(and fortunately, many of these are obsolete, in locales more culturally advanced than ours)
Global warming deniers are "like polar bears on shrinking real estate." *
It’s their point of view. Annoyance, not collaboration, is their idea of effective action.
It's a munitions factory for saturation bombing of any debate that might actually be interesting and useful. There’s no interest in acquiring knowledge. It’s all for politics.
Conspiracies happen all the time. But we deny this because of a classic American fallacy, born of our relative unconnectedness to the old world: what I like to call the fallacy of insufficient cynicism.
In this persistent and well-funded campaign of denial [the skeptics] have become interchangeable ornaments on the hood of a high-powered engine of disinformation. Their dissenting opinions are amplified beyond all proportion through the media while the concerns of the dominant majority of the world's scientific establishment are marginalized.
‘How can we expect Americans to know anything beyond what they happen to remember from science class? Journalists certainly don’t tell them.’
It is a belief that can gain consensus and then become a permanent cultural carbuncle.
It seems to me we should be using mole traps, and not mallets, as the whack-a-mole game is nonending.
One partisan can tie up a whole company of the enemy’s troops by sniping from good cover and forcing them to pay attention to him, while maneuvers are going on elsewhere.
I don't think these people who believe that stuff ... I think they're not really getting it from the print either. They're getting it from Fox News and, I've heard, from their ministers, at their churches.
[Elke] Weber’s research seems to help establish that we have a “finite pool of worry,” which means we’re unable to maintain our fear of climate change when a different problem ...comes along. ...And even if we could remain persistently concerned about a warmer world? Weber described what she calls a “single-action bias.” Prompted by a distressing emotional signal, we buy a more efficient furnace or insulate our attic or vote for a green candidate — a single action that effectively diminishes global warming as a motivating factor. And that leaves us where we started.
What too many people refuse to understand is that the global economy's existence depends upon the global environment, not the other way around.
Someone asked [Dr. James Hansen] what the most important thing to do is, what can we personally do to help stabilize climate, to "answer the call to action"--what is the most important lifestyle change?
Hansen's answer was unequivocal. Take part in the political process. Help make our democracy real. Hold our candidates accountable.
Keynes’s genius – a very English one – was to insist we should approach an economic system* not as a morality play but as a technical challenge.
it was that night, a year ago today, that provided the lesson - never let a setback wreck our spirits, and never presume it's as bad as your opponents tell you it is - and gave the opening for a "teaching moment" about the contagion that is panic and the antidote that is hope.and of course
It's not enough to pull drowning victims out of the river; we need to walk back upstream and find out who's throwing them in.
Update, some more* -
A newspaper's main product is neither news nor information but influence.
...the strong version of the Copernican thesis - where ever you are is, by definition, unimportant.
Reality is that which, when you refuse to believe in it, doesn't go away.
It's clear that the body politic is subject to power disorders. By this I mean events where some person or group suddenly concentrates a lot of power and abuses it. Power disorders frequently come as a surprise, and cause a lot of damage.
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