[Vaughan Pratt portrays the Mongol Tactic in HB Gary outfits.]
Kim, I’m getting the impression that The Matrix was written for you. You are Neo, acronym for The One. “Authority” is 50,000 Agent Smiths, the many, created (Isaiah 54:16) to impose the ideology of Machine City on the public, as its method of concentrating wealth and power in the core of the Matrix.
(Source: judithcurry.com)
[P]eople are smart enough to figure out that a theory that can account for everything is unfalsifiable and unscientific, even if they’ve never heard of Karl Popper.
But Gerard, there is an easy way to falsify this theory. If increasing CO2 is supposed to be making the weather fluctuate more violently, and it returns to the relatively calm state it was in before 1960, as we would all love it to do, then you have your falsification right there!
(Source: judithcurry.com)
[** Vaughan Pratt clears up some smoke and mirrors of a self-avowed agnostic who smokes while mocking self-righteous Puritanism.**]
If as you imply cigarette smoke only inconvenienced the smoker I too would oppose antismoking laws. As one who hates cigarette smoke I selfishly applaud that legislation. I would be most disappointed, and you presumably greatly relieved, were the high courts to strike down all such restrictions on smokers.
(Source: judithcurry.com)
[Yes indeed, argues Vaughan Pratt.]
Free will is an illusion.
I hate to admit it but you’re right. I’d chosen not to reply but was overcome by the urge.
On the other hand, if it seems to others that I am exercising my free will in choosing my battles, who is having the illusion, me or the others?
Or is your argument simply that everything is an illusion and so free will in particular is an illusion?
(Source: judithcurry.com)
[Vaughan Pratt infers to the best explanation:]
The “actual facts” as you put it are that some combination of influences drove the temperature up quite dramatically since 1970. The CO2 went up dramatically in that period, and we’ve known for a century that increasing CO2 drives up the temperature, and moreover we understand the mechanism by which it does so in considerable detail.
Hence to rule out CO2 as the culprit you would need to propose an alternative cause with a comparably plausible mechanism. Your candidate?
(Source: judithcurry.com)
[According to my confidential source, this comment by Vaughan Pratt wins the Internet forever.]
I would call it a point made in a different fork and thus not a point made in the response you claimed I ignored a part of.
Brandon, no one (modulo my remark at the bottom) is being “stupid” here as you claim. You’re running into WordPress’s inability to keep two consecutive comments together, which can be moved far apart as comments between them pile up.
(Source: judithcurry.com)
