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If giving up is not an option, get up and do something - by citizenschallenge


The past half year has been quite a period of changes and reflection for me.  One inescapable seems to be that rolling over and wrapping myself up in my own lucky circumstances and writing off the rest of the world simply isn't an option.  I am and will continue to be an engaged member of our global community during my time, it is there and I can't hide from it.  Hope is a survival strategy in hopeless times.  

So now despite the feeling I'm little more than the sound of one hand clapping, I think I'm going to try and step it up - even try to go for some source funding so that I can finally focus full time on writing rather than this scattered interruption infested effort I live.  I'm what I say I am and two, three thousand a month would buy me that freedom.  Often it seems an impossible dream, other times I realize it doesn't matter, gotta try, take it one day at a time.  What's the worst that can happen?  More silence?  Or perhaps the time to finally be able to really focus and perhaps really accomplish something I can be proud of.

Critique (and/or donations) welcome:

Peter Miesler
aka citizenschallenge
PO Box 56
Durango, Colorado 81302
( citizenschallenge at gmail )
_____________________________________________________________________________

That little outburst was inspired by a short comment I just posted at
 http://whatsupwiththatwatts.blogspot.com/2017/08/diary-081117-cfi-contrarians-mo.html

Diary 8/11/2017 - Center for Inquiry Forum, Cracking the Contrarians' Code.

It starts:

"... lately mostly confined to commenting over at the Center for Inquiry forum.  Recently conversations have gotten a bit livelier and occasionally even constructive since a few more people are getting involved.   

Check it out sometime.  Faith based vs Fact based.  Climate skeptical challenges add some spice, civility and feigned civility, facts and fiction, devious rhetoric and touche's, sometimes genuine learning, insults and ruffled feathers, usually for effect, occasionally heart felt, sturm und drang and all that fun stuff.

Still, at the end of the day we’re left with the same challenge that started long ago with the first strategic attacks on the scientific understanding of tobacco smoke dangers - though at the time no one realized it, too many still don’t.  ( For those details see: http://www.merchantsofdoubt.org.  It's all been documented, though contrarians prefer to dismiss the book as meaningless ad hominem attacks {on their right to lie I presume}, all the while ignoring all evidence presented.)

The challenge is: How to engage in a constructive intellectual dialogue with characters who are dedicated to disparaging and dismissing serious science with what ever words and tactics are required at the moment, merely because it’s what their jobs depend on?

Good faith learning holds no interest.  Sowing doubt and confusion is the goal and it’s such an easy thing to achieve if one possesses no scruples and limitless chutzpah.


It finishes with

... Unfortunately they are pros at these rhetorical devices, so though they are incapable of defending with substance - they constantly win the public argument game.  Too few serious rational folks are willing to put up with the grief of confronting their venomous onslaughts.  

Our only hope is in more people understanding the oligarch's game and the modus operandi of their minions.  Stop ignoring the trolls, use real facts to expose them, reduce them to running away - you'd be amazed at how easy it is - once you crack the code of their malicious farce. 

If you want to learn more about it, I have a sloppy draft (yet to be completed project) of this lay-person's lesson plan that may be of use. 
Then to be willing to stand up to them every time they comment, who knows what could change within a society facing ever increasing pain and challenges, if more informed citizens actually got involved and made their reasoned voices heard.
LandscapesAndCycles 
In a nutshell Jim Steele proposes that landscapes and natural cycles are more powerful drivers of global warming driven climate change than the atmosphere that lies between Earth and frigid outer space. 
. (Sorry, can't make these quotes work the way I want)

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