Not sure about either "writing mankind off" or, conversely, blithe unconcern as valid attitudes. The above reminds me of "They said we couldn't" blablabla. Never mentioned are all the good things other "theys" promised that never materialized. Take the nuclear industry - power was supposed to be too cheap to meter as early as the 1960s. Where are the flying cars? Where are Julian Simon's inexhaustible resources? Etc. The people who were mostly right were the environmentalists and the more pessimistic futurists, frankly.
The Mises Institute is a cult. No one there has the slightest knowledge of science, let alone relevant climate science. The fact that someone links to, e.g., the Ayn Rand Institute or the von Mises Institute is a dead giveaway they're simply a wounded cultist, not actually correcting something wrong with an article that included science. There is always some noise in a trend - always. But the current warming trend is huge and most years the noise doesn't overcome it. The cultists have depended on flagrant cherrypicking so far, on ignoring any records that included the Arctic, where warming is greatest, and when those didn't serve, on entirely doctored graphs (The Great Global Warming Swindle, Ian Plimer's Heaven and Earth, all Monckton presentations, the Heartland Institute Climate Denial conference, etc.)
The only good side to this is that maybe, eventually, people will learn:
Like the US politicized fundies, a tiny minority of Moslems is stirring people up as a sort of proxy for the general third-world experience of disrespect and abuse by richer, mostly Northern and Western societies (I would argue, nowadays, really by corporate megaculture which will trade in that colonial and imperial legacy as it's profitable). They don't represent Islam, and they don't represent the Third World, but just as the US and allies cast the communists as their designated representative and leader of the Third World to justify attacking Third World nations all over the world, they've designated Islamists to fill the same role, and they're as willing as the Soviets and Chinese were to play along.
There really aren't universally accepted prohibitions in Islam against allowing outsiders to criticize the prophet Mohammed, first because Islam is decentralized and second because even the prohibitions against images involved other people and even animals and were to prevent excessive veneration, not criticism.
And maybe we'll revisit the original controversy about the Danish cartoons, and it will be better known that the paper that did it is famous for being pro-Nazi even before Hitler attacked Denmark, that it bans anything that criticizes Christianity, that the editor wanted a Crusade against the Arabs and Moslems, and that in the riots afterward, with the exception of one African country where the Christian president went back on his pledge not to seek power again and was probably the real cause of rioting, it was the rioters who were killed by their repressive regimes, not the rioting violent Moslems killing people over cartoons.
John:
Not sure about either "writing mankind off" or, conversely, blithe unconcern as valid attitudes. The above reminds me of "They said we couldn't" blablabla. Never mentioned are all the good things other "theys" promised that never materialized. Take the nuclear industry - power was supposed to be too cheap to meter as early as the 1960s. Where are the flying cars? Where are Julian Simon's inexhaustible resources? Etc. The people who were mostly right were the environmentalists and the more pessimistic futurists, frankly.
"rather than the sea rising."
No, it's not
http://www.skepticalscience.com/are-sea-levels-rising.html
The Mises Institute is a cult. No one there has the slightest knowledge of science, let alone relevant climate science. The fact that someone links to, e.g., the Ayn Rand Institute or the von Mises Institute is a dead giveaway they're simply a wounded cultist, not actually correcting something wrong with an article that included science. There is always some noise in a trend - always. But the current warming trend is huge and most years the noise doesn't overcome it. The cultists have depended on flagrant cherrypicking so far, on ignoring any records that included the Arctic, where warming is greatest, and when those didn't serve, on entirely doctored graphs (The Great Global Warming Swindle, Ian Plimer's Heaven and Earth, all Monckton presentations, the Heartland Institute Climate Denial conference, etc.)
Just to clarify, Juan, my guess is that absolutely none of this was news to you, though it might be to some of your readers.
The only good side to this is that maybe, eventually, people will learn:
Like the US politicized fundies, a tiny minority of Moslems is stirring people up as a sort of proxy for the general third-world experience of disrespect and abuse by richer, mostly Northern and Western societies (I would argue, nowadays, really by corporate megaculture which will trade in that colonial and imperial legacy as it's profitable). They don't represent Islam, and they don't represent the Third World, but just as the US and allies cast the communists as their designated representative and leader of the Third World to justify attacking Third World nations all over the world, they've designated Islamists to fill the same role, and they're as willing as the Soviets and Chinese were to play along.
There really aren't universally accepted prohibitions in Islam against allowing outsiders to criticize the prophet Mohammed, first because Islam is decentralized and second because even the prohibitions against images involved other people and even animals and were to prevent excessive veneration, not criticism.
And maybe we'll revisit the original controversy about the Danish cartoons, and it will be better known that the paper that did it is famous for being pro-Nazi even before Hitler attacked Denmark, that it bans anything that criticizes Christianity, that the editor wanted a Crusade against the Arabs and Moslems, and that in the riots afterward, with the exception of one African country where the Christian president went back on his pledge not to seek power again and was probably the real cause of rioting, it was the rioters who were killed by their repressive regimes, not the rioting violent Moslems killing people over cartoons.
Plain words are welcome in a time of obfuscation, which is the thrust of a lot of what Orwell wrote.
How did the project for getting foundational Enlightenment and American Independence literature translated into Arabic get along?