Maggie's Farm

Post-flood, God loves terror and death in specific cases unrelated to moral agency, cause, and effect.



God wants us to be rigidly moralistic because of the terror and death it prevents.

An irritating man is one who claims that the solution he adopts has been reached in an impersonal way, the one who does not want to take responsibility for what he adopts.

-Dávila

...no different...

Oh, it's different. It's different legally and scientifically. It's even different culturally.

Regarding the differences between various sciences - if that's where you're going instead of admitting to differences of application after you insisted there were none - we can damn AGW as conjecturing psuedoscience fairly easily.

Incidentally:

Perhaps they are misled about the science, but then you wouldn't say they are "advocating for more authoritarian government over freedom." Rather, you would argue the science.

Rather, one may argue the science but that's not been your point (although I invited you to revert to it anyway). The point is the net effect of a behavior, which is what the line we've both quoted obviously addresses.

You're projecting intent - 'perhaps' being a weasel word and 'misled' being an presumption not in evidence - so as to avoid projecting real culpability. Yet the net effect of the action is already known, i.e., culpability is assessable because it's certainly not eliminated.

In other words, the most direct conclusion is that the net effect is intentional. We'd have to resort to pretzel logic to avoid it, deviating off into a 'scientific' tributary of the first proposition, as you put it. But if it walks like a duck...

So you will inject intent into others in order to legitimize the force they'll deploy. Which is to say that democracy by your definition isn't either necessarily based in science or American constitutional originalism (where except in very rare and enumerated circumstances, even in the presence of a threat to the joint nation only State-level action is authorized).

Let's recap: Lacking direct evidence, project intent onto others so as to arbitrarily legitimize their actions. Invoke science in pursuit of this force but do not require that by its literal definition it be employed or adhered to. Call this reasonable. When questioned, dissemble into merely describing the phenomenon by other means. When questioned again, label opposition the new favorite word, facile.

The problem with writing stuff, Zees, is that then you've written it.

Intent was at the core of the claim in the article, that the religious leaders were advocating authoritarianism over freedom. That was a false characterization.

As the publicly-funded, largely unaccountable, agenda-driven, involuntary, oppressive religion it is, AGW naturally suffers more from serial scandal than its Science! proves its main premise. That Science!, which is a projected rhetorical authority of oppressive zeal and intolerance, can't possibly redeem it from whatever befalls it when its politicization inevitably intrudes. Which is to put it fairly charitably. This is what politization does, all the the more when there's cubic miles of cash to redistribute at the end of the rainbow.

The author's characterizations thereof are not only believable, they're credible. They're recorded and documented making them testable and verified.

This puts your argument back at square one, co-opting intent while you make less credible efforts to conform intent yourself. There's a difference there, just as there's a difference between the other downstream principles you conflated earlier. One is sensible and the other is now. They cannot be either conflated or reasonably compared.

You vaguely refer to such a conflation again here:

Democracy isn't based in science, though we hope that advocacy would be. There is nothing unconstitutional about advocating for laws to limit pollution.

I didn't say democracy was built on science and there may very well be and is unconstitutional advocacy. I alluded that American originalism prevented science - and especially religious AGW Science! - from intruding upon the first principles of any federal republic ordered such as this in order to dominate society and culture. AGW Science! has become dominate.

The characterization is credible. Yours lacks footing. Both project intent but only one is believable.

Indeed, "these religious leaders are advocating for more authoritarian government over freedom" hews well to the visible and quite undeniable effect of the political AGW phenomenon, which barring scientific evidence, is all that we reasonably expect recommends it. Barring scientific proof, that's what you're left with. Barring authority, that's what you're left with. That phenomenon is what we're all left with which very well also explains the national push-back.

Such advocacy isn't 'democratic' in the constitutional, American sense either, because it's not legitimate as an approved federal issue. It has to be completely redefined to grant it such entree.

