Hacker News Reader

Comment by cool_look | Hacker News Reader

(forced to use a side account to comment on this)

You have to look at it from the Trump teams point of view. They honestly don't see that the 'free speech' argument holds water. They see it as abuse of a public position to spread falsehoods.

Basically EPA employees in the Trump Team's view are perpetuating climate alarmism ( again in the TT view ).

So they are stopping that.

Just flip it around just for a second. I'll choose an equivalent that would cause liberals to shut down the twitter of an official.

Imagine a Department of Health official was tweeting photos of aborted foetuses and keeping a tally "350 aborted this month. #whatawaste".

There would be calls to stop that official speaking out.

View on HN

Yes, but there's a difference. Abortion is in many ways an issue of personal conscience, rather than a simple scientific determination.

Climate change on the other hand, isn't controversial in reality. It's been made controversial because some people have an interesting way of deciding what is true or false.

There seems to be a certain mindset that treats wishful thinking as equivalent in power to empirical evidence. So they start with what they want to be true, and work backwards from there. For example: "It's inconvenient for my business interests if climate change is true. Therefore it must be false."

Some people even work themselves all the way to: "... and therefore climate change is a conspiracy invented by jealous scientists to screw over successful capitalists like me".

thats why my dreamt up example included just factual statements "350 this month".

doesnt make it better though, does it ?

That argument holds for everything. It is the full relativism: there is not good or bad, there is not true or falsehood, there are just opinions.

That reasoning is flawed, as true facts exists and there are ways to get to that facts like the scientific method. And morality exists, not every action is just relative.

The last part is that oil industry has paid big to silence science about climate change. "Conflict of interest" is another big point against Trump teams "point of view".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com