gore is a pure fearmonger”, but you “can’t be bothered” to find any credible cites to support that view. OK. I’ll leave it there. Seems to speak for itself.
Incidentally, I myself have no problem finding cites in credible media, like this one, for example, from the Washington Post: Scientists OK Gore’s Movie for Accuracy
If you read some history of the prewar period before World War II, you’ll find that a complacent and even supportive attitude toward Hitler was quite commonplace, and it had nothing to do with “the American left”. Warnings about Hitler in the 30s, from the likes of William Dodd (US ambassador to Germany in the early 30s) went largely unheeded in both the US and Britain, and there was a good deal of anti-Semitism around, too.
And I find it hard to believe that “a whole lot of the American intellectual left” were big fans of the USSR in the anti-communist hysteria that flourished in the middle part of the 20th century, though a guy named Joe McCarthy, much beloved by the American right, certainly thought so. Anyone even hinting of social progressivism back then would have been branded a communist.
Although it’s true that some of these American intellectual leftist commies, disguised as Democrats, came into power during that time and instigated one of the most nefarious schemes in history to start Soviet-style socialism in America and take away everyone’s freedom. Ronnie Reagan warned us about this evil plot, “a definite step toward either communism or totalitarianism” (his exact words) – a plot so nefariously evil that “…one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free”. The Democrats even had a name for this evil plot to introduce Soviet totalitarianism in America. They called it “Medicare”. I don’t know what happened to it, I assume the evil Democrats must have failed, or we’d all be toiling in collective farms and speaking Russian.
Oops – the link I posted above to the pronouncements of Saint Reagan (blessed be His name) has a syntax error. This is the correct one.