Larry is right. The battle is being waged off the battlefield and clearly we aren’t winning the fight. I think part of it is that most conservatives have a certain respect for others and don’t invite controversy where as the left have no shame when it comes to raising their hands and stating their opinion no matter how twisted or empty.

I fly a lot and typically try to not bother others but occasionally I have the opportunity to strike up a conversation or overhear one. There was one instance where I sat through the most empty headed discussion of global warming coming from a guy that sounded like country boy liberal (these are the worst)and an black guy. The were discussing Al Gore’s movie like it was the gospel. I was a few seats back from them so I bit my tongue and managed not to interrupt their conversation. It was a love fest any way one I could live without and probably wouldn’t make a difference in anyway.

Interestingly enough on another flight later in the month I had the luck to be seated in friendly territory and struck up a conversation with a gentleman who did some technology work for credit reporting. I being a data warehousing guy we hit it off. I think I mentioned the weather and he made a causal comment about global warming and which left the door wide open for me which I gladly stepped into. I discussed how most don’t realize that there are only two other periods in the history of the Earth when CO2 levels have fallen below 400ppm and that those periods were the Modern day Quaternary Epoch and the Carboniferous period. I pointed out that I didn’t disagree that the Earth was warming but what I disagreed with was the hysteria and conclusions about it and that how misguided attempts to fix something that isn’t broken could possibly interfere with what could be a coming “Eden”. I went on to describe the state of the Earth during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum when the poles were ice free and subtropical forests existed in Antarctica.

I pointed out that if the world and the environment survived this swing in temperatures in a period of a few thousand years then I had little doubt that the Earth could survive the small swings in comparison predicted by “climate experts” and questioned them and asked that even if man was responsible did they really think our government bureaucracy could be trusted to “fix” something as complex as the environment?

We discussed back and forth for some time and a young lady on my right entered the discussion and in the end we had an enjoyable time not just discussing climate but several other things like the fact that her father was a pilot she was in school and so on. They seemed to come away impressed and in the least I’d made a couple of good acquaintances. The thing that was evident is that these were reasonable people and regardless of the power or weakness of my argument they had not really been exposed to the counterarguments or the idea that there was even a different perspective.

Most people don’t spend their free time contemplating arriving at an accurate picture of climate change or any of the other hundreds of issues. They instead pick up popular phrases and then they take those opinions as their own without even knowing why other than they “feel” right. Why do they feel right? They feel because the brain has a familiarity with those ideas and the way the brain’s neural networks work is through reinforcement of connections between information it is exposed to.

A non questioning person is very venerable to being brainwashed in believing things they have no credible way of explaining why they believe them. The left depends on this and it is why they try to turn arguments into popularity contests and keep them on a personal level and make blanket statements about things that are far from proven.

We need to make sure people hear us and sometimes it is our merely stepping forward to say “I don’t necessarily agree” to a rabid liberal that will benefit our unannounced audience. Liberals want people to think that disagreeing with them is hate, is discrimination, is fascist the only way to fight that is to step forward and have our say. They sure do.

Maelstorm (I visited Daily Kos. It was like visiting Planet Dumbass.)

I rarely post comments from other message boards, but when you're right, you're right...

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