The Rise of the Irrational Argument Lobby

[K]

Is is me, or is irrational argument seeing a huge rise?

I mean, I understand that in things like Climate debates where you have all this evidence and there are differing viewpoints. Sure, the vast majority of anti-global warming climate debates are super weak, but you have people seriously hacking into climate scientist's emails looking for out of context stuff in an attempt to discredit it as a viewpoint (because of course, science is not allowed to have a conversation on a topic).

Then you get crap like creationists trying to say crazy things like that the banana is Darwin's worse nightmare because it is perfect for human use (and any biologist will tell you it is, but because humans have selectively bred it to be so.... just take a look at wild bananas).

Or you get crap like Conservatives trying to say that two backwater governor races are moratoriums on the Obama administration..... or that the TV show "V" is a conservative critique of the liberal agenda .... or that the President bowing to a ceremonial leader with no power is a major scandal.....

I mean, it really seems like there are these groups of people with ulterior motives who just think that if they shout loud enough arguments that sound like real arguments then people will believe their point of view.

I mean, have we really fallen so far that no sees the parody in the "Did Glenn Beck rape and murder a young girl in 1990?" style of arguments?

[shadzar]

How exactly is Obama and conspiracy theorists using the Streisand effect?

They want it to work that way, but it doesn't always work as well as Beck's lawsuit that got him the domain, but set precedent about domain names and international law, as well his embarrassment sent him to the hospital to get his appendix removed for a second time.

I think mostly it is just sensationalism TV at its best, like the Palin Tea Party trying to become a 3rd party against the Repubes, and Demos.

Don't forget that hobbits are real and are a species of their own, rather than a dwarfism style disease/illness/whatever.

Also the LHC has run successfully for 6 hours. There is ice on the moon. We have 30+ planetoids and exo-planets in our solar system in addition to the 8 planets from Mercury to Neptune.

Just so much crap going on, that everyone is trying to capitalize on it during a recession.

[PhoneLobster]

You know that saying "If you don't have anything good to say..." etc...

Its kinda crap, but maybe Shadzar needs "If you can only spout irrelevant gibberish and non sequiturs you should keep off a thread".

I mean WTF? Really?

Anyway, more to the point. I doubt irrational argument is genuinely on the rise. I suspect its a symptom of the proponents of irrational ideas getting crazy and desperate enough (and experienced enough) to spend some real money on getting their same old arguments and methods a lot of media exposure.

Conservatives, science deniers, and crazy religionists have been losing ground steadily ever since the enlightenment. They have, in all that time, learned two lessons. 1) Buy air time, buy media, spend harder, yell harder, always escalate, never surrender, 2)Science and rationalism has respect, maybe if they put on the shallow appearance or perform the outward mysterious ceremonies of those things they will get respect too!

The reality is Obama is still popular. The climate debate is over and they lost. Evolution is accepted fact. "V" is based on "V". No one really gives a damn about the emperor of Japan.

Irrationality is on the losing side of all those arguments. They just refuse to shut up. Because that's what they've been doing for all of modern western history. Have they shut up yet about civil rights? Feminism? Social Welfare? Economic Regulation? even Tax?

The irrational strategy is indeed literally irrational. Yell about the same thing forever and one day that strategy will work. No matter how many years, decades, or centuries that the yelling has proven to be a failed strategy.

[Kaelik]

Now to totally hijack your thread K:

If V is seriously a commentary on the agenda, then the first thing is that it's also calling democrats stupid, because the Vs are like the worst totalitarians ever ever. I mean, in 1984, they were already rocking total constant surveillance. And Britian has CCTV to be watched should a murder occur.

But apparently when the Chief medical officer spends some time with a patient, and then kills him, they have to ask politely who did it? Fuck. Not only do the apparently not have cameras anywhere on their mother ship, they apparently don't even have time clocks!

And the stupid Fifth Column people are seriously talking about it within ear shot of other Vs! Not to mention at the skinning, where, again, if she really suspected him, why didn't she fucking have a camera. It's not like they didn't already show that they have high quality cameras that are paper thin.

Bottom line. Reading 1984 would teach the Vs to not suck so much at being evil.

[Username17]

Consider that right now, one of the conservative cause celebs is to try to fight the criminalization of hate crimes. That's not random or anything, they seriously commit 20 of those a day in the US, so it's a pretty big deal for them. Which underlines the point: that seriously is their argument. It's "we're going to put a flaming cross on your lawn to send a message that if you keep talking, we'll attack your family." With the police actually starting to crack down on that sort of behavior, what are they left with?

