The NRA is at it again with another one of their dark dystopian commercials that seem to advocate for civil war. I am not going to do their work for them by posting it here (you can find it yourself if interested). Several people claim that the NRAs real goal is to actually not try to scare the left and anybody on the right who doesn’t feel like they have enough guns to increase gun sales. So I did a little digging into this possibility. We all know that gun sales rose under Obama, with false claims about how he was going to take our guns, but I had know idea how much. Below is FBI data on the number of background checks performed. While this doesn’t translate directly into gun sales themselves, the number of checks certainly is correlated.
You might have to click on the image to get a better view. What I thought was interesting was that despite violent crime per capita peaking in the early 90s and declining steadily since, the number of background checks (for as far as the data goes back) seems reasonably steady, in fact falling slightly until 2005. What changed then? This was during the Bush presidency, certainly nobody was suggesting G.W. Bush was going to take away guns, so I did a little more digging and found this article in Forbes. From the article:
“Over 50 firearms-related companies have given at least $14.8 million to NRA according to its list for a donor program that began in 2005. That was the year NRA lobbyists helped get a federal law passed that limits liability claims against gun makers. Former NRA President Sandy Froman wrote that it “saved the American gun industry from bankruptcy,” according to Bloomberg.”
The NRA appears to have been riding a wave to more and more gun sales since. By the end of the Obama Presidency, background checks had increased by 300% from pre-2005 values. It was just kind of a “holy shit” moment for me, so I thought I’d share. Since Trump has been elected, the number of background checks seems on pace for about 10%-20% reduction by the end of the year. It seems all the rich gun manufacturers want to keep getting richer, and the best way to do that is for them to market fear. And that is what they have done steadily in the US for well over a decade. Whatever your stance on the second amendment this should frighten you more. Unfortunately for many the fear they feel is an imagined one.
There have been numerous articles now posted in local papers about the upcoming possibility of a state system of higher education strike in Pennsylvania. And with that comes comments. It has been unsettling to see the amount of ire towards educators. I know there are a lot of conservative people in PA. In a way PA is probably a good microcosm for the general breakdown of the country in Republican vs. Democrat. There is a thread in attitude by the critics of the strike and I just wanted to briefly talk about it. I don’t know what to do about it, but it does make me sad.
There is of course general ignorance towards the problem. Nobody really understands what educators go through on a daily basis, but apparently we can all easily be replaced with more qualified people at a lower cost. For most people it’s all about the bottom line. Dollars and cents. Critics don’t think of whether or not changes to our contract might not cause the quality of education to suffer, we are simply greedy people who want more money and don’t care about our students.
There is an overwhelming sense in these hard times that if other people are suffering we should suffer too. One person commented “Let them not work for a year and see them struggle to pay their bills just like us.” When did we become a country who simply wanted to tear each other down. Shouldn’t we be trying to raise people up? I want other people to have good health care…if mine became bad I wouldn’t be asking for others to have their health care reversed. As we tear each other down, it seems like the only people going up are the very wealth in our society. I saw a meme recently that was based on a Harvard Business study on perception vs reality. Most people think CEOs make 30 times what the average American worker makes, when in fact it’s 350 times more. Here is a video that illustration financial perception vs. reality. It seems to me that the wealthy have done an excellent job at pitting us against each other. In the south poor white people blame poor black people or poor Latinos for their problems. Average workers are pitted against educators. Teacher salaries are actually quite low compared to other countries and yet we are painted as people who are draining the system. Poor people are pitting against law enforcement. Yet law enforcement doesn’t pay very well, and pensions are being cut. Law enforcement is an important job that requires intelligent and highly skilled people. Somewhere in lost in the sea of finger pointing are wealthy people laughing at us all and distracting us from who is really
taking away all of our money.
Anti-union sentiments are strong. I never really thought much about unions and their value. I know unions can become corrupt. Anything can become corrupt. Churches, government, business. But overall I’ve noticed that when there are no unions, workers are taken advantage of more strongly. This country has a history of workers not being treated fairly and humanely. Unions have helped us rise out of that situation. They have brought us child labor laws and helped workers make living wages. And while there are plenty of examples where workers are treated well without a union, by and large this isn’t always the case. Some companies have no need to form unions, others I think it is very important. Our union is unique because our contract also contains important elements to educational quality. Investing in education pays off, but when we treat it like a business and we don’t invest in that business, the quality suffers.
