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That's a fantastic analogy. Climate science is no more political than quantum mechanics or Einstein's theory of relativity. 97% of climate scientists agree tha
by JSavageOne 6y ago
That's a fantastic analogy.
Climate science is no more political than quantum mechanics or Einstein's theory of relativity. 97% of climate scientists agree that global warming is real and that humans are causing it, and 9 of the 10 warmest years in recorded history have occured since 2005. Yet oil corporations and polluting factories with ulterior motives have managed to convince the politicians and the public that there is a debate, that some layman with no scientific background is as equally entitled to speak to the matter as a professional climate scientist who's spent their whole life studying the discipline, and that it is a question of politics.
Once it becomes a "political debate", all logic and science goes out the window, and the individuals/institutions with the vested interest in muddying the debate win out while the public loses out, and everyone just ends up dumber. You're not even allowed to debate or talk about it anymore because now it's "politics", and in America politics is super-sensitive and you shouldn't talk about it because everyone is entitled to their own dumb opinions.
That's why I'm such an advocate of freedom of speech, and not just in the legal sense. So long as you can support your view with facts and evidence, anyone should be allowed to speak, including in the workplace. Unless you're failing to perform your job's duties, one should not be fired simply for having a contrarian political viewpoint (so long as it's not openly hostile, like being racist). The second we censor people based on their views, we lead towards this totalitarian dystopian state of society where nobody feels comfortable talking about anything remotely controversial or interesting (unless it's about some Game of Thrones episode). Politics in the U.S. has become extremely partisan because people don't talk to others with differing viewpoints anymore and everyone retreats to their echo chamber safe spaces.
> “The key element of social control is the strategy of distraction that is to divert public attention from important issues and changes decided by political and economic elites, through the technique of flood or flooding continuous distractions and insignificant information.” -Noam Chomsky
- pacala 6y agoThere is little hope that one day we could speak about the willful blindspots on both sides of such debates. Global warming is a major crisis with a hard tradeoff between two deeply negative outcomes: poverty now vs. climate disaster in the medium future. Judging by the covid19 response, humanity is unable to handle such tradeoffs with any degree of maturity. Society will polarize, each side never mentioning one half of the tradeoff and blaming the other side for all the negative impact of the other half of the tradeoff.