Why Do They Pound the Table?

 

A brilliant post from last year wondered why Harrison Ford was so angry about science. Discussions of science are not generally emotional events and are often perceived as boring. Math is not thrilling – it’s just math – it adds up or it does not. There’s nothing to believe in. So there’s no reason to convince anyone of anything. But those who promote climate change very often attempt to use emotions rather than simple scientific explanation.

When I saw this picture of Greta Thunberg, I was reminded of that post, and of this quote from Carl Sandberg: “If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell.”

It doesn’t bother me that the climate change promoters are wrong. I’m often wrong. What bothers me is that they clearly know they’re wrong. But they want power, so they pound the table.

Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio do not live like people who think that carbon emissions are important. Harrison Ford and Ms. Thunberg do not speak like someone who has the facts on their side. These are not honest mistakes. Ms. Thunberg is not an innocent kid sharing her uninformed opinions. This is being done not with innocence, but with malice. It’s not foolish, it’s vicious. This is scary stuff.

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  1. Western Chauvinist Member
    Western Chauvinist
    @WesternChauvinist

    That was a brilliant piece. I didn’t see who wrote it. Do you know?

    • #1
  2. Dr. Bastiat Member
    Dr. Bastiat
    @drbastiat

    Western Chauvinist (View Comment):

    That was a brilliant piece. I didn’t see who wrote it. Do you know?

    Gosh, I can’t remember.  I was too dazzled by his brilliance to remember his name.  Judging by his writing, it sounds like he’s very slender and handsome, as well…

    • #2
  3. James Gawron Inactive
    James Gawron
    @JamesGawron

    Dr. Bastiat: It doesn’t bother me that the climate change promoters are wrong. I’m often wrong. What bothers me is that they clearly know they’re wrong. But they want power, so they pound the table. Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio do not live like people who think that carbon emissions are important. Harrison Ford and Ms. Thunberg do not speak like someone who has the facts on their side. These are not honest mistakes. Ms. Thunberg is not an innocent kid sharing her uninformed opinions. This is being done not with innocence, but with malice. It’s not foolish, it’s vicious. This is scary stuff.

    Dr. B,

    Agreed.

    Regards,

    Jim

    • #3
  4. Percival Thatcher
    Percival
    @Percival

    They pound the table because in their minds passion > precision.

    I once had a technical disagreement with a (to be charitable) nontechnical person at a status meeting. He took umbrage; not with my facts (which he couldn’t fault), nor with my reasoning (which he couldn’t follow), but with my disagreeing at all.

    At a subsequent meeting, he disagreed with me on another technical issue.  Then he added “Now you know how it feels to have someone disagree with you!

    “Not really” I replied. “When I disagreed with you before, you were wrong. When you just disagreed with me, you were wrong.”

    • #4
  5. Pony Convertible Inactive
    Pony Convertible
    @PonyConvertible

    Great Post

    From the link I know one of your Laws of Foolishness.  Where is the rest of the list?

    • #5
  6. B. W. Wooster Member
    B. W. Wooster
    @HenryV

    My fallback statement to (attempt) to end arguments is often, “I could agree with you, but then we would both be wrong”.

    • #6
  7. Arahant Member
    Arahant
    @Arahant

    Dr. Bastiat: Ms. Thunberg is not an innocent kid sharing her uninformed opinions.

    This is the one statement I have to disagree with. This is a mentally ill child who is being used, because children get more sympathy. How were your mental faculties at sixteen? And you were probably smarter and much more stable than she is. How were your emotions at sixteen? I know mine were overwhelmed by hormones, and I did some really stupid stuff. She is a child being used for emotional manipulation.

    Look for the puppet-master behind her. The puppet master’s intentions are not innocent.

    Wie findet ihr Greta Thunberg? (Seite 10) - Allmystery

    • #7
  8. Dr. Bastiat Member
    Dr. Bastiat
    @drbastiat

    Arahant (View Comment):

    Dr. Bastiat: Ms. Thunberg is not an innocent kid sharing her uninformed opinions.

    This is the one statement I have to disagree with. This is a mentally ill child who is being used, because children get more sympathy. How were your mental faculties at sixteen? And you were probably smarter and much more stable than she is. How were your emotions at sixteen? I know mine were overwhelmed by hormones, and I did some really stupid stuff. She is a child being used for emotional manipulation.

    Look for the puppet-master behind her. The puppet master’s intentions are not innocent.

    Wie findet ihr Greta Thunberg? (Seite 10) - Allmystery

    Fair point.  I considered that point of view as well.

