mhaze,

In your world of the statistically based epistemology people like Marx and Weber and Durkheim along with a plethora of renowned sociologists, historians and anthropologists would all be relegated to the intellectual wastepaper bin. There's a big world of intellectual endeavour that started with Socrates that you have never had contact with and I suppose never will have. But if you're content to see the world as some magical model structured from the numbers and symbols of a statistician's pen then so be it. But for me there is much more to see and experience in the lived in world of human reality.

Mr Opinion,
The trouble is if you ignore the numbers you end up living in a world of human fantasy.

Marx would almost certainly have done better work if he'd reality checked his hypotheses more. As would many others.

Statistics are not a substitute for knowledge. But knowledge can be derived from statistics. And crucially, statistics can alert us to the errors in what we think we know.

Conspiracy theories are rampant, absolute proof not given, does absolute proof exist. The world is in a period of unfamiliar happenings of mega proportions and to do nothing is not an option.
Man has created an over abundance of atmospheric Co2 + the worlds normal supply of Co2, and there is a better than 50-50 chance this is causing climate change that would not normally happen without some other worldly happening to put a massive amount of pollutant into the atmosphere to trigger climate change.
Nature has been compromised to the extent we are responsible for this reaction we are experiencing right now. All indications say Co2 is responsible, we can get off of fossil fuel, but will the level of Co2 diminish or just stabilize. The amount of Co2 being released from ice melt and the oceans giving up its stores of Co2 may be to much for co2 levels to decrease.
The world knew we were headed for climate change twenty years ago, and now the situation is urgent action needs to take place.
Storms, fires, and droughts will continue to upsize until we can get stability in Co2 emissions, by man and man made climate change. We are guaranteed hotter temperatures, colder temperatures, bigger floods and longer droughts, and whatever else climate change has for us, for decades to come and the unknown future after that

Did you hear that everybody, mhaze reckons Marx didn't make a substantial contribution to knowledge because he didn't know anything about statistics. He probably has the same thing to say about Durkheim and Weber as well as poor old Socrates (which mhaze probably pronounces as so-crates). It's easy to recognise the people who don't have Arts degrees.

My apologies to mhaze. I just realised after posting my last comment that it was actually Aidan who reckons Marx didn't make a substantial contribution to knowledge. But I think mhaze would probably concur with Aidan. 100% probability there.

Bravo Aidan. Well said. I have bagged you out enough so it is only fair I praise you when you say something sensible.

Now you only have to apply what you just said to the idea that man-made CO2 emissions are causing catastrophic global warming, to see that the data don't support the theory. And that's before we even start on your faulty assumptions to do with political economy.

MrOpinion,
speaking of epistemology, for a complete demolition and explosion of Marxian theory from the ground up, and using the Socratic method, see "Epistemological Problems of Economics" by Ludwig von Mises. It applies just as much to social sciences in general as to economics btw.

file:///Users/Justin/Downloads/Epistemological%20Problems%20of%20Economics%20(6).pdf

579
You are not engaging, and apparently not understanding, the issues. All you are doing, is endlessly repeating the same old warmist tactic of entering the discussion having assumed everything in your own favour without proof or reason, and when challenged, repeating the cycle. In case you haven't noticed, this does not persuade anyone. On the contrary, it only turns people off the warmists' ideology.

"The world is in a period of unfamiliar happenings of mega proportions and to do nothing is not an option."

You're assuming that governmental action has no costs or is necessarily beneficial. But you can't just enter the debate having assumed this in your own favour. You need to prove it. I have never seen any warmist make even the slightest attempt to understand or state the problem, let alone prove it.

So why don't you try stating it, and we'll see whether you are intellectually capable of getting to square one? (Hint: any quantity you put on one side of the equation, has to be accounted for on the other.)

ant provides a good example of the warmists' intellectual standard. He openly confuses a statutory monopoly with a free market, while implicitly trusting to his understanding of political economy to solve the alleged problem, by politically re-engineering the world's economy and society!

And you wonder why you guys excite fear and loathing?