The conservative message has never been backed up with erudite rational discourse. The fact that you hear them flailing around trying to make a coherent point in the spotlight is merely that people are finally shining a spotlight on them preventing them from falling back to their usual tactics: threats and violence in the dark.

-Username17

[Draco_Argentum]

Or you get crap like Conservatives trying to say that two backwater governor races are moratoriums on the Obama administration..... or that the TV show "V" is a conservative critique of the liberal agenda .... or that the President bowing to a ceremonial leader with no power is a major scandal.....

The real fun is imagining how pissed the same people would be if some foreign leader refused to shake the president's hand.

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[Maxus]

What gets me is the outright lying that goes on to make these arguments.

The kind of flat-out lying about the processes involved in geology and plate tectonics...

I have seen someone try to say that all this fine particle sorting was done by the Flood, because of course a slow, steady rate wouldn't have the power to do it.

For those not up on sedimentology, a single powerful force, be it flood or glacier, acts sort of like a bulldozer and pushes everything in front of it. There's random boulders in fields in the American Midwest because that's where a glacier stopped.

Now, streams and rivers are different. They're stronger and more forceful closer to the source and therefore push more stuff along. As it goes further and slows down, the larger stuff drops out, unable to be pushed by the current. Eventually you're down to stuff like silt and clay.

And then the argument that erosion can't be real, because if it was, the planet would be smooth as a marble...

But the real problem with dealing with this thing, is the people who make idiotic 'proofs' that evolution can't be real, that the world can't be 4 billion years old...They don't hang out with other kinds of people much, so they reinforce each other's views.

It's sort of like how a younger college student of my acquaintance is having his conservative views broken down under all the stuff he's exposed to. I'm helping that along, too.

He tried to argue that science is unreliable because any of it you see in the news is censored by the 'liberal media'.

I pointed out that the originals are on file. Public record, usually. He's at a university. He can, in fact, look this crap up himself and find out how real it is.

And, to be fair, he's getting over it. He already believed in the need for regulated capitalism, and he's sort of disgusted with the right-wing tendency to go nuts over bullshit that they make up. He says he's conservative, but when pressed, the stuff he wants to happen in the country has a definite liberal bent to it (health reform, etc.).

Education and exposure to different ideas works wonders...

[Lago PARANOIA]

Hey, biologists, how does it make you feel that creationists still say shit like we've never found one transitional species?

Does it feel you with the urge?

The urge to MURDER EVERYONE ON THE PLANET?!?!?!?!?!?!

[shadzar]

Biologists have faith that one exists, wherein creationists have no proof that God exists.

[tzor]

No K, but I do see a big rise in dismissialism. People are convinced that some people are deliberately fudging evidence (Al Gore’s Hockey Stick is as fake as a US $3 Bill but it gets revived more times than conservatives reviving the Laffer Curve) and some people manage to hack into one of the leading educational institutes only to discover that not only are they actually admitting it, they are actually aiding and abetting the censorship of contrarian information (even if they have to change the definition of pier review so that only their data counts).

It’s interesting you also mentioned Creationism in the same post. I think we just proved beyond reasonable doubt that Creationism and Global Warming are very much alike in their anti-science philosophy; come up with a conclusion and try to find the evidence to support it (ignoring or dismissing any evidence that gets in your way). That is the inverse of science where the observations drive the conclusions, not the other way around.

So, what do the great media do about this? How about the New York Times who has been known to publish anything it can get its hands on? They dismiss it. They dismiss it because it doesn’t fit their agenda. (Again isn’t that the opposite of the notion of news; the reporting of facts as opposed to being ministers of propaganda.)

Folks, let’s face the truth. Science died. Unless you are into some exotic stuff that no one gives a fuck about (in which case you are also fucking near broke; my friend who works with an advanced electron microscope has been on half salary for the past two years) you are working for some interest with huge amounts of money at stake and a significant interest in a specific conclusion. There is billions of dollars of money at stake here on both sides of the equation here.

So, riddle me this, why haven’t you seen this news on MSNBC, or NBC, or ABC, or CNN or heck why the fuck isn’t it even on NPR? I guess it’s ok to publish illegally obtained information if it was illegally obtained from a conservative, but not from the liberals? Let’s just dismiss it, perhaps it will go away. (After all, consider how much money the major news outlets make on publishing and promoting global warming alone … who cares how many people die each year from real pollution, let’s talk about this global warming threat instead because it’s “proven science.” Pay no attention to the fact that the people doing the proving were selecting the fudging the data to “prove” their pre-drawn conclusion … just like Creationists.)

So don’t fucking complain about Creationists; you’re just like them.

[Cielingcat]

Hey, biologists, how does it make you feel that creationists still say shit like we've never found one transitional species?

