For the dangerous crime of not agreeing with Adam Weinstein…
In a jaw-dropping post on Gawker-–I would suspect link bait if this wasn’t a disturbing trend-— a supposedly (formerly?) reputable journalist argues that anyone who challenges global warming orthodoxy should be prosecuted as a criminal. Here is Adam Weinstein making a fool out of himself (actually, only a fool could write such crap), and doing it by quoting as an authority the absurd Prof Lawrence Torcello, whose earlier advocacy of punishing global warming skeptics I wrote about in this post. Weinstein:
Those denialists should face jail. They should face fines. They should face lawsuits from the classes of people whose lives and livelihoods are most threatened by denialist tactics. Let’s make a clear distinction here: I’m not talking about the man on the street who thinks Rush Limbaugh is right, and climate change is a socialist United Nations conspiracy foisted by a Muslim U.S. president on an unwitting public to erode its civil liberties. You all know that man. That man is an idiot. He is too stupid to do anything other than choke the earth’s atmosphere a little more with his Mr. Pibb burps and his F-150’s gassy exhaust. Few of us believers in climate change can do much more—or less—than he can.
Nor am I talking about simple skeptics, particularly the scientists who must constantly hypo-test our existing assumptions about the world in order to check their accuracy. That is part and parcel of the important public policy discussion about what we do next. But there is scientific skepticism… and there is a malicious, profiteering quietist agenda posturing as skepticism. There is uncertainty about whether man-made climate change can be stopped or reversed… and there is the body of purulent pundits, paid sponsors, and corporate grifters who exploit the smallest uncertainty at the edges of a settled science.
I’m talking about Rush and his multi-million-dollar ilk in the disinformation business. I’m talking about Americans for Prosperity and the businesses and billionaires who back its obfuscatory propaganda. I’m talking about public persons and organizations and corporations for whom denying a fundamental scientific fact is profitable, who encourage the acceleration of an anti-environment course of unregulated consumption and production that, frankly, will screw my son and your children and whatever progeny they manage to have.
Those malcontents must be punished and stopped.
Nice, don’t you think? Just yesterday, I believe, a major study was released that suggested that saturated fats were not as unhealthy as “settled science” had long told us they were. Oh, they are fighting over the findings now, but never mind: the point is that anyone who tries to shut down ongoing challenges to “settled science” is ignorant, and worse, dangerous.
If you think slowing down the political (it’s not objectively scientific, of course) steamroller on climate change policies is deadly, just examine the history of what has transpired when dissenters like “Rush and his multi-million-dollar ilk in the disinformation business” were intimidated and punished by the state for daring to challenge conventional wisdom declared by The One as “fact.” Tally up the millions upon millions slaughtered, liquidated and starved to death by Stalin and Mao; you don’t even have to add in Hitler’s casualties in World War II. Will the entirely speculative effects of global warming be more deadly than that? I can only guess, but I do know how deadly suppressing free thought, research, debate and dissent has been, because I’m not relying on computer models.
Does Adam, or for that matter, his hero Torcello, actually know how accurate climate change models are? Could he even read one? I doubt it. I