These People vote? (1 Viewer)

Frothingslosh

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Ugh, I could have gone all year without being reminded of Deepak Chopra.
 

Alc

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well if more than one of us is saying it, perhaps we're not the problem ? ;)
 

Frothingslosh

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Aaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhh
 

Galaxiom

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And they must be right when so many of the establishment frantically conspire to discredit them.
 

Galaxiom

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Only the true Messiah denies His divinity.
 

The_Doc_Man

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Wait, Galaxiom... is non-denial of divinity a case of the "No True Scotsman" fallacy?

As to Deepak Chopra,

Yeah, can't handle being faced with a TRUE scientist, huh?

Read the reference and STILL haven't been exposed to a true scientist.
 

kevlray

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An IQ test before voting, nothing too hard. Things like what is the capitol of the state they live in?
 

Alc

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An IQ test before voting, nothing too hard. Things like what is the capitol of the state they live in?
That's not an IQ test, it's a test of knowledge. Granted they should probably still know, but you could be a genius and still not.
 

Groundrush

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Anyone seen the flat Erthers on You Tube lately?

It seems to be a big thing at the moment and I really cant believe that in this day and age there are still people that actually believe that the earth is flat.
 

Frothingslosh

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Anti-intellectualism is growing in popularity in the US. Being intelligent is, more and more, seen as a problem, at least poltically.

If people can convince themselves vaccines are deadlier than the diseases they eradicated, that climate change is not real despite a virtual unanimity in the scientific community that it is not only happening but being driven by human actgions, and that the government regularly runs air-tight conspiracies involving hundreds of thousands of conspirators aimed at doing evil for the sake of evil, then people deciding that the Earth is flat isn't surprising at all.
 

The_Doc_Man

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If people can convince themselves vaccines are deadlier than the diseases they eradicated,

I'm going to PARTIALLY defend this one. If you pay attention to all the medicine ads on USA commercial TV, you see things that have more severe side-effects than some of the diseases they supposedly cure or control. Comedian Jeff Foxworthy has done a routine on medicine side effects where the particular pill is supposed to cure some minor condition but, WARNING: Side effects include acne, bloating, chills, dementia, edema, ... (and the list is literally an A-Z of symptoms). It is NOT that far a jump for some folks to believe that the side-effects of many medicines are worse than the disease.

OK, I'm not that far gone as to believe that vaccines have the side-effects that many folks mistakenly believe they have - but given the background noise of medicine ads, I can see how folks MIGHT draw the wrong conclusion.

that climate change is not real despite a virtual unanimity in the scientific community that it is not only happening but being driven by human actgions (sic)

Climate change is real and has been for the last many millions of years. Whether human action is the cause? I am not sure and have not yet seen a definitive article. Let me clarify my position by telling you that I am absolutely against polluting the air, water, and soil - but my viewpoint is based on my ability to find so-called "smoking gun" articles that give a step-by-step mechanistic pathway that leads from (for example) putting dioxin in the soil all the way to liver poisoning cause by that pollutant. I can find literally thousands of such articles that prove that pollution causes illness and for that reason I want industries held responsible - but as to global warming or global climate change, I have not seen a smoking gun article that made sense. Therefore, I abstain from agreement (and disagreement).
 

Frothingslosh

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Well, to be fair, I was specifically referring to anti-vaxxers, not people worried about the ridiculous list of side-effects you see on most meds.

Anti-vaxxers hold the opinion that vaccines are poison and do more harm to humanity than good. Most buy into the whole 'vaccines cause autism' thing, and would honestly rather risk the death or crippling of their child by a preventable disease than "risk" autism because 'some doctor somewhere said it happens'. (The rest generally seem to be scared of the big words you find in vaccine creation and ingredient lists.)

They actually think that the dangers of polio, smallpox, and all those other diseases Americans generally no longer suffer from are nothing but massively overblown government propaganda, and most of the anti-vaxxers I've spoken with reject modern medicine in its entireity).

As to climate change, reports and studies come out every week showing again and again that human actions and behavior are what's driving the current warming bout. Hell, poll after poll shows that scientists actually studying the phenomenon are virtually unanimous in saying that humanity is behind it.

I tried to dredge up some good links for you, but the problem I'm running into is that there are SO many articles on the subject by everyone and their brother than the signal-to-noise ratio is INCREDIBLY bad. The query "List of studies proving climate change caused by humanity" pulled up over 67 million hits, almost all of which are just people arguing one way or the other. I wasn't able to dig through all that enough to find links directly to research results directly, but I did find an interesting study by someone who actually went through over 10,000 articles on a peer-reviewed source and found agreement closer to 99.9% than 97%.

I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but at this point, saying "It hasn't been proven to ME" in regards to climate change is much like saying "Well, *I* haven't seen any proof the world is round".

If I were an actual scientist involved in the research in some way, I could provide you direct links to studies pretty easily. Since I'm just a data analyst killing time while reports run, I'm just going to have to continue doing battle with Google until I can find them.
 

Rabbie

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My two cents worth. Climate Change is definitely occurring and it is hard to think that the increase in greenhouse gases released by the burning of fossil fuels over the last two hundred years have not had some effect. It may not be the only cause it may not be the main cause but it is certainly IMO one of the causes.
 

The_Doc_Man

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Frothingslosh, my answer for global climate change was non-committal on the cause. I.e. I have seen a LOT of junk science and lot of summary articles that reference junk science, but I have reached a tentative conclusion that is in line with your observation of a really extreme signal-to-noise ratio. A lot - and I really do mean a LOT - of the articles were obviously written with the intent to attract federal or state government grants.

I specifically recall overhearing one of my doctoral committee members telling one of his grad students, "Here, go do some experiments on " <some stuff> " and write up a fast paper on the promising nature of this field of study. I'll fill in the blanks with some extra references and we'll publish." Dr. G was well-respected but not immune to the publish-or-perish mind-set of academia, and ALSO was exceptionally good at blowing smoke initially in order to attract grant money. To be fair, he usually came through - about 80% of the time - with a research track that turned up something worth an honest publication (as opposed to the "grab their attention" first salvo).

I am trying hard to not be arrogant, but with all the hype out there, it is increasingly hard to not be really skeptical on this topic. Which is why I made my point on diseases caused by the pollution created by modern industry.
 

Frothingslosh

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Honestly, I think the hype is happening so much because we have so many political leaders who think it's not happening at all and are doing everything they can to block the issue getting addressed.

Hell, I'm half-expecting a repeat of 'this snowball disproves climate change' soon.
 

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