Education itself may need reform, but the answer isn’t to reduce quality. Let’s look at what research demonstrates as effective pedagogy and make that happen in our schools. Let’s make education truly affordable again. Let’s not bring each other down, and focus on the true cause of our suffering. People on welfare aren’t my enemy. People who have lost their jobs, their benefits, who have had to take pay cuts aren’t my enemy. I would support you every step of the way for you to improve your quality of life, and be treated fairly by your employer. I’m not your enemy either. I’m in the middle income tier in PA, as are many other professors. Your teachers on average are in an even worse place financially. The middle class continues to get thinner and it’s not good for our country. There should be common ground between democrats and republicans to work together to build the middle class. Weakening education and tearing middle class people down, doesn’t seem to be the answer.
We have a lot of people living in poverty in this country and through various conversations on Facebook and on blogs you see a lot of arguments against providing a social safety net, raising the minimum wage, and helping them in general that I thought I would compile a list of my least favorite and most fallacious arguments I hear.
I know some people that actually think the government owes them, doesn’t look for a job, and these people are just lazy freeloaders. Throwing money at them just supports a dependency culture.
Some variant of this argument is often used so let’s dissect it. Whenever you hear someone say “I know some people…” or “I know this person who…” this argument can already be dismissed based on being anecdotal and not necessarily a representation of how things are. We all have our own experiences that shape our views, nobody is saying your own experience didn’t happen, only that you may not be understand your experience properly in the context of the bigger picture. There is no question that some people cheat the system. But this happens across the board at every level of society, and I would argue that the rich cheat the system by a far higher percentage rate than the poor, the only difference is that the rich can change the laws so what they are doing is legal. They can afford better lawyers. More importantly is that we do tend to focus on the negative, and this is what we tend to see. There are so many poor in our country that even if 2% of the 50 million living in poverty in the U.S. were cheating the welfare system that still 1 million people and FOX news could run 100 stories a day focusing on a different cheater of the system and still not be done in a year, but that doesn’t really give you the reality of the situation. What if there are a lot of people on welfare who are trying to get a job, or who actually work a job but it doesn’t pay well enough to make ends meet? What if most people are actually embarrassed that they are on welfare and are trying to get out of it and don’t get very vocal about it. Do the rest of our time really take the time to talk to all the poor and find out which ones are on welfare and are honestly trying to get out of their situation? Nope. And especially if the freeloaders anger us, not surprisingly we are going to take special notes on those people and they are going to stick in our memory and support our views about wasted taxpayer money. I have also yet to find anybody post some actual data on how many of these welfare freeloaders are. They are always anecdotal.
I would agree that throwing money at the poor is not always the solution that we also need to do better to help people out of it so that they can support themselves, but the conversation always seems to be welfare, or not welfare. There is a 3rd option and that is to improve welfare. To say it doesn’t have value is an insult to many people who have depended on it when times were lean. Not all people on welfare are on welfare for the rest of their lives.
And concerning the subject of wasting taxpayer money if we want to play the “I’m not supporting things I don’t like game” with my taxes, then I would also not like any of my taxpayers to go to foreign wars that I disagree with. You pull your money out of the freeloader driven welfare system, and I will pull my money out of military spending, and I guarantee I will be much richer at the end of the day.
I have never had to work a minimum wage job in my life. If you can’t live on minimum wage, go find a better job. Ask for a raise.
Once again we have a point that rests on anecdotal experience. I find these statements also come from white people. I’m not saying their racist, but perhaps the people who hired you are, and preferential chose you. That’s a light argument though, so let’s get a little deeper.
Let’s just look at it by the numbers. In a capitalist society I think conservative and liberal alike we can say that businesses want to make money. They will definitely maximize their profits by selling some product for the highest possible price that gives them a large base of customers, and they will try to cut costs on expenses. People that work for them are part of those expenses. So we would expect that just like there are always a very small amount of really rich people in the country, there are also going to be a lot of low paying jobs and then less and less jobs that are higher paying. The more special skills you have, and this could simply being really strong and doing hard manual labor, trade skills, or this could be, being highly educated, you are of course are going to garner a higher wage. The types of jobs available to the high school graduate are small. You have a job at $7.25/hr and you want a better one, and of course a lot of people do. You have to compete, and if that higher paying one doesn’t require a specific skill set then you have even more competition, quite simply not everyone can get it. So just to say “Find another job” isn’t realistic. Finally, how easy is it to find that new job when you are working 5 days a week and actually can’t search for jobs which are quite often only open during the times that you work? How do you take time off from your job, unpaid, to go look for jobs? How do you think your boss will react when you need to take an afternoon off to go to a job interview? And if they don’t get the job, they’ve lost money just by taking those hours off. Money they desperately need.
