All Generalizations Are Invalid

How about California? We don't usually think of it as a Southern state, I suppose because it's so far west, but it's definitely south and left of center. I suppose that Canada is generally more liberal than most of the U.S. I don't know about Mexico, but they're pretty chaotic and they sell drugs, which sounds liberal to me. Then there's Montana, a Northern conservative state. I'm not sure about Idaho, but I suspect they're pretty conservative too. In the North East we have New Hampshire and Vermont side by side. One of them is liberal and one of them is conservative, but I've forgotten which is which. On to Southern Europe, where we find Italy and Greece. They must be liberal because they're bankrupt and trying to persuade Germany to bail them out, but they don't want Germany telling them what to do. Expecting something for nothing is certainly a liberal trait. Back home in Michigan, the northern part of the state generally votes Republican while the southern part generally votes Democrat. Unfortunately, most of the people live in the southern part, which is why we're always stuck with Democratic U.S. Senators. The only reason we have a Republican governor is that he's a pretty left leaning Republican, always trying to raise our taxes. In Illinois it's just the opposite, probably because your northern part is more urban and your southern part is more rural.

National Geographic is hardly a "crackpot" publication! You should read the article in question and then see what you think. I'm sure that somebody in your building has a copy. The author of the article, Joel Achenbach, who is a science writer for the Washington Post, admits to a pro-science bias, but National Geographic always tries to tell both sides of any story. The quotes I gave you came from a guy who he interviewed, one Dan Kahan of Yale University. He's the one who did the study that concluded "Scientific literacy promoted polarization on climate (change), not consensus." Another study, conducted by the Pew Research Center, found that "only 40 per cent of Americans accept that human activity is the dominant cause of global warming." The author is not bragging about this, he is complaining, because he is one of those 40 per cent.

The reason I brought it up was that I believed it was relevant to our discussion about how people get ideas and form opinions based on what other people say, people who are usually their friends or somebody they admire. If you think of it, almost all of our information comes from other people. There's nothing wrong with that, but I was trying to point out that it doesn't hurt to get a second opinion from an outsider before you make up your mind. If you keep talking to the same people, or reading stuff written by the same people, you can easily get the impression that everybody believes what they believe. I was trying to explain this to one of my school bus passengers one day. He had said something like "Everybody does it that way". I asked him if he meant everybody in the world or just everybody in Michigan. He said "Everybody in Michigan". I said, "Do you know everybody in Michigan?" He just gave me a blank stare and walked way. I don't think he got it.