[MD] Julian Baggini: This is what the clash of civilisations is really about

[John Carl]

Hope you feel better soon, Ron.

Denying climate change is simply idiotic.  How much more directly
experiential can you get, than the weather?

But the fact that there is a large body of opposition to the view that
"reducing carbon" ought to be our goal, I think is perfectly fine.  After
all, a given fact has differing interpretations and the fact of climate
change does NOT mean that our smartest response is fighting against it.
Perhaps our resources would be better spent adapting to it.

But Baggini's whole point is just this:  if you don't give people something
to believe in, they will find something to believe in.  So why not come up
with some ideas to believe in?  Rather than spending our time rejecting
belief, per se.

John

On Mon, Jun 22, 2015 at 5:46 PM, Ron Kulp <xacto at rocketmail.com> wrote:

>
> "Of course, some folks were hard at work trying to dispute inconvenient
> scientific facts long before conservatives began to borrow postmodernist
> rhetoric. In Merchants of Doubt (Bloomsbury Press, 2010), two historians,
> Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, have shown how the strategy of denying
> climate change and evolution can be traced all the way back to big tobacco
> companies, who recognized early on that even the most well-documented
> scientific claims (for instance, that smoking causes cancer) could be
> eroded by skillful government lobbying, bullying the news media, and
> pursuing a public-relations campaign. Sadly, that strategy has largely
> worked, and we today find it employed by the Discovery Institute, the
> Seattle organization advocating that "intelligent-design theory" be taught
> in the public schools as balance for the "holes" in evolutionary theory,
> and the Heartland Institute, which bills itself as "the world’s most
> prominent think tank promoting skepticism about man-made climate change." -
> See more at:
> http://m.chronicle.com/article/The-Attack-on-Truth/230631/#sthash.cc0fahpi.dpuf
>
> Ron replies:
> Thanks for pointing me at that book Dave. I found something similar at:
>
> http://www.salon.com/2014/03/04/bible_barons_how_the_gop_uses_religion_to_keep_voters_captive_to_corporate_ideology_partner/
>
> I had a lot more to say but I have been ill and I'm in the middle of
> changing Jobs so I lost my train of thought. When things calm down and I
> can concentrate on the subject at hand I would like to take it up again.
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play within boundaries.
Infinite players
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