Cosmos - With Neil deGrasse Tyson

[Christopher]

As I said, Carl Sagan was a prominent liberal activist. Cosmos was intended to advance a point of view and to serve as a protest against the political trends of the time, namely the increasingly hawkish trend in the American right, the shortsighted risking of our planet's future for the sake of narrow ideological clashes or the profits of the military-industrial complex. And the new Cosmos is emphatically speaking against the harmful political trends of our time, the growing influence of the Tea Party and its anti-intellectual, anti-science, climate-change-denialist policies. It's disingenuous to pretend the information is being presented in a politically neutral way, when the narration and the choice of emphasis are going out of their way to specifically target those current political trends and provide a contrasting viewpoint. Yes, the show is grounded in scientific objectivity, but in an age where the right has declared scientific objectivity an inimical viewpoint, just standing up for it cannot help but be a political statement in its own right -- just as standing up for truth in the face of oppressive or deceitful leaders has always been.

I think you're defining politics too narrowly. As the Wikipedia definition says, it's "the practice and theory of influencing other people on a civic or individual level." That's largely about government but not limited to government. Politics can be something practiced by ordinary people. Heck, isn't that the whole conservative philosophy, that running society should be more a responsibility retained by individuals than one surrendered wholly to government? On the other hand, what were '60s peace activists and anti-government protestors if not political? Politics means taking a stand, speaking out for what you believe in and trying to influence society. As you say, change won't happen without a push. Politics is the way we push, the way we advocate a cause and influence policy. It's not a dirty word, or shouldn't be.

 

[Greylock Crescent]

I think you're defining politics too narrowly.

And I think you're defining it too vaguely, to the point where the word is almost meaningless. If any scientific recommendation is considered political then I think we're missing the distinction between education, and advocacy of specific policies. If Cosmos is political activism, how then do you differentiate between political, social and environmental activism? Calling them all "political" is far too clumsy, IMO.

There's a reason why politics is connected to policy. And, as yet, Cosmos isn't either of those. The injection of politics - the specifics of policy - to the discussion has come from everyone else reading into those scientific recommendations - from you and I and our support for innovating new, cleaner technologies, to Yanks' conspiracy-tinged statements, to the repeated sensationalism and obfuscation in gturner's statements.

Can you show me where Cosmos itself is advocating an actual policy - where it has tried "persuading people to elect and support a government," to use your own words? As I've said, I may have missed it, but I don't see it.

 

[Christopher]

Look, I'm not going to split semantic hairs. I'm just making the point that it's disingenuous to claim that Cosmos is somehow a neutral documentary, that its purpose is not to make a stand. Some people who object to what the show is saying are accusing it of being political, and I think that instead of raising our hands in alarm and going "Gasp, I do declare, I have no idea what you are talking about," we should have the basic honesty to say, "Yes, the show is taking a position and there's nothing intrinsically dishonest about having a point of view, especially when that point of view is based in real evidence and common sense rather than self-interested obfuscation." That way, we don't let the opposition define the terms and put us on the defensive. They want to discredit the show by calling it political? Then let's take away their rhetorical ammunition by pointing out that advocacy is not intrinsically a bad thing. Don't let them silence us by making us ashamed to take a stand.

 

[Greylock Crescent]

Look, I'm not going to split semantic hairs. I'm just making the point that it's disingenuous to claim that Cosmos is somehow a neutral documentary, that its purpose is not to make a stand.

Yeah, in the interest of avoiding a never-ending semantic discussion, I'll say that I agree that Cosmos has a specific point of view. In essence, though, I'd call it advocacy (or activism, if you prefer) because the act of creating a show, for the purpose of educating people about, and persuading them to accept, a scientific worldview, is most definitely activist. I'd simply add that advocating a point of view, IMO, is not always about politics - which was my initial point of contention. But if you see it the other way, then I'll agree to disagree about it.

we should have the basic honesty to say, "Yes, the show is taking a position and there's nothing intrinsically dishonest about having a point of view, especially when that point of view is based in real evidence and common sense rather than self-interested obfuscation." That way, we don't let the opposition define the terms and put us on the defensive. They want to discredit the show by calling it political? Then let's take away their rhetorical ammunition by pointing out that advocacy is not intrinsically a bad thing. Don't let them silence us by making us ashamed to take a stand.

All of this I wholeheartedly agree with.

