back to the crucible

You’re right, I am taking somebody else’s word that the CO2 in the atmo has been increasing over the last couple hundred years, but unlike those gentleman scientists of yore, I have no basement laboratory to take a reading myself, and even if I did I’ve only been around for the last seventy years. And as I wrote in that paragraph from my last posting, since we can’t be everywhere and do everything we have to depend on things we hear from other people, or else we can’t have a discussion at all. How can we discuss this issue of whether murders have gone up or down due to concealed carry since the only way we can get any information is by listening to other people, and if we follow your declaration that when two different groups disagree there is no way to determine where the truth may lie, then all we can do is list the stuff that we believe and there is no discussion.

I think we need to drop the whole global warming thing for a bit here to discuss the validity of things we hear of second hand.

Let’s say we have person A and person B. Person A says he heard that Michigan is tightening up on gun control, and person B says he heard that Michigan is getting looser on gun control. We ask person A where he heard that and he says he has no idea, person B says he read it in the Cheboygan Times of November 17, 2013. We can track back to that newspaper and see what it has to say, and say it does indeed carry an article of that nature, but since we are distrustful of that commie hate rag, we can check the state record, the people who have been quoted in the article to see if they said what it says they said, we can look through other Michigan newspapers of the same date and see if they carry a similar story. So now who do we believe person A or B? They are just two people who told us something after all? Do we choose the guy with the better haircut? Do we throw up our arms and say, well there is no way of knowing whose story is more likely true?

I think this is that crucible thing. Do we say well both these guys are equally apt to be correct or do we put it in the crucible and find out which one is more likely to be right?

I think we need to resolve this issue, to wit, presented with two opinions from two different people, there is a way to determine which of these guys is more likely correct. If you think this statement is false, I don’t see how we can discuss anything.

You know who else is paid by the government besides scientists? Beagles. Why should we believe anything he has to say?

Volcanoes can and have erupted and thrown dust into the atmosphere and cooled global temps, so have meteors hit the earth and done the same, probably other things could do the same, hell man could blow himself up and that would certainly cool the earth. This is all true, but irrelevant to the discussion.

t's only recently that I've been hearing about the theory that the increase in concealed carry permits has anything to do with it.

You’ve been hearing? You are person A. I dismiss whatever you say you have been hearing out of hand.

If somebody did a study about anything to do with gun control and it’s findings were that it is a good idea, you would say, ah, you can’t believe something just because somebody says it, but if the conclusion was that it was a bad idea you would embrace it as the absolute truth. So why should anybody do a study since you are going to believe the same thing either way?