OT: Hearts vs Minds
zipman68
the speed force!
Friday, August 1, 2014 4:33 AM
The "hey lowpaw" thread degenerated into me, jerikson40, and Pole_DOC when most folks left. I continued because I thought things that might entertain me would still left to be said. And one was...jerikson40 wrote a rather long post with the topic of "hearts vs minds", a theme jerikson40 has returned to in other posts. Fundamentally, jerikson40 appeared to be asserting that his positions were largely based on careful analysis (he is of the "minds" camp) whereas others (those who left the thread out of frustration) were simply being emotional (and, therefore, of the "hearts" camp)
This resonated because, by coincidence, I read a National Review Online story excoriating the "nerd culture" of the left:
[view link]
I was amused by this because it illustrated the general perception that the American center-left is the reality-based community and the right is, well, less educated and less intelligent bumpkins. Note that I used "center-left" because real left has no actual political power in American since the rise of Clinton's third way democrats. Obviously, this is a bit unfair, since there are a number of genuine intellectuals that served in the Bush administration. Indeed, many of the problems during Bush's tenure reflected hubris rather than stupidity and many highly intelligent people are laid low by hubris (going further than that would be a major digression).
What struck me was tat the exact same "hearts vs minds" narrative that appeared in jerikson's posts. The struck me when I read the author's criticism of people "who can't tell you at what temperature water boils rolling their eyes at Bjorn Lomborg or Roger Pielke because they disagree with Harry Reid on climate change." I laughed because I was familiar with Lomborg's position -- which is that climate change is anthropogenic but that the costs of mitigation efforts are too high. Certainly different from Reid's position and the position of the vast majority of climate scientists on policy recommendation, but 100% in agreement regard the basic fact that climate change is 1) occurring; and 2) anthropogenic.
I was unfamiliar with Pielke's position, so I looked him up. It turns out he ALSO agrees that climates change is occurring and anthropogenic, but disagrees regarding the mechanism. Apparently, Pielke believes that less than one third of global warming can be attributed to CO2 but still feels the remainder is anthropogenic. I didn't pursue this further, but it struck me as highly humorous that Cooke's "look at the left -- driven by their hearts to believe this silly global warming stuff" article couldn't even find an intellectual that agreed with the likely position of most of his readers (i.e., that global warming is not anthropogenic and not even happening).
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