 

[gturner]

As I said, Carl Sagan was a prominent liberal activist. Cosmos was intended to advance a point of view and to serve as a protest against the political trends of the time, namely the increasingly hawkish trend in the American right, the shortsighted risking of our planet's future for the sake of narrow ideological clashes or the profits of the military-industrial complex.

The planet's future was at risk from the march of leftism, which in case you didn't notice was turning the East Bloc into a toxic wasteland, on top of their plans to shower Europe with nuclear warheads to clear a path for their tanks. The Europeans were considered collateral damage. Reagan played the cowboy role because US intelligence found out that Russian generals were terrified that he might be a cowboy and actually challenge them. Not one to hold himself above the fate of humanity (unlike a more recent President), he milked their fears for all they was worth, and along with a raft of other unorthodox policies caused the USSR to collapse and implode. If Sagan had succeeded with his liberal nonsense, most of us and most of Europe and Asia would probably be dead now.

And the new Cosmos is emphatically speaking against the harmful political trends of our time, the growing influence of the Tea Party and its anti-intellectual, anti-science, climate-change-denialist policies.

Well thanks for so thoroughly discrediting the program as anything to do with science, other than perhaps National Socialist Workers Science, where the Permian extinctions were caused by coal, asteroids 5000 times bigger than Chixculub routinely smacked into the Earth, where the entire geological data set gets tossed into the trash can as inconvenient to the party cause, and where human evolution will continue by winnowing out the weak and stupid to advance the cause of socialist science.

And you claim to support science by accusing anyone who questions your political and scientifically unsupportable worldview as a enemies who must be crushed. That was what the Nazis did to their enemies, accusing them of being anti-scientific and anti-intellectual, then doing whatever it took to improve the Earth's environment and the human gene pool. We don't need more of that.

 

[AgentCoop]

^Nice to see Godwin's Law is alive and well.

 

[Greylock Crescent]

Is there some cosmic "inverse word count-to-content" law that gturner's posts are forced to obey?

 

[gturner]

^Nice to see Godwin's Law is alive and well.

Well, I could have gone with Lysenko, since many climate scientists who are bucking the current dogma are likening it the earlier period when science became politicized, and where anyone who disagreed with his genetic nonsense was branded an anti-intellectual, anti-scientific crypto-fascist who stood in the way of humanity's advancement. It's what happens when scientific establishments get taken over by intolerant, thin-skinned thugs and bullies who have no qualms about faking data or committing fraud to advance "the cause". Some other climate scientists say this is reflective of noble cause corruption, because the question "would you do X to save humanity from extinction" gets a "yes" for all X, so all means are justified, however questionable or downright heinous.


Some of the tactics are just daffy, such as last week's situation regarding the raw data behind the claim of a 97% consensus, which recently fell into the wrong hands. The University of Queensland, in an amazing bit of bravado and legal idiocy, sent a cease and desist letter to the blogger who possessed the raw data, forbidding him from publishing the data, analyzing the data, or even looking at the data, and then went on to forbid him from revealing any of the contents of the cease and desist letter because (and this is the good part) they held the copyright on their own cease and desist letter.

 

[Timewalker]

But why do we need activism to con people into acting on climate change, when IPCC lead authors predict that within the lifetime of our newborns, we'll go from an average temperature of 289 degrees Kelvin to a scorching 289.37 degrees Kelvin? Thus we must revamp our entire society, raise energy prices so high that poor people can't afford food, sit back and watch corn riots in Mexico City, and make sure Africans don't have reliable electricity for another hundred years. It is a cause that is both stupid and evil.

My source is the recent papers putting the TCR at 1.3 C, very slightly lower than earlier estimates, and one of which was by multiple IPCC lead authors. You just deny science in favor of your apocalyptic death cult and its wacko beliefs that make Scientology seem sane. You could've seized on any random variable, such as average wind speed (which has been dropping) or water vapor (which has been dropping), or the number of lightning strikes, or the number of shark attacks. You've grabbed on to a particularly stupid number as your cause, because warmer is better and you have to argue against all reality to pretend it's not so.

Almost everyone goes on vacation by flying about 10 or 15 C closer to the equator, where it's warmer, except for the people who already live there, who mostly just drink beer, fish, and enjoy a life that's not spent chopping firewood to get through the winter. As we warm up by a fraction of a degree, or even a whole degree, a few people will actually notice the longer growing season and increased vegetable yields.

I would only worry if temperature were going the other way (which they possibly will till about 2200 AD based on recent papers on solar data), because during the Little Ice Age, when temperatures were slightly less, North America and China experienced centuries long mega-droughts, and crop yields plummeted and millions of people starved to death, even in Europe.

