Oh, I have no clue if he’s Alt-right or GOP, it’s just he was using the same tactics.
I suspected this. Pinker doesn’t directly address your crackpot views on society and nature, and you are compelled to attack his scientific integrity. That’s all we need to know.No it's not! >:-( In an honest, rational, constructive debate you would now be honor bound to define "my crackpot views on society and nature." Are you capable of that Beltane? Here wanna tackle this one?
I could give a thousand reasons that life and reality stun me into believing evolution and in turn that this understanding and appreciation for Evolution and Deep Time provides a spiritual underpinning that no printed text's facades can touch. :coolsmile:
I suspected this. Pinker doesn’t directly address your crackpot views on society and nature, and you are compelled to attack his scientific integrity. That’s all we need to know.No it's not! >:-( In an honest, rational, constructive debate you would now be honor bound to define "my crackpot views on society and nature." Are you capable of that Beltane?Look in every thread you’ve started started about climate and politics. Hippy nonsense way past its sell-by date.
¶This is monumentally incoherent, even by your standards.Please do explain. Ridicule is empty air. ps - Beltane, do me a favor visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnitLNObR7c - you can help me find out if my comments are there for others to see. you could critique those if you wanted - yes a little sloppy, but than this is about substance, so have at it.What does libertarianism have to do with anything? Pinker is not a libertarian, he is a liberal centrist. Why does his hair matter? Do you think he’s manipulating the public with his hair? Finally, you don’t know Pinkers “arguments" since you haven’t read him.Why not read the book instead of dismissing his work as bullshit based on video clips and someone else’s description.Well I don't have that much free time. But, what I do do, and what I did do, was march over to YouTube and plug in his name and listen to him in various presentations and lordie are their a lot videos of him and his golden locks and usual misrepresentation of what he's opposing. Why the hell should I waste my time on his book when I already know his arguments are built on the back of fictions. Straw men, tailored to his specifications. He can be the sweetest smoothest most fascinating writer there is - but his stories and arguments are still built on bullshit. And that's how the Libertarians do it, always with the what if world, that ignores what is. {seems pretty clear, what part don't you understand Beltane?}
His hair doesn’t have anything to do with anything but the way the looks.
Very weird why would listening to the man not inform me about the way the guy thinks, or the way he formulates his narrative,
or his glaring blind spots?
Yeah, the labels get confusing, don’t they.
Like I said I was mainly listening to his words and they tended towards what I’d call libertarian apologetics.
Got any Pinker pearls of wisdom worth sharing?
Beltane, I’ve made a project out of listening to various people via YouTube discussing “Libertarianism” and not a one impressing me as being realistic.
Perhaps you can suggest someone you take seriously, so I can listen to him, (or her, although now that I think of it’s all been guys.)
Or is Pinker as ‘serious’ as they get?
Beltane, I've made a project out of listening to various people via YouTube discussing "Libertarianism" and not a one impressing me as being realistic. Perhaps you can suggest someone you take seriously, so I can listen to him, (or her, although now that I think of it's all been guys.) Or is Pinker as 'serious' as they get?No idea, I’m not a libertarian and neither is Pinker.
Got any Pinker pearls of wisdom worth sharing?
The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that in an isolated system (one that is not taking in energy), entropy never decreases. (The First Law is that energy is conserved; the Third, that a temperature of absolute zero is unreachable.) Closed systems inexorably become less structured, less organized, less able to accomplish interesting and useful outcomes, until they slide into an equilibrium of gray, tepid, homogeneous monotony and stay there. In its original formulation the Second Law referred to the process in which usable energy in the form of a difference in temperature between two bodies is dissipated as heat flows from the warmer to the cooler body. Once it was appreciated that heat is not an invisible fluid but the motion of molecules, a more general, statistical version of the Second Law took shape. Now order could be characterized in terms of the set of all microscopically distinct states of a system: Of all these states, the ones that we find useful make up a tiny sliver of the possibilities, while the disorderly or useless states make up the vast majority. It follows that any perturbation of the system, whether it is a random jiggling of its parts or a whack from the outside, will, by the laws of probability, nudge the system toward disorder or uselessness. If you walk away from a sand castle, it won’t be there tomorrow, because as the wind, waves, seagulls, and small children push the grains of sand around, they’re more likely to arrange them into one of the vast number of configurations that don’t look like a castle than into the tiny few that do. