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“Assault on Reason” Endangers Democracy (2008)
- VHRanger 6y agoI'm surprised no one came back to Al Gore now. He was made into a joke for his climate change documentary (remember ManBearPig?) when now it feels like if we listened 15 years ago we'd be in less of a snake pit.
- notmyname9173 6y agoInstead, we’re feigning shock that the party that wants to drown our government in a bathtub can’t govern effectively.
- munk-a 6y agoAh yea - the old Grover Norquist quote - it's amusing to see that what was once a fringe libertarian ideal has become a central tenant of the GOP.
- AnthonyMouse 6y agoOf the last six Presidential administrations, zero out of six have made the federal government smaller. Four of them were Republicans.
- munk-a 6y agoThat is true - but making the government smaller is still a proclaimed virtue of the GOP. Maybe I can clarify - it's not a tenant they actually appear to follow in any real way, but they definitely hold it near and dear and are outspoken in their criticism whenever it is broken by people not them.
- nickthemagicman 6y agoWhat's your favorite scientific paper regarding climate change?
- klyrs 6y agoGiven that the fearmongering strategy has worked so well, why would folks abandon it now? It's grown legs of its own with QAnon, etc.; politicians aren't even controlling the message, but riding its popularity to success.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- once-in-a-while 6y agoCalling QAnon 'fearmongering' tells us that you don't know anything about it... Just inform yourself before repeating nonsense, thank you.
- hoka-one-one 6y agoDocumentaries virtually always get made fun of. It's filmmakers trying to make sense of empirical data and history, and they always say some stupid stuff.
- Jtsummers 6y agoEven South Park revisited that sometime in the last few seasons. With ManBearPig literally in front of people and they're still questioning it, or asking "Well, so what if it's real? What can we do now?"
- macjohnmcc 6y agoI have a friend in his mid 70's who believes that global warming is happening but not due to any human activity that it is all just part of the normal cycles of the earth. He knows nothing of science and is just spewing what he has heard on conservative radio and television.
- the_only_law 6y ago> have a friend in his mid 70's who believes that global warming is happening but not due to any human activity that it is all just part of the normal cycles of the earth. What I dont get about this viewpoint is like so you're just gonna sit around while the climate becomes more hostile because it's natural? I mean humans have done a lot to combat nature and bent the world to their comfort for a lot less.
- macjohnmcc 6y agoYeah there is a fire. Do you try to slow it down or do you just sit back and burn?
- a1369209993 6y agoI think the argument is that, given that climate cycles are natural and not a result of human carbon (etc) emissions, reducing carbon emissions is not a effective way to combat nature, and there's no political will to undertake strategies that would actually be effective. (To be fair, it is actually true that reducing carbon emissions is not a effective way to combat nature; the position of non-stupid advocates is rather that it's the least ineffective method.)
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- jeffbee 6y agoManBearPig is the perfect example of something everyone really needs to know: if someone appears to be a galactic asshole, who makes a mean-spirited TV show where everyone behaves like a jerk, then it's quite likely that they are in fact an asshole. These entertainments are not edgy, insightful cultural artifacts. They're just assholes on TV.
- ccktlmazeltov 6y agowould you say the same of john oliver?
- theplague42 6y agoDo you sincerely think Last Week Tonight is on the same level as South Park?
- jeltz 6y agoYes, I do. His stuff is often poorly researched and presented for maximum entertainment value rather than for accuracy. I may be pretty close to him politically but his stuff is mostly just entertainment.
- theplague42 6y agoCan you point to a specific instance of him valuing entertainment over accuracy?
- ccktlmazeltov 6y agoReally? Any example? I rely pretty hard on his show.
- disown 6y agoIt's worse. It's literally foreign propaganda. I know oliver became a citizen and he loves the mets.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
- nabla9 6y agoHe was also made joke for contributions for creating the Internet. People still don't believe that he played important part in it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_techno...
