Wow! Science

Richard Carrier, historian and all round rationalist atheist good guy wrote a blog post some time back: called "Meat Not Bad." Here:  Meat Good For some reason Carrier chose to speak in a palaeolithic prose style (perhaps he just doesn't like verbs).    I like Carrier.   But me no like his rationality in blog about meat (like delicious mammoth).  In fact, blog make no sense.   He blog emotions and pretend be rational.  He argues: "...Being a vegetarian merely out of compassion for animals is nonrational (it’s often just another kind of phobia based on false associations between animals and people)... there are other reasons to be a vegetarian. But the reasons [are] just as nonrational." Now, I'm not about to argue whether it's rational to be vegetarian.   Well, I probably am but I want to look at Carrier's alleged rational response to what he sees as the irrationality of being vegetarian.   Let alone Vegan, blimey. ...

I was keen to become enlightened.   About now.  So I headed off to Youtube and watched Steven Pinker give a talk at EarthOptimism on why we should be earth-optimistic about the state of the environment and the future of human well being in general.  The talk is primarily to promote his new book, Enlightenment Now (he says this at the beginning of the talk).    "Enlightenment Now is a bold, wonderfully expansive and occasionally irate defence of scientific rationality and liberal humanism," says The Guardian. In his Earthoptimism talk, a taster for his new book, Pinker, conversely, gives us a peculiar faith based pseudo-science perspective on why we should be optimistic about the future and about how we are to, and will in some imaginary future, tackle climate change (though he never actually uses the term as far as I can hear).   I say faith based because increasingly as the talk goes on his arguments become ever more irrational, he uses the ...