Getting colder would be a real reason to rethink how we've laid out our infrastructure and farming, and how we should cope with a climate that shifts our crop lands hundreds of miles to the South, eliminating or severely curtailing northern areas. In contrast, there is no equatorial line of foodlessness. The problem at the equator is that plants grow so well that you have to spend your day in hand to hand combat with all the weeds, as if you were in a hydroponic greenhouse from hell.

So from this blindingly obvious state of affairs, where the tropics are called "lush" and the Arctic is called "desolate", and the massive geologic record where all the really hot periods were called "climate optimums", a bunch of self-hating, guilt-ridden scientific morons has proposed a reality where the Earth coincidentally reached an absolute climate optimum (from the northern Siberia to Nigeria) sometime between the Bee Gee's and the Duran Duran epoch. My working theory is that Andy Gibb screwed with their heads, because nothing in their thinking is remotely rational.

The temperature versus latitude from the tropics to the Arctic circle is about 1C per 90 miles and is very close to linear, in both hemispheres. Are you really terrified of moving 90 or 180 miles to the South, and if so, do you make out your will and testament before every vacation to Disneyland because you're traveling to a climate that NGT and the alarmists tell you is unable to support any life, much less human life?

Do you really believe all that nonsense?

So you are arguing that explaining things to people and telling them that their governments don't necessarily act in the best interests of their own average citizens, or even tell them the truth, is a con? My own country's government (in Canada) has the viewpoint that environmentalists are terrorists and if you're against draconian internet regulations that shred your privacy and give the government and police sweeping powers to know everything about you, that means you're "on the side of the child pornographers" (this was said by former cabinet minister Vic Toews).

No, not everyone flies 10-15C closer to the equator for vacations. If I want to experience that degree of temperature change, all I need to do is stay home. I've never flown anywhere on vacation.

90 miles south of me is Calgary, Alberta, Canada. It's a nice city to visit, with a view of the mountains from the higher hills, and it's got decent drinking water. The smog is terrible, though, and most of the time I spend there, I'm contending with a low-grade headache - very annoying, and intrudes on what would otherwise be a pleasant visit.

Calgary had a bad flood last year. So did much of the rest of the province. No, I'm not willing to move south. My comfort zone barely works right where I am, and I find summers very uncomfortable.

You remind me of people I get into discussions with on one of the social activism sites, who seem to think the entire world is like their very own back yard, and they call anyone who points out otherwise a liar.

I think you're defining politics too narrowly.

And I think you're defining it too vaguely, to the point where the word is almost meaningless. If any scientific recommendation is considered political then I think we're missing the distinction between education, and advocacy of specific policies. If Cosmos is political activism, how then do you differentiate between political, social and environmental activism? Calling them all "political" is far too clumsy, IMO.

There's a reason why politics is connected to policy. And, as yet, Cosmos isn't either of those. The injection of politics - the specifics of policy - to the discussion has come from everyone else reading into those scientific recommendations - from you and I and our support for innovating new, cleaner technologies, to Yanks' conspiracy-tinged statements, to the repeated sensationalism and obfuscation in gturner's statements.

Can you show me where Cosmos itself is advocating an actual policy - where it has tried "persuading people to elect and support a government," to use your own words? As I've said, I may have missed it, but I don't see it.

In this respect, Cosmos is giving people the information and letting them draw their own conclusions as to what they might consider doing about it. The point was made that scientists sometimes have an agenda that means lying or twisting the data to convince people of something that isn't in their own best interests. The solution: vote for a government that makes that harder to hide. This is why many Canadians desperately want the Conservatives out of government in next year's federal election. Our current government has fired many scientists, de-funded critical climate programs, muzzled the remaining scientists, branded environmentalists as terrorists and environmental charities as money launderers, and shows bucolic TV commercials for fracking.

As I said, Carl Sagan was a prominent liberal activist. Cosmos was intended to advance a point of view and to serve as a protest against the political trends of the time, namely the increasingly hawkish trend in the American right, the shortsighted risking of our planet's future for the sake of narrow ideological clashes or the profits of the military-industrial complex.

The planet's future was at risk from the march of leftism, which in case you didn't notice was turning the East Bloc into a toxic wasteland, on top of their plans to shower Europe with nuclear warheads to clear a path for their tanks. The Europeans were considered collateral damage. Reagan played the cowboy role because US intelligence found out that Russian generals were terrified that he might be a cowboy and actually challenge them. Not one to hold himself above the fate of humanity (unlike a more recent President), he milked their fears for all they was worth, and along with a raft of other unorthodox policies caused the USSR to collapse and implode. If Sagan had succeeded with his liberal nonsense, most of us and most of Europe and Asia would probably be dead now.

