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http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2015/0...r-a-crook/

EXCERPT: There is an interesting research project [...] that has emerged in written form in a few places, that looks at conspiracy ideation in relation to science denial. An earlier version of this research was subjected to significant and somewhat effective attacks (effective as in a monkey is effective at getting attention when it throws poop at you) against this research by conspiracy driven anti science activists involved in some sort of conspiracy! Against the people studying conspiracy!

Now, there is a brand new paper [...] in the current or upcoming issue of the Journal of Social and Political Psychology. [...] This paper is going to cause an uproar in the science denialist community. Mud will be thrown. Tin hats will be donned. Somebody better check the oil pressure.

[...] The authors note that there are generally two reasons someone would reject established consensus climate science. One is their politics (climate change is truly, an inconvenient truth for them). The other is conspiracist ideation, or “…person’s propensity to explain a significant political or social event as a secret plot by powerful individuals or organizations.” They point out that there is a sensible link between rejecting an area of science and believing in a conspiracy. In essence, a significant conspiracy is required in order for thousands of research scientists working in hundreds of institutions across dozens of countries to all be saying essentially the same thing about a major area of science. Conspiracy is not enough. Massive conspiracy is required....
Quote:Now, there is a brand new paper [...] in the current or upcoming issue of the Journal of Social and Political Psychology. [...] This paper is going to cause an uproar in the science denialist community. Mud will be thrown. Tin hats will be donned. Somebody better check the oil pressure.

[...] The authors note that there are generally two reasons someone would reject established consensus climate science. One is their politics (climate change is truly, an inconvenient truth for them). The other is conspiracist ideation, or “…person’s propensity to explain a significant political or social event as a secret plot by powerful individuals or organizations.”

That's a typically leftish top-down view of conspiracy ideation.

I'm a global warming skeptic and I don't think that way. I prefer to think of it in bottom-up terms. I don't think that there is a secret cabal or "powerful individuals or organizations" that's driving the apocalyptic hysteria. It's more of a herd-instinct thing. Academics tend to think alike and agree with their colleagues. So if their peers all seemingly adopt a particular view, they will adopt it too. It becomes 'conventional wisdom'.

I think that the proximate cause is the 70's "student movement" among baby-boomers. These people dodged the Vietnam draft by staying in school, which meant going to graduate school, getting advanced degrees and many of them eventually becoming university professors. They loved the university life (which to some extent was was their way of avoiding real life.) So as the World War II generation of professors retired, the culture in the faculty clubs veered left, to the point it was more acceptable to be a Marxist than a Republican.

That's what we see today. It's why humanities and social "sciences" departments today are so dominated by race-class-gender theory and by trying to facilitate radical social change, and why even the hard sciences are becoming increasingly left-politicized. ('Climate science' not the least of them.)

I'm a layman. I have no way of evaluating the scientific claims of various factions in these highly politicized disputes. From my point of view, it's just competing arguments from authority.

So the post that led off this thread is really a complaint that people like me don't believe and display sufficient faith when we are commanded by the academic and media elites. Well, too fucking bad.

I'm not a Christian. I already don't believe in GOD. Despite what he thinks, Al Gore isn't God. Not even God's mouthpiece (though he is a former seminarian, and it shows in his fire-and-damnation sermons). I'm already facing eternal damnation, so what more can the Democrats do to me? (Burn me at the stake, probably.)

What evidence do I have that "climate science" is no longer objective? (Yes, I know that the academic elites in the humanities think objectivity is an outmoded concept. That does make it problematic why it's wrong to "deny" things said in the name of science.) All I need to do is quote this stupidity from up above: "This paper is going to cause an uproar in the science denialist community. Mud will be thrown. Tin hats will be donned. Somebody better check the oil pressure."  

It's good-guys vs bad-guys, it's denunciation of heathens and heretics ("deniers"!) with a vigor that we haven't seen since the middle ages. There's nothing thoughtful or dispassionate about it. It's "What we say is right and fuck anyone who doesn't believe exactly as we do."

So when a skeptical layperson like me reads rhetoric like that, I naturally wonder about the objectivity of the "science" that underlies it ("science" that I'm expected to believe merely on faith).

