Above, classic Bill Maher on a real threat to democracy.
If you live on the parallel universe that climate deniers are part of, where “reality based” answers are just not good enough – you already had go-to online resource for nonsense unadulterated by pesky “facts”.
Conservapedia, right?
Conservapedia is very clear on the supposed worldwide scientific conspiracy to promote climate change, where the entry begins:
Climate change is the new name used by liberals for their global warming hoax, which they coined as it became obvious that there is no crisis in global warming. The modification in terminology is identical to what liberals did in redefining “evolution” to be “change over time,” which of course is a meaningless expression just as “climate change” is.
Famously, Conservapedia has taken on that infamous pseudo-science hoaxter, Albert Einstein.
TPM Muckraker:To many conservatives, almost everything is a secret liberal plot: from fluoride in the water to medicare reimbursements for end-of-life planning with your doctor to efforts to teach evolution in schools. But Conservapedia founder and Eagle Forum University instructor Andy Schlafly — Phyllis Schlafly’s son — has found one more liberal plot: the theory of relativity.
If you’re behind on your physics, the Theory of Relativity was Albert Einstein’s formulation in the early 20th century that gave rise to the famous theorum that E=mc2, otherwise stated as energy is equal to mass times the square of the speed of light. Why does Andy Schlafly hate the theory of relativity? We’re pretty sure it’s because he’s decided it doesn’t square with the Bible.
In the entry, “Counterexamples to Relativity,” the authors (including Schlafly) write:
The theory of relativity is a mathematical system that allows no exceptions. It is heavily promoted by liberals who like its encouragement of relativism and its tendency to mislead people in how they view the world.[1]
Our concern today is that, for climate deniers, Conservapedia is not good enough for the important issue of climate science, and they’ve gone a step further into the shadowy realm.
A new “experimental” search engine for climate deniers announces itself thusly:
Google search on climate related topics is dominated by climate alarmists and cultists. The alarmist propaganda machine receives between $20 billion and $200 billion annually through governments and government-influenced entities. Dissenters are threatened and silenced directly or through their employers. The saturation of the Internet with climate alarmism creates a false impression of consensus and drowns out useful results.
Finding information on anything remotely related to climate change is difficult for experts, and almost impossible for ordinary citizens. The Climate Sanity and Freedom search is a modest attempt to remedy the situation.
Below, the entry on NASA and climate science:
In case you missed it, Obama government made NASA a proselytizer of Climate Change Cult. A special website climate.nasa.gov exists solely for this purpose. It peddles usual climatism dogma and then adds some garbage of its own, such as ” The sun is a giver of life ” (permalink). This pronouncement appears in an article, attempting to play down impact of solar activity on global temperatures (read Dr. Willie Soon). The dominant role of solar activity in the Earth temperature changes has been quietly accepted in the recent years by both scientific and IPCC communities.
The Sun is simply a star of G2V type, around which our Earth moves. Giver of life is none of the government’s business.
So far, users have submitted rapturous praise like this –
In 2004, Ron Suskind wrote of an interview with an Aide to then-President George W. Bush, which introduced the term “reality based” as a pejorative. The Aide, later identified as Karl Rove, explained why too much emphasis on “reality” had a stifling effect on men of action.
The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
The fight for reason and the rule of science in the climate change arena is not only important because it is the only hope our children have of a liveable planet – it is important because if a democracy based on the free play of ideas and information is to succeed, we must find a way to crack thru the “bubble mentality”.
We may be seeing some glimmer of that in the currently building Grand Debate on climate that will become part of the 2016 election campaign. Small glint at 2:35 here.
I’ve always wondered why the right wing nut jobs didn’t focus in on the theory of relativity. It’s a lot more damning than evolution in refuting their religious beliefs.
Up to now, it may be because most of the clan are science illiterates who couldn’t figure out what the conclusions of the theory actually were. E=MC squared is an offshoot, not the major problem, which is this:
In the relativity world time is RELATIVE and effected by matter. As objects move away from each other, the time relative to each other is affected. As objects approach the speed of light, time appears to slow down. There is no absolute time in our universe.
Now read the bible. The physical world and the spiritual world are fixed in universal time. This includes heaven and hell. There are no other worlds except the earth, heaven and hell and they are obviously physical places. Bible physics doesn’t hold up to modern physics.
There is (absolutely) no concept of universal time in the Bible. In fact, in the mythopoeic world in which the Old Testament was written, space and time are qualatative, not quantitative. By being in certain places you are actually in the same (qualatative) space as somewhere far removed. Time is also something characterized by its qualitity, and a certain time can repeat itself. The bible uses expressions such as “in that time” — undesignated by numbers. Forever (or the future) is simply denoted with the expressions olam we-olam, something like ages and ages or time and time.
What’s more, the theory of relativity actually states that the speed of light is absolute, and could just as well be called the theory of absolute propagation of electro-magnetic force. Energy and matter are relative to each other, and space and time are bent by gravitational “force”, but the speed of light is a constant.
The theory of relativity has very little intersection with biblical themes, nor does it bear any relation to cultural relativity, except for the word. But then your mother is also a relative, and having relations with somebody — again the same word.
It is true that Einstein’s theory dispensed with the need for a universal ether (a kind of pure mathematical space time matrix) in which EM radiation was supposed to propagate, but there have never been that many believers in such an ether among the population at large outside of the community of physicists.
As for those who feel you need to contradict Einstein as the intellectual basis for moral or cultural relativism, that discussion is as old as the world: Plato also thought the Sophists were dangerous relativists. If you really want to nip nascent relativism in the bud, I would concentrate on TV where you can watch a documentary about concentration camps interspersed with advertisements for soap and such — enough dissonants to turn anybody into a relativist.
Of course the bible has universal time. Jesus spends 3 days in hell, God gets transformed in real time from a single being to three, the spirits of Jewish forefathers need to be converted to Christianity in real time, the world gets “created” in 6 days (with the earth being created before the sun), etc. However you play with it, the ideas are still time based.
And yes, the theory of relativity states that the speed of light is absolute. Now figure out what the consequences of that are. If two objects are moving away from each other, time has to slow down relative to each object. That “time” is actually a physical dimension like length and with and is determined by the physical properties and conditions of matter. This means that there’s no absolute time in the universe.
And what is this business of “moral relativism”? Some word association with the word “relativity”?
You seem to have lifted some bits and pieces from the theory, but no real understanding.
Oh. Maybe you can read it again and see if you get it. Don’t know where to begin with so much misunderstanding.
This kind of time is commonly experienced by people with PTSD, JW; it’s the difference between time as [measured, if that’s the right word?] by the amygdala vs. by the hippocampus. The Body Remembers, by Babette Rothschild, and Judith Herman’s Trauma and recovery: The aftermath of violence from domestic abuse to political terror are good sources on this. Of course it makes sense; the three brother religions come from deep patriarchy-based trauma (Abraham and Isaac)
I’m going to take issue with the Bill Maher bit. It was funny, but I’d challenge that the internet’s “news bubble” is something new. In the olden days of the 1950s it was the newspapers that drove the McCarthy scare and much of the cold war BS that riled the public up. And there were few other sources of information that would challenge it. Television went right along with programs like “I Led Three Lives” about a commie double agent, designed to fire up the McCarthy witch hunts of the time. At least with the internet much of the right wing bunk can be immediately challenged from other, quickly available sources.
I think you are right in that, the themes of the right wing have always been prominent in the American Media. I hope you are correct that we are in a better position today..
When you believe in magic, magic will have all of the happy answers you need.
If you recognize reality, magic is still a nice addition to a fictional story. But it sucks when you try to explain what’s what.