I'm more interested in - man alive, it is repugnant to say this - the "pleasant" parts. The parts that have nothing to do with race or any other key Nazi tropes long proven wrong.

Assuming they exist. He couldn't have gotten every single word wrong, could he?

And please let me reiterate - I am in no way an admirer of Hitler or his philosophy. I am not seeking to celebrate the stuff Hitler got right. I am instead seeking to show that you can make any book look good if you choose your quotes carefully.

DG

Granted - anything Hitler has to say on "race" is going to be completely out to lunch and is pretty much a given to be "bad" stuff.

But if he says something like "farmers need to get their produce to market and an efficient transportation system is a way to make that happen" - well that's true, even if it did come out of Hitler's mouth.

I'd love to see a list of quotes from Mein Kampf that follow a similar pattern - stuff that is unquestionably true, even though the source is pretty much the worst possible source ever.

DG

I have had an essay peculating away in my brain for a while whose subject is the selective reading and quotation of various holy books.

The bible, for example, is full of all sorts of horrible things, but there are passages that contain "just", "lawful", "good", or "moral" stories and instructions - for simplicities' sake, let's call them the "bad" parts and the "good" parts.

Those who hold up any particular religious philosophy as the paragon of human virtue quote the "good" parts and ignore the "bad" parts.

Well, Nazism has this wonderful rhetorical value as being one of the few philosophies that is universally regarded as being wholly "bad". Aside from a few nutcases - who most of the world recognize as abhorrent - nobody has anything good to say about Nazis. They are the go-to bad guys.

Mein Kampf is the Nazi bible, or at the very least a work of Nazi scripture. The common view of the book is that it must be evil through and through. I posit, however, that there exist passages in Mein Kampf - much like the bible - that are, if not ethically and morally good, at the very least neutral. If so, this would make it possible to - again, much like the bible - to selectively quote Mein Kampf and use it as an anchor for a moral philosophy.

Not that I'm in any way interested in rehabilitating National Socialism! The point here being that if you can find good in Mein Kampf, well, what does that say about the practice of selective quoting in the bible?

I think you can see where I'm headed with this.

Anyway, I have never read the book, so the postulation that it contains good/neutral passages remains (to me) unproven. Are they in there?

DG

I don't thing you need a lawyer - yet.

You are in a negotiation. The company has made you an initial offer - the half-month free hosting - and that initial offer has a dollar value associated with it.

You have been inconvenienced, and it took time to rectify the problem. Your inconvenience and time also has a dollar value associated with it. So what is it?

I would work out the value of what you lost, add 20% for general hassle costs, and present that as a counter-offer to the company.

I would also work out the minimum value for which I would settle. It's less than getting everything I want (which you might get) but enough to counter-balance the additional hassle of hiring a lawyer and all those extra expenses.

Then negotiate. If they present an offer that is above your settle value, take it. If they don't, THEN you call the lawyer. Not only is this likely to arrive at a mutually agreeable solution without lawyers taking a cut, if you do wind up hiring a lawyer, you give him more to work with "my client made a perfectly acceptable counter offer and you refused it" etc.

Lawyers can be a useful tool, and sometimes they are necessary, but a reasonable negotiation can also work. You just need to understand your position first.

DG

No, I don't think that's the one (although I may be mentally mixing details from that one with the other)

The one I'm thinking of had wholesale fabricated data, and this data set would up being used by a number of other studies who didn't realize that the data books were cooked.

I do wish I could provide more detail, but I don't have it with me at the moment and can't really take the time right now to track it down.

DG

There was a big story a couple of years ago - I'm sorry that I don;'t have the details readily availible, but Google could probably find it - in which the data from which a number of prominent "human global warming" studies drew their facts turned out to have been deliberately falsified.

I want to say it came out of England but I may be mistaken.

Not just cherry-picked (although that happens too) but made up from whole cloth.

DG

Are you, perhaps, a Jesuit?

You appear to have a talent for the ruthless pursuit of heretics.

For all your chest beating, you present not a single fact - and, in so doing, continue to strengthen my initial point.

DG

Because science isn't a democracy. Majority doesn't rule. I don't care if 90% of the "experts" think that the earth is the centre of the solar system, or that fire is a product of philostegon, or that light travels through the luminous aether (all perfectly reasonable postulates that were at one time held as fact by the majority of the learned) when there is data and experiment that suggests a helocentric solar system, rapid oxidation, and electromagnetic waves as alternates.

There are studies that arrive at a conclusion of human-caused global warming. There are studies that arrive at human-caused global COOLING. There are studies that find global warming of a scale similar to temperature swings in the past, and those that claim that the current swing is unprecidented.

And instead of all these studies being studied in aggrigate and being used to fine-tune the overall picture, the respective "sides" just yell at each other and - even worse from a scientific perspective - agressively seek to discredit the other and ruthlessly surpress dissenting opinions.

You don't need to look any farther than the moderation history for this comment tree; back and forth between "Insightful", "Informative". and "Overrated". And it is the "Overrated" that I find most telling; rather than debate the facts, attempt to surpress the discussion - the tactics one expects of the big-business backed "anti" crowd, not the supposedly dispassionate and logical "science" crowd.

So I have chosen #1 and #2, and I find that the facts as presented are non-compelling either way, and I further find that the tactics used especially by the "it's happening" side are both frightening and inconsistant with the scientific method. That doesn't mean they are WRONG (the dissenting picture painted by the facts prevents either side from claiming victory) but it sure isn't helping anything.

Do you not see this?

DG

There is an element of truth to that - if, for example, someone determined that the root cause of all cancer was masturbation and that all cancers everywhere could be eliminated by eliminating masturbation, he'd face quite the uphill battle to both prove it and effect the behavioral change.

But there is a difference between getting the public to accept a difficult or challenging truth, and the kinds of fraud and groupthink that is happening right now amongst those who study global warming/climate change. If you do a study which determines that, within the boundaries of your study, human effected climate change is not happening, or that at least a proposed mechanism is not being observed, and then publish those results, your peers will seek to ruthlessly discredit you, you run the risk of losing your funding , and in many cases, your job.

One could argue that the "broadly held opinion" is that "climate change is happening" and those struggling to overturn it are those whose studies show otherwise.

DG

*facepalm*

I am agnostic not because I am "ignorant", but because my analysis of the studies that I have read - many, many of them - arrives at the following conclusions:

1. Neither case is particularly compelling; and

2. Both cases are presented by people with vested interests and evidence of fraud, so neither side is particularly trustworthy.

Thank you, by the way, for providing an example that proves my point. You regurgitate the groupthink, and instead of relying on science to make your argument for you, instead immediately go to an attack on the man, rather than the facts. This is the sort of behavior that makes me profoundly distrustful of the proponents of "global warming" as a postulate.

DG