Letters to the Editor
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The Question of Whether Camille Paglia Fakes the Letters to Herself
A few people have asked in this thread, "Did Camille Paglia write the letters that she then answers?"
I think this is a fair question. In fact, it's more than fair, I think it demands a response from the Salon editors and/or Paglia herself.
Each of the letters is written in Paglia's writing style, with a similar adverb/verb and adjective/noun structure. The letters also largely agree with Paglia's positions or open up a relatively obscure subject about which Paglia seems all too ready to launch a treatise.
The names of the writers do not match any who show up in these message threads, and I haven't seen any responses here from the people who wrote to Paglia. (Or was there a brief one early in the messages?)
I think Paglia either writes all the letters herself, or uses a few real letters and pads the rest of them out with stuff she makes up on her own. Paglia, can you confirm or deny this? Salon editors, will you weigh in? If Paglia makes up her letters, would it kill you to provide a small-print disclaimer somewhere in the article that makes this clear?
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What Hutman just said
Until this piece, I never thought I could write for a respected online news journal. Thanks for giving me hope!
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I meant the letter on page 30
Too quick
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Sources
Try these to start and get yourself subscriptions to Nature, Science and Scientific American.
I subscribe to Scientific American. Nature and Science are peer review journals. They're not only above my head (I'm a layman), they're also prohibitively expensive. Thanks for the links. I'll take a look.
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You Say Tomato,...
Lynx,
"Consesus here doesn't mean "how many people believe something". It means that most scientists,...science doesn't work on "facts", it works on evidence, experimentation and theory."
You're arguing semantics? How cheap can you get? You know what I mean and you ignore that in favor of harping on word choice? Like I said, that's below me.
"I have no idea what "cultish thinking" you're accusing me of. Reading scientific journals, studying and drawing the conclusion that global warming is both real and primarily caused by human activity? I fail to see how thinking for myself and studying is "cultish". I'd be far more likely to describe fringe ideas held by small groups who insist they're right despite a preponderance of conflicting evidence to be "cultish". You know, like what you're promoting."
Global Warming has been called a religion by almost every skeptic that's tackled the subject. But what religion are they talking about? I'll tell you: the new age. If you would look over my blog - or Chris's - you'd find enough to start thinking a bit more about what inroads this "spiritual" phenomena has made into Western culture. And how much it's warped liberal thinking. And - forget global warming - think about this: how is water - H20 - sold in health food stores (!) as "medicine"? Why is Therapeutic Touch - which was debunked by a nine-year-old girl - pushed in hospitals? You think scientists aren't capable of leading us down the wrong path? Explain those two.
James Randi explains homeopathy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWE1tH93G9U
TT's spread in medicine, explained by the leader of the Apple Macintosh project: http://jef.raskincenter.org/published/NursingTheoryForSite.html
TT, debunked: http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/9804/01/therapeutic.touch/
Why skeptics are having such a hard time getting equal time on those issues: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=395568&in_page_id=1770
You are being led astray, my friend, as Malcolm X used to say.
"[Al Gore's] not a scientist, he's a well informed celebrity spokesman."
Who makes a movie that even scientists say over-states the issue into a deplorable level of scare-mongering. It's not right.
"The skeptics tend to get far more airtime thanks to Fox and the mainstream media's idea of "fairness".
You overestimate the power of FOX (which has a 50% Democratic viewership) to the point where you can't see anything else out there.
"Wait, you're proposing that the new agers are the ones giving you your skeptical ideas?"
No - just the opposite - new age ideas are the foundation for the global warming scare.
"That is how scientific truth is discovered."
See - I do understand the method - so to crap on me for semantics is unfair. Let's try not to be unfair.
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From Anonymous
"The head of the scientific panel repeatedly evaded the question with rates of change comments which did not even come close to an answer. After about three rounds of the senator trying to get an answer out of the head scientist he directed to the question to whole panel. Not one offered an answer to his question or said a word. The senator who asked this question stated that the references he had checked state the amount of co2 from human activity contribute to the atmosphere is about 10%. Not one of the scientists breathed a WORD at this point."
It's a cult scam of the highest order - the pols don't know what they're talking about - but they want to tax us, and start selling carbon cards, and taking away our cars, stopping us from traveling, etc.
Get pissed, people!
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When Maladroit Contrarians Attack
The knack of global warming discourse for drawing attention to the useful idiots in our commentariat knows no equal. Paglia's piece is simply the latest edition, though the canards she employs, 'Al Gore is not credible- there is no scientific unanimity on global warming' and 'humans are arrogant to think they can affect the climate', are nothing new. The beauty of the former statement is that it both red herring and inaccurate, making it all the more difficult to counter without doing harm to the debate. The latter is simply unsubstantiated by anything other than the author's wandering and starry-eyed prose. As to the inaccuracy of the former, a study conducted by Dr. Benny Peiser- one highly motivated global warming skeptic- was, (after further review*), unable to come up with a single solitary peer-reviewed scientific paper that disputed the basic science of global warming over a period from 93 to 03. So I await with zenithal anticipation Paglia's clarifying what she meant by her libel of Al Gore.
Moving on to the red herring dimension of Paglia's essay, as outlandish as this may seem, skepticism is customarily informed by arguments regarding the substance of something one claims to be skeptical of, rather than hostility. In this case, that means a competing explanation of how the physically demonstrable CO2 forcing ultimately affects the climate system, (and one that leads to less threatening consequences of our dumping the pollutant wholesale into the atmosphere). However, Paglia and her fellow self-proclaimed gadflies provide no such thing. Theirs is more correctly contrarianism/antagonism masquerading as skepticism- and more succinctly, 'skepticism'- of a piece with the top dollar energy industry propaganda in which many in our society, Senator Inhofe for example, have been pickled.
It is also worth noting that this criticism of 'skepticism' applies equally to most if not all of its known arguments. Crichton's favorite psalm, (increasingly de jour of the 'skeptic' community)- the one about those durn hypocritical private jet flying as much energy using in one day as the average American in one year libs- just happens to be the most frivolous. A second of his, 'scientific consensus is meaningless, because historically it is not 100% accurate', is also of the incorrect variety of ruses. Incorrect that is unless, (if and only if), the claim is also that climate scientists are uniquely dull amongst researchers, that science itself is totally irrelevant or that there is a massive conspiracy to defraud amongst these scientists, presumably to take over the world. If none of these are being claimed and shown, their consensus is indeed meaningful and considerably so.
In the final analysis, this piece and others like it are a disservice to the community. They are poorly reasoned, uninformed and supercilious and ultimately only useful for feeding the misinformation factory of credulous hacks like Matt Drudge. Salon can and should be expected to do better.
* See http://www.desmogblog.com/deltoids-tim-lambert-bursts-peisers-bubble