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Originally Posted by Mazer
...just thought I should offer my forgiveness on the off chance that you actually cared whether you were steamrolling my opinions with your high and mighty intellectual smugness...
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First of all, that's a bit like a fish complaining that the water is wet, but the queer thing about high and mighty intellectual smugness is that I would characterize the gist of my participation in this thread as a
response to
precisely that, considering anyone ready to dismiss out of hand a potential threat to the medium of our collective existence on the bases being offered here to be the epitome of it.
Let's review:
• global warming doesn't exist because Al Gore made a movie about it and he owns a big house.
• global warming doesn't exist because it's cold outside where I live right now.
• global warming doesn't exist because it's a theory and theories are just ideas and shouldn't be taken seriously.
• global warming doesn't exist because the lack of
conclusive evidence for it can be transformed into a
conclusive case
against it.
• global warming doesn't exist because the lack of
conclusive evidence for it can be transformed into soundbytes such as "not supported by science at all" and this makes you sound cutting edge and informed.
• global warming doesn't exist because
some scientist's inconclusive theories about it predict
preposterous disasters and contradictory effects that could just
never happen.
• global warming doesn't exist because
some other scientist's inconclusive theories about it suggest that even if it did exist the effects
might be mild and regional.
• global warming doesn't exist because it's just a liberal conspiracy to turn us into overtaxed zombie drones and take away our freedom.
• global warming doesn't exist because goddamned liberals are always wrong about everything.
In light of the fact that my own endlessly repeated opinion is that
we simply don't know if it's occurring or not but that it
might behoove us to acknowledge our affect on the environment and seek to protect and conserve it
anyway, I'm not really sure what you feel the need to 'forgive'--the fact that I've got a good basic common sense argument? Or perhaps, more hopefully, you're forgiving me for simply feeling the need to make this argument over and over in response to incessant denials which seem to be based on sheer hostility as opposed to reason.
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Originally Posted by Mazer
One hopes that in thirty years that little girl will have figured out that it's safer to ride the train than to stand in front of it. But if you were trying to use the speeding freight train as a metaphor for inconclusiveness, you failed miserably.
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"Cute, but you know I didn't mean it that way. You've either misread me or you're just being obtuse." The only 'metaphor I was using' or thought was appropriate in this context (I didn't make the commercial), was of the man who doesn't give a fuck one way or the other because he knows it will not affect him personally.
People have a lot of
excuses for not giving a fuck by which they can pretend to exalt themselves. Sheer derision,
intellectual smugness, claiming to be more informed than it's even
possible to be, irrelevant political hostility, plain old entitlement. But however you boil it down it still stinks.