Summary: Polling acts as one kind of mirror to our society; Internet comments provide a reflection of another kind. With over 23 thousand comments about geopolitics, the FM website gives us a perspective on America’s ills. Here we sort them and find one ominous pattern.
There is conflict in every society because people always debate the important things in life. How to interpret the past. How to see the kaleidoscope of current events. What path we should take towards the future. How to relate to incompatible values: individual rights vs the needs of the community, freedom vs. equality, etc.
We’re living the Best and the Brightest but larger. That book examined the failures of America’s elites during the 1960s. Now we experiencing the same thing but on a larger scale.
America’s intelligent and well-educated people should be one of our great resources, best able to see and understand our nation’s problems. Instead our society’s dysfunctionality — our gullibility and credulity — has allowed our best to become indoctrinated. They have been taught an interlocking set of historical falsehoods and bogus theory, become fervent believers of things that are not so, fearful of things not likely to happen.
It’s not political, appearing on both the Right and Left. It’s converted American politics into a theater of the absurd, a Kabuki of over-coked actors.
In my experience these people cannot be broken from these beliefs. Contrary facts, testimony of experts — all useless. This is the battle fought out every day in the comments on the FM website since 2007. Here are two examples.
(1) Smart guy fearful of the absurd
Comment: Question by a licensed clinical laboratory scientist, who has studied chemistry:
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The human organism( and all other organisms on this planet) is adapted to a certain balance of atmospheric gasses. Do you really think it’s a good idea to alter the atmosphere from one to which biological organisms are adapted, to one to which biological organisms are not adapted?
This is weird. Let’s look at the effects of more CO2 and less oxygen.
CO2 forms 0.039% of the atmosphere. That’s 390 parts per million. It’s a trace gas. Some forecasts project a CO2 level as high as 700 ppm by 2100 (there many uncertainties in these long-term forecasts, which use largely untested models). How much will CO2 levels have to rise in order to affect us? I think we can trust Wikipedia for a rough answer (the entry gives citations and links for more information):
CO2 is an asphyxiant gas and not classified as toxic or harmful in accordance with Globally Harmonized System of Classification and Labelling of Chemicals standards of United Nations Economic Commission for Europe by using the OECD Guidelines for the Testing of Chemicals. Concentrations of 1% (10,000 ppm) will make some people feel drowsy. Concentrations of 7% to 10% may cause suffocation, manifesting as dizziness, headache, visual and hearing dysfunction, and unconsciousness within a few minutes to an hour.
What about the corresponding change in the air’s oxygen content? Assuming CO2 directly replace oxygen, its volume would go from 209,500 ppm to 209,800 ppm — an rise of 0.19% (390/209500). If we that sensitive to change in oxygen levels, then humanity would occupy only a narrow range of altitudes. And altitude sickness would occur even with small changes, and become serious far more frequently. Travel bookings and Goggle Maps would automatically display the change in altitude of your trip.
(2) I know what I know. It’s science!
A Comment prioritizing personal experience over science (common on both sides of the climate wars):
I lived in the San Fernando Valley from 1957 to 1970. It was hot there in summer but the temperature never got above 105 F. I visited four years ago in September and the temperature was 115 F. Forty years is a very brief time in geological history. The accumulation of green house gasses seems a very plausible explanation. What will the high temperature be 40 years from now? I would be concerned.
His impression of local data, even if correct (which I doubt) tells us nothing about global trends. That’s why we fund the large and expensive networks of satellites, radiosonde balloons, Argus ocean sensors, and land weather stations. The American Meteorological Society just released a new statement about climate change:
“Surface temperature data for Earth as a whole, including readings over both land and ocean, show an increase of about 0.8°C (1.4°F) over the period 1901─2010 and about 0.5°C (0.9°F) over the period 1979–2010 (the era for which satellite-based temperature data are routinely available).”
The global temperature increase (the two century long increase) is aprox one degree during the period you mention. And scientists debate how much of that one degree is caused by human activity.
Forecasts of the future are, of course, debated. We have reliable data from a brief period of time and space, sparse and often unreliable data from a larger area of space and time — processed by a poorly-understood set of mind-bendingly complex climate processes.
(3) We lost in Iraq and Afghanistan. Bring out the “stabbed in the back” myth!
A comment in repsonse to the post “I come not to praise COIN but to bury it. And to ask you why we adopted it, at such cost.”
Journalists, and other so-called smart people, fail to understand one major important point about the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan; Iraq and Afghanistan were/are nation building missions. This policy was not created by the people on the ground; it was created/approved in the form of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorist Prevention Act (IRTPA) of 2004 {see Wikipedia} …
… I also think the journalists should go after other journalists, academics and politicians who directed this policy be enforced in the first place. This is a bipartisan screw up of the highest magnitude, yet the people being attacked served on the ground, in country, away from their families; killed many terrorists and insurgents and kept the fight in the enemies’ areas of operation and areas of influence. This article makes Generals Stanley McChrystal and Petraeus, Major Nagl and Aussie (Dave Kilcullen) casualties of war.
It was incomprehensible to American hawks and war mongers that we — a SuperPower! — lost Vietnam. So they use the classic loser’s myth — it was a stab in the back. We lost only due to the traitorous hippies and journalists, plus the weak American people (quitting when the consigliere could see the light at the end of the tunnel).
Despite assurances that we’ve learned from Vietnam, the same agencies have again led us to defeat. Will they admit error? Will we change our militarized foreign policy? Perhaps not, when the stab in the back ploy can be used again. This comment might foreshadow excuses coming down at us.
In this version the Executive Branch and military were not responsible for our defeats. They were victims too, puppets of the all-powerful deciders in Congress, academia, and the news media. The bold advocates of the war were — General Petraeus (now head of CIA), Nagl (Lt Colonel, then 2008-2012 President of the lavishly funded Center for a New American Security), and author/media star David Kilcullen. This is nuts, but emotionally appealing.
Will this myth gain traction? Our ability to learn from the expeditions to Iraq and Afghanistan depends on the answer.
For more information
See this FM reference page for more examples of comments debating climate change issues.
To see many more examples go to the FM Reference Page Information & disinformation, the new media & the old.
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