Quebec man who blamed wildfires on government pleads guilty to setting 14 fires
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
>..."At this point, the accused admitted he was the one who started the fires and, as his main motivation, claimed he was doing tests to find out whether the forest was really dry or not," Charron said.
Spoiler alert - they are really dry.
My father in law only finally came to believe climate change last year. He had some sickly trees on his property and he called up someone from the state forestry department. The guy came out, took a look, and had a good, long, and healthy conversation about how my FIL needed to start thinning out his trees to keep the healthy ones alive because there was just not enough water for them all anymore. Some of these trees were hundreds of years old - my FIL really took it to heart and changed his mind.
It's easy to think people are being obtuse and sticking their heads in the sand, but this was the first time someone with expertise he trusted actually came out and showed him first hand.
It's easy because it is the case. You don't believe in facts: you either recognize them or choose to ignore them.
That might be true for some persons and assertions, but I don't think it's true in all cases.
There's a reason why rhetoric is divided into 3 parts - assuming that you can just bombard people with logos and win them over is intellectually lazy.
People are not one fact-checking article away from changing their minds on most subjects - so if you actually want to change people's minds on a topic and not just score points in a debate, you need to approach them on their terms.
Rest assured, I'm in with you in the rest of us. As you said, we have to trust the experts: that's why we pay them!
I do concede that, concerning climate change, too many articles and reports switch perniciously from science to politics, with no warning. E.g. "Global temperature are rising [science], and fossil fuels are a big part of it [science], thus we have to cut off fossil fuels [politics]".
Now, if you decide to fight for your petrol guzzling pickup that you objectively don't need, I'm not sure I'll side with you, but I'll get your point. And if you insist on flying on your holidays instead of going to the local pons, I'll get your point again. In general, I'll side with you that people at large must have the last word on what actions to take and which part of comfort to give up.
But you don't believe in global warming, and you don't believe in the role of fossil fuels: those are facts, this is what experts have been screaming for decades. If you don't feel your daily life reflects what experts are saying, you are welcome to ask for help in understanding what you are getting wrong. But you don't put your limited experience over the enormous corpus of studies that have been performed for decades all around the world: that would be idiot!
- The ongoing replication crisis has shown that experts and entire areas of study can be completely wrong for a long periods of time. People are rightfully distrustful when economists put out a "model", so it shouldn't be so crazy to expect natural skepticism elsewhere.( I don't think that applies to climate change - you should be able to look with your own eyes and see that it's real. )
- There are actually several distinct arguments people have to accept for climate change: 1) It's really happening 2) It's caused by greenhouse gases 3) It's man-made 4) There are bad consequences 5) There are achievable solutions. People are often expected to "buy in" to all of these arguments at once, but some experts do not even buy into all 5!
- At this cultural moment, facts do not matter. Or they only matter when "our side" wants them to. This is true for climate, but it's also true for other topics like gender, diet, economics, guns, nuclear power, etc. There are a lot of areas where people willfully ignore or set aside "facts". So it should be no surprise this one gets treated the same way.
I myself do not live my life according to the best paid experts - I drink, I eat red meat, I listen to music too loud, I stay up to late. So I will act with a touch of grace when other people don't listen either.
We need a critical mass of people to accept reality to make progress together. So if our goal is to achieve action, we need to find out the best way to get more people on board with reality. And the best psychological research shows that a focus on being right, morally or technically or factually, actually gets in the way of convincing people to abandon delusions. Radical empathy is the best way to make progress, putting aside that these people are being obtuse, selfish, and threats to us all.
Like I said, I am not yet to the point of being able to practice this effectively. But it achieves greater efficacy in many parts of life, not just climate change
The trick is to let them reason their way out of it themselves. You have to remember, political beliefs are a much worse predictor of someone's intelligence or amount of information consumed on a subject, than you might expect. Usually people are biased by their immediate surroundings and have incomplete or inaccurate information. It's tempting to score easy points with rhetoric, but that only serves to insult their intelligence, and they'll get defensive.
