Reflecting At the Beginning Of a New Year

When you blog you end up reading a lot of other information on the internet. Often that means that you scroll down and read the comments as well. I have been much instructed by the comments I've read on the many news sources that I end up looking at. I am profoundly unhappy about what I see.

Too many comments are simply directed bias without any clear facts to motivate the bias. My own blog is distinctly conservative and right wing for which I make no apology. It is that way because I believe that respect for the truth is the fundamental way of leading a good life. I believe that conservative principles are true and that in general, most liberal thought barely warrants the name thought.

Now that is a harsh generalization, but I make it because I believe that it is largely true. The liberals that I watch have their conclusions running before their facts are in. They are agenda driven. I think that's the foundation of all the lying. They call names before they present facts and if the facts can't be bent into shape to support them they just call names. I call that demonization and ascribe it to the Demon-crats. (Of course they accuse me of the same thing, which I find painful. The world is very complicated so sometimes the facts are ambiguous or hard to interpret and then you often have to fall back on principles and common sense plausibility.)

The left also traffics in a lot of logical fallacies. Some are really funny except that they actually believe them and are not pretending. But I want to get back to the point I was making about the comments I see. A very large majority of them are just name calling and it doesn't matter which side of the political spectrum is being talked about. The right wing is name calling and the left wing is name calling and the whole thing starts to sound like a couple of three year olds arguing about whose mother makes the best cookies or something.

The days when men and women started by being polite are long long past. We now live in a society that is rushing towards barbarism. You can't have serious political discourse in a society that fails to honor truth, facts, and principles, but instead only yells and applies force. In the society we are driving towards, the strong will prevail regardless of truth or honor. One would hope for more. I'm old enough that I'm likely not to see the bottom of this trend, but my grandchildren will and that concerns me. I'd like to see us spend more time marshaling facts and principles and less time just calling names. I have a mantra: "Show me the facts." It is a frustrating mantra because in today's society that means to many filter the facts to get the support you need and then pretend that is all the data, or it means shout louder that the consensus supports your point of view as if taking a vote was ever the way to discern the truth.

The Global Warming Alarmism seems to be an instance of this kind. We have evidence of cherry picking the data, of maligning those who don't agree, and of contriving to hide data that does not agree and despite these revelations many are still shouting the same mantras. What do you have to have to show that people are engaging in bad science?

It's time to get back on the road to honoring truth and following things because they are true and not because they are just more convenient or let you score on the other fella. If we succumb to every big lie that comes down the pike we'll soon be in chains.