Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Daily Kos Deletes Meteor Blades' Entry, 'Time to stop debating global warming deniers driven by invincible ignorance and self-interest'

Here's the background, from Ben Geman, at National Journal, "‘Meet the Press’ Host: Climate Segment Meant as Debate on ‘Policies’" (at Memeorandum).

Clicking through at Memeorandum you'll get an error result at Daily Kos:
ERROR!

The error was:
This diary has been deleted.

Hostname: web3.dailykos.com

Time: 2014-02-18T04:51:11
But you can read this idiot Meteor Blades at the cached version here:


The global warming "debate" between Bill Nye and Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn shown above and engineered by the producers of NBCs Meet the Press Sunday attracted a fair amount of commentary beforehand and afterward. See, for instance, Kossack xaxnars solid post on the subject here, which includes a poll and an extensive and thoughtful comment thread, and Ben Germans write-up at the National Journal.

The whole affair was, of course, a phony debate since Blackburn is a climate science denier whose only direct challenge to scientific fact on the program ended in a failure in basic arithmetic, and Nye, who for all his rightly touted skills at presenting a broad range of science topics in an appealing way, never landed a knock-out blow or addressed what should have been the topic of the entire 13-minute segment—the politics of global warming.

Dont get me wrong. I appreciate Nyes exuberant demeanor and all he has done to get young people to understand and engage in science. And I appreciate his willingness to go head to head with Blackburn. Given the dreadful Meet the Press format based on the premise of false balance regarding climate change—something he had no control over—and given that he needs serious media combat training, Nye did an okay job.

But even if he had been spectacular, it wasnt the right job. Its way past time to stop politely coddling these deniers, stop treating their opinions as anything but scientifically illiterate nonsense and lies promoted by fossil fuel fools and mountebanks. Their well-honed use of the Gish Gallop—dumping so many exaggerations, half-truths, quarter-truths and outright fabrications into the conversation that their factually motivated foes cant keep up—works unless the counter-technique is to run a relentless, focused attack on a few key points without getting distracted. Doing that takes skill, passion and determination because its not something the typical radio or television host wants to happen.
Who knows why it was deleted? My bet is that there's at least one remaining adult in supervision over there, who against the odds was able to convince the Kos diarists that, hey, the essence of science is skepticism, and that if you're arguing there should be absolutely no debate over scientific findings you're the one who's actually "anti-science," doh.

But again, who knows? Adults in charge or not, leftists are just too stupid to even consider their own imbecility.

0 comments: