re: #64 Intenzity

Richard Feynman used to say “If it was something the average person could understand I wouldn’t have won the Nobel Prize for it”, and these Republicans think all of science is something that one can just pick up along the way, reading a few magazine articles, and that their common sense makes them just as valid and authority as someone who is an actual scientist and has studied a subject for decades. They then turn around and convince millions of people that is how it works, and see, you are just as smart as any ol’ “scientist” and they use logical fallacies that anyone with a semester of a reasoning class would be able to identify to convince people of that untruth.

The scariest thing is…it works.

They are anti-intellectual because it is easier to get dumb, superstitious religious people to do what they are told and to react to someone who takes an authoritarian posture than it is to have to deal with educated people that have all these crazy ideas and can use logic and stuff. THOSE people are the enemies to Republicans. They want a scared, religious population that is easily manipulated and controlled, can be used in perpetual wars and just do what they are told.

It is a mistake to think that the people who are stubbornly refusing to believe the bad news about AGW are just stupid. Many of them are genuinely intelligent, perfectly aware of evolution, good in their work, etc.

Where they go wrong is in trying to reason from motives to scientific conclusions. It’s a somewhat natural crutch. If the science is too hard, why not just go by the apparent motives of the people who are talking about the science?

But the simpler realities of science are not nearly so good at deception as people are. Smart people can be fooled by other smart people. The suckers who fall for the AGW=conspiracy are, many of them, no different from the suckers who invested with Bernie Madoff.