    Although my motivations at that age were not always innocent or benign.  I lashed out at people that I didn’t like, in various different ways.  My immaturity and raging hormones partially explain my actions, although in my view it does not excuse them.

    My first impulse is to cut Ms. Thunberg a little slack.  But the further she presses this, I’m not so sure.  I think it’s dangerous to allow her youth to shield her from criticism, especially on such an important topic.

    • #8
  9. James Gawron Inactive
    James Gawron
    @JamesGawron

    Arahant (View Comment):

    Dr. Bastiat: Ms. Thunberg is not an innocent kid sharing her uninformed opinions.

    This is the one statement I have to disagree with. This is a mentally ill child who is being used, because children get more sympathy. How were your mental faculties at sixteen? And you were probably smarter and much more stable than she is. How were your emotions at sixteen? I know mine were overwhelmed by hormones, and I did some really stupid stuff. She is a child being used for emotional manipulation.

    Look for the puppet-master behind her. The puppet master’s intentions are not innocent.

    Wie findet ihr Greta Thunberg? (Seite 10) - Allmystery

    Ari,

    This massive staged nonsense is exactly the work of the puppet master Soros. Follow the money and I’m sure it will quickly lead right back to him.

    Regards,

    Jim

    • #9
  10. Dr. Bastiat Member
    Dr. Bastiat
    @drbastiat

    Arahant (View Comment):
    This is the one statement I have to disagree with. This is a mentally ill child who is being used, because children get more sympathy.

    This part is fair.  I have no first hand knowledge, but it is my understanding that she has a long history of psychiatric problems.  If that is true, that should be considered.  Still, at some point, she should take at least some responsibility for her actions.  And her actions are scary.

    • #10
  11. MarciN Member
    MarciN
    @MarciN

    Your post from a year ago remains a must-read for all thinking people. I would love to see it on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal.

    I spent last weekend in Burlington, Vermont, with my kids. My son-in-law is a devout atheist. My daughter leans in that direction, although I don’t think she is as closed minded about things as her husband is. He loves to spout off or have me read something or listen to something about the “science” of evolution. This weekend on our way to apple picking, we listened to a podcast on the disappearance of the dinosaurs, which happened–someone has posited–in a matter of one or two days ten million years ago when an asteroid or meteor hit the earth. When it was over, I said, “That’s interesting, but it would mean that everything else perished too, so how would the biological world restart itself? Given all of these other suppositions, less-instantaneous-acting viruses or bacteria would make more sense to me because those would leave the rest of the biological world in tact.” I was just making conversation. I have no intellectual attachment to these theories.

    My daughter and son-in-law then moved on to talking about the different meanings of the word “theory”–they said it means something different to scientists than it does to the rest of us. I know exactly why they are saying this, and I’ve seen this said recently too. “But,” I said, “to my knowledge, and admittedly I haven’t looked it up lately, a ‘theory’ is only one thing. It has come down to us from the Greeks’ construction of logic and experimentation. It’s the proposition statement or thesis statement at the beginning of an examination of the truth or accuracy of a particular supposition. As far as I know, the word has no other meaning. Our use of experimentation came out of Greek geometry, which was a simple system for applying logic and evidence and testing to our ideas. Someone has an idea–a theory–to test. He or she puts the idea in a concise sentence with the goal of eliminating as many variables as possible so he or she can test the theory. He or she then conducts experiments and records the results and reaches a conclusion about the truth or accuracy of the original theory.” Actually, that’s what I wish I had said. In reality, I stopped after the first sentence above. :-) It was the best I could do on our way to get apples. :-)

    [continues in comment 12]

    • #11
  12. MarciN Member
    MarciN
    @MarciN

    [continued from comment 11]

    But, and this was really interesting, in the course of the conversation, my son-in-law said confidently to my grandson who was sitting next to me, “The whales came from the hippopotamuses.”

    “Actually,” I said, “there’s some debate about that evolutionary link. The DNA and genetic biologists are not sure anymore that that is true.”

