Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Cogito who wrote (59530)	4/15/2008 11:40:02 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542784

enemies of individual freedom and free enterprise have used scare tactics to advance their agenda. I see. Sorry. I got sidetracked by the list and never did read the rest of the post. That list or one like it has been showing up here for a decade. Bugs me every time. I don't see any reasonable way to induce "enemies of individual freedom and free enterprise" from subscribing to the human effect on global warming. Not that illogic ever stopped folks from forming and advancing opinions. From that brief piece, I suspect that the gratuitous characterization wasn't specific to the point being made but general to Gore and company, which could be either environmentalists or liberals, probably the former. One could argue that neither group is exactly BFF with individual freedom and free enterprise. Any property rights zealot, for example, would hold that opinion. And environmentalists have never been popular with business. It's a frequently repeated meme among GW debunkers. Perhaps because the GW cure would be so brutal to business/the economy as they know it. You can see why they would prefer not to go through the cure, whether simple self interest or self interest induced denial.

To: Cogito who wrote (59530)	4/16/2008 12:34:19 AM
From: neolib	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542784

There is a very well known basis for that position. Irving Kristol way back in the dark ages, gave a very famous speech which laid the foundation for Think Tank "research". He noted that much of Academia was leaning liberal, and he urged conservative, libertarian leaning organizations to establish a network of parallel institutions which could carry out "research" whose results were supportive of libertarian goals such as individual freedom and commerce. This would advance conservative goals and lend legitimacy to research which could not be obtained from academic circles, or so he thought. Apparently it did not strike him at all odd that one would want to fund research where the goal was known a priori. Fool or knave, I don't known which he was. This model was adopted with alacrity, and the world is now blessed with Think Tank Science. Almost universally they place commercial interest before scientific understanding. You might recall cancer/smoking "studies" as one of the most famous such examples. In fact, the OISM's so called Oregon Petition is linked to a famous individual from the smoking wars (former President of the National Academy of Science, Frederick Seitz,) who ran a Think Tank to conduct "studies" helpful to the tobacco companies. Cato Institute was one of the big players via a character Steve Malloy. Eventually his behavior became sufficiently embarrassing that he was booted from Cato. He now runs a website called JunkScience.com where he supposedly critiques real scientists, when their work conflicts with his paycheck. I've often thought that he must be smarter than his websites content, and that his choice of name is flipping the finger at his own sponsors, BWDIK? Oddly enough, the exact same tactics have been embraced by anti-evolutionists. Think Tanks sprout, fund "research" and try to lend legitimacy to anti-science views. The goal is never to actually produce useful research, but rather to spread doubt and befuddlement in the general population as regards the true state of science on the particular subject. That is the real goal. Victory is obtained when the average person on the street thinks that the real science and the fake science are "just two different points of view".