Does it feel you with the urge?

The urge to MURDER EVERYONE ON THE PLANET?!?!?!?!?!?!

I didn't manage to keep up in college, but it still does.

[Username17]

No K, but I do see a big rise in dismissialism. People are convinced that some people are deliberately fudging evidence (Al Gore’s Hockey Stick is as fake as a US $3 Bill but it gets revived more times than conservatives reviving the Laffer Curve)

This is why we can't take you seriously tzor. Seriously. No, seriously.

You're getting into global warming denial now? Is there any incoherent teabagger talking point you won't try to find a vestige of credibility to set on fire in order to align yourself with? If there's a rising feeling that you're being dismissed out of hand, it's because you're jumping on bandwagons to Crazy Town more and more often.

-Username17

[erik]

Hey, biologists, how does it make you feel that creationists still say shit like we've never found one transitional species?

Does it feel you with the urge?

The urge to MURDER EVERYONE ON THE PLANET?!?!?!?!?!?!

Well, I know something like this does...

Folks, let’s face the truth. Science died. Unless you are into some exotic stuff that no one gives a fuck about.

What the fuck? What. The. Fuck?

Science is a systematic process that creates a knowledge base of potentially repeatable, verifiable and predictable outcomes. Which incidentally global warming is potentially all those things and Creationism is fucking not.

Some people who are not scientists do tend to lap up whatever is published without understanding the process and then spreading 'the word' (or their misunderstanding of what studies imply) dogmatically... but just because of these folks doesn't validate their counterpart dumbasses on the other side of the fence who don't understand the difference between dogma and science either.

Visit any research university, look up their teachers. Check what they are researching. All sorts of fucking things, using the scientific method. I have worked in a lab where plant genes were being inserted into yeast genomes and tested to see if any were responsible for increased temperature tolerance. I have worked in a cardiac lab where theories on heart fluid dynamics were being formulated and tested. And I was an effing nobody in the scientific community. All sorts of interesting and useful knowledge is still being developed and discovered in every sort of field.

Or just go to a library. Please.

[PhoneLobster]

Folks, let’s face the truth. Science died... you are working for some interest with huge amounts of money at stake

Hey remember that time that there were those cigarettes. And they were good for you. And the cigarette companies paid scientists to research that. And they told the cigarette companies "not so good actually" and the companies, not the scientists, covered it up.

And then the medical science community gathered an ever growing mountain of evidence of the not so goodness of cigarettes, with opposition no greater or different in nature to the crazy global warming and evolution denialists?

Remember that?

No of course you don't remember that because in Tzor's world the scientific community and the scientific method itself were all bitches to the cigarette companies.

So cigarettes are still "scientifically" good for you.

In Tzor's world.

[cthulhu]

So, riddle me this, why haven’t you seen this news on MSNBC, or NBC, or ABC, or CNN or heck why the fuck isn’t it even on NPR? I guess it’s ok to publish illegally obtained information if it was illegally obtained from a conservative, but not from the liberals? .

It's been covered in most news outlets globally. But seriously, they are all being super cautious because they did initally then got burnt once they did more than the most preliminary look and discovered that the out of context quotes that had been pimped to them were lies.

Plus, that statement is a fucking lie. Even here in Australia I got the NPR coverage of the fucking emails being hacked!

Why must you lie! IT'S A LIE MAN! YOU ARE LYING! WHY MUST YOU LIE!

Argh.

[Draco_Argentum]

Heres an article that is relevant to the irrational argument lobby. Is the U.S. on the Brink of Fascism? Retarded emotive appeals to past values and glories are part of the rise of fascism.

[Heath Robinson]

Why must you lie! IT'S A LIE MAN! YOU ARE LYING! WHY MUST YOU LIE!

Argh.

It seems that tzor values personal outrage more than integrity or truth.

[Koumei]

It seems that tzor values personal outrage more than integrity or truth.

So... like a lot of "news" sources (Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, Fox News etc.) then? :p

[Tshern]

And Britian has CCTV to be watched should a murder occur.

Perhaps not the most relevant quote to pick from the topic, but this interests me. As you might know, I am Finn, who recently packed his shit and moved to Scotland. One of the most blatant differences (apart from the cars driving on the wrong side of the road, lack of double windows and having two taps in every fucking sink) is CCTV. Every damn place has a sticker saying that I am being wathced. It's ridiculous and it goes to ridiculous lengths.

So, riddle me this, why haven’t you seen this news on MSNBC, or NBC, or ABC, or CNN or heck why the fuck isn’t it even on NPR?