    That got my son-in-law’s attention, and I am sure he spent some time after I left looking it up via Google. (As did I when I got home. I had read about the debate a few years ago in a book on evolution and biology But I hadn’t looked into the debate lately to see where it is now. It turns out that the evolution scientists who are forever wedded to the hippos-to-whales shibboleth have reasserted their dominance in the argument to come up with a crazy series of connections–they present these in “evograms”–to establish an unequivocal cousin relationship between these two animals. :-)  )

    However, as I was driving home to the Cape, it dawned on me that young people who are in this utterly brainwashed generation are now in the sciences themselves and are finding out that some of the stuff they were handed as facts are not in fact facts at all. :-)

    There is hope! :-)

    Postscript: See also comment 99. :-)

    • #12
  13. Samuel Block Support
    Samuel Block
    @SamuelBlock

    Dr. Bastiat:

    A brilliant post from last year wondered why Harrison Ford was so angry about science. Discussions of science are not generally emotional events, and are often perceived as boring.

    It doesn’t bother me that the climate change promoters are wrong. I’m often wrong. What bothers me is that they clearly know they’re wrong. But they want power, so they pound the table. Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio do not live like people who think that carbon emissions are important.

    William Voegeli was reviewing a novel by a New York white liberal – the kind of person who is proud to send their child to a highly diverse school (you know, somewhere in Park Slope) – and in it the narrator made an admission that she’d be terrified if she found herself alone, on a dark street with a thuggish-looking black youth approaching her.

    Voegeli used this to make the point that progressive anger is rooted in the sincere belief that while we conservatives are hateful bigots, these poor progressives are anguished souls.

    • #13
  14. Western Chauvinist Member
    Western Chauvinist
    @WesternChauvinist

    I haven’t watched Miss Thunberg so I’m taking everyone’s word that she exhibits signs of mental illness for which there is some history. But, I can’t imagine being as afraid of her as I am the adults around her willing to exploit her to gain political power. It is so unimaginably vile, I find it terrifying that these people are out there and have major influence — especially over our children.

    • #14
  15. Stad Coolidge
    Stad
    @Stad

    Dr. Bastiat (View Comment):

    Arahant (View Comment):
    This is the one statement I have to disagree with. This is a mentally ill child who is being used, because children get more sympathy.

    This part is fair. I have no first hand knowledge, but it is my understanding that she has a long history of psychiatric problems. If that is true, that should be considered. Still, at some point, she should take at least some responsibility for her actions. And her actions are scary.

    If the girl actually has mental problems, what does that say about the UN for letting her speak?

    • #15
  16. Arahant Member
    Arahant
    @Arahant

    MarciN (View Comment):
    This weekend on our way to apple picking, we listened a podcast on the disappearance of the dinosaurs, which happened–someone has posited–in a matter of one or two days ten million years ago when an asteroid or meteor hit the earth.

    No. It was not one or two days. Yes, the asteroid tipped them over the edge, but there were dinosaurs dying out before then for millions of years, and there were (and still are) dinosaurs after that time. But the after-effects of the asteroid took years to extinguish many of the species that did die off.

    MarciN (View Comment):
    but it would mean everything perished, so how would the biological world restart itself?

    Not everything died off. Mostly, it was the mega-fauna of the time that could no longer sustain themselves. That still left many smaller species. The generally-accepted idea is that this opened up many niches in the environment that mammals rose to fill. Likewise, the remaining dinosaurs also filled some of those niches as beneficial mutations popped up over time. Ditto lots of other types of critters and the other kingdoms out there.

    • #16
  17. MarciN Member
    MarciN
    @MarciN

    Arahant (View Comment):

    MarciN (View Comment):
    This weekend on our way to apple picking, we listened a podcast on the disappearance of the dinosaurs, which happened–someone has posited–in a matter of one or two days ten million years ago when an asteroid or meteor hit the earth.

    No. It was not one or two days. Yes, the asteroid tipped them over the edge, but there were dinosaurs dying out before then for millions of years, and there were (and still are) dinosaurs after that time. But the after-effects of the asteroid took years to extinguish many of the species that did die off.

    MarciN (View Comment):
    but it would mean everything perished, so how would the biological world restart itself?

    Not everything died off. Mostly, it was the mega-fauna of the time that could no longer sustain themselves. That still left many smaller species. The generally-accepted idea is that this opened up many niches in the environment that mammals rose to fill. Likewise, the remaining dinosaurs also filled some of those niches as beneficial mutations popped up over time. Ditto lots of other types of critters and the other kingdoms out there.

    The theory I heard in the podcast actually asserts that it happened in a 72-hour period. Something to do with glass balls. It’s the newest theory, and it has something to do with a new dig out in Colorado. I asked my kids if these guys had spoken recently with the plate tectonics guys: are we sure Colorado was where it is now ten million years ago? 

    I’ll see if I can find the podcast. It was pretty interesting. 