- dorchadas 6y agoThe more I read about Gore, the more it really seems American kinda fucked up in 2000...
- theplague42 6y agoThe 2000 Supreme Court fucked us over for decades.
- macspoofing 6y ago>it feels like if we listened 15 years ago we'd be in less of a snake pit. We really missed the boat in the 60s/70s when the West largely gave up on Nuclear power (which environmentalists are against). Imagine if the West invested in nuclear power to the same level as France did - think of the trillions of tons of CO2 that would not have been emitted into the atmosphere. Maybe it would have bought us an extra 5 decades. There is nothing we could have done in the early 2000s that we didn't do (and though your comment is very American-centric, the world is bigger than America). The biggest gains we received were when many regions transitioned from coal to natural gas but natural gas was not an economical option before the fracking revolution (which environmentalists are against). Even now, we don't really have any options to transition from fossil fuels. The best we can do (outside of nuclear, and if geography allows, hydro/geothermal) is to pair natural gas with solar panels and wind mills - but though solar/wind are OK (just OK) with CO2 emissions, they are very hard on the environment because of land-use requirements, production, and disposal. This doesn't take into account other fossil fuel use, like fuel for cargo ships, rockets, and airplanes, and the thousand of products that need petroleum. By the way, there's a Green party candidate running in Vermont (or Maine) that is against importing hydro power from Quebec. Insanity.
- andromeduck 6y agoThis! We could have reduced our GHG footprint by 20-30% for the last 3 decades just by having gone nuclear in the 80s and 90s. What's crazier still are all those "extinction rebellion" types who oppose it even now because "it's too late now" and "we'll have better storage tech in 5-10 years". It makes absolutely zero sense. What rational mind when faced with an impending existential threat wouldn't take a known good solution over a potentially better solution down the road? At least temporarily if not forever, but but alas we have to let perfection be the enemy of the good. And that's assuming what they want is even achievable or desirable in practice. I swear half of the "greens" you meet are actually just malthusians in disguise. They don't care what happens to the environment as long as they have theirs, others be dammed.
- macspoofing 6y ago>What rational mind when faced with an impending existential threat wouldn't take a known good solution over a potentially better solution down the road? Agreed. I suspect the people who claim climate change as an existential threat and denounce nuclear because of reasons like nuclear waste, don't really believe climate change is an existential threat. >types who oppose it even now because "it's too late now" They aren't wrong about that because we set ourselves a timeframe of 2030-2060 to completely decarbonize. Restarting large-scale nuclear deployment would take decades and wouldn't really fit within that timeframe. The brutal reality is that we will not decarbonize by 2060 with renewables - so we keep wasting time by not investing in nuclear. Don't get me wrong, I firmly believe we will get back on the nuclear wagon, because we live in a world that is still growing in population and per capita energy use and there is nothing as energy dense as nuclear. I'm also surprised that for all the talk about decarbonizing to fight climate change, there is very little discussion on what we need to do to live with the effects of climate change. It's pretty obvious that no matter what we do, we're not going to be removing the existing carbon from the atmosphere anytime in the next few hundred years.
- nickthemagicman 6y agoWhat's your favorite scientific paper regarding climate change?
- philipkglass 6y ago"A New Estimate of the Average Earth Surface Land Temperature Spanning 1753 to 2011" from the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project: http://static.berkeleyearth.org/papers/Results-Paper-Berkeley-Earth.pdf http://static.berkeleyearth.org/papers/Results-Paper-Berkele... This paper confirmed the warming trend and came from someone who was a somewhat skeptical outsider to the climatology field. Author Richard Muller wrote in 2011: When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn't know what we'd find. Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that. They managed to avoid bias in their data selection, homogenization and other corrections. Its publication helped to separate actual scientific skeptics of anthropogenic global warming from dogmatic contrarians. Warming "skeptic" Anthony Watts, for example, said that he would accept whatever results came out of the BEST group, regardless of whether it confirmed his premise. After the BEST results confirmed mainstream climatology, he dismissed them as flawed.