Here's a question:

WHY DOES IT MATTER SO MUCH WHAT I BELIEVE? WHY IS IT SO IMPORTANT WHETHER OR NOT I REMAIN A DAMNABLE HEATHEN?

I probably haven't produced as much green-house gas in my entire lifetime as Al Gore or Barack Obama do in a single day. I don't own an automobile. I take public transportation. I live in a studio apartment. I don't fly in personal jets or travel in big motorcades with police escorts. I don't have a fleet of Marine Ospreys flying me to partisan fundraisers, they way that Obama travels around Silicon Valley. If there's any truth to this global warming stuff, they are the ones who have to change their behavior, not me.

So given that, why is it so fucking important to the left whether or not I hold the beliefs they command me to hold?
yazata Wrote:I probably haven't produced as much green-house gas in my entire lifetime as Al Gore or Barack Obama do in a single day. I don't own an automobile. I take public transportation. I live in a studio apartment. I don't fly in personal jets or travel in big motorcades with police escorts. I don't have a fleet of Marine Ospreys flying me to partisan fundraisers, they way that Obama travels around Silicon Valley. If there's any truth to this global warming stuff, they are the ones who have to change their behavior, not me.

There's a write-in column in the San Jose Mercury News where readers ask questions about traffic issues. One reader reported that as he approached the Sand Hill on-ramp to Interstate 280 recently, he found it blocked off by police who weren't letting anyone through. That continued for about 15 minutes as traffic backed up. Then a group of police motorcycles went by on the interstate, followed by police cars with lights flashing, followed by several black SUVs, followed by several big limos flying little flags. Then more SUV's, police cars and motorcycles. After this little parade had passed, the cops opened up the onramp.

The reader said it looked like a head of state had passed by and asked the paper what had happened. The reply was that Vice President Joe Biden was in Silicon Valley for some Democratic Party fundraisers with the tech moguls.

Back in the 1990's, I saw an almost identical parade in San Francisco, complete with police closing off intersections, motorcyles, cop-cars, SUVs and limos. That one was global-warming hysteria's own Al Gore, also VP at the time, in SF for.. you guessed it... fundraisers.

But vice-presidential travel is nothing compared to how Obama rolls.

When he travels around Silicon Valley, it's in a whole fleet of Marine Osprey tilt-rotors. You know he's on his way to visit Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg or Apple's Tim Cook when you hear the whump-whump-whump from the sky and see four of those amazing aircraft pass over.

Here's the list of aircraft that accompanied Barack Obama to the Sept 4th and 5th, 2014 NATO summit in Wales. (Source 'Air Forces Monthly' Nov 2014, pp. 70ff.)

At RAF Fairford, there were 12 C-17A transports, presumably carrying Obama's presidential limos and other gear. There was one VC 25A 'Air Force One', and there were 2 C32A transports, presumably carrying press and lower level entourage that weren't cool enough to get a seat on AF1. In addition, one C32A each landed at both London Stanstead and RAF Mildenhall. These may have been communications aircraft or something like that. There were 3 KC 130J Hercules at RAF Fairford, presumably to refuel and support 4 MV-22B Osprey tiltrotors to carry Obama in-country. There were also 3 Sikorsky VH60N Blackhawks along for the ride.

So Obama traveled to this conference with a fleet of no less than 27 military aircraft. That's more planes than some small countries have in their entire air force. The British themselves assigned 5 additional helicopters of their own to Obama's security, bringing the total devoted to this one guy to 32.

This guy does not travel light.

As I said, I haven't produced as much green-house gases in my entire life as these stalwart defenders of the environment produce in a single day. Do we see any sign of them dialing back either their own personal environmental abuse or their hypocrisy? Of course not. Do we see the mainstream media commenting on it? Never.

What we get instead are repeated angry attacks on so-called "deniers" like myself, because we damnable skeptics refuse to believe whatever the elites (media, governmental or academic) tell us that we must believe. It seems that our failure to parrot whatever our betters tell us to espouse threatens not only the planet Earth and the continued survival of the human race, but reason, science and logic themselves.