Science Deniers are Everywhere

Note how this one topic, which everyone knows, is verboten. If it is brought up by me in threads other than those officially designated/consigned to areas where all the people of science, like you, Max, can studiously avoid, I will be suspended.

But Finn, Max, et al can remark on it, casting spurious assumptions and ad hominems without ever having to defend themselves. That is anti-science. That is you and all your science denying cohorts in a nutshell.

Camlok, what you are doing is what every science denier does. You are focused on the 2 or 3% of "scientists" who are the fringe ignoring the vast majority of scientists who represent the scientific consensus.

Yes, you can find "scientists" (people with credentials) that say that 9/11 didn't involve airplanes. You can also find equally credentialed scientists saying that Global Climate Change is a fraud and that the Earth was created 10,000 years ago.

There is always a fringe. There are always YouTube videos purporting to have proof of everything from UFOs to Ghosts to angels.

It is very nice of you to come to this thread. You are a textbook example. But it is a fact that the overwhelming majority of scientists reject 9/11 conspiracy theories and accept Global Warming and think vaccinations prevent disease.

You are on the fringe.

Worth seeing to those it is worth seeing...(Intentional tautology)

For the record, I don't want you to be suspended. Part of a argument is that even people who deny science on one issue have every right to participate in other discussions.

But you must realize that this is an obsession for you, and that bringing it up on dozens of unrelated threads is a little boorish. No one else even thought 9/11 belonged on this thread until you came here.

False, Max. And you can tell it is false because the "majority" you think exists is silent. That is totally anti-science and yet you just keep on highlighting your 13th century thinking.

Notice all the science deniers scurrying around voting you down because they don't want to hear any of this verboten science.

You keep making this personal, "you are on the fringe" as if I am the only one advancing these issues of science. That is a totally unscientific approach, Max.

I didn't bring it up. farmerman, Finn and others, including you, Max, did. Discussing science is never boorish. Refusing to discuss science and confining it to places where "adults" can ignore it is both boorish and unscientific.

And note, carefully, that I am not the one bring "it" up. I have to studiously avoid bringing "it" up, among the very people who are pretending they are science based individuals.

And consider, really consider, Max, with your love of science, what better thread to bring "it" up than one that discusses science deniers.

I will agree that history is similar to science in that it involves an established and disciplined process for the collection and analysis of data but it is not even generally considered a field within that least scientific of the branches of science, Social Science. The important distinction between history and science is not that the former contains any element of art but that it depends very heavily on the perspectives and interpretations of human nature that are particular to the historian or a given school of history and that these perspectives and interpretations differ among individual historians and schools and are not subject to a definitive validation or ranking.

So-called "People's History" is an attempt to explain and put in context historical events from the perspective of common people, not their leaders. While this may be interesting, may provide meaningful insight, and may even be considered to provide a fuller comprehension of the events and their times, it is clearly a perspective that will view events differently (and not in an insignificant way) than the so-called "Great Man" perspective.

To my knowledge there is no such thing as the People's Chemistry or the Physics of Great Men.

Developing a theory of the nature and impact of dark matter will not be subject to the theorist's personal preference for one of multiple variants of mathematics, the way a historian's theory on human conquests over one another might depend upon his personal assessment, or that of the school of history to which he belongs, of the hierarchy of human motivations.

Marxist historical theory, whether it led to the concept of communism or was created to describe an inevitable arc towards an ultimate societal stage is not based on a universally held historical perspective.



I certainly credit farmerman with higher level of scientific knowledge than I possess, and an admirable level of general knowledge, I'm afraid I don't, necessarily, acknowledge him as an expert of all fields and history in particular and therefore I take his explanation to be of his opinion of history, not history itself. That historian call upon the results of scientific pursuits and techniques (e.g. carbon dating and subterranean imaging) doesn't mean history is science. There are artists who call upon science in their pursuit of artistic truth, but I don't think that you would therefore classify their art as science.



Yes, if one considers history as a science a denier of history would be a denier of science, but, clearly, I'm not accepting the initial premise.



Your opinion is not senseless, but I submit that you are either not taking into consideration the wide variations in historical perspective or you believe this same level of personal interpretation exists in science. I suspect it's far more the former than the latter.

This is something more than argument on semantics because I sense that you and, to a lesser degree, FM, who feel so confident in the certainty of science would like to extend that certainty to history and be in a position to use your accusation of "science denier" to confront and combat ways of thought that are far less certain and settled than evolution, the origins of the solar system, or even climate change.

Max, the man of science. And no one else calls you on what is your obviously planned, scurrilous unscientific crap.

That's cute Camlok.

For some reason, you keep insisting that I have to engage with you (again). Let me make it clear. I don't care. I think your point of view is silly and inconsequential. I don't care if you think I am being anti-scientific. I don't care if you think that your video should have rocked my world. I gave you a chance to show me something that would get my interest. You didn't. sorry.

As I am sure you realize, I don't take you very seriously. You seem to follow me around like a puppy dog trying to get me to accept what you are saying. Making personal attacks isn't going to work.

If you stop this silly begging for my attention... we can either talk about other things, or we can ignore each other.

If you keep trying to pester me into respecting you, I am going to keep amusing myself at your expense. Until... that is, you figure out that I don't think your silly obsession with 9/11 has any merit and I simply don't care.

