re: #55 CuriousLurker

I have couple of questions for you guys since so many subjects nowadays seem to be sufficiently politicized (and therefore polarizing) as to render the topics extremely controversial and cloud any related facts, thereby making calm, rational discussion difficult if not impossible. The first two (Erlich & Shahak) have Wiki pages, but the third (Rabinowitz) does not. In any event I don’t totally trust Wikipedia, so here I am asking you guys (again):

On climate change

Paul Ehrlich: Is he okay? He seems to make sense and know what he’s talking about (though he does appear to lean a bit to the hyperbolic LVQ side), but I don’t know enough about the subject to be sure. Help?

On the Israeli-Palestinian issue:

Israel Shahak: He strikes me as pretty extreme and prone to what I’ve come to think of as “Gellerisms”, except WRT Judaism & Zionism instead of Islam. He also comes across as even more strident & extreme than Norman Finkelstein (which is how I heard about him). Anyone?

Dan Rabinowitz: He’s a social anthropologist at Tel-Aviv University and, after watching this lecture he gave—he strikes me as perfectly sane & reasonable. He sounds like a liberal, as far as I can tell.

Can anyone kindly confirm or correct my assessments?

When he sticks to the physical sciences, Ehrlich understands the issues, though he does have a problematic tendency to go hyperbolic, as you noted. On economics, he’s a good bit less knowledgeable, and he doesn’t deal with that group of issues as often as he once did.