Previous Thread
Next Thread
Print Thread
Rate Thread
Page 6 of 16 1 2 4 5 6 7 8 15 16
Re: Maybe Al Gore is onto something...
Ukiah #292450 02/16/10 05:06 AM
Joined: Dec 2006
Posts: 3,569
connoisseur
Offline
connoisseur
Joined: Dec 2006
Posts: 3,569
 Originally Posted By: Ukiah
You introduced a “religious” context, I’ll extend it.

I never said I was believed in “Secular Humanism”; although I unreservedly agree with a secular government.
In the U.S, a president would never be elected if they don’t play the religious card. Whereas in most other countries, including Canada, you play that card and you’ll never be elected. But don’t fret, the U.S is in good company: Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan…etc. You understand.

“If we go to war” What? The U.S is at war!

Peace brother!! ;\)



Since you seem to take things so personally when your sniping at others is challenged (the oxymoron comment) I doubt we can have a meaningful exchange, but I’ll try.

First, I compared the secular humanist movement to religion, never said you believed, but did seem to strike a nerve.

Whether someone is trying to impose their secular ideology or religions ideology on someone it looks pretty much the same. Only difference I see is that the latter claims to be morally superior while the former claims to be both morally and cognitively superior, with my experience being that both are neither. IMO the only difference today between secular ideology and religion is semantic.

I’m only guessing but I imagine that most elected officials in Canada or other Western countries wouldn’t get elected if they didn’t tow the appropriate secular line with their constituents. IMO this differs in no substantial way from the U.S. and only makes a difference to those who choose to believe that there is a fundamental difference between secular and religious based ideologies.

Comparing the U.S. to Iran, Iraq. . . is as non-sequitur as comparing Canada to the secular governments of the Soviet Union, Communist China, Deutsches Reich. . . . It’s a tired out left wing tactic to inflame the passions of both sides. Bored now! ;\)

“If we go to war you’ll find out about it!” was something we said to new squad member when I was in the Marine Corps if they started griping about the lack of info about the “real” world when we spent weeks/months in the field training. It meant if something really important happened you’ll hear about it.

How copy? Over! ;\)

Cheers,
Out!


3M80 2M22 6QS8 2M2 1EP500 Sony BDP-S590 Panny-7000 Onkyo-3007 Carada-134 Xbox Buttkicker AS-EQ1
Re: Maybe Al Gore is onto something...
JaimeG #292451 02/16/10 05:11 AM
Joined: Jan 2010
Posts: 91
old hand
Offline
old hand
Joined: Jan 2010
Posts: 91
Uhmm.. Pmbuko,

There are a couple of problems with the scientific method - for a start it assumes the participants are Gentlemen who will act accordingly.

Don't get me wrong here, there is some very good science out there, however the scientific method can be undermined and circumvented in exactly the ways demonstrated at the University of East Anglia.

These days it seems to be more of a mechanism to prevent plagiarism than anything else.

And please don't get me started on the IPCCs idea of peer review either.

I think it's fair to say that just about everything that constitutes Peer reviewed literature from the area of climate science over the past 10-15 years must be re-reviewed and assessed.

There are simply too many mistakes with too much evidence of political corruption of the scientific method to do otherwise.



Last edited by madjak; 02/16/10 05:12 AM.

Now this is how you learn Philosophy :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tm0Uq08xXhY
Re: Maybe Al Gore is onto something...
pmbuko #292452 02/16/10 05:16 AM
Joined: Dec 2006
Posts: 3,569
connoisseur
Offline
connoisseur
Joined: Dec 2006
Posts: 3,569
 Originally Posted By: pmbuko
 Quote:
“If we go to war” What? The U.S is at war!


 Originally Posted By: George Orwell
We've always been at war with Eastasia.


Actually from their POV we have. They don’t view war as narrowly as we in the West who are often blinded by filtering what we experience through deconstructionist Western thinking. For them war is always happening only difference is how it’s being manifested as any given time.

And believe me the Chinese haven’t forgotten how the Western Europeans, U.S. and Japanese have treated them.


3M80 2M22 6QS8 2M2 1EP500 Sony BDP-S590 Panny-7000 Onkyo-3007 Carada-134 Xbox Buttkicker AS-EQ1
Re: Maybe Al Gore is onto something...
madjak #292453 02/16/10 05:20 AM
Joined: Apr 2003
Posts: 16,441
shareholder in the making
Offline
shareholder in the making
Joined: Apr 2003
Posts: 16,441
Can you cite examples? I'm honestly interested in how you came to your current stance on the subject.

Re: Maybe Al Gore is onto something...
madjak #292454 02/16/10 05:25 AM
Joined: Feb 2006
Posts: 6,471
axiomite
Offline
axiomite
Joined: Feb 2006
Posts: 6,471
 Originally Posted By: madjak
There are a couple of problems with the scientific method - for a start it assumes the participants are Gentlemen who will act accordingly.

You're right, the temptation is there to bend one's ethics for money or power, just as the temptation is there in any other profession. However, I'd still throw in with your everyday scientist before just about any other profession as far as ethics are concerned. Who else would I trust more? Not lawyers, politicians, salesmen, financiers, oil men, other businessmen, the clergy ... maybe farmers. They're good people, by and large. And I.T. people are pretty cool. \:\)


Bears, beets, Battlestar Galactica.
Re: Maybe Al Gore is onto something...
pmbuko #292455 02/16/10 05:32 AM
Joined: Jan 2010
Posts: 91
old hand
Offline
old hand
Joined: Jan 2010
Posts: 91
Hi PMBuko,

I don't want to spout on about all the *gates, as I am guessing peoples eyes will roll.

