Talk:Alarmism

hi

Apologies for my edit summary. I put it in there as a pointer but then went back and did it myself after a preview of changes. Otherwise - played with wording to make it read "nicer". Added some flesh to some common alarmism (eg, everything causes cancer! Obama / the democrats / health care will destroy the world! Etc) 203.58.120.11 (talk) 08:23, 7 October 2009 (UTC)

Oil crash

I fail to see how an oil crash in the future is alarmism. It is pretty real.

You'll find people willing to say "It's pretty real" about everything on the list. 220.239.88.91 03:24, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

Do some research, new finds are still been made and the recovery rate is still improving, here is one recent example for gas

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124104549891270585.html

and for oil; Electro Thermal Dynamic Stripping Oil Recovery Could Unlock 400 Billion More Barrels of Oil in Alberta at $26/Barrel

I believe that is a lot of oil, here is the source

http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/04/electro-thermal-dynamic-stripping-oil.html and http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124050418449248573.html —Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.16.170.172 (talk) 20:18, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

I don't believe "that is a lot of oil". How many barrels does the world use in one day? Now, 'that' is a lot of oil. Plus, if the technology's so great and from 2006, where's the plant? Finally, what's the maximum flow rate of that operation? I doubt it can prop up production rates what often take abrupt declines. Peak oil isn't "pretty real", it's very real. It's not alarmism if it's a real risk.

Sectional sorting

It would be great to sort the list into categories like "economic," "political," "environmental", etc. The problem is that so many of the items belong in several categories (nuclear war, for example, could be something affecting all three). What, if anything, might be done about this? Perhaps a sot of Venn diagram or the like? --Lenoxus 15:26, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Transhumanism?

I don't understand Loremasters edit, which I reverted here [1]. This appears to be alinked to some fight at Transhumanism William M. Connolley (talk) 22:34, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

1. Issuing early warnings on the ideas that will supposedly be the most destructive in the 21st century is the definition of alarmism. Transhumanism is not the only idea that was mentioned in the Foreign Policy special report so I stand by my edits of the Alarmism article.

2. Therefore, there was nothing POV about an internal link to the Alarmism article from the expression "world's most dangerous ideas" in the Transhumanism article. However, to avoid a needless dispute over such a trivial issue, I won't try to put back the internal link.

--Loremaster (talk) 02:19, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

Issuing early warnings on the ideas that will supposedly be the most destructive in the 21st century is the definition of alarmism - no, of course it isn't. Your version of the article simply makes no sense. Just talking about the vague concept of w-m-d-i isn't intelligible. Meanwhile, the hidden link to here was clearly POV. Lastly, apologies for my last edit comment - I didn't realise you'd talked here William M. Connolley (talk) 10:00, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

I'm no longer going to debate the POV issue since I don't think it is essential that there be a internal link from the expression "world's most dangerous ideas" in the Transhumanism article to the Alarmism article. However, issuing early warnings on the ideas that will supposedly be the most destructive in the 21st century is the definition of alarmism in light of all the counter-arguments that they automatically illicited. The whole point of Foreign Policy's special report on the world's dangerous ideas is determining whether or not these warnings are alarmists. That being said, I agree that expression "world's most dangerous ideas" alone may not most intelligible so I've rephrased it. --Loremaster 13:40, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

By the way, William, if you are going to revert my edits again before this dispute is resolved here on that talk page, it would make more sense to use Bailey's rebuttal of Fukuyama's claim than that the claim itself as a reference:

Transhumanism: The Most Dangerous Idea? Why striving to be more than human is human

--Loremaster 13:47, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

Quick summary of Wikipedia's alarmism page

Alarmism – The production of needless warnings. Use of the word implies that one does not share the concerns of the person giving the warnings, and that the anticipated danger is overstated. Some warnings that have been called alarmist include:

• The threat of terrorism

• The 2002-2003 SARS incident

• The prediction of end times events from the Bible

• Mutually assured nuclear destruction causing mass extinction

• The possibility of a bird flu epidemic killing hundreds of millions

• Population explosion or Malthusian catastrophe, causing mass starvation

• The Y2K bug causing a breakdown of the world's computers and life itself

• Nuclear meltdown scenarios on a larger scale than 3 Mile Island or Chernobyl

• The possibility of an asteroid collision with the Earth, causing mass extinctions —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.234.69.28 (talk) 23:14, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Laundering

The article seemed to be just an uncited laundry list so I have knocked it back to s stub, based upon a journal article which seems to make some attempt to discuss the general nature of the topic. Material of this sort is what we need most, please. Colonel Warden (talk) 13:24, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

Looks about right. Guettarda (talk) 13:34, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

Hey Boys what's that

I just saw that Alarmism links to Club Of Rome. Hey kids, that's not PC, right? Somebody might actually notice that the CoR is all about alarmism. Make it disappear, quick, quick, can't have the counterrevolutionaries take over the NPOV, right? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.34.195.40 (talk) 17:24, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

Just to be clear, which part of the Club of Rome's ideas are "excessive or exaggerated"? I don't think there's any thing excessive about saying exponential growth with beat finite resources in the long term. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 209.6.252.192 (talk) 19:50, 17 September 2010 (UTC)