...you equate people agreeing with you as 'intelligent', presupposing that those who disagree with you are unintelligent. That's a shoddy debating tactic...
Shoddy tactic yourself. The poster to whom you are replying said no such thing. Are you in advertising? Politics?
My take on it is that intelligent people can understand the meanings of a whole raft of
measurements which are (1) published in peer-reviewed literature (2) incontrovertible (3) broadly in agreement with each other (4) widely accepted as representative of the way things are and (5), unless you've got your head up your jumper, more than a little alarming.
Not arguments. Measurements.
You can disagree with the arguments, but you can't argue with the measurements.
...load your argument like that and expect people to fall for it.
But you can do the same thing and get away with it?
.... your main argument is a non-sequitor
Sequitur. And when your own case on this point fails the same test you can't expect to get away with it either. Once again, tomongoose did
not say what you say he said, and although you may carry a debate by playing to the crowd with your word twisting ways, the fact remains that this really isn't a debate. It's a long way past being debatable but it seems that most people haven't spotted that yet. The meaning of the measurements is denied in public by many people know perfectly well what's happening, but they choose to further their own private (and usually financial) agendas rather than risk some miniscule personal inconveniences. It's
them that you need to worry about. Forget the bankers and the taxmasters, they're almost completely irrelevant to the survival of our race. Think about how we will feed ourselves when the Garden of England starts to look like north-western Egypt, quite possibly complete with minefields.
It obviously upsets you (as you say in your opening sentence) that people will think for themselves...
My interpretation is that tomongoose is more like me, in that I'm upset that people will
not think for themselves. Here's an example of why I believe that, taken from this very thread:
[taken out of chronological sequence for the purpose of this illustration]
I was taught (yes I really was taught to think, to deliberate, to understand, to be critically analytical
)
ged said:
For pity's sake look at the graphs, and ask the obvious questions. Here's one of the graphs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_population_growth_(lin-log_scale).png
There's no disagreement about what's shown there. You can't argue with it. The figures are real, agreed, undisputed, incontrovertible and downright scary.
Have any of the obvious questions made themselves uncomfortable yet?
No absolutely none.
Y'see, I don't believe that anything appalling is going to happen.
I think that just about sums it up for mankind. Take another look at that graph. If you haven't noticed, the graph has a
logarithmic scale. Please take a thirty minute course on graph plotting so that you can understand just how terrifying that graph really is. The graph says that to go from twenty million people on the planet to twenty million people in a country took us about two thousand years. To go from there to twenty million people in a city took us about another two thousand years. That's where we are now. The rate of population growth is completely out of control and cannot continue. It is the fundamentally and undeniably the cause of global climate changes taking place as most of us sit, and watch, and argue the toss about who said what. If the population is not controlled
by us, and soon, it will be controlled
for us, by Mother Nature. As everyone on this forum should know, Mother Nature treats her children very harshly. She is, after all, just obeying natural laws. Laws which she could not break even if she wanted to.
Getting back to debate:
durulz said:
...what makes you think you are so 'right' and they so 'wrong'? Ah yes, because the intelligent ones agree with your ideas, and so the dissenters must be unintelligent. They were your words.
They were not the words. Here are the words that you willfully misinterpreted:
tomongoose said:
...I wrongly assumed that as you all seem intelligent and love the great outdoors that you would be more receptive to seeing how we have upset the balance. Obviously I can't expect everyone to be of the same opinion...
Nobody said anything about agreeing with anybody. What was proposed was (1) intelligent + (2) love the great outdoors = (3) more receptive.
The posts in this thread have amply demonstrated the fallacy of that proposition, and tomongoose is quite right that his
assumption (that
was what he said) was wrong. There. He said it. He was wrong. You're completely missing the point. He said he was wrong, and you're lambasting him for admitting it. Shame on you.
Me? I have absolutely no idea. For me, it's like who shot JFK - the truth is probably out there already but it's become so mired in argument and counter-argument that I can't tell what's right and what's not.
Well if you're bothered by the fact that it's all mired in argument, why add to the mire with your own sophistry? This is not in fact about argument and debate. As I have already said, this is already a long way past debatable. It might have been debatable in 1995, but after another fifteen years of data collection and correlation it's just too late for that. Here's my take on the attempts to debate this issue away:
Scientists: "This is your captain speaking, if you'll look out of the windows you'll see that the engines are on fire."
First class passengers: "Well if all those people in coach will just jump out, we can probably land safely."
Me: "Please return to your seats, make sure all your belongings are safely stowed and the tables are put away, fasten your seat belts securely and adopt the brace position for impact."
Durulz: "You said look out of the window! There's blue sky out there. Anyway I've put my paper napkin in the little mesh thing. I can't be bothered to do anything else no matter what you say. I don't care. Deal with it"
durulz said:
I'm just a lay person. Yes, I could Find Out For Myself (tm) but I can't be bothered.
I've spent a few days trying not to reply to your post, but this most of all is the thing which I can't leave unchallenged.
How can you possibly not care? At the very worst, if you reason that we have a lot better chance of doing something about a man-made issue than a natural one, you should at least hope that it's really man-made.
So I do the best I can (split my refuse into 'recycle' and 'land fill', try not to be wasteful, and things like that) and let the Devil take the rest. That's the reality - deal with it.
You shot yourself in the foot with that one. If, as you say, you really don't care, why would you even do this?
If you really don't care, then please just get out of the way of those of us who do.
