Tyler Cowen seems to be getting a tad confused in his moral reasoning, as he tries to shove the poop back up the fear-mongerers  who fatally compromised science, genuine environmentalism, and genuine conservation:

“Good vs. evil thinking causes us to lower our value of a person’s opinion, or dismiss it altogether, if we find out that person has behaved badly.  We no longer wish to affiliate with those people and furthermore we feel epistemically justified in dismissing them.

Sometimes this tendency will lead us to intellectual mistakes.

Take Climategate.  One response is: 1. “These people behaved dishonorably.  I will lower my trust in their opinions.”
Another response, not entirely out of the ballpark, is: 2. “These people behaved dishonorably.  They must have thought this issue was really important, worth risking their scientific reputations for.  I will revise upward my estimate of the seriousness of the problem.”
I am not saying that #2 is correct, I am only saying that #2 deserves more than p = 0.  Yet I have not seen anyone raise the possibility of #2.  It very much goes against the grain of good vs. evil thinking:  Who thinks in terms of: “They are evil, therefore they are more likely to be right.”

My Comment

This is so idiotic confused

(in the spirit of Humble Libertarian´s post, I want to start ratcheting down any stridency on my own part, before expecting others to)

I can´t believe I´m reading it.

I don´t believe the very intelligent Professor Cowen wrote it.

Let´s see. Point by point.

1. Hitler did several rather evil things…would Cowen be happy if we tried to take another look at Hitler, because, gee, we´re all counterintuitive an’ all..

Of course, see what happens when anyone dares to make the morally far saner argument that although Hitler did many evil things, he might have been right about some other things…say, like vegetarianism. The howls of neo-Nazism would drive him from respectable (and unrespectable) society forever.

But it´s quite OK for a liberal to argue from the morally insane position that because Hitler did many evil things, he was therefore right.

I can only imagine what would have happened if someone from the south had ever said that….or someone from the third world….or any other benighted place where our superiors haven´t already planted the flag of moral imperialism (I coined that one just now)….

It never occurs to the supercilious center-liberals (I´m not sure the positions taken by Cowen or Powell are really libertarian) that their lectures admonitions are best directed at themselves.

2. Cowen calls Austrian theory a religion, when it´s not even a theory. It´s a set of principles that can be applied quite broadly to arrive at very different conclusions, even conclusions diametrically opposed to many positions that Austrians actually hold.

3. He uses the phrase ¨good versus evil thinking” — which seems to be a reference to Glenn Greenwald´s book on Bush and how good versus evil thinking got his administration into trouble. As a matter of fact, I made that analysis of Bush´s reasoning in my first book (“The Language of Empire”) as well as in an article, “The Pharisee´s Fire Sermon” (Dissident Voice), …and I can assure you that “good versus evil” thinking permeates every aspect of American thought…from Christian fundamentalism to liberalism universalism. Lew Rockwell has the least of it.

And one of the underlying reasons for why this kind of polarised thinking is pervasive is a very simple one.

Citizens in an imperial state can get away with it.

In no other corner of the world is there a state with so much space in its back yard, so many armaments to back up its lightest word and so much clout to twist every arm that can be twisted to get reality to bend to its own solipsistic vision of how things should be.

Mr. Cowen has mistaken an imperial problem pervasive in the US for a local ideological problem.
Only one of a number of errrors.

Here´s more of Cowen´s cogitations via EconomicPolicyJournal.com:

“Cowen began his comments, and almost immediately differentiated between what he called “Ron Paul-Lew Rockwell libertarianism” and “realistic” libertarianism. He said that like Palmer, he fell into the “realistic” camp.

During the Q&A, I asked Cowen to amplify on the differences between what he deemed “Ron Paul-Lew Rockwell libertarianism” and “realistic” libertarianism. He pointed to a view on immigration and “too much” conspiracy theory that he claimed the “Ron Paul-Lew Rockwell libertarians” held. He said they were moving toward the extreme right wing Republican camp. He contrasted this with what he called realistic-secular libertarianism. He said he expected that a full split between the two camps will occur.”

Outside the right-wing Islamophobe militarati, the place where you´ll see the most “good-versus-evil” thinking is not Lew Rockwell (where you can find even liberal-left thinkers like Glenn Greenwald and Naomi Wolf). It´s the liberal-left center.

And that split that´s coming up between LRC and secular libertarianism?

Baloney.

Lew Rockwell has plenty of atheist and secular libertarians. I happen to be a secularist and a Christian agnostic. Both the Christianity and the agnoticism are important to me. Equally. If Cowen can´t get his head around a position like that and lumps it in together with some loony farfetched idea he has about “Austrian religion” that really is his problem, not LRC´s.

Actually, the only split that´s coming up is the split of libertarian progressives and sensible environmentalists…from the left…and into the Ron Paul camp..which is also, much more prosaically, the just-the-facts, ma´am camp.

