12-16-2008, 03:17 PM
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Guru
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Join Date: Jun 2008
Posts: 10,102
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Denier Conspiracy Theories: More Paranoid Than Thou
"Capturing the madness in a nutshell, the premise is that scientists are motivated by the generous, biased, government controlled grant system to do research that supports the current understanding of climate change. The claim is that there is a climate of political correctness such that those who do not support the model of anthropogenic climate change are denied grants, honours and awards, and even punished.
These various claims are rebutted repeatedly and in detail here and I will not be repeating those arguments, although I will mention one or two in passing.
Now every crackpot with a perpetual motion carburetor claims their genius is being censored by a cabal of oppressors of one form or another. That some of the crackpots have bad proposals and silly ideas for climate research is neither surprising nor noteworthy. So how do we distinguish the crackpots from the legitimate whistleblowers?
The obvious and simple way to provide evidence of the alleged conspiracy is to publish the research proposals that were turned down. Let the world see how the applications were rational, robust proposals for solid science. This is such a no brainer that the Deniers naturally published them …. nowhere that I know of.
Does anyone? has anyone ever seen one of these? Apparently not. Apparently we are supposed to take it on faith that they were good science that should have been funded. We have the word of people who have been shown to misrepresent and distort over and over, so why would we not trust them now?
Now we get to the interesting parts. The fact is that other than a few anecdotes tossed about the Denialosphere there is no attempt to actually document the conspiracy. Why not? There are any number of ways that evidence could be provided. Grant guidelines and terms of reference could be offered and their bias revealed. Statistics could be generated on what research is funded to demonstrate bias, and so on.
Looking for clues
Looking for clues
It is fascinating that the Deniers invest almost no energy into documenting the alleged conspiracies. Most conspiracists obsess on gathering evidence. They watch videos over and over, study floor plans and forensic reports, plot trajectories and lines of sight, read and compare testimonies of witnesses endlessly, post youtube videos explaining byzantine timelines and event sequences. Their obsession with documenting evidence is almost pathological. Indeed there is a process to validating a conspiracy.
Yet the Deniers toss out a few anecdotes and move on. Why?"
http://greenfyre.wordpress.com/2008/...oid-than-thou/
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