- nickthemagicman 6y agoGood for you. Now expand that time frame from 300 years to 400 million years. How unusual is our climate change in a geological time frame?
- disown 6y ago> He was made into a joke for his climate change documentary He was made into a joke long before that ( lock box ) because he was a joke. And his climate change "documentary" was nonsense. All he did was use his name recognition to peddle a documentary to make himself a shitload of money. > when now it feels like if we listened 15 years ago we'd be in less of a snake pit. We did listen. That's the problem. If you want a good laugh, go watch the Inconvenient Truth. Then go watch Moore's "Human Planet" and see what al gore had been up to since his documentary.
- jansan 6y agoHow would life be different if people listened to him? Would we all be driving Teslas by now or putting solar tiles on our roofs? Or would there be an ongoing lockdown that started in 2008? Would there be rolling blackouts all over the world? I am really curious, how would life be different?
- Schiendelman 6y agoWe would have invested the trillions we spent in Iraq and Afghanistan in renewable energy. We might have a coal free grid. Hundreds of thousands fewer children would develop asthma. Heart disease might even be on the decline.
- nostromo 6y agoGore supported the war in Afghanistan
- kyleblarson 6y agoI think people also had a problem with sanctimonious preaching from someone who flies around the world in private jets for six figure speaking engagements and lives in a mansion with 20x the electric usage of the average American household. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/GlobalWarming/story?id=2906888&page=1 https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/GlobalWarming/story?id=29068...
- jansan 6y agoWasn't John Travolta, who privately owns five airplanes and has an airport in front of his mansion, one of those climate warriors, too?
- DFHippie 6y agoYes, apparently some of the people who support the global scientific consensus are rich. This is a big hit to its credibility.
- kyleblarson 6y agoRight, I was only criticizing his wealth and not his hypocrisy.
- yongjik 6y agoSorry for being repetitive, but when a teenager girl from Sweden had enough of the hypocrisy and decided to cross the Atlantic in a freaking yacht to prove the point, the same group of people also made fun of her... for using single-use utensils in a train. All one has to do is to decide that they hate "climate activists" - humans are fallible, so it's not hard to find reasons to hate every single one of them, be it Al Gore, Greta Thunberg, or Michael Mann.
- sleepysysadmin 6y agoNot many people in the climate change community like Al Gore. https://i.imgur.com/SXA5sEo.jpg https://i.imgur.com/SXA5sEo.jpg Miami and Fort Lauderdale should be completely destroyed today according to his predictions. In order to boost his investments and become richer he was predicting catastrophic issues that clearly never happened. He now has become a symbol of anti-climate change arguments and he has done more harm than good.
- mythrwy 6y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsioIw4bvzI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsioIw4bvzI Well that didn't happen, nor even close.
- loopz 6y agoWe need to address the bullying first. We're still stuck at that step.
- jariel 6y ago'Man Bear Pig' was not a universal meme, it was just a cartoon where he was mocked. South Park is satire, it doesn't translate to universal or even popular perspective - it's just a show. Some climate skeptics obviously would mock him, but that's to be expected given their view of the world.
- RickJWagner 6y agoGore had to be low profile. He had some #metoo moments.
- guscost 6y ago“In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?” - George Orwell, 1984
- nickthemagicman 6y agoMost people who believe in climate change have never read a single scientific paper regarding it nor know the name of a single climate scientist. The names they know are Greta thernberg and Al Gore. How can you know what 2+2 equals if your source of reason is the media and not science.
- theplague42 6y agoDo you feel that the science itself says climate change is not real?
- nickthemagicman 6y agoI'm not saying if it's real or not because I've never read a single paper on it. Neither have most people who are championing it though.
- judge2020 6y agoMuch like we hope businesses listen to their cybersecurity personnel since they've dedicated their career to securing information systems, we should listen to the scientists who have dedicated years, maybe even decades of their lives to researching climate change.