IMO - for someone with the time and the interest, a torrent search on University of east anglia or CRU should get you the emails and the model code for a deeper dive.

Another, easier route would be the following timeline:

Timeline


Now this is how you learn Philosophy :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tm0Uq08xXhY
Re: Maybe Al Gore is onto something...
medic8r #292458 02/16/10 06:04 AM
Joined: Jan 2010
Posts: 91
old hand
Offline
old hand
Joined: Jan 2010
Posts: 91
[/quote]
However, I'd still throw in with your everyday scientist before just about any other profession as far as ethics are concerned. Who else would I trust more? Not lawyers, politicians, salesmen, financiers, oil men, other businessmen, the clergy ... maybe farmers. They're good people, by and large. And I.T. people are pretty cool. \:\)
[/quote]

I am tempted to agree with you on a personal level, however, it is my view that the politicians, financiers, oil men etc have managed to have an overt influence on the scientists.

I don't buy in necessarily with the "they did it for the money" argument, however there is a very large left wing Bias in Academic institutions which simply isn't counterbalanced.

People can do some pretty awful things if they believe by doing those things they will save the planet.


Last edited by madjak; 02/16/10 06:06 AM.

Now this is how you learn Philosophy :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tm0Uq08xXhY
Re: Maybe Al Gore is onto something...
madjak #292459 02/16/10 06:08 AM
Joined: Apr 2003
Posts: 16,441
shareholder in the making
Offline
shareholder in the making
Joined: Apr 2003
Posts: 16,441
Well, it is just the Earth we're talking about. On a cosmic scale, it's pretty insignificant. \:\)

This quote from Carl Sagan pretty much sums it up:

 Originally Posted By: Carl Sagan
Look again at that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.


Here's the image to which he's referring:



Last edited by pmbuko; 02/16/10 06:12 AM. Reason: added pic
Re: Maybe Al Gore is onto something...
madjak #292461 02/16/10 06:16 AM
Joined: Dec 2006
Posts: 3,569
connoisseur
Offline
connoisseur
Joined: Dec 2006
Posts: 3,569
 Originally Posted By: medic8r

Sometimes I'm tempted to take Grunt's way out and just tune out of the debate. I might also throw in there a retreat from following politics, as well. I might be able to preserve what little sanity I have left.

I use to be very involved in politics. Started by helping my parents campaign for Eugene McCarthy though I was very young.

I’ve read Confucius, Socrates (pronounced so-crates ;\) ), Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Pliny the Younger, Saint Augustine, St Thomas Aquinas, Ibn Khaldun, Machiavelli, Martin Luther, Calvin, Bacon, Hobbes, Spinoza, Lock, Rousseau, Kant, Smith, Burke, Paine, Jefferson, Malthus, Hegel, Ricardo, Fourier, Comte, Feuerbach, Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, Kierkagaard, Thoreau, Marx, Engels, Nietzsche, Veblen, Weber, Strauss, Hayek, Fromm, Popper, Adorno, Sartre, Rand, Bobbio, Rawls, Foucalult, Habermas, Friedman, Meyer, Leibniz, Mises, Gahndhi, Chomsky, Mao, Hitler, Lenin and don’t ever leave out the Christian Bible as it’s a wealth of insight into the human character. And that’s just the political philosophers I could cull off Wiki lets not get into the historians, and other social scientists and politicians.

What did I learn from all of this. Pretty simple, those with power get what they want and those without power don’t. Spin, moralize, justify any way you want if it makes you feel better because in the end might makes right because those with power decide what’s right and wrong. If people want to save themselves some reading some very smart men distilled most of this all down into one document:



Up until the 1993 election I never missed voting (well I don’t count my write-in vote for Mickey Mouse that year). And in the end after all the learning, campaigning, voting what difference have I made in the world:

Used tear gas and a shotgun to drive off 50 or so demonstrators out of 2000, who broke off and tried to scale the wall of the embassy in Accra. Another Marine and I pulled two kids out of burning building in Freetown (probably died later in the civil war). Saved another Marine from drowning. Helped put out numerous fires as a volunteer fire fighter. Volunteer help a various JROTC and Veterans functions. . . .

OTOH all my political efforts have never made the difference in any election because reason only wins debates while emotion wins elections and I won‘t use emotion to scare people onto voting.

So yup I’ve checked out of politics too.


3M80 2M22 6QS8 2M2 1EP500 Sony BDP-S590 Panny-7000 Onkyo-3007 Carada-134 Xbox Buttkicker AS-EQ1
Re: Maybe Al Gore is onto something...
pmbuko #292462 02/16/10 06:21 AM
Joined: Jan 2010
Posts: 91
old hand
Offline
old hand
Joined: Jan 2010
Posts: 91
Yes, I am aware of how small the earth is in the larger scheme of things.

So your point is what? That I don't care for the environment or that I want to leave the earth in worse shape for my kids than I inherited it?



Last edited by madjak; 02/16/10 06:26 AM.

Now this is how you learn Philosophy :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tm0Uq08xXhY
Page 6 of 16 1 2 4 5 6 7 8 15 16

Moderated by  alan, Amie, Andrew, axiomadmin, Brent, Debbie, Ian, Jc 

Link Copied to Clipboard

Need Help Graphic

Forum Statistics
Forums16
Topics24,940
Posts442,457
Members15,616
Most Online2,082
Jan 22nd, 2020
Top Posters
Ken.C 18,044
pmbuko 16,441
SirQuack 13,840
CV 12,077
MarkSJohnson 11,458
Who's Online Now
0 members (), 386 guests, and 4 robots.
Key: Admin, Global Mod, Mod
Newsletter Signup
Powered by UBB.threads™ PHP Forum Software 7.7.4