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is acknowledged in everyday life, in sayings such as “Ashes to ashes," “Things fall apart," “Rust never sleeps," “Shit happens," You can’t unscramble an egg," “What can go wrong will go wrong," and (from the Texas lawmaker Sam Rayburn), “Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a carpenter to build one." Scientists appreciate that the Second Law is far more than an explanation for everyday nuisances; it is a foundation of our understanding of the universe and our place in it. In 1915 the physicist Arthur Eddington wrote: The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations—then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation—well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation. In his famous 1959 lecture “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution," the scientist and novelist C. P. Snow commented on the disdain for science among educated Britons in his day: A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's? And the evolutionary psychologists John Tooby, Leda Cosmides, and Clark Barrett entitled a recent paper on the foundations of the science of mind “The Second Law of Thermodynamics is the First Law of Psychology." Why the awe for the Second Law? The Second Law defines the ultimate purpose of life, mind, and human striving: to deploy energy and information to fight back the tide of entropy and carve out refuges of beneficial order. An underappreciation of the inherent tendency toward disorder, and a failure to appreciate the precious niches of order we carve out, are a major source of human folly. To start with, the Second Law implies that misfortune may be no one’s fault. The biggest breakthrough of the scientific revolution was to nullify the intuition that the universe is saturated with purpose: that everything happens for a reason. In this primitive understanding, when bad things happen—accidents, disease, famine—someone or something must have wanted them to happen. This in turn impels people to find a defendant, demon, scapegoat, or witch to punish. Galileo and Newton replaced this cosmic morality play with a clockwork universe in which events are caused by conditions in the present, not goals for the future. The Second Law deepens that discovery: Not only does the universe not care about our desires, but in the natural course of events it will appear to thwart them, because there are so many more ways for things to go wrong than to go right. Houses burn down, ships sink, battles are lost for the want of a horseshoe nail. Poverty, too, needs no explanation. In a world governed by entropy and evolution, it is the default state of humankind. Matter does not just arrange itself into shelter or clothing, and living things do everything they can not to become our food. What needs to be explained is wealth. Yet most discussions of poverty consist of arguments about whom to blame for it. More generally, an underappreciation of the Second Law lures people into seeing every unsolved social problem as a sign that their country is being driven off a cliff. It’s in the very nature of the universe that life has problems. But it’s better to figure out how to solve them—to apply information and energy to expand our refuge of beneficial order—than to start a conflagration and hope for the best.https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27023
Not trying to partake in the debate about who is woo and who is not woo, one things struck me as possibly significant.
We speak of entropy as if it is an abstract universal phenomena in which we play no part.
Has anyone ever considered that human activities may well be causal to drastic entropy of the earth’s finely tuned ecosystem?
We are the “sledge hammer” someone mentioned, to our own ecological system, precisely because we are carving out safe havens for humans, ignoring that the earth’s ecosystem is an integrated system, and that wasting energy in our frivolous pursuits is tantamount to human caused entropy… :shut:
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Not trying to partake in the debate about who is woo and who is not woo, one things struck me as possibly significant. We speak of entropy as if it is an abstract universal phenomena in which we play no part. Has anyone ever considered that human activities may well be causal to drastic entropy of the earth's finely tuned ecosystem? We are the "sledge hammer" someone mentioned, to our own ecological system, precisely because we are carving out safe havens for humans, ignoring that the earth's ecosystem is an integrated system, and that wasting energy in our frivolous pursuits is tantamount to human caused entropy..... :shut:I'll buy that. Though I haven't a clue what Beltane's post was supposed to be all about. I imagine that'll help him feel smug and superior. For me, it reminds me of what I was writing about today
Libertarian Siren Song: "Listen to how their assertions always depend on tailor made hypotheticals and metaphors. It’s a sort of nostalgia, dreaming of something that never was and never could be."Now everyone wants to deny being libertarian they just like sounding like it. The label was always rather silly anyways, so who knows what's what there. To me anyone that has waved around Ayn Rand and has her babble as part of their foundation is "libertarian". Now I'm always open to someone rationally explaining it, just haven't been fortunate enough to hear from that someone. For the most part they're too busy with personal jokes for anything that straightforward and informative.
I suspected this. Pinker doesn’t directly address your crackpot views on society and nature, and you are compelled to attack his scientific integrity. That’s all we need to know.No it's not! >:-( In an honest, rational, constructive debate you would now be honor bound to define "my crackpot views on society and nature." Are you capable of that Beltane?Look in every thread you’ve started started about climate and politics. Hippy nonsense way past its sell-by date.Here again hyperventilating bullshit. Would he care to raise any specific point to look at rationally, dare I say constructively? NO. The grand sweep, followed by, it's all bullshit, cause I think so. Beltane you impress less and less.
