[Eco] BS on the BS

[ginohn]

On Jan 30, 2007, at 3:12 AM, Rick Castello wrote:

> [John Cooper wrote:]
>> BTW, Penn Jillette is also a research
>> fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank which
>> publishes policy papers and press releases to further their agenda.)
>
>      <snip>
>
>      While I've heard the term conservative used as a dirty curse
>      word before (and liberal!), I've never heard the word libertarian
>      used with such distaste before!
>
These were not meant as dirty curse words, I only repeated this  
phrase to point out how P&T's sources are all from one corner of the  
issue. I would be just as alarmed (and I hope I would have used  
similar wording, though it seems to have backfired) if all their data  
came from left-wing policy institutes that exist to further their own  
agenda. Sorry that I didn't make that clear.

I actually agree with many of the Cato Institute's policies. I  
wouldn't be surprised if some people think of me as a social  
libertarian. I didn't mean those phrases to look defamatory, just  
repetitive, to get my point across. I was hoping for a few chuckles,  
really. Guess I failed in the message.

Perhaps my mistake while watching P&T's show was in assuming that it  
included an attempt to gather data in an unbiased fashion. I realize  
now that they are actually just, um, having fun entertaining people  
with their show, and trying to spread their own gree-grees. At least  
they got me looking closely at the arguments for and against  
recycling, and investigation is a good thing.

If P&T had been more clear up front, and told their audience that  
practically all their support for their argument against recycling  
were going to come from political policy institutes, I would feel  
less swindled in the end. The fact that I had to dig for their  
sources, and that they gathered those sources from a small bandpass  
in the political spectrum indicates to me that P&T knew what they  
doing, and didn't want the viewers to catch on before they were  
sucked in to P&T's meme.

:-j



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.looneylabs.com/pipermail/eco/attachments/20070130/9aec582a/attachment.htm