Not only is there no “middle ground” there is no real argument in the first place.
Hear, hear. Word. So much yes. And any other exclamation of agreement and support I can come up with!
I would add “The ancestors tale” to this list of books, it’s a beautiful account of evolution told backwards.
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Don’t believe I ever suggested we take the notion the earth is 6K years old seriously. i certainly don’t, haven’t since I was like six as far as i can remember.
I certainly never meant to suggest that we should deny or ignore science in any way… So I’m not quite sure what you’re on about… You don’t have to be nice if you don’t want to, I won’t break, but I hardly think I’m anti-intellectual or a science denier… So there is that…
It’s really strawmannery to talk about climate issues as if the only opponents are snake-chunking fundamentalists.
A lot of the middle and working class people who live in my area aren’t really on a scientific “side” in the AGW debate. What they want is cheaper drives to work and cheaper heating of their homes.
They are all delighted with the $50-$100 a week they are saving since oil prices dropped this fall. (We live in a semi-rural, very hilly area so bicycles and mass transit are out of the question…please don’t bother suggesting that we all move downtown, okay?)
Now, if the AGW activist community can figure out a way to get CO2 emissions down without giving all these folks a big fat kick in the wallet, I believe a lot of the deliberate ignoring of the science will become a thing of the past.
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‘Just as many’?
So abandoning vaccination is a major position of which major us political party?
How many newspaper editorial boards are dedicated to arguing against vaccination?
You off in meaningless "they do it to centrism"which is one of the mechanisms of political failure in the US now.
The american right and republican party is very unusually strongly anti science and anti evidence these days.
Now in theory and in history this isn’t a bad behavior seen only on political movements of the right, but in the US now the right is deeply in various kinds of factual denial and the left is at an ordinary background level of denial.
The two are qualitatively different.
Yes, but, what if the actual solution is, ‘tough shit, we can’t do that, or everyone is fucked’?
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As an outsider who lived there for a decade, American politics seems to value ideology and rhetoric more than perhaps other countries do. Perhaps it’s the religious element–your “scientific truth” is no better or more objective than my “biblical truth”–but it seems to pervade all aspects of politics. Local politics as boring and mundane as a new cycle path is somehow a battle between the Freedom and Liberty of car ownership and the Tyranny of Liberal Elites riding bicycles.
There’s a real sense that ceding any ground, in any aspect of politics, to the “other side”, is failure and shows a weakness of character. Politicians rarely change their minds anywhere but in the US “flip-flopping” it’s seen as traitorous, disloyal. When there is no objective truth–because my truth is as objective as yours!–ideology is all that remains.
The Republicans are masters of rhetoric above all else. They are far more willing to cherry-pick data, nitpick over details and attack the rhetorical foundation of arguments, the character of the speaker, anything to win the argument. Democrats are seen as weak because they try to compromise, because they try to incorporate some element of facts.
“Facts” are just talking points, in politics. Who gathered the data? Who’s funding them? What biases do they have? Did they ever make a mistake? These are all just things to be attacked.
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I’d say that what you are describing is dogma and ideology. My experience has been that the US, and especially wanna-be conservatives such as the Republican party are quite rhetorically weak. This is why they avoid real debates at all cost. It’s all sloppy tribal groupthink where hardly anybody can definitively explain or argue a position. They can’t handle rhetoric.
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Call it what you will, it’s effective. Republican politicians are good at winning arguments by reframing them, by changing the rules on the fly, by not playing fair. They are masters of persuasion. Of course they avoid real debates. “Real debates” are for suckers.
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I don’t know about that, but the Republican primary debates from 2012 were some of the funniest TV I’ve seen in years. I’m really looking forward to them again.
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I find them utterly insane and completely unconvincing! But you don’t get elected by convincing people who know what the hell is going on. Unfortunately I can’t vote, so I’m no bloody help at all.
Me either. My amusement was seriously tempered by the thought that I share where I live with people who would seriously vote for (picks at random) Herman Cain for president.
I mean, it was a no brainer. There was one half credible candidate involved and yet he sank without trace.
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Populism doesn’t really have anything to do with winning arguments. Reframing them merely amounts to deflecting things until either they get elected, or the campaign is over. Communication and fairness have about as much to do with it as it does in “professional wrestling”.
I hope you guys don’t pay taxes, apparently people like you aren’t supposed to do that in the US.
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You are right. However, I was getting really disgusted by the comments to the effect of “How could these idiots deny SCIENCE?” I think we all cherry pick what we think is credible or not. The Republican party is exploiting this for their own political ends - true dat - but the people who are buying it are no more idiots than the people who are swishing oil in their mouths to improve their immune systems or paying for reiki sessions.
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