The immobility of the poor demonstrated by disasters like Katrina
More importantly many poor people have other issues to deal with than just finding that better job. What if that job is another city? Can they afford to move if they already have no money? What if by moving they lose the support of family who can help reduce their costs by taking care of their kid(s) while at work? Even a job in another part of the city may involve a long commute on public transportation which increases the time that they have to leave kids at daycare or a babysitter that increasing their expenses. Finally, should we really expect other people to move away from friends and family for a better job, a decision many of us are not willing to make either? Why is it so unreasonable for them to expect the minimum wage to be increased and keep pace with inflation, since it has not?
Well wanting the minimum wage raised, is actually asking for a raise. Going back to the start of this argument, in a capitalist society why would a company raise the wage of a minimum wage worker if they didn’t have to, if they job had such a low skill they could just replace them with the next applicant? What if by asking for a raise, the boss actually decided to terminate them or give them worse hours? When you are barely surviving rocking the boat isn’t always the safest play either.
And raising the minimum wage will help greatly with reducing suffering. While it’s probably best to raise the minimum wage incrementally, in general the idea that prices on everything would double is wholly untrue, since wages are only a portion of expenses for a business. While $15/hour might be excessive, no study finds that when the minimum wage is raised to keep pace with inflation that this harms the economy. This article by the Department of Labor does a great job of discussing it and remember that when people actually have money to spend, this is good in a consumer driven economy. All those people in poverty aren’t buying as much stuff as you think.
People on welfare are buying steak, have smart phones, getting manicures, smoking, buying drugs, etc.
Nothing cheers me up more than a person of privilege who has been fortunate to have the luxuries of this world, whether through marrying someone with a great job, or being born into a middle-class or higher family, complaining about other people wanting those things too.
Let’s ignore the fact that people need a phone, and that smart phones are practically free, and that maybe spending more money on quality nutritious food is maybe a better idea than crappy food which is cheaper and leads to all sorts of health problems. But let’s look at the psychology of poverty . When you live paycheck to paycheck barely making ends meet, and have grown up in poverty, your ability to long term plan fades, and yes you tend to not save money depriving yourself of creature comforts, because your life is one in which appears to have no long terms solutions. So why live for tomorrow, when you can live for today?
In my training for my volunteer work we had to try and make a budget based on what a family makes on two minimum wage jobs and it is a daunting task. And of course there are many families that do try to save, but saving is hard to do when you’re poor. If you don’t have access to public transport, you have to depend on car. And people live in poverty have to buy old cars that nobody else really wants, but they can get a good deal on them. However, such cars need repairs frequently, and repairs cost. Now you could say why don’t they get a better car that is more reliable. Quite simply it costs more and they wouldn’t qualify for the loan. This leads to, what I call, the “stay-in-poverty-feedback loop”. What little money poor people often save goes to these types of expenses because they literal can’t afford better quality stuff. Car repairs are just one example, but people in poverty often have to get home repairs more often, replace things like water heaters, furnaces, or air-conditioners more often, because poorer housing means people are getting used, cheaper, and/or older stuff in their home. So even if they are able to put away a little money each month it often gets eaten in one fell swoop by these unexpected repairs. And there are plenty of other big costs, like health care, which they often put off, even if they have insurance to save money on co-pays, but then this compound into a worse cost later, but remember how poverty doesn’t lend itself to long-term planning. And if you have kids, there are even more emergencies that can come up.
On the topic of buying drugs, well I don’t see a lot of people asking that all employees receiving public money take such drug tests, only poor people. Some how if poor people are doing drugs, that is more egregious than any other income bracket. As it turns out though, the amount of drug abuse among those on welfare is staggering low. So low that the cost of testing everybody costs more taxpayer money than letting that small percentage of people have their drugs. Not to mention that just cutting off their life support doesn’t actually work as a deterrent to doing drugs, just makes them resort to more desperate measures to obtain drugs likely causes more problems. And throwing these horrible drug users in jail, just gives them a criminal record, making it harder for them to get a good job and get out of poverty.
4. Why are they having babies if they can’t afford to raise them?
Well there are all sorts of reasons that people have children, and if we ignore the fact that there are many areas of the country that don’t have adequate sex education, women don’t have easy access to birth control, or that a woman might simply get pregnant because a man lied to her, or the birth control failed. But let’s say that there are these terrible women out there who are having children as some sort of scam to get more free money. I am sure such women exist. Nevermind the fact that such women were likely raised by a similar mother, probably has little education and special skills and is certainly not mentally well to be making that decision, should we cut her off from that money? Is this the way she will become a wonderful mother? Or will she literally be unable to cope, unable to keep up with all her new responsibilities? More importantly it’s of little good to question whether she should have had children, she does have children. These children are innocent, they’ve done nothing wrong, and so cutting off the mother also harms the children. Where is the humanity in this? If you’re pro-life then this must also be part of your consideration if you care about children.
