Peter Hume and Jefferson,

I don't see why I should respond to a couple of misrepresentative throw-away lines. There's too much of this sort of thing on OLO and I'm not going to dignify your falsehoods (which do you no credit) by responding thoughtfully.
If you want to challenge anything I've said--and I would appreciate constructive criticism--please do so considerately and considerably, that is by representing my position faithfully and your own more fulsomely.

Squeers
Your first post contains so many fallacies piled on top of each other that it’s hard to know where to begin. If we chase all the rabbits down all the burrows, it just ends in incoherent left-wing drivel, like last time when, having been completely disproved, you shifted to arguing there’s no such thing as “absolute” proof or disproof, whatever that’s supposed to mean. To which I said objective proof will suffice, and asked whether Pythagoras’s theorem can be proved or disproved, on which you fell silent.

So let’s eliminate the possibility of evasion or dishonesty before we go any further – can Pythagoras’s theorem be objectively proved or disproved, or not? Do physical laws, and the laws of logic, apply to human action, or are we free to make up whatever economic reality we fancy?

As for the rest, where to begin?:

“Climate change…”
So what? Isn’t the climate allowed to change any more?

AGW
The globe is not warming, it’s cooling, and you will have to address the mountains of fraud, corruption, and straight lying that infests this whole government-funded field of vested interests, before you can expect to begin the argument on the basis that everyone else must acquiesce in your baseless hysteria as a starting point.

Prove that greenhouse gas emissions cause catastrophic man-made global warming, without
a) appeal to absent authority
b) assuming what is in issue.

Profit demands economic growth…
a) prove it
b) so what?
c) By the way, what are you doing tapping away on your computer? You’re against such despicable luxuries, remember?

Since a “capitalist mode of production” is evil, then the radical alternative you envisage must either
a) not use capital goods = death of thousands of millions
b) hold capital goods in common = death of thousands of millions.

It is indeed hard to comprehend the confusion of thought that must have given rise to your utterances, but it’s not a pretty sight.

Peter Hume,
congratulations on your new person(non grata) "Jefferson", though I hope you know he hated economists, and that the ignorant deep-southerners cleave to his doctrines more fervently than the Chicago School, who cleave to liberalism in economics only. Hypocrites, in other words, in dire need of a standing army and logistics.
I'm not a mathematician, though I'm fascinated by Bertrand Russell's autobiographical line: "I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux" (my quotes btw come from actual reading). But then Wittgenstein was Russell's disciple (just as Heidegger was Husserl's and Beckett was Joyce's.) and he's on the impressive list of anti-foundationalists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-foundationalism who held that proof is a human fantasy. Truth is relative--at least for us. There is no "objective" truth. That's easy. If you'd asked me about "subjective truths" I'd have answered in the affirmative.

"As for the rest": no one is denying nature's proclivity for change, are they? It's a case of whether "we" are responsible. If we are capable of objective thought, should we not put it into practice and secure our future? You defend objective thought and in the same breath denounce the scientific community (tens of thousands of passionate, professional and dedicated individuals) as motivated by nothing more than the next grant?
Where is your evidence that "the globe is cooling", and can you provide a modest hill from "the mountains of fraud, corruption, and straight lying" you assert?
After all this you ask me for "proof"! If scientific consensus moves you not, how can I?
<Since a “capitalist mode of production” is evil, then the radical alternative you envisage must either
a) not use capital goods = death of thousands of millions
b) hold capital goods in common = death of thousands of millions>

I haven't said the capitalist mode of production is "evil"; indeed you're far more reliant on these inflammatory terms than I am. Nor does your sylogistic reasoning reflect anything I've said.
My question to you is, if we are capable of objectivity, why don't we use it to secure the future?

Who's "we"?

Haha. Yep Pete, it's all to do with the Humanism. The humanists speak for us all. There's nothing more useless than a personal existential crisis projected onto the world. 'we'!

Yes, at least we can expect he will be deep-learned in the philosophy of his existential crisis.

The humanists are so humane they can proceed form the premise that nothing is capable of objective proof, that everything is a matter of personal opinion, to the conclusion that every individual in the world should be forced to comply with their grand collectivist plan, on pain of being locked in a cage for disobedience.

The fatal flaw of the article is that, after cataloguing five different kinds of knowledge, the author can only conclude that they could be better put to use in solving our problems by “committees” – thus laughably assuming the beneficence of the entire power structure underlying the original problems.

Such a weak and insightless comment, such thoughtless and uncritical state-worship, coming from someone doing a PhD in sociology, only raises the question why anyone engaged in *productive* activity, dirty or dangerous or stressful work, should have any of their income confiscated to pay for the insipid pontifications of a comfortable privilegentsia.