> Your points about climate change and other recent political developments are not relevant to understanding this situation at all.

Well, it is certainly possible that they are irrelevant, but I see that you have given up any pretense of justifying that claim.

On the one hand, given how badly your earlier attempts to make that case went, I can see why you would want to avoid another try. On the other, as the person making the claims has demonstrated such a poor record on critical thinking here, why would anyone just accept it?

And these are claims, I may add, that you recently doubled-down on once again, as in this statement:

>Far from my case being based on a fallacy so obviously wrong that it may not occur often enough to have a recognized name, the reality is that your reply suffers from one that is well known and quite common among your ilk: recency bias.

The thing about parody is that it doesn't work if the premise is false! And what premise was behind this version of your claim of recency bias? Explicitly this: "the article actually discusses national winterization standards versus those of Texas, and points out both that other southern states have experienced power disruptions due to the cold, and that the national winterization standards are neither stricter than those of Texas nor strict enough to address the events of recent days."

For one thing, I had only just before pointed out that the fact that multiple states were unprepared does not excuse any one of them. Secondly, what sort of claim could both be an example of recency bias, and be refuted by the statement of yours that I have just quoted? For example, if someone said "only Texas was affected", it would be refuted by that statement of yours, but it would simply have been a false statement about a recent event. That would not be recency bias!

Your other basis for claiming recency bias is "Texas's separate grid dates back decades, and was driven by a conscious desire to optimize for the needs of manufacturing", but as Texas was free to respond to more recent warnings about the inadequacy of its energy infrastructure, its failure to do so at that time is, of course, more relevant than the facts you quote about a much earlier time. This is not recency bias!

The grids in the rest of the country are not particularly more robust than those of Texas or the south, so it's wrong to look to local political factors to understand the situation. The poor preparedness of the US grid is well known. The only reason to start talking about peculiar conservative beliefs is to drive partisanship enthusiasm and to sow division. It's a dishonest, cowardly act, and detracts from public dialogue.

Firstly, widening the scope does not alter the fact that the failure of many does not excuse the failure of any one of them. Secondly, none of them failed as badly as Texas. Most importantly, many other areas of the country have solved the biggest problems that occurred in the Texas debacle, those solutions are well-known in the industry, and experts have been telling Texas for a long time that it is not properly prepared. And when politicians start saying things like the debacle being preferable to federal regulation, it absolutely is reasonable to ask whether Texas' failure to heed the warnings of experts was overly influenced by ideological concerns, and that question clearly belongs in the public dialogue.

As for calling this a "dishonest, cowardly act", that's the sort of rhetoric that most people give up after childhood. It is that, rather than the substantive issues that many knowledgeable people have been raising, which does not belong in public dialogue. You seem to be annoyed that this thread has demonstrated a complete failure of critical analysis on your part (a situation that your latest reply has done nothing to repair), but it is entirely of your own doing.

Almost none of what you're saying is true, here -- it's generalizations and false implication. Notice how you don't say which problems or which experts. Dishonesty is the sort of rhetoric...

There are northern states with better winterization, but that is easily explainable with reference to the obvious difference in weather. Even given that, significant blackouts -- like the northeast blackout of 2003 -- have occurred in areas with quite a different political climate than Texas. The US grid has overall shown a low level of preparedness.

And when politicians start saying things like the debacle being preferable to federal regulation, it absolutely is reasonable to ask whether Texas' failure to heed the warnings of experts was overly influenced by ideological concerns...

The only winterization recommendations that would have made a difference for Texas came from within the Texas energy sector itself. What are you talking about, here?

You started your responses to me in this thread by arguing that because "Texas's separate grid dates back decades, and was driven by a conscious desire to optimize for the needs of manufacturing", the mere suggestion that it could have done something to prepare for the recent situation was nonsense. Now you are saying that "the only winterization recommendations that would have made a difference for Texas came from within the Texas energy sector itself", so, whether or not these were in fact the only recommendations made, your belated acceptance that such recommendations were made represents complete capitulation on that point, and tacitly acknowledges that your response to my original post was the only nonsense to be found at that time.

It is, of course, irrelevant where the criticism of the existing infrastructure came from, what is relevant is that it was not acted on, and therefore, the question of why it was not acted on is very pertinent, just as I have been saying from the beginning. And, for the third or fourth time, you are trying a slightly different version of the nonsensical notion that if other jurisdictions' infrastructure is not perfect, then what led to Texas' debacle is a question that should not be asked.

Furthermore, your newly-found claim that Texas' infrastructure was criticized from within can only raise additional questions of why such recommendations were ignored - was the Texas energy sector prevented from implementing its own recommendations?

>Dishonesty is the sort of rhetoric...

This is just a continuation of the childish outburst in your previous post, which does nothing to rehabilitate your reputation for critical thinking, which has been thoroughly trashed, by your own hand, in this thread.

What is telling here is that you're no longer arguing on the basis of the governor's conservatism, or trends in conservative politics -- but that was the whole substance of your initial reply to me.

Furthermore, your newly-found claim that Texas' infrastructure was criticized from within...

You are not being truthful, here. Consider the comment of mine that you first replied to, where I wrote:

...the national winterization standards are neither stricter than those of Texas nor strict enough to address the events of recent days.

This is pretty amusing: your current situation is best described in terms of cartoon tropes - you are in a superposition of the character who has just sawn through the tree-branch he is sitting on, and the character who has run off a cliff but not noticed it. By acknowledging that Texas was warned of the vulnerability of its energy infrastructure - and by industry insiders, no less - you have demolished your claim that there's nothing to see here.

Of course the question of why these warnings were ignored needs to be asked, and to anyone who understands anything about human nature, it is obvious that your insistence that certain questions should not be asked is the purely political position here.

What has changed about my situation? My remarks about the Texas regulator's recommendations are in the first comment you replied to. Are you dealing in truth, here? Or is it more of your characteristic dishonesty?

The problem here is not with asking the question, but how you chose to answer it: by bringing up partisan irrelevancies, in order to tell a divisive fable.

> My remarks about the Texas regulator's recommendations are in the first comment you replied to.

The full text of that comment is "This is not a fair reading of the article. It actually discusses national winterization versus those of Texas, and points out both that other southern states have experienced power disruptions due to the cold, and that the national winterization standards are neither stricter than those of Texas nor strict enough to address the events of recent days", and I would be interested to see how you can find "the only winterization recommendations that would have made a difference for Texas came from within the Texas energy sector itself" in there (it does, of course, contain the seeds of one of your absurd ideas - that other entities' failings excuse those of Texas - but that unshakeable non-sequitur is a separate issue.)

- And even if that was somehow what you intended to say, then it would merely mean that you have been flying with no visible means of support for longer than I thought. Anyway, thanks for acknowledging that fact in your recent post, as otherwise I would never have guessed that you recognize it as being so!

I do see that, in another thread, you wrote "there's no solution that works if we don't hold regulators accountable and the regulators don't hold the industry accountable." Yes, indeed - recognizing, of course, that the state executive and legislature have considerable control over the regulatory process, and a corresponding responsibility in the debacle.

It doesn't seem like you've been paying much attention to what I've actually said.

The comment I replied to was not a fair reading of the article, and left out both a lot of what the article said and a lot of what was important to understanding the situation.