From: Platt Holden (pholden@sc.rr.com)
Date: Mon Mar 15 2004 - 13:37:14 GMT
DMB and All:
> dmb says:
> I don't think we need Pirsig to issue an opinion on every topic. Its easy
> enough to put the debate in a MOQ framework.
> Pirsig wrote:
> "Phaedrus had always believed science is a search for truth. A real
> scientist is not supposed to sell out that goal to corporations who are
> searching for mere profit. Or, it he had to sell out in order to live that
> was nothing to be happy about. These frat brothers of his acted like they
> never heard of science as truth. Phaedrus had suddenly seen a tentacle of
> the Giant reaching out and he was the only one who could see it."
Pirsig could well have added scientists selling out to politicians who
decide who gets government-funded research grants:
Item: In testimony before Congress, Professor Richard S. Lindzen of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology said: "The whole notion of a
scientific consensus has been contrived to disguise the genuine
disagreement among scientists on a number of different issues. Major media
outlets announced, incorrectly, as early as 1988 that the issue of global
warming was scientifically settled, and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) has been spending over a decade trying desperately
to make their reports conform to this belief. To think that hundreds of
scientists could be in full agreement in dozens of separate disciplines is
ridiculous. The aura of certainty with which the IPCC's conclusions are
being reported is clearly more a matter of politics than science."
Item: Sallie Baliunas, deputy director of Mount Wilson Observatory and an
astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said
there was "no scientific basis" for the claim that human actions cause
global warming."The key layers of air, from one to five miles high, shown
no human-made global warming trend," she said. "Global warming at the
surface is largely, if not entirely, natural."
Item: Greenpeace co-founder Dr. Patrick More argues that the movement
really became radicalized after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the USSR.
That's when hordes of activists left their Communist Party jobs and joined
the environmental movement. "When I helped create Greenpeace in 1971," Dr.
Moore reflects,"I had no idea it would evolve into a band of scientific
illiterates who use Gestapo tactics to silence people who wish to express
their views in a civilized forum. In short, the environmental movement has
lost its objectivity, morality and humanity."
Pirsig is right. Scientists can sell out their commitment to truth. The
environmental movement is a classic case in point--tentacles of the
political Giant reaching out to corrupt intellectual honesty.
Platt
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