What, is Sunday "idiots-upmodding-mindless-drivel they-agree-with day?"

(1) You put this in quotes:

"this is probably just nature at work, and we haven't directly observed nature scientifically for a long enough period to know if this is a temporary condition".

Except... it's not a quote. BlueStrat didn't say "this is probably just nature at work." Those are YOUR words. They are not the words MightyMartian was commenting on. If you want to paraphrase/make up words and start debating them with yourself, be my guest. But don't drag me into it.

(2) There is nothing rational about saying we just do nothing about a bad situation because we haven't observed in the past how those situations play out.

Of course there is. Doing nothing IS sometimes the most rational response. History is replete with instances where everyone would have been much better off if authorities had simply done nothing. I can think of a dozen instances just off the top of my head. Does that mean THIS is one of those cases? I don't know -- and neither do you. We only know about those things in hindsight. But history makes it sand-poundingly obvious that, yes, sometimes doing nothing is much better than a badly misguided attempt to address a problem affecting a complex system we don't understand very well, on the theory that, well, we must do SOMETHING!!

(3) and accusing someone of being "emotional" when they post a sarcastic comment etc etc etc

So pointing out an obvious fact (i.e., that MightyMartian's reaction was emotional and not rational) is an "accusation"?

Cunning? Oh for Pete's sake. Grow up.

lllll Alaska Jack

Translation: I don't like BlueStrat's perfectly calm, rational point, so I'm going to argue against it with emotion, wave my hands around, and come up with some meaningless term that sneers at his point without SOUNDING too sneery. oh, I know -- "meme." Yeah, that'll work.

So, I have a question for you. Do you consider yourself scientifically minded and skeptical? Do you think it's the OTHER guys who post on emotion, looking for anything that confirms their pre-existing notions? Because -- surprise! -- that's exactly what you just did. Kind of humbling, isn't it? BlueStrat made a perfectly scientific point -- this observation, in and of itself, doesn't mean much, because our data set is so small. We've only been making these observations since (I think) 1978 -- an eyeblink in geologic time.

If you actually have something meaningful to say, and you want to show all of us you're actually NOT an idiot, well -- what's stopping you?

lllll Alaska Jack

"We can now say with some confidence that we will in [sic] have the smallest extent of ice so far. "

... where "so far" seems to mean "in the last few decades."

lllll Alaska Jack

After a long time on Macs, I took the plunge into Linux with a Dell Mini 10.

I was amazed to find out that, once purchased, you were pretty much stuck with the OS as it shipped. If you upgraded, you broke the graphics driver.

There were gigantic, epic forum threads (this I think is the main one -- 543 pages. Not comments -- pages.) devoted to fiddling with command-line settings to try to get things working again. Eventually, it just got to be too much and I installed XP on the thing.

||||| Alaska Jack

Count me in as another guy who came here to say exactly this.

Will lives in a rural peasant village in England. His life is pretty normal for any kid growing up in the dark ages.

Except, strangely, his father has a wristwatch ...

The American system is based on the idea that we are endowed *by our Creator* with certain unalienable rights, and that governments are instituted among men to *secure* those rights. - aj

I've thought many times that there must be a huge, untapped market for a line of electronics for grown ups. Try searching for a shelf stereo system, for example. Most of it is garish crap, burdened with all kinds of obscure functionality most people will never use. There are systems more minimal and adult-looking, but "minimialist" doesn't mean "user-friendly." What I'm talking about is a system that looks nice, is of relatively good quality, and for which you never need to read the manual. It's just obvious how to work it.

Car stereos are the same way. They almost all sacrifice function for style.

And alarm clocks. How about an alarm clock with a panel that you flip open, and behind it is a simple, phone style number pad. To set alarm 1, you press

[Set Alarm 1] - [7] - [3] - [0] - [am] - [Enter], then turn a little analog dial to set the volume, and flip the panel closed.

Done.

lllll Alaska Jack

The idea that someone's great-grandson should be taken as some kind of authority on what his grandfather would think -- which in ITSELF is just an "appeal to authority," void of any real meaning.

So this is an appeal to an appeal of authority. Or is it an appeal to authority of an appeal to authority? Whatever, it's meaningless.

- aj

I mean no disrespect, but those sources all seem to cite... each other. To be more specific, they all ultimately seem to rely on that George Monbiot article, which in turn -- provides no source.

I remain open to the possibility that Richardson actually said this, but at this point it's looking unlikely.

- aj

Hey, Mr. chrb, sir.

I know your post was modded insightful and all, but can you point me toward the original source of the Richardson quote? I can't seem to find it. Your link points toward an unsourced citation.

Thanks,

- aj

Reading this, it's hard to escape the impression that you are just grimly set on interpreting the entire scope of history in a way that simplistically blames the American bogeyman as much as possible.

To do this,you have to ignore all kinds of inconvenient facts -- like the fact that the alternative to the right-wing Shah came not from the democratic left, but from the even FARTHER right: Khomeini and his ilk.

Or this part, which is funny: "The war we helped create." "Helped create?" Huh? Newsflash: Saddam Hussein and the Ayatollahs were perfectly capable of doing this on their own. These were two aggressive, militaristic regimes, each bent on regional supremacy. Oh, but of course, it was the big, bad US that made them fight. Sure, ok.

- aj