    • #17
  18. Dr. Bastiat Member
    Dr. Bastiat
    @drbastiat

    MarciN (View Comment):
    My daughter and son-in-law then moved on to talking about the different meanings of the word “theory”–they said it means something different to scientists than it does to the rest of us.

    Many people confuse the meaning of “hypothesis,” “theory,” and “fact.”

    Also, I often remind people that in 100 years, much of what we believe now is going to look pretty silly.  We don’t know what part of our scientific understanding is wrong, but we absolutely know that some of it is.  I wonder which part?

    I would love to have witnessed your conversation.  Nothing bothers know-it-alls more than someone who knows more than they do.  Nice job.

    • #18
  19. Dr. Bastiat Member
    Dr. Bastiat
    @drbastiat

    Arahant (View Comment):
    No. It was not one or two days. Yes, the asteroid tipped them over the edge, but there were dinosaurs dying out before then for millions of years

    MarciN (View Comment):
    The theory I heard in the podcast actually asserts that it happened in a 72-hour period.

    It can be very difficult for me to determine what a patient is dying of, when they are sitting in my office, and I can ask them questions, and examine them in the flesh, and do any test I want.  Often, I’m still not sure what’s happening.

    Such things will be very difficult to ascertain millions of years later, to animals we’ve never seen, in conditions we don’t understand and can’t measure. 

    It’s fun to think about.  But good luck.

    • #19
  20. Samuel Block Support
    Samuel Block
    @SamuelBlock

    Stad (View Comment):

    Dr. Bastiat (View Comment):

    Arahant (View Comment):
    This is the one statement I have to disagree with. This is a mentally ill child who is being used, because children get more sympathy.

    This part is fair. I have no first hand knowledge, but it is my understanding that she has a long history of psychiatric problems. If that is true, that should be considered. Still, at some point, she should take at least some responsibility for her actions. And her actions are scary.

    If the girl actually has mental problems, what does that say about the UN for letting her speak?

    I don’t think I want to know. Doesn’t the UN have a major child-sex abuse issue? I think it was Ben Shapiro who called their headquarters  Mos Eisley.

    • #20
  21. Arahant Member
    Arahant
    @Arahant

    MarciN (View Comment):
    But I said, “To my knowledge, and admittedly I haven’t looked it up lately, a ‘theory’ is only one thing. It has come down to us from the Greeks’ construction of logic and experimentation. It’s the proposition statement or thesis statement at the beginning. As far as I know, the word has no other meaning. Our use of experimentation came out of Greek geometry, which was a simple system for applying logic and evidence and testing to our ideas. Someone has an idea–a theory–to test. He or she puts the idea in a concise sentence with the goal of eliminating as many variables as possible so he or she can test the theory. He or she conducts experiments and records the results and reaches a conclusion about the original theory.”

    You are confusing hypothesis with theory. The hypothesis is the testable conjecture. It becomes considered a scientific theory when it has a heck of a lot of proof behind it, in theory. 😉

    Darwin’s hypothesis was not what most people think it was. There is no favored direction to “evolution.” His theory was for speciation driven by natural selection of mutations beneficial in a given environment. Why do species die out? Because the environment they are best adapted to changes, either through cataclysm, climate change (climate is always changing), or addition of some newer, better-adapted competition either through mutation or introduction from elsewhere.

    Going to the hippos and whales bit, whales did not evolve from hippos. They had a mutual common ancestor. Just as we had a mutual common ancestor with chimps…or with whales and hippos. One just has to go back a bit further to find that common ancestor. The whole “evolved from” thing is usually put in a way that would be equivalent to saying, “You are descended from your third cousin.” No, you are both descended from mutual common ancestors several generations back. (Unless you have one heck of a strange family tree.) Whales, like the other even-toed ungulates including pigs, cows, and yes, hippos, go back to a common ancestor millions of years ago.

    To quote from Wikipedia:

    The roughly 220 land-based even-toed ungulate species include pigs, peccaries, hippopotamuses, camels, llamas, alpacas, mouse deer, deer, giraffes, antelopes, sheep, goats, and cattle.

    Yep, giraffes are related to whales. Are they as close a relation as hippos? No, but they’re related. And as humans, we are each related to every other human on the planet. The only question is how many generations do we have to go back to make the connection?

    • #21
  22. Kozak Member
    Kozak
    @Kozak

    Stad (View Comment):

    Dr. Bastiat (View Comment):

    Arahant (View Comment):
    This is the one statement I have to disagree with. This is a mentally ill child who is being used, because children get more sympathy.

