TheVat

His FR Evangelicals, conservative RCs, and the Dominionists seriously believe he is an instrument of God, sent to bring back a more theocratic society. They are under an umbrella called NAR (New Apostolic Reformation). And there are the Christian Nationalists, who are a little different in focus - they contend that America has always been a Christian nation - it's more about identity than religion, bound up in nativism and white supremacy. But they all seem to be converging on a Trump iconography AFAICT. How anyone would look to such a damaged, amoral and delusional pantsload as an object of religious reverence is...well, it's the mystery in many cults, eh?

What I've seen has looked two sided, with several members kind of piling on, so I would also request everyone involved just get back to topic in those threads. This is an example of something to just let go, and figure it's a misunderstanding. @exchemist was describing a potential state of mind of some patients who have anxiety about physical contact in a examination; he was not expressing it that way to be vulgar or denigrate health professionals. That would be a much smaller Web!

Ok. Well, I tend to see methodological differences between sciences as not being usually philosophical differences. Unless the method in play is one where researchers don't go after empirical data and just explore theoretical constructs and their implications. String theorists, maybe.

Not at all what I said. I agree with @CharonY .

But the OP may be looking for ways to engage with one. This is not a technical thread but rather one dedicated to engagement with those who may lack technical expertise. Several here have tried to clarify this for you.

Well, one answer to OP seems to be: refrain from judgmental comments or flaunting one's scientific purity while presenting a broad summation of climate research in a friendly and non-jargony manner.

I know that somewhat kindred fields can do different things with a dataset. A wildlife biologist could count cougar scat in order to derive a species census and use that for wilderness management. Meanwhile an ecologist focused on invertebrates might use that count in understanding how a trophic cascade from cougar scat will affect dung bettles and other interacting species (insectivore avians, e.g.) It's not likely however that a quite different field would use the data - a particle physicist wouldn't do much with that. Except step in it and then use colorful language. Pity. You did seem kinda rude.

People are so frequently turned into catfood. My aunt was eaten by neighborhood cats after she passed out in the garden from too much gin.

So go handle some cat poo and reap the benefits!

Not sure that immigrants causing the price surge in housing is factual. It could be one factor, but there were others, like covid and global supply chain problems, a deficit in housing units that had built up over years of under-building, labor issues etc. That immigrant=housing shortage narrative was certainly peddled here and demonstrably false. (here, in fact, migrant workers were helping alleviate a labor shortage among contractors) Agreed. What was so sad about 2024 was that some Independent voters (our largest voting bloc in fact) went and voted for Trump because they had been duped by propaganda that contained false allegations about Democrats. So they did actually make a shift based on policy, but unfortunately on false beliefs about said policies - the failure of legacy journalism continues to lay waste to American civic understanding)

I will eat a Vegemite sandwich in honor of the occasion. RW setbacks in France, Poland, Canada, and now Australia, a good trend and one furthered by MAGA, as others note.

Fair point. As Canadian comic Red Green observes, the hardest three words for men to say are "I don't know." To further complicate, I've heard that trucks account for 99% of road wear, so then you would have densely populated areas of Europe (more people per square km than US) where road wear is especially intense. Also, another confounding factor is that land is more expensive in Europe which increases highway construction cost. So: IDK. (hey...it's easier as an acronym) Whatever the relative cost per km, it makes sense to charge higher tax for gas if people have good alternatives to personal vehicles. It keeps transit attractive and reduces SCC (social cost of carbon) and makes cities more pedestrian friendly.

Sure seems like sexual selection would be part of the answer. Also, if a male has more lumber to lift this feat of hydraulics and so on would require good health and nutrition and therefore a prominent erection would be a display of overall good condition and likely fertility.

No, I I wasn't questioning they are higher over there. I was questioning your assertion that "the high price of gas in Europe is in large part due to taxes having nothing to do with the 'real' cost of the product." What I was trying to get at was that Europeans tend to drive less, but they still need all the infrastructure to get anyone from point A to point B. That means that a European driver is costing more per mile than an American driver. If Pierre Euro drives 25 miles a week and Joe Merica drives a 100, they still both need paved roads, signals, signage, bridges, etc. Pierre is going to cost society more per mile, and gas taxes should reflect that. Otherwise Henri who takes the Metro and Eloise who rides her bike will end up paying other kinds of taxes which are subsidizing Pierre in his carbon spewing travels. Well, I lean towards the idea that both carrot and stick are needed to bring about real change. If EVs and PIHVs are mandated at a certain level of production, then it helps if people are motivated to buy them by high gas prices. And the high taxes collected can also go into a program to assist lower income people who find it harder to transition away from an old gas hog they need for their job.