5. Poor people need to be more personally responsible.
I’ve blogged about personal responsibility before, I don’t want to repeat all I’ve said there, but I think we can agree that one’s responsibility for themselves depends on the environment in which they were raised, such as level of education, family, friends, culture, etc. And as I also stated in that post, when we look around we don’t see a lot of people being personally responsible. Politicians rarely are. Rich kids like Ethan Couch certainly don’t show a lot of personal responsibility and so even if you believe that personal responsibility comes down to the absolute free will to choose to be that way, it’s clear that a lack of personal responsibility is not a trait that only applies to the poor. Should we say that rich people are allowed to lack personal responsibility, but poor people or not? More importantly why aren’t we asking the question of personal responsibility to those that are extremely wealthy? Is it personally responsible to have more wealth than you can spend in your lifetime. Is it personally responsible to have more wealth than is required to meet your basic needs have plenty of luxuries and send your kids off to the best of colleges? Is it personally responsible for corporations to ship jobs overseas just to make more money, while their fellow citizens now struggle to make ends meet? Is it personally responsible to make that 5 billion in a year than the 2 billion you might make if you paid your employees a fair wage? Is it personally responsible to not pay your fair share in taxes by hiding your wealth in off-shore accounts and other tax shelters? For those who hold personal responsibility as the most important of virtues, can we not apply this attitude consistently across all economic classes? Why are only the poor held to these standards of personal responsibility?
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I know this is already a little TLDR, so I’ll be brief here. In a line from the movie the Usual Suspects Kevin Spacey’s character says “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled is that he convinced the world he doesn’t exist.” Well maybe there is an even greater trick. Is it possible that those who are driven by greed in the acquisition of wealth and power have instead convinced you that the poor are the demons in our society? That even though a majority of them work longer hours, take less vacation, receive poorer education, less nutritional options, worse health care, and less social mobility, somehow a good proportion of the wealthy have led you to believe they are the bane of your quality of life? And so effective is this message that many of the poor are complicit in that oppression and vote into office the same people who have demonized them in society. If trends continue as they do, with the exception of a small percentage of the population we all sink together so let’s stop making the poor our enemy.
I recently watched this clip from Last Week Tonight with John Oliver about public defenders. It is not a slam against public defenders, but rather a criticism of a system in which anywhere from 60-90% of people arrested cannot afford lawyers and rely on public defenders, but there are just far too many of them for public defenders to do their job adequately. This leaves many defendants with less than adequate representation. As a result over 90% of cases by public defenders end in plea bargains, even when the people aren’t guilty. That’s a quick summary, but watching the clip is well worth the time and speaks for itself.
And I started to think about the entire philosophy of justice we have in this country and got really sad about it all. It would be one thing if we had a beautiful ideal and we were continually striving towards it, but it seems that there is enough of a portion of this country that feel justice is working fine, and that if you are in a position to be arrested than you simply have some sort of punishment coming your way. The system is rigged from the police procedures that target low income people knowing that many can’t afford to fight back and will pay fines whether they were really guilty or not, to the court system which puts low income people at a severe disadvantage, to the prison system which profits from long jail sentences for minimal crimes. And once they are in there, opportunities are so low once they get out. As President Obama said, we have 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of the world’s prison population and compared to other western nations with similar standards of living we are one of the least safe nations. The violent crime rate is down 40% from what it was in 1980 and yet prison populations have increased by over 400%. Something is definitely not right.
And my question really is why is it this way? As poverty continues to grow in this country why do we continue to punish the most impoverished of our people for simply being in poverty? I’m not saying that there aren’t people who commit crimes and that we should just let it happen, but when you look at the environment and challenges they face, those who criticize rarely have experienced such adversity. Sure there is always a small portion who rise out of poverty but for the most part the poor are simply exploited for their labor or for their money. On average, we don’t give them a living wage, we don’t give them access to equal education, we don’t give them equal access to quality health care, and we don’t give them equal access to healthy and affordable food options.
