Due to obligations and commitments crowding my reading and writing time down to the bottom of my get-it-done list it has remained scattered and lately mostly confined to commenting over at the Center for Inquiry forum. Recently conversations have gotten a bit livelier and occasionally even constructive since a few more people are getting involved.
Check it out sometime. Faith based vs Fact based. Climate skeptical challenges add some spice, civility and feigned civility, facts and fiction, devious rhetoric and touche's, sometimes genuine learning, insults and ruffled feathers, usually for effect, occasionally heart felt, sturm und drang and all that fun stuff.
Still, at the end of the day we’re left with the same challenge that started long ago with the first strategic attacks on the scientific understanding of tobacco smoke dangers - though at the time no one realized it, too many still don’t. ( For those details see: http://www.merchantsofdoubt.org. It's all been documented, though contrarians prefer to dismiss the book as meaningless ad hominem attacks {on their right to lie I presume}, all the while ignoring all evidence presented.)
The challenge is: How to engage in a constructive intellectual dialogue with characters who are dedicated to disparaging and dismissing serious science with what ever words and tactics are required at the moment, merely because it’s what their jobs depend on?
Good faith learning holds no interest. Sowing doubt and confusion is the goal and it’s such an easy thing to achieve if one possesses no scruples and limitless chutzpah.
Resentment towards and dismissal of evidence is a given.
