Trump and Trump supporters keep using the Y2K Fallacy, and it is driving me crazy

Yep, I have that one saved too.

Look a little farther. As I said in Message 123, they provide links to the actual facts.

As Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, "You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts."Some opinions are supported by unequivocal facts and therefore carry great weight. Then there's a whole spectrum of lesser opinion ranging all the way down to baseless speculation. We'll be suffering for years to come from the Trump years of alternative facts. A generation of Republican politicians have learned that to many people facts don't matter, and they're unscrupulous enough to take advantage of it. Democrats haven't a chance.Everyone from all points of the political spectrum should be very concerned about the Republicans not for political reasons but because facts matter.--Percy

Percy writes: i was almost ready to exclaim "All Facts Matter!" as a new slogan when i remembered Kellyanne Conway's "alternative facts" shitbomb.so maybe it should be "Real Facts Matter!"

From an old movie called Born Yesterday: A world full of ignorant people is too dangerous to live in.—Percy

Unfortunately, it's the only world we have. As an observer it sure looks like people are getting stupider.

Homer Simpson said that whenever he learned something new, it pushed something else out of his brain. Maybe that applies collectively too: When one person becomes smarter, somebody else becomes stupider, to balance it out.

Ok, I'm in a depressed mood but, ringo, thank you for give this old man the sweet remembrance of a past once forgotten.Homer may be famous for it but I used it before Groening even knew how to spell Homer.I would tease the little girls that with all I had to learn that week my brain had to cast off ballast and I feared in the wreckage I would lose the memory of her sweet attentions. She would kiss the leaking memories back into my head, my eyes, my nose, my lips.Thank you, ringo.So very much thank you.

You're missing the distinction between convincing people of things that do not conflict with their current views and convincing people of things that run contrary to their current views.If you make predictions which turn out to be alarmist hype you may not have problems with people who already believe you (they just shrug it off with the reasonable statement that predictions of the future are never 100% certain). On the other hand, people who are skeptical of you in the first place may have their preconceptions confirmed.

But the whole point is to convince people to change their behavior so you CAN save the environment. If you shoot yourself in the foot by making predictions that turn out to be alarmist hype, people won't change their behavior and you've endangered the environment.

I think this started with a discussion about global warming predictions that turned out to be inaccurate.It's an interesting question, a case of "does the end justify the means?" when you think of how to persuade people to save the planet. Maybe it's like a game of chess. You can sacrifice a lot, if you succeed in checkmating your opponent. If however, you don't succeed, you're in a worse position.

That's silly. People posting on Facebook post links all the time, to actual facts as often as posters do here.

I was just speaking to the fact-checking on various online forums, not to party affiliations.

You haven’t looked at American society.These are Americans. For so many of them if you lie to them they stay lied to. They’re too stupid to change. That’s why we have an anti-vax problem, a flat earth problem, a religion problem and a republican party problem. There are even people here that still believe Richard Nixon was not a crook.This is a feature of whole segments of American society. Truth and reality don’t matter. Their unshakable faith in what they can be made to believe is all they will ever recognize. If you tell these dweebs (early enough and often enough) that with climate change they are in grave personal danger, they will see grave personal danger everywhere. Some prediction that didn’t quite pan out … yet … will not alter their view. No foot, no shooting.I would rather use that super power for good than for stupid. Scare the crap out of them until they become avid climate warriors.Edited by AZPaul3, : title

Edited by AZPaul3, : spln

A "flat earth problem"?Who actually says that the earth is flat?Who on earth ever heard of Nixon? That might be a real issue.