But they all deserve it right? Making those bad decisions when they had so many good decisions open to them. Do we not have a responsibility to raise the less fortunate up? Do we just leave those who haven’t had the opportunities we had to languish and justify it with the idea it’s their fault they are in this position? What about forgiveness? What about compassion? How can we paint such a large population of our country with just one color and ignore the tapestry of lives that exist there? As the top income earners continue to suck away the wealth of the bottom 99% why do we turn our attention downwards, kicking those at the bottom instead of shaking the tree more to let the fruit fall to the ground? Some people in this country act like if we just eliminated the poor the country would be a better place, but in fact it would be chaos and nothing would remain. No soldiers to fight our wars, no workers to pick our food, serve our food, work in retail, and all the other jobs we don’t even notice get done everyday. And even if the void could be filled, the capitalist policies our country function on would simply shift more of us down to the bottom, while the rich keep benefiting.
Welcome to an economy built on consumerism and profit. To answer the real question why, one simply has to follow the money. It is to the benefit of the rich to keep the population of a large portion of the country poor. Because there is only so far wealth can grow, it is finite and if the populous has more, they have less. Life, liberty, and happiness for all citizens of this country take a backseat when money is involved.
I know this post was ranty and I try to put more logical discourse, but just sometimes you just look at these large systems that are so difficult to change when you are just one person and see millions upon millions of people being impacted by a system that is simply not there to help them, and in the long run doesn’t help the rest of us either. I made a resolution with myself about a year ago then when I moved strongly by something emotionally I need to not just complain but do something positive, even if it’s just donate some money to a worthwhile charity. Although perhaps on the periphery of the central theme of this post, there is something that I have been sort of procrastinating getting involved in for some time and I am happy to say I am procrastinating no longer. I have decided to be a CASA volunteer which is a wonderful program where the volunteer acts as an advocate for a neglected or abused child in court until the system finds them a good and safe home. Incarceration is a strong possibility for children who grow up in broken homes and maybe helping in this way I can help a few kids stay out of the prison system in this country.
Presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders has been talking a lot about the minimum wage and the cost of education in this country. It’s been a subject of course of many democrats. One of the memes that I think ties both together well is the one that shows how many hours in a day you would have to work to pay off yearly tuition at Yale at minimum wage in 19—compared to today.
But I don’t want to talk so much about minimum wage, but rather the cost of education. Bernie Sanders would like to make it free at public institutions. There are many memes mocking this idea, mostly in regards to this being a wild campaign promise that has no chance of coming true. Or questioning where all the money is going to come from. Bernie has a plan for that but I’d like to take the politics out for a second and question why anybody would be opposed to the idea of free tuition at public universities.
Can anybody argue that an educated public is not better than an uneducated one? Regardless of the type of government a public that is educated simply has less chance of becoming oppressed at least long-term than one that is uneducated. In fact we should be worried about a society in which education is become less and less valued, and less accessible to a good portion of the population. The constantly rising price of tuition and the decreasing middle class certainly implies a general decrease in access of education for many families. Sure student loans are an option, but that’s a heavy cost one has to pay going $40,000 or $50,000 in debt puts you behind the 8 ball for sure through most of your young life. My generation (which would be about the age of many the students now) or the previous one never had to start out life that way, so why should it be that way for this generation?
A more educated one is also more civil and less divided. We argue in this country over issues that are non-issues to most other industrial nations. Issues that become politicized which have no need to belong to one party or the other because they are simply something we need to all agree on and do something about. As the public becomes less and less literate on important issues such as climate change, GMO’s, vaccines, environmental conservation divides in viewpoints exist when they should not. Even when viewpoints do differ and educated public will force the debate to be relevant, and compromise is more easily found. A democracy is only successful when everybody participates. But how can people effectively participate when they don’t understand the issues? For many who participate their vote is based less on an understanding the issues over more surface based and emotional reasons.
Look at any country in which all people have equal access to education and you will find a country with less crime, a large middle class, and a productive economy. So why would anybody oppose free university education without seriously looking at how it could be done. It’s not like we don’t have the money but yes it would cause us to put less priority one thing to put the priority on education. It’s simply unclear to me why equal access to education wouldn’t be a primary concern for any nation. Education makes business better, but that does not mean education should be a business. As soon as we turn education into a product we’ve ruined it. This is because like any product, when the quality is high, the cost is also high and few can afford it. People with less money who want that same product end up getting a cheaper version of the product that simply isn’t as good. Most universities do want to keep their quality high, but it leaves them with a choice of raising tuition costs to do so, or lowering standards of enrollment to get more students. After they’ve let more students in who they know will struggle in university they end up inflating grades or lowering expectations so they can appear ethical and that they haven’t just let a bunch of students in only to make money. Anybody who is in academia sees this business model as a terrible way to run education and yet it seems to be the trend. There is no doubt in my mind it will come back to bite us.
So let us not oppose the idea of free college education, let us work together to find a way that it can happen. Other nations are able to provide this to their citizens. Why can we not do the same? It really is to everybody’s benefit.
