Sunday, January 9, 2011

The Limits of Discourse

Brendan provides some real clarity regarding the looming debate about rhetoric in the wake of the Giffords shooting.
Can we blame an individual act by some loon on a specific statement by a specific prominent conservative blowhard? Probably not, not any more than we can attribute a single nasty storm to anthropogenic global warming. But, as with AGW, there is something we can say with confidence -- muck with the climate, and you increase the odds that extreme events will happen.