But let's look at it strictly scientifically. Strictly scientifically, and based on the local versus the global or macroscopic scale, are you saying there's 'no difference' between local pollution and AGW? That oil in the river is as much a national threat and phenomenon as greenhousing the world is? That killing wildlife or the whole environment in Kansas or Detroit or Manhattan to the point of threatening human life is akin to a tenth of a degree F threatening all of mankind around the whole globe? I ask because in purely scientific terms, obviously there is no equivalency between any of these subsets. Different phenomenon, different identification, different treatment, different everything.

Let's now extend that contrast. Here the planet is a local system and the universe is the macroscopic system. Let's take, for example, gravitational force on Earth's surface as our local system and let's take 'dark matter' gravitationally organizing the universe as our macroscopic system. One is local and the other universal and macroscopic, and just like cleaning up the local river or chemical spill isn't an issue or phenomenon for or within AGW, driving your car under the influence of gravity isn't what holds galaxies together. We know this as a scientific veracity.

Like pollution, gravity is an accepted, physical phenomenon that in gravity's case orders or conforms billions of lives. As a phenomenon universal force involves however, a linguistic placeholder for a phenomenon completely unknown as yet to all of mankind. We place-hold that unknown phenomenon with our conjecture 'dark matter'. The whole point of it is that we have no idea what it is, hence the name.

Just as with pollution vs AGW, one is a physical property materially measured and sensorily observed while the other is, as it now turns out, an unscientific theory because it lacks testability or falsifiability. In your case I think you're conflating the physical, material, real local environment with a global theory so as to cover the latter with the former's credence. Is there a difference then? Yes, there's an enormous difference, and that's just speaking scientifically.

But I threw you a fat hanging curve there. My example has a visible, recorded, mathematical deviation to a classic norm or standard needing an explanation, where in your pet theory such a deviation - or even one an order of magnitude less than it - hasn't been observed at all. It's been projected, conjectured, and hoped for but it hasn't happened.

So there is a difference. Local gravity is physically - and even rhetorically and scientifically - unassociated with a vast phenomenon known to fundamentally order an enormous universal system starting at the galactic level. Yet unlike entirely theoretical, untestable 'dark matter' AGW isn't Earth's equivalent of a universe-wide phenomenon affecting nine-tenths of reality for which there isn't even the first rational step toward explanation in the model of the standard sciences. 'Dark matter', in this one example of many theories about larger systems, exhibits those effects and yet it's not strictly a science.

So. 'Dark matter': A classically or strictly unscientific theory but an enormously powerful physical phenomenon, whatever it eventually proves to be. AGW: 'Scientific' but ephemeral. Immaterial. Non-existent as far as we know. Does that strike you as cause to either upset an organizing national authority or to co-opt the reasonable intent you have about minds expressing similar thoughts? Based on so much political evidence?

From a classically scientific standpoint, an objective analysis of AGW has to conclude, scientifically, that it's a premise looking for its first instance of systemic, global validity. At least the standard model of gravity, to my example, has an enormous, incontrovertible, undeniable variable looking for an explanation, a variable that is said to account for about 90% of related material reality.

So yeah, big difference. Big enormous unavoidable gigantic difference. '[A]dvocating any other law in a democratic society' by your means is not the same as sound, proper, rational, sane activism by originalist, constitutional means either, so we're back to observing how, as the man said, all we're left with as evidence is 'religious leaders advocating for more authoritarian government over freedom'. Your theory would have to start with a deviation of about forty degrees F just to legitimize one particular set of experiments from which you could then lay claim to your unique brand of Science! trademarked for use by other zealous enthusiasts - by the forces and agendas the author correctly identifies - who've forgotten what the literal, dictionary, classic version of the word means but have no compunctions about politicizing policy in the extreme, a phenomenon you refuse to allow them to identify.

The problem has neither science or American democracy to back it. Not unless you take as many liberties with definitions as you do with liberty itself. IS AGW real? Who knows. Given man's activity and influence I for one certainly expect it would be, to some degree. But it hasn't even the tiniest fraction of the recorded evidence far larger phenomenon already have for which there is no real supporting science whatsoever. How we'd move straight to enormous political pressure while demanding we not see it as political pressure and agenda escapes me.