Hey, Travis, when everybody is out to get you, paranoid is just good thinking!
– Dr. Johnny Fever
If there is one group of people that I despise arguing with, it is conspiracy theorists. I find it even more frustrating than debating someone with strong religious convictions. Maybe it’s just because I can sympathize better with people with strong religious beliefs because I have been exposed to religion and have had family who have strong religious beliefs. Now both types of people are belief driven and in many ways there is no difference at least in terms of how neural pathways are formed and how the impact of reinforcing those neural pathways impacts the brain, but there is something about conspiracy theorists that seems more concerning. Maybe this is true only for religious fundamentalists in the west. In other areas of the world I would fear religious fundamentalists much more, but maybe it’s because with religion the crux of the debate falls to the supernatural and with the supernatural there is no way to disprove it. For those who have faith it’s tangible and real and this is what governs their thinking. A lot of times if you bring into the realm of the real world you can often find common ground and agree on things, even if you disagree on the mechanism. In fact I’m pretty sure I’d be less surprised if someone found actual evidence of the existence of God than some of the conspiracy theories that some people believe in as being real.
When it comes to conspiracy theorists, the troubling part to me is that all of what they believe is easily disprovable. There are no supernatural forces at work; it’s a conspiracy that involves this plane of existence. It’s physical and tangible in a very real sense. We can actually settle the debate. With God, you’re never going to settle it, because God cannot be disproven in a strictly logical sense (of course that’s because for something to exist the onus for proof is on those that would assert its existence).
I was talking to a colleague recently who is a geologist. He had told me before that his father was very conservative and does not think evolution is real. More than not accepting the scientific evidence he has invented a conspiracy theory in which all fossils are fabricated and made in a factory somewhere and then scientists plant them around the world so that they pretend they have evidence. It just blew my mind when he told me. The amount of fossils we have is enormous and the time and energy to make all of those, plant them all over the world, all so that we could tell a false narrative about the origins of life are astronomical for me to even wrap my head around it. Of course I’ve heard the general theme before that evolution is just a conspiracy to try and disprove the Bible and I literally don’t understand.
As an atmospheric scientist of course the one I deal with the most is the conspiracy associated with global warming. Thousands and thousands of scientists all banding together trying to get greedy off that alternative energy money and trying to destroy the poor fossil fuel companies who apparently are struggling to make ends meet. Debates usually go something like this:
Me. “As somebody who studies this and understands how the atmosphere works…” I list a lot of hard evidence, and explain how the greenhouse effect works.
CT (Conspiracy Theorist) Evidence ignored and the grand retort is “But other people are experts too and they disagree”.
Me. Thinking, ohh they want to try to take that right now “Actually not really, few people who deny climate change are actually atmospheric scientists, and none of them have been able to publish any scientifically sound papers in peer-reviewed journals on the subject. Such scientist’s research is always funded by oil companies.”
CT: “That’s because the journals are controlled by the IPCC and they prevent any contrary evidence from getting published.”
Me: *bangs head*
The back and forths are usually longer, but this was just a glimpse. One thing I have noticed that is common with all these debates is that they never address any scientific evidence you present directly. So in retrospect, debate is a bad word. They have no defense on the workings of antigens, the physics behind the greenhouse effect, or the random mutations of genes. There is always some larger organization involved pulling the strings, shadow networks, cover-ups, secret e-mails, vast sums of money involved. They post links to sites that reference other articles written by someone with equally little knowledge of what they are talking about. There are vague references to events that never happen, or if they did happen there is no way to prove that they happened. And why do these conspiracy theories always involve the government or scientists?
Governments are for the most part, simply incompetent. The level of organization they need to have to pull some of the shit off that people give them credit for is truly astounding. The really corrupt ones are so obviously corrupt and drunk on power there is no need of secrecy they do it right in front of your face. And of course I know many scientists. They are some of the finest people I know: curious, intelligent, and for the most part noble and compassionate. Corrupt scientists are few and far between and are easily exposed because scientists believe that what they are doing is valuable and important and have zero tolerance for those that would make a mockery of the scientific process and allow bad science to flourish.
Now certainly you might say at this point, while we have never proven the existence of a supernatural deity, there have been conspiracies. To that, I say most definitely and in fact that’s what makes conspiracies relatively short-lived and small. Because people are generally good and if there is some conspiracy that is causing harm to people, and lying to people it’s not long before somebody’s conscience gets the better of them and they get the message out. In fact, this would seem to put a natural limit into how large a conspiracy can grow. Once it gets too big or too harmful, whistleblowers will come out of the woodwork. And there will be tangible evidence of this conspiracy and unsubstantiated hypotheses are no longer necessary.