Cowen:

He then told me I could google, Austrian theory and financial crisis, and half the results would be “religious Austrians.”

Nice try at scare-mongering.

This is simply scare-mongering.

The real ayatollahs of thought are Olympian liberal-leftists who believe that anyone who argues against any of their most precious sacred cows — subsidized illegal immigration, thought police, the immaculate purity of the government on 9-11, the imminent end of planet earth on account of Republicans, and a host of other dim-bulb positions — must automatically be a wicked, greedy racist.

Economist, audit thine own intellectual books before trashing anyone else´s.

And for more juicy tomatoes flung at the good professor by fellow libs, read this .

Monbiot in the Guardian::

“When it comes to his handling of Freedom of Information requests, Professor Jones might struggle even to use a technical defence. If you take the wording literally, in one case he appears to be suggesting that emails subject to a request be deleted, which means that he seems to be advocating potentially criminal activity. Even if no other message had been hacked, this would be sufficient to ensure his resignation as head of the unit.

I feel desperately sorry for him: he must be walking through hell. But there is no helping it; he has to go, and the longer he leaves it, the worse it will get……….

Some people say that I am romanticising science, that it is never as open and honest as the Popperian ideal. Perhaps. But I know that opaqueness and secrecy are the enemies of science. There is a word for the apparent repeated attempts to prevent disclosure revealed in these emails: unscientific……

When the emails hit the news on Friday morning, the university appeared completely unprepared. There was no statement, no position, no one to interview. Reporters kept being fobbed off while CRU’s opponents landed blow upon blow on it. When a journalist I know finally managed to track down Phil Jones, he snapped “no comment” and put down the phone. This response is generally taken by the media to mean “guilty as charged”.

My Comment

George Monbiot seems to be the only global warming advocate with the integrity to state the obvious. What the emails reveal is reprehensible in the extreme, given the position of the scientists involved. They have to go, no matter where you stand on the issue.

And by the way, I´m no hard-core skeptic about climate change or human influence on the environment at all.  I think the “preventive principle”

(correction: I mean precautionary principle)

is a pretty good rule to go by when considering economic and other options, am a strong advocate of organic and sustainable farming, and think that many forms of development do indeed create havoc with the environment – destroying shorelines and exacerbating natural disasters, if not actually provoking them.

However, hijacking the entire world into an international regime in which scam artists like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, allied hedge funds, speculators, and governments play roulette with “carbon credits” has nothing to do with being a steward of the environment.

Want to help the planet?

Plant a garden. Plant trees. Use meat as a condiment not as a staple. Walk or ride a bike as often as you can. 

Don´t think of yourself solely as a consumer but also as a citizen.

And fight the militarized state.

The single biggest problem (I mean man-made problem) for the climate is war. Nuclear weapons, depleted uranium, fighter jets, weapons testing, bunker-busters – this is where the damage is done, most of all in misdirecting energy and resources into destruction, when they could as easily be directed toward productive uses.

Dr. Tim Ball, from Canada Free Press (via Lew Rockwell):

“Professor Wegman showed how this “community of scientists” published together and peer reviewed each other’s work. I was always suspicious about why peer review was such a big deal. Now all my suspicions are confirmed. The emails reveal how they controlled the process, including manipulating some of the major journals like Science and Nature. We know the editor of the Journal of Climate, Andrew Weaver, was one of the “community”. They organized lists of reviewers when required making sure they gave the editor only favorable names. They threatened to isolate and marginalize one editor who they believed was recalcitrant.

These people controlled the global weather data used by the IPCC through the joint Hadley and CRU and produced the HadCRUT data. They controlled the IPCC, especially crucial chapters and especially preparation of the Summary for PolicyMakers (SPM). Stephen Schneider was a prime mover there from the earliest reports to the most influential in 2001. They also had a left wing conduit to the New York Times. The emails between Andy Revkin and the community are very revealing and must place his journalistic integrity in serious jeopardy. Of course the IPCC Reports and especially the SPM Reports are the basis for Kyoto and the Copenhagen Accord, but now we know they are based on completely falsified and manipulated data and science. It is no longer a suspicion. Surely this is the death knell for the CRU, the IPCC, Kyoto and Copenhagen and the Carbon Credits shell game.

CO2 never was a problem and all the machinations and deceptions exposed by these files prove that it was the greatest deception in history, but nobody is laughing. It is a very sad day for science and especially my chosen area of climate science. As I expected now it is all exposed I find there is no pleasure in “I told you so.”

You can download the climate change fraud documents from the link below:

http://www.filedropper.com/foi2009 or http://www.megaupload.com/?d=003LKN94

(Lila: I am linking the hacked emails after all, because no private emails (correction: I meant ´personal´) are included and because I´m convinced the material was gathered for an FOIA request that was being obstructed).