    This part is fair. I have no first hand knowledge, but it is my understanding that she has a long history of psychiatric problems. If that is true, that should be considered. Still, at some point, she should take at least some responsibility for her actions. And her actions are scary.

    If the girl actually has mental problems, what does that say about the UN for letting her speak?

    She has ADHD, Autism,  Aspergers and  Depression.

    So yeah. mentally unstable.

    • #22
  23. Arahant Member
    Arahant
    @Arahant

    Stad (View Comment):
    If the girl actually has mental problems, what does that say about the UN for letting her speak?

    Oh, do you really want me to go into the level of vituperation they deserve?

    • #23
  24. Juliana Member
    Juliana
    @Juliana

    We discussed the dinosaur die-off in a presentation I gave to 18-21 year olds (with disabilities). We talked about how dinosaurs are related to birds. We also talked about the four theories of how the larger dinosaurs died (disease, starvation due to food chain imbalance, volcanic activity, and meteors). One of the kids asked about the present danger from meteors.  Unfortunately one of the educational paraprofessionals who work with us – who is at least 50 years old and college educated – made this comment / asked this question: “You know, now that we have holes in our atmosphere from all the engines, we may be more vulnerable to meteors. Could it be that something like that happened millions of years ago from the volcanoes and that put holes in the atmosphere so the meteors got through?”

    Yeah. There’s that.

    • #24
  25. Dr. Bastiat Member
    Dr. Bastiat
    @drbastiat

    Juliana (View Comment):
    one of the educational paraprofessionals who work with us – who is at least 50 years old and college educated – made this comment

    Holy Toledo.

    • #25
  26. MarciN Member
    MarciN
    @MarciN

    I found the podcast. It was Dinopocalypse by Radiolab. It was published in December 2013 originally. This is the updated version issued on May 2, 2019, and it covers the newest “proof” of the original 2013 theory that has been discovered at a dig in Colorado. If readers want to listen to this, be sure to listen to the second one from May of this year.

    • #26
  27. Arahant Member
    Arahant
    @Arahant

    MarciN (View Comment):
    The theory I heard in the podcast actually asserts that it happened in a 72-hour period. Something to do with glass balls. It’s the newest theory, and it has something to do with a new dig out in Colorado. I asked my kids if these guys had spoken recently with the plate tectonics guys: are we sure Colorado was where it is now ten million years ago?

    It was closer to 63 million years ago, and while not in the exact same place, it was pretty close. You can watch the first 44 seconds of this to see the difference:

    • #27
  28. MarciN Member
    MarciN
    @MarciN

    Arahant (View Comment):
    It becomes considered a scientific theory when it has a heck of a lot of proof behind it, in theory.

    But it has yet to be put over the fact line. :-) Hypothesis and theory are on one side of the line; fact is on the other. Right?

    And I don’t think I’m confusing them. One has to have some sort of theory in order to frame a workable–that is, testable–hypothesis. Right?

    I don’t see a real difference between hypothesis and theory.

    • #28
  29. Western Chauvinist Member
    Western Chauvinist
    @WesternChauvinist

    Juliana (View Comment):

    We discussed the dinosaur die-off in a presentation I gave to 18-21 year olds (with disabilities). We talked about how dinosaurs are related to birds. We also talked about the four theories of how the larger dinosaurs died (disease, starvation due to food chain imbalance, volcanic activity, and meteors). One of the kids asked about the present danger from meteors. Unfortunately one of the educational paraprofessionals who work with us – who is at least 50 years old and college educated – made this comment / asked this question: “You know, now that we have holes in our atmosphere from all the engines, we may be more vulnerable to meteors. Could it be that something like that happened millions of years ago from the volcanoes and that put holes in the atmosphere so the meteors got through?”

    Yeah. There’s that.

    Oh, dear Lord.

    • #29
  30. Old Bathos Member
    Old Bathos
    @OldBathos

    We in DC saw a movement yesterday that was clearly drawn from the essence of #Science itself. This STEM scholar making his case to a policeman while simultaneously blocking traffic (you can just make out the wings of the dancer in a bumblebee costume to the right of the policeman who assisted in this well-crafted evidence-based presentation for the benefit of fossil fuel burning commuters) pretty much sums it up.

    Scienced-based discussion in DC 9/23/2019

    Our esteemed @drbastiat misses the essential circular nature of #Science as opposed to science.    The cause must be right because of #Science and #Science must be right because the cause is so important. Either way, science just gets in the way, so there.

    • #30
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