Nice to be here and able to contribute my irrelevant ramblings to a forum of people that seem to actually want to rationally comment upon and question extremely important issues, as opposed to the typical blog these days that consists of “diz songe is da *&it”

Hi all, I’m glad to be here and when I have done putting you all on a pedestal I will add some attempted deep thought followed by strong gusts of humor. Cheers

I disagree that they’re irrational.

I’d be very surprised if the vast majority of car drivers did not believe that CO2 contributes to global warming, and did not know that cars produce CO2.

That does not mean that driving a car is irrational. Rationally, the economic impact and inconvenience caused by, say, finding alternate transportation or making big lifestyle instead of say, buying a Hummer is huge at the level of the individual, compared the the miniscule, immeasurable reduction of global warmingwhich that individual Hummer causes. So the individual IS acting rationally to buy his Hummer even if he is 100% confident it contributes to global warming.

So Gore’s point about the ratio of scientific opinion versus op-ed opinion is irrelevant to the basic logic of how individuals make decisions. If you want people to get behind reductions in global warming, or any other environmental or humanitarian depradations you have to find a way to make the cost of that depradation LOGICALLY exceed the benefit the individual enjoys from it.

Good luck. I don’t think it’s going to happen because global warming is a the result of every individual behaving rationally at the individual level even if the emergent phenomenon that results is not too nice. Short of coercive measures I don’t see how you you can change the inherent logic at the individual level.

According to my CIA personality quiz results (via https://www.cia.gov/careers/CIAMyths.html) I am a “Thoughtful Observer” which fills me with rocket propelled confidence.

Suck on that Trotsky!

In an interview with Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air, Al Gore talked about his documentary and the slide that brings the most feedback: the one that shows how in all scientific peer review journals no articles of 928 over a 10 year period disagreed with the scientific consensus on global warming, but in the msn (NYT, LAT, WSJ, WP, etc.), articles over a 14 year period gave equal weight to the scientific conclusion and the corporate view that humans played no role. In this example we find evidence for the way corporate media helps foster the irrational “rational choices” plnelson attributes to what can only be seen as a selfish and exploitative form of liberty.

Meanwhile, Fraternity (and Sorority, or better yet, the awkward but righteous ‘Siblinghood’) is a nearly meaningless concept in American politics.

Another thing about this whole “family” (brother, sister, etc) metaphor is that real families are voluntary. I come from a big family, and I’m very fond of most of them, sort of fond of others, and few I’m not crazy about at all. I’m under no obligation to send Christmas cards to the ones I don’t like or bail them out of jail or anything. My degree of association or interaction with my family is voluntary.

But “fraternity” the way you’re using it implies an actual, enforcable obligation. Rather like the way a Muslim woman needs the permission of her brother or father or someone to date a man. So it’s a perversion of the concept of fraternity for political ends.

It’s a little bit like the way the left has recently started using the concept of “stakeholder” as a kind of parallel to “shareholder” in trying to extract concessions and obligations from companies. Companies are of course, beholden and obligated to their shareholders. So the left has introduced the idea of “stakeholder” to try to create a new set of obligations for companies. Stakeholders are employees, local communities, mom-and-pop businesses that depend on business from the corporation, local governments that depend of the taxes the company pays, etc, etc. It’s just a semantic game trying to turn a set of voluntary choice-based relationships into binding ones.