I have decided that I need to stop engaging such people. But it’s hard, because there some of the conspiracy theories, if allowed to spread, can cause real harm. Like ones related to climate change or vaccinations and then I find it hard to keep quiet because lives are literally at stake. Ultimately it feels like people who purport conspiracy theories enjoy the attention, the feeling of importance that they are part of the minority and they get it and everybody else has been duped. Perhaps it’s just ego. Perhaps it’s just pure and utter fear of a world they don’t understand. Perhaps it’s just people wanting to believe in something do badly that they will invent anything to rationalize that belief. I don’t know. I’d be curious to learn how some of my other readers deal with conspiracy theorists.
Note: A study was conducted to determine whether Tin Foil Hats really protect your thoughts being read. Turns out it makes it worse. At least that’s what “physics” tells us. (That’s the punch line if you don’t want to read the article).
One facet of human nature that fascinates me is the idea of destiny. Now when I say destiny here I don’t mean like some blockbuster movie in which I am destined to save the princess, fulfill the prophecy and become the most benevolent leader of mankind. I am talking about something more fundamental than that. What some people might refer to as “a calling”. And maybe not even in the sense of a career only, but rather one’s passions, one’s nature. It is not too surprising that I am reflecting on that, because as I watch my son, I wonder what he’s going to be like. What will his interests be? How will he want to live his life and how different will that be from me or his mother?
The nurturing influence of parents cannot be overlooked, but we’ve all known people who were vastly different from their parents in some very fundamental ways. Two parents might be very messy and their child is neat. Two parents might be teachers, and their child wants to run his own business. Of course trying to determine why somebody ends up the way they do is a fool’s errand in a lot of ways, because nurture is not just a function of parents, but of teachers, friends, relatives, society, etc. It could be that one day a kid sees a fancy car that he just loves and says to himself, alright how do I get a job that allows me to drive around with that. Perhaps not the most noble of callings, but he we like shiny things that enhance our status and so these kinds of things certainly happen.
For most of my life I thought I had a calling to be a meteorologist. I’ve loved storms since I was a small child. I would get up in the middle of the night to watch the lightning. In grade 6 we learned about different clouds and how they could tell us about the weather that was coming our way. I was fascinated by this and remember feeling hooked by it. I wanted to learn more about clouds and forecasting. In grade 8 our science class was a full year and broken up into 3 parts:
astronomy, meteorology, and geology. I loved all 3 of those and at the time they had us thinking about careers, but I was already hooked on meteorology and I decided then that I was going to be a meteorologist. During my undergraduate I decided that being a forecaster wasn’t for me and wanted to teach it so I went to grad school and I loved it and don’t regret a second of it. At the end of my undergraduate I took a linguistics course and I loved it. At that time I questioned my career decision a little, but it was my last year of undergrad and it seemed too late to do anything else, and what did it matter, I still loved the weather. I do think that I would be just as happy if I had chosen linguistics as a career had I been introduced to it earlier in life. Now my interests lie in cognitive science and neuroscience. I could definitely see myself being a researcher, or even a clinical psychologist because I am deeply interested in understanding others and our nature, and feel I have some aptitude in understanding the motivations of others.
Despite these ponderings on alternative careers, I still don’t have any regrets. I enjoy my job, and perhaps being a professor is the reason I have had time to pursue these other passions. But it has led me to some questions about this idea that I was somehow “destined” to be in the atmospheric sciences. Would I still have become what I became had I not lived in a climate that did not have thunderstorms? What if our curriculum in grade 6 did not include learning about clouds? What if the grade 8 science curriculum didn’t have meteorology which helped me appreciate the subject at a greater depth and attract me to it even more? What if I had a mother who was afraid of storms and that made me afraid of storms? Yet my choice to go into meteorology seems beyond these things. We had lots of subjects in school and with some good teachers. Why didn’t any of those subjects arouse a passion in me? My parents were not scientists, teachers, historians, writers, etc. and it seems that they didn’t influence me in any particular academic field so I could have chosen anything. In terms of time, we spent more time learning about many other subjects than meteorology. There are rocks everywhere and I had been to the Rockies, so why didn’t I go into geology? I loved watching nature shows so why didn’t I become a biologist? Why did I feel I had a “calling” when I meet so many students who aren’t even sure what they want to do? Is this a rare feeling? Or do other people feel it and just ignore it?