Not sure about that. When I was over there, it seemed like more people used mass transit which meant that the cost of serving up roads and other infrastructure to motorists might be higher per person. Higher price of gas could also serve to encourage continued production of fuel efficient vehicles and EVs, which is generally seen as a public good. Yep, which is why any real gas tax hike would need to be accompanied by better mass transit options and, for the pizza guy who needs his own vehicle, better reimbursement on his work mileage. A gas tax, isolated from real infrastructure improvement, is regressive.

Yesterday I had the distinct feeling this thread would go tits up.

I have to ask if you really believe that millions of Jews, Poles, Roma, gays, etc will not have been murdered in the Holocaust if we collectively agree that didn't happen and remember it as a giant beer and bratwurst festival. For that matter, if Subjectivism is really the hill you want to die on, we could brainwash everyone that life is like The Truman Show, and the moon only a projected image on a giant dome ceiling. The moon composed of rock will cease to exist, as will the descendants of Apollo program astronauts and those chunks of feldspar, pyroxene, and olivine they brought back to Earth. Gone. Never happened. I can't tell if you want to grapple with some of the ontological issues your theory brings up. Your insistence that mental states (like perceptions and memories) are not physical states has glaring philosophical problems, but you've sort of skipped past them. Handwaving ("they are not physical and that's that") doesn't really work with this crowd. If I see a cat sleeping on a lawn chair, that's a chain of physical events, starting with photons emitted by the sun, some reflected off the cat and into my eyeball, then absorbed by retinal pigments, then chemical changes that cause nerves to propagate signals to my brains occipital region, and so on. These are physical events that have been observed and objectively determined to consistently correlate with conscious states. ETA: So he's undearly departed, so my reply was wasted. Damn, I was still hoping he could engage on these ontological problems. I was wondering how deep we would wade into subjectivism. We had someone at another science forum who believed the moon stops existing if no one is looking at it. (They were suffering that misunderstanding of QT in which someone imagines that an entire planet is only as a quantum system forced into an eigenstate when someone conscious observes it, not understanding that a system with such a large number of degrees of freedom will behave as a classical one. And that measurements happen constantly, with objects interacting with the surrounding universe and with itself - no conscious observer needed)

Aren't we part of physical reality? How can my brain show changes as it perceives something (electrochemical, synaptic, measurable interactions with sensory organs, changes in blood flow to certain brain areas), and it's "not itself a physical event." You are offering an unsupported metaphysical postulate, which is that some ethereal or supernatural thing is happening when we think or perceive. This would seem to be an example of Gilbert Ryle's category error. Ryle is an important read, if you are looking at any theory that makes claims about human minds. (he coined the term, "ghost in the machine")

ExC was addressing how some patients feel, not the rational analysis that one can make about mammography. His point was that, if more women prefer for a female to conduct a breast examination, then having female staff provided will improve the effectiveness of screening. It is not our place to judge women who prefer not to have men examining their breasts. The medical profession tries to respect personal modesty and not have people abstain from diagnostic procedures due to such feelings.

Helps to read the rest of the thread. Much was clarified, as to definitions and what qualified as chronic disease under those broad definitions.

Again, how is a perception not a physical event? You seem to be implying some supernatural phenomenon with metaphysical dualism.

Classic New Yorker cartoons don't really need a comment, thanks.

If people's memories change, then retro-causality is involved. The physical brain is altered, and different courses of action may be taken on the basis of different perceptions and different physical state of neural networks. You still have paradox because you can't sweep physical changes under the rug of memory. Even if we were Boltzmann Brains or "Brains in a Vat" there would still be a physical change when memory is altered.

IIRC, the thread topic is how to present persuasive (and one presumes, understandable) arguments to climate change skeptics. I'm not sure skeptics are really amenable to fact-based arguments, but if there exist such then they would be the very tiny subset of climate change skeptics who grasp the deep complexity of atmospheric science and climate modeling. So the optimum focus would be on the actual Earth, historical data including ice cores, and the most predictive models of how various GW drivers play out - CO2, methane, glacial melting, airborne particulates settling on snowfields, oceanic pH, vulcanism, cloud cover changes, feedback mechanisms like Co2/water vapor loop, conversion of dense forest to scrub or savannah, etc. So, yes, precision on particular points of geophysics is good, but it's maybe important to really look at how all these different trends and feedback loops interact with each other in a real-world big picture way.