Ask Ben Bagdikian, he has just what you need. He has written a couple of editions of a book called The Media Monopoly (the newest one, I think, is called The New Media Monopoly) and he explains in great detail why things are or are not on TV. Using that as an argument is fucking stupid, because TV shows whatever brings them money.

Heh, I got a little amused by seeing Al Gore's name being posted in a discussion about global warming. He's a great example of green washing...

[tzor]

This is why we can't take you seriously tzor. Seriously.

It’s OK Frank. I’ve stopped taking you seriously a long time ago. I guess we are even.

Perhaps I'm the not taken seriously because I know the cause of global warming; I know who first started the whole global warming nonsense and I know why she did it. I can see this fucking con artist scandal spout from a conservator who wanted to give a flying fuck to her own nation's coal mining unions to a billion dollar boondoggle where scientists can make millions in shoddy science and convenient number fudging which they can then invest into political policies that can double or triple the easy millions they have already made.

I love the use of antidotal evidence in support of a given science of questionable repute. Yes genome sequencing science is getting well funded; fortunately it is being well funded because people want to make a profit on the results (mostly drug companies who could really make a profit by targeted drugs that might work with fewer side effects; as would the rest of the world). There is also lots of science that is vastly underfunded because no one wants to make a profit. Finally there is the corporate/political policy decisions that need the veneer of science in order to justify themselves to the general people.

The existence of one honest politician doesn’t make all politicians honest.

P.S. I may have gone a bit overboard with the NPR statement; on the other hand if they did have a report on it, why can't I find it on their website? If you can find it, I’ll retract my statement. I see they listed it on their “two-way” but I’m talking about an on air piece, not something they added to their web pages.

[K]

Perhaps I'm the not taken seriously because I know the cause of global warming; I know who first started the whole global warming nonsense and I know why she did it. I can see this fucking con artist scandal spout from a conservator who wanted to give a flying fuck to her own nation's coal mining unions to a billion dollar boondoggle where scientists can make millions in shoddy science and convenient number fudging which they can then invest into political policies that can double or triple the easy millions they have already made.

I've never heard that particular conspiracy theory. How do you make easy millions off climate change? It doesn't scan at all.

[Guyr Adamantine]

I've never heard that particular conspiracy theory. How do you make easy millions off climate change? It doesn't scan at all.

Sunscreen producers.

[tzor]

I've never heard that particular conspiracy theory. How do you make easy millions off climate change? It doesn't scan at all.

God so loved the world that he gave us Google. Try it one day, you would be surprized that all the strange things you find. Here is the first Thatcher conspiracy theory argument that I found and I wasn't even looking for it at the time Global Warming: How It All Began

I had to go to page 3 of a Google search of "global warming research grant dollars" to get 'Grantsmanship' Distorts Global Warming Science (May 21, 2008)

But here is an interesting question: Why doesn't "global warming research grant dollars" get me a good link within 6 pages? Let's change this query a little "high energy physics research grant dollars" and BINGO we got a winner on the first link, Synopsis of Federal Agencies and Funding Activities Pertaining to the ARRA Allocations


Here is another riddle for you, what does Carbon Credits and Enron have in common? The Kyoto Conspiracy (Gore, Enron, Carbon Trading, Global Warming)

From 1994 to 1996, the Enron Foundation contributed nearly $1 million dollars - $990,000 - to the Nature Conservancy, whose Climate Change Project promotes global warming theories. Enron philanthropists lavished almost $1.5 million on environmental groups that support international energy controls to “reduce” global warming. Executives at Enron worked closely with the Clinton administration to help create a scaremongering climate science environment because the company believed the treaty could provide it with a monstrous financial windfall. The plan was that once the problem was in place the solution would be trotted out.

Margaret Thatcher, Enron ... really the only reason why Dr. Evil isn't involved in Global Warming is because he doesn't exist.

[Data Vampire]

I've never heard that particular conspiracy theory. How do you make easy millions off climate change? It doesn't scan at all.

Here are a few links. Being conspiracy theories i will not vouch for the accuracy.

Here is a reference at about 2:30 about this conspiracy theoryLink
That is a reference to the Earth Summit 1992 that lead to the Kyoto Protocol.

I'm not sue but this one might be referring to economic justice, or redistribution.

Carbon Scam? Al Gore, Profits, and Copenhagen this one bothers to give links to the sources.

It seems to me that the suggestion is that they invest is green tech and then pass global warming legislation that allows them to make huge profits of that tech. Emissions trading would likely be another vehicle.

[Kaelik]

And now Tzor is claiming that Google is manipulating it's searches to bury "THE TRUTH!" Is there no depth to which you won't sink Tzor?