And the new Cosmos is emphatically speaking against the harmful political trends of our time, the growing influence of the Tea Party and its anti-intellectual, anti-science, climate-change-denialist policies.

Well thanks for so thoroughly discrediting the program as anything to do with science, other than perhaps National Socialist Workers Science, where the Permian extinctions were caused by coal, asteroids 5000 times bigger than Chixculub routinely smacked into the Earth, where the entire geological data set gets tossed into the trash can as inconvenient to the party cause, and where human evolution will continue by winnowing out the weak and stupid to advance the cause of socialist science.

And you claim to support science by accusing anyone who questions your political and scientifically unsupportable worldview as a enemies who must be crushed. That was what the Nazis did to their enemies, accusing them of being anti-scientific and anti-intellectual, then doing whatever it took to improve the Earth's environment and the human gene pool. We don't need more of that.

It wasn't the Russians who mused about "fighting a limited nuclear war over Europe." It was Reagan. It was also Reagan who "joked" into an open mic that "gentlemen, we begin bombing in five minutes." There's a reason his nickname is "Ronnie Ray-gun."

 

[Awesome Possum]

In Reagan's defense he was probably already suffering from Alzheimer's at that time. I'm willing to cut him some slack.

Still someone should have cut the mic.

 

[Timewalker]

I'm not. I cut NOBODY slack for such actions. If he already had Alzheimers, he should have resigned.

 

[Awesome Possum]

I don't think they knew at the time, it was only announced in the 90s. But the warning signs were there when you look back at them. He wasn't as great a President as his worshipers believe that he was, but I can't say for sure that his mental state contributed to it. It certainly didn't help towards the end of his time in office.

 

[Christopher]

There were constant jokes at the time about Reagan being senile and forgetful. But nobody expected it to be Alzheimer's, as far as I recall.

 

[BigJake]

His son claims to have noticed something wrong as early as 1984.

 

[Christopher]

Not unprecedented for presidential health problems to be kept secret, either in reality (FDR's polio, JFK's litany of health problems) or in fiction (Jed Bartlet's MS on The West Wing). The administration can't afford to risk letting their guy look weak, so they cover it and compensate for it as best they can.

 

[gturner]

It wasn't the Russians who mused about "fighting a limited nuclear war over Europe." It was Reagan. It was also Reagan who "joked" into an open mic that "gentlemen, we begin bombing in five minutes." There's a reason his nickname is "Ronnie Ray-gun."

Reagan was a hardcore nuclear abolitionist. He wanted the number of nuclear weapons in the world to be zero. The left still hasn't figured out this obvious position, and it's not like he hid it. It was a central goal of his policy, and probably the most consistent political position of his entire life. After we bombed Japan, he became an immediate anti-nuclear activist who wanted to lead anti-nuclear rallies, but Warner-Brothers wouldn't let him.

Once he became President, he haggled with Gorbachev for days and proposed the elimination of all nuclear weapons, and Gorbachev and his advisors agreed, but only on the condition that Reagan kill SDI. Reagan regarded SDI as the guarantee that nuclear weapons would become useless, and wouldn't budge on the issue. Gorbachev argued that he could not to return to Moscow with SDI intact or he'd lose his job, and they were at an impasse.

The whole point of Reagan's arms buildup was to make the Soviets rethink their system and abandon it, along with their nuclear weapons, or collapse economically as they tried to keep up with the West. To make that happen, like a cop saying "drop the gun and come out with your hands up!" Reagain basically had to play Clint Eastwood saying "Make my day."

He did, and it worked.

 

[AgentCoop]

^Will your version of reality ever be available on Blu-Ray so the rest of us can enjoy it?

 

[gturner]

Probably so, since it's also the reality conveyed in numerous books by historians of the Cold War (you could start with works by John Gaddis), and in the memoirs of the high-level officials who worked under Reagan (I read about half of those), and books by CIA officials, journalists, and just about everybody who ever wrote a book on the subject. Some people are Civil War history buffs, but I happen to be fascinated by the history of the Cold War, and so I joined the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Library.

 

[Yanks]

Oh Jesus..... Now you all are bashing Reagan.... Pathetic

 

[Timewalker]

^ Yes, some of us have a negative opinion of him and his actions during his presidency, and with good reason.