It my comment is so obvious then why do you insist on pursuing the notion that Holocaust denial is properly called science denial.

Se my response to Olivier as to why I think there is an important distinction involved here.

I added a comma, in bold, where I believe it was warranted, Finn.

Why would you add a quote from a science denier, who flings out phony scientific mumbo-jumbo, which seems to have, 1) impressed you; 2) allowed you to get in anti-science propaganda without having to do any heavy work?

If you had any courage you could quickly discover that he is vehemently anti-science when it suits his purpose. Notice how he only uses scathing remarks when he addresses me.

Why wouldn't this fellow with a "higher level of scientific knowledge" be willing and able to use that knowledge to discuss.

Actually, that, science deniers, describes a lot of folks here. I'm afraid to say, you included, Finn.

I personally think this idea is particularly nasty. This is another example of "Everyone I don't like is Hitler".

How are you, a purported scientist, different than the "fundamentalist Creationis ts [sic]?

You outright deny voluminous evidence, hence you are, by your own defining post, a denier of science.

Both of you are being unscientific, Max. Science demands explanations not curt dismissals. Note that you rely on curt dismissals A LOT!

You seem to be confusing yourself with science. Science doesn't demand anything, and yet I take science seriously.

Yes, science demands that people don't act like chickenshits and avoid discussing issues of science. That is the essence of science - that one addresses the science issues raised.

The science deniers are voting you down for, 1. engaging with me; 2. lying about your dedication to science [though they don't seem brave enough to address with you directly]



I hesitate to state that you are an outright liar but in the thread YOU started, you categorically refused to discuss many science issues that directly related to the topic under discussion.

That is not reflective of a person that "take[s] science seriously".

This "thread" within the thread, which started some posts back with Finn and farmerman and has now had Max leap in, is a complete study in confusion.

Who said what, who is saying what, who is Max accusing of saying what, how did Hitler get involved???

Science Deniers are Everywhere

Science deniers - shakes head in disbelief!

The problem with the term "science denier" is that it is most often used as a political weapon.

There has very definitely been, of late, an attempt to associate ideological beliefs with scientific fact and to give what are political opinions the stamp of scientific certainty. Because there are people who, for whatever reasons, cling to preposterous notions largely informed by religious beliefs and use those notions to justify political opinions, certainly doesn't mean that the overall ideology to which these folks generally subscribe is based on ignorant nonsense, but that is precisely the conflation those who are politicizing science wish to achieve.

Most of us find it at least amusing that someone believes the earth was created only 4,000 years ago or that humans existed when dinosaurs walked the earth. It's at it's very best quaint and at it's worse just plain kooky, (Of course there is no shortage of people who believe the kooks are no less than dangerous and malignant agents of some sinister plot to erase everything in the book of human knowledge that was written after the death of Jesus and return us to an age of superstition and shamans) but regardless of how they are cast, are believed to be rightful targets of ridicule. Being able to cast your political opponents as ridiculous is a powerful advantage and one that both sides seek.

There's not much difference between efforts to cast all liberals as ridiculously delicate snowflakes who curl up into fetal positions if someone triggers them with violent hate speech like "Elect Trump 2016!," and those to portray all conservatives as ridiculous knuckle dragging troglodytes who insist that human beings appeared in their modern form in an instant, some 3,999 years and 357 days ago.

Now blatham is liable to pop into this thread shortly after I post this and make an argument to the effect of: Yeah, but liberals do it a whole lot less than conservatives and besides, in the case of conservatives it's pretty close to the truth.

I would argue though that regardless of which side engages more in efforts to ridicule their opponents, doing so by politicizing science is fraught with far more peril for society than infantilizing those you disagree with. The peril represented is that as certain ideological ways of thought are classified as scientific, on an adjacent track the notion is advanced that denying science is dangerous, and as Olivier has remarked, could be illegal. Clearly the potential exists for both tracks to head toward a merging point where denying certain ideological ways of thought is considered dangerous and therefore is made illegal.

Bill Nye the Thought Police Guy is not the only Climate Change Zealot to either advocate that deniers suffer some form of punishment or to coyly dance around the question of whether denial should be made illegal and deniers imprisoned. It's should astonish me that more liberals don't react to this sort of thinking with horror, but I'm afraid it does not. Particularly as it respects freedom of speech a great many liberals seem to be growing comfortable with illiberal positions.

By the way, Nye in an somewhat infamous interview with Tucker Carlson (which both sides seemed to have viewed as a demolishing of the guy they dislike by the guy they like) claimed that humans are 100% responsible for the rate of climate change. Of course he repeatedly dodged the question of how much of climate change is caused by humans because no one say with any certainty, but when he decided to declare that we are totally responsible for accelerating the dire ecological effects of climate change from 15,000 years or more to decades "and now years" he offered not a scintilla of evidence to support his claim. Is that a demonstration of undeniably sound science at work?

For Nye and too many others, not only questioning the "settled" science of climate change but the policies being advanced to respond to it is evidence of denial and "cognitive dissonance" that needs to be stamped out, because somehow they are preventing the world from coming together to solve the problem, as if Tucker Carlson and his ilk are preventing nations like China, India and Russia from doing more than stating they will do something at sometime in the future. Clearly they were able to derail the Obama administration which is a pretty powerful demonstration of reach, but who knew that they could influence authoritarian regimes around the world too?