Beltane said, "Look in every thread you’ve started started about climate and politics. Hippy nonsense way past its sell-by date"Yes, lets not discuss our Global Ecosystem until the Sixth Extinction happens. Then we will know for sure what we have been dealing with all this time. But then, of course, it will be "past its save-by-date", and then everyone will shout, "why did nobody warn us"!....... :shut: Reminds me of “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper." ~ T.S. Eliot { poetry}
Discussing it is fine, just not in the way citizens challenge does it.Beltane said, "Look in every thread you’ve started started about climate and politics. Hippy nonsense way past its sell-by date"Yes, lets not discuss our Global Ecosystem until the Sixth Extinction happens. Then we will know for sure what we have been dealing with all this time. But then, of course, it will be "past its save-by-date", and then everyone will shout, "why did nobody warn us"!....... :shut: Reminds me of “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper." ~ T.S. Eliot { poetry}
¢Libertarian As Inigo Montoya] would say.....Not trying to partake in the debate about who is woo and who is not woo, one things struck me as possibly significant. We speak of entropy as if it is an abstract universal phenomena in which we play no part. Has anyone ever considered that human activities may well be causal to drastic entropy of the earth's finely tuned ecosystem? We are the "sledge hammer" someone mentioned, to our own ecological system, precisely because we are carving out safe havens for humans, ignoring that the earth's ecosystem is an integrated system, and that wasting energy in our frivolous pursuits is tantamount to human caused entropy..... :shut:I'll buy that. Though I haven't a clue what Beltane's post was supposed to be all about. I imagine that'll help him feel smug and superior. For me, it reminds me of what I was writing about todayLibertarian Siren Song: "Listen to how their assertions always depend on tailor made hypotheticals and metaphors. It’s a sort of nostalgia, dreaming of something that never was and never could be."Now everyone wants to deny being libertarian they just like sounding like it. The label was always rather silly anyways, so who knows what's what there. To me anyone that has waved around Ayn Rand and has her babble as part of their foundation is "libertarian". Now I'm always open to someone rationally explaining it, just haven't been fortunate enough to hear from that someone. For the most part they're too busy with personal jokes for anything that straightforward and informative.
Discussing it is fine, just not in the way citizens challenge does it. And this is your example of "discussing"Beltane said, "Look in every thread you’ve started started about climate and politics. Hippy nonsense way past its sell-by date"Yes, lets not discuss our Global Ecosystem until the Sixth Extinction happens. Then we will know for sure what we have been dealing with all this time. But then, of course, it will be "past its save-by-date", and then everyone will shout, "why did nobody warn us"!....... :shut: Reminds me of “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper." ~ T.S. Eliot { poetry}
Libertarian As Inigo Montoya] would say.....
just not in the way citizens challenge does it.Don't suppose you can add any constructive examples or critiques? Oh, and what about the example you set? How does that invite constructive discussion? :)
Look in every thread you’ve started started about climate and politics. Hippy nonsense way past its sell-by date.Oh and let me point out this has absolutely nothing to do with my "style" - this is about sharing and wanting to discuss genuine down to Earth geophysical reality. That you don't seem to "believe" in. Maybe you do, but you're so busy playing games and issuing blanket dismissals with ridicule rather than constructive contribution to the discussions - that who knows.
Discussing it is fine, just not in the way citizens challenge does it. And this is your example of "discussing"Beltane said, "Look in every thread you’ve started started about climate and politics. Hippy nonsense way past its sell-by date"Yes, lets not discuss our Global Ecosystem until the Sixth Extinction happens. Then we will know for sure what we have been dealing with all this time. But then, of course, it will be "past its save-by-date", and then everyone will shout, "why did nobody warn us"!....... :shut: Reminds me of “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper." ~ T.S. Eliot { poetry}
Libertarian As Inigo Montoya] would say.....
just not in the way citizens challenge does it.Don't suppose you can add any constructive examples or critiques? This thread is a perfect example. By your own admission you are unfamiliar with Pinker's work, yet that didn't stop you from overreacting to what some climate blogger claimed is an attack on environmentalists in his most recent book. After that come nonsense accusations of him being a libertarian (a term you use often but don't seem to understand) apologist, consumerism apologist, which to you really translates as CLIMATE CHANGE DENIER. This is crank behavior. A rational response would be to read the supposedly offensive book instead of awkwardly attempting to portray Pinker as something he's not.
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This thread is a perfect example. By your own admission you are unfamiliar with Pinker's work, yet that didn't stop you from overreacting to what some climate blogger claimed is an attack on environmentalists in his most recent book. After that come nonsense accusations of him being a libertarian (a term you use often but don't seem to understand) apologist, consumerism apologist, which to you really translates as CLIMATE CHANGE DENIER. {How about Reality Denier, their's more to it than climate, land degradation and its cascading consequence, and oh so much more. Stuff, you dismiss and ignore, thus seem oblivious to} This is crank behavior. A rational response would be to read the supposedly offensive book instead of awkwardly attempting to portray Pinker as something he's not.First, Monbiot is not some crank and I notice Beltane has done nothing to constructively take issue with his article, or the point he makes. Second, Beltane maintains that listening to numerous talks from Mr. Pinker talking about his books and explaining his thoughts - leaves us totally ignorant of what he's about? How the hell does the work. It's like saying I know nothing about evolution because all my understanding cames through popular science and reporting from the scientific frontier, rather than digesting every learned paper ever written. Even though much of that "popular science" comes from the scientists who did the work themselves. It's like saying no one can learn anything from a lecture. Do you really think that Beltane? Beltane that's silly, but then we know all you want to do is paint me some idiot using whatever mud you can fling. As for the mislabeling as you call it. A) was it really? B) So the fuk what! LETS GET BACK TO THE SUBSTANCE OF THE DISCONNECTED IDEAS I'm taking issue with? But then, Beltane the tactic works that way with anyone, christ you dismiss Monbiot as easily as you dismiss me. Further you can never actually get to the issues themselves. Either constructively critiquing me , or bringing your own thoughts and perspectives to the table so we can look at those. Instead, its always so much easier to play the Superiority Card and dismiss it all.