Someone who gets it!

Fragment of a discussion from User talk:Armondikov
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Well, my point was more directed toward the "meta-discussion" where you don't get to define terms. No matter how strictly you define "climate change," denialist partisans will just substitute "evil watermelon conspiracy" in for the phrase. If you look at most of the denialist output (as well as some of the anti-corporate hard green stuff), it's screamingly obvious that the "debate" has nothing to do with climate science, but with capitalism and the role of the market in modern society. Screamingly obvious to me, at least, but some people still seem not to have caught on to this.

Nebuchadnezzar (talk)22:01, 5 July 2012

People have agendas? no......

Green mowse.pngGodotFire! Fire! Fire! (please send spare firefighters)22:07, 5 July 2012

It's not so much agendas as failing to see them combined with the "We've got the facts on our side, how could we possibly lose?!" mentality. Switching back to creationism for a moment, good old Dawkins supplies us with a salient example: "If they’ve [the creationists] been told that there’s an incompatibility between religion and evolution, well, let’s convince them of evolution, and we’re there! Because after all, we’ve got the evidence." That'll make any cognitive scientist, historian, anthropologist, etc. bust a gut and die of laughter.

Nebuchadnezzar (talk)22:16, 5 July 2012

There are some tools to help with this, of course. I know I pulled that one with a discussion on slavery in the Bible, and the guy claiming "it doesn't really endorse slavery because it's a different kind of slavery" shut the fuck up pretty sharpish after that.

But speaking of the hard green and politics stuff, there is the episode of Penn & Teller's Bullshit! on Greenpeace (IIRC, of course) where someone actually asked a Greenpeac protester about GM foods. Even if you haven't seen it, you'll be unsurprised to hear it was derailed to "capitalist corporations are evil" in about 3 seconds flat.

Scarlet A.pngd hominem23:06, 5 July 2012
Nebuchadnezzar (talk)23:27, 5 July 2012

True, but we waive that point. We do not press it. We look over it.

Scarlet A.pngbomination23:30, 5 July 2012