The more time you spend listening to someone, the more "socially indebted" they are to you, the more leeway you get to poke some small holes.
Nothing too big. You don't want to destroy their whole position, because that feels like an attack on their intelligence again. You just wanna plant some seeds of doubt, so that they can figure it out on their own, away from the embarassment of being proven wrong in front of everyone.
And yeah, it ain't easy. Sometimes you end up hearing some rather vile stuff, and it's really hard to resist the urge to make a visceral response. Not saying I successfully do this all the time. But it is the only strategy that has ever made any progress at all.
Average people in 1990 would never have explained these effects using climate change. Now, average folks in the third world know more about climate change, global warming, droughts, intensity of and unpredictability of storms, depletion of aquifers, abuse of water usage, scarcity of drinking water, even human migrations due to droughts, etc.
Because he obtusely refused to trust all prior experts because he thought he knew better than them.
“It’s not real until it affects me personally” is a disgusting attitude
> More than 700 forest fires burned over 4.5 million hectares of Quebec forest over the summer, according to the province's forest fire service, which said 99.9 per cent of the fires were sparked by lightning.
Multiple posters have purchased hateful / doxxing avatars for themselves in order to make themselves appear persecuted, so they could blame the purchases on their "forums enemies". In at least one case, though, they were too cheap to use the totally anonymous $10 buy-for-somebody-else option, so they bought the hate avatar on their own account and just hoped the admins wouldn't look at the logs.
Basically people make terrible decisions all the time in service of their obsession.
It can absolutely be the best move in certain circumstances.
More recently, Sony was caught deleting negative criticisms of the females Ghostbusters movie, except the ones that were blatantly sexist so they could paint all criticism as sexist.
Humans are hard wired to respond to calls of war.
Do you have a source for this? Who caught them and how were they caught?
I did see this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWROBiX1eSc) which only made the claim that it was being "widely reported" and then briefly showed a screenshot of this "article" at manlymovie.net (https://manlymovie.net/2016/03/sony-rigging-ghostbusters-com...) which has a scandalous headline but doesn't even make a claim that Sony was selectively keeping sexist comments up while removing all other criticism. The entire meat of the article looks to be a post from some internet rando called "MilesBennetDieSon" who just said they were removing negative reviews and "botting the comments section and replacing negative comments with good ones"
I don't doubt that Sony pushed the sexism angle to drum up controversy but what do we really have to show they were leaving up sexist comments while suppressing legitimate criticisms. Looking at the comments from around the time of release today, there are accusations that sony was removing negative comments, but there also appears to be many which are negative and also not sexist in nature.
Everyone loves a stupid criminal. As an American, I'm just shocked that police were able to overcome their apathy of doing their jobs and were able to catch a stupid criminal at all.
Especially when it comes to politics. Getting people to believe obvious nonsense means that you can push lots of other further nonsense even more easily, as your mark is already captured. Remember when it was mainstream to call Obama not an actual citizen?
I fear for the US and other Western countries as we become more politically polarized. It leads to general instability and eventually really poor decisions wrecking economies. Looking at the current state of the UK is really sad, a nation that has neutered its future economy despite have a highly educated and industrious populace.
These sorts of insanities becoming mainstream has the potential to affect us all.
I hate flying. But I would feel safer if I was controlling the aircraft. Which is completely irrational because I am not a pilot and wouldn't even consider myself a good driver.
Like a lot of things we hold dear we often abandon having others care / act for the right reason ... and people settle for making others care / act anyway we think we can.
Surely now that he's burned down so much of the forest he understands that the forest was in fact dry and that there was no conspiracy /s
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/pizzagate...
I didn't realise the guy went in with a gun. Still, it's fascinating how absolutely he turned around once he didn't find anything. He clearly wasn't delusional, since delusional people are not affected by incontrovertible*, evidence against their delusions. The delusion simply morphs to accomodate new evidence, or the evidence is hallucinated/confabulated away.
*It has to be truly incontrovertible, though. E.g someone who continues to believe they can fly despite numerous failed attempts.
But $65k can still buy you an awful lot of hotdogs.