I don’t know that I have an answer to any of these questions, but what I do know is that I was very fortunate. I’ve seen many students with a passion for meteorology but very weak quantitative skills, having weaknesses in math and physics that forced them to take a different career path even if their interest remains. I do not have that problem. I am fortunate by circumstances having parents who worked hard for me to give me a chance to pursue my passions. I wonder how many people feel this “calling” towards science, the arts, humanities, history, education, etc., but simply must take a job as soon as possible to support a family. Maybe they can’t afford to go to school and don’t want to take out student loans. Some people might argue that their “calling” is perhaps not that strong to drive them, but there are practical realities that must be adhered to and when basic needs must be met they simply must be taken care of first. Somewhere there are people who could have been brilliant athletes with enough training and leisure time, but instead had to work in a factory to support their family. How many geniuses have simply died of starvation? How many talented artists have died of curable diseases simply because they couldn’t afford a doctor or the vaccine that would have save their life, or a doctor or vaccine simply wasn’t available?
In the end I don’t think I subscribe to this idea of destiny, because whatever natural passions we have, they must be cultivated, and even those passions may fade slightly as new ones take their place. In the end I can only be thankful for the natural gifts I seem to possess and the family, friends, and society that has allowed me to develop them.
I was reading a fellow blogger’s post about the vaccination debate (a debate that should not even exist) as the author of the blog had highlighted a particular response to her blog from a physician and posed the question about why are we not willing to
listen to the physicians point of view. She was also interested about why we would trust doctor’s in one case, but not in the case of vaccinations. This is a very valid question. If you are going to say doctors are out to lunch on vaccines and the very same medical science goes into everything else in the profession then you should never go see a doctor, take care of things on your own, and most importantly keep your kid at home so he or she doesn’t infect anybody else.
However it is the “Why don’t we believe the physician?” question that had me thinking as I drove to work this morning and I started thinking about how this is true for things like climate change and other scientific issues now and in the past like GMOs, evolution, the dangers of smoking, etc. I was reminded of an excellent YouTube video that I have posted many times before called Good without Gods that talks about the basis for morality in a society. One of the ways in which we can acquire morality is by default to authority, sometimes mistakenly so. I believe that this is a basic cognitive bias humans have, perhaps because we all, from a very young age, default to the authority of our parents. Part of growing up is realizing that your parents don’t have all the answers and don’t know everything, but part of our brains never really grows out of this default to authority bias. This is in part why many people feel comfortable deriving their morality from religious authority without question. Of course there is too much to know in the world and defaulting to authority saves time, and thus energy of which we all have only a finite amount of. As a scientist I would say always be skeptical, but that means that we should also be equally skeptical to somebody who says vaccines cause autism. In the face of controversy it seems the default to authority is what people rely on, so the question is, why isn’t the authority thousands of scientists who by consensus and exhaustive amounts of research say one thing as opposed to a politician who says another? I have come up with a few possibilities but would be interested to hear what others think. Here are the thoughts that I have come up with so far:
False authority figures.Who are the people we value in our society?
Michele Bachmann – Not an authority figure (From http://www.warrenjasonstreet.com)
Here in the U.S. it seems like the views of celebrities, politicians, and people with money (who are sometimes all one and the same) carry weight as being an authority on scientific issues. This is simply not the case.
The power of money. In a highly consumer based society, money is seen as equivocal to power and thus authority. If you have a lot of money you must have been smart to get it. That is false of course. Many people inherit their wealth, have connections, work very hard (but don’t necessarily have a high intellect), and some just get lucky breaks. Most of the smartest people I know don’t make money their goal.
Devaluing intellectualism. In many countries I have visit those who are well educated, teachers, scientists are well respected in the community and in society at large. Education itself is increasingly devalued here in the U.S. and so if educated people don’t have value in society that how can they be a worthwhile authority on anything?
The American Dream was built on valuing education, change, and progress. We do not live in a society in which that dream is simply unobtainable for most and yet we believe in the concept like it manifested itself out of nothing.
no supernatural forces at work; it’s a conspiracy that involves this plane of existence. It’s physical and tangible in a very real sense. We can actually settle the debate. With God, you’re never going to settle it, because God cannot be disproven in a strictly logical sense (of course that’s because for something to exist the onus for proof is on those that would assert its existence).
that people give them credit for is truly astounding. The really corrupt ones are so obviously corrupt and drunk on power there is no need of secrecy they do it right in front of your face. And of course I know many scientists. They are some of the finest people I know: curious, intelligent, and for the most part noble and compassionate. Corrupt scientists are few and far between and are easily exposed because scientists believe that what they are doing is valuable and important and have zero tolerance for those that would make a mockery of the scientific process and allow bad science to flourish.
Cloak Unfurled 