- egberts1 6y agoThat’s why the initial Republic only allowed landowners to be able to vote. Now, we have lowered ourselves to any reasons (other than to ensure the business, welfare, defense, and property ownership).
- jdauriemma 6y agoTo which capital-R Republic are you referring? Since you're saying "ourselves" I assume it's not Rome or Athens, so maybe the USA? What was so special about landowners that only they merited full citizenship? There is ample evidence it had more to do with their ancestry, religion, gender, and wealthiness than some sort of appeal to "reason." In fact, assigning merit based on race, wealth, etc. qualifies as an assault on reason in my book.
- andromeduck 6y agoPer climate change, I'd suggest everyone here read the seminal paper, Death of Enviromentalism by Shellenberger and Nordhaus which explains why these negative only outlooks don't and won't work. It predicted to a T our current situation way back in 2005. https://grist.org/article/doe-reprint/ https://grist.org/article/doe-reprint/ https://youtu.be/qwIW6LmEDAU https://youtu.be/qwIW6LmEDAU
- Schiendelman 6y agoI generally agree with this. Would you recommend any structures that do work?
- wrnr 6y agoPost positivism, you got to have people believe in progress to make progress. But it's all meaningless, they say, because over 4 billion years the sun will run out of hydrogen and go super nova. It's not the sort of attitude that will make someone think of star-lifting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzuHxL5FD5U&feature=emb_logo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzuHxL5FD5U&feature=emb_logo
- olivermarks 6y agoI think the Gibbs/Moore film 'planet of the humans' is highly pertinent to this thread. https://youtu.be/Zk11vI-7czE https://youtu.be/Zk11vI-7czE Blood & Gore come across very poorly as cynical green capitalists in this 2020 documentary. https://youtu.be/Zk11vI-7czE?t=4219 https://youtu.be/Zk11vI-7czE?t=4219 The profit motive Generation investment management/ Blood and Gore https://youtu.be/Zk11vI-7czE?t=4650 https://youtu.be/Zk11vI-7czE?t=4650
- DubiousPusher 6y agoI am 100% for an assault on reason. Reason is the hibrisitic force that led a few hundred college grads at Rand to think they could guide an empire through wars of occupation from thousands of miles away. Reason is the intoxicating brew that lends credibility to all kinds of quak medicine. Reason has let theologians fabricate cathedrals in sky and then consecrate them with the blood of thousands. Reason without the guide posts of empiricism is as deceitful as mysticism maybe moreso.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jefurii 6y agoThe article is all about fearmongering and how it can be used to destroy reasoned discussion. Gore argues for television's more direct connection to the limbic system and how useful that is for fearmongering. He promotes print media as better for rational discourse and was especially hopeful about the internet, which is interesting given where we are in 2020.
- ergl 6y agoDavid Foster Wallace 1990's E Unibus Pluram also digs into this a bit, and also talks about the influence of a possible future smartphone (taken from a proposal by George Gilder): The downside of TV's big fantasy is that it's just a fantasy. As a special treat, my escape from the limits of genuine experience is neato. As my steady diet, though, it can't help but render my own reality less attractive, render me less fit to make the most of it, and render me dependent on the device that affords escape from just what my escapism makes unpleasant. [...] My real dependency is on the fantasies and the images that enable them, and thus on any technology that can make images fantastic. Make no mistake. We are dependent on image-technology; and the better the tech, the harder we're hooked. [...] An exponential surge in the mass of televisual images, and a commensurate increase in my ability to cut, paste, magnify, and combine them to suit my own fancy, can do nothing but render my interactive [telecomputer] a more powerful enhancer and enabler of fantasy. [...] . Insights and guides to human value used to be among literature's jobs, didn't they? But then who's going to want to take such stuff seriously in ecstatic post-TV life, with Kim Basinger waiting to be interacted with? – https://jsomers.net/DFW_TV.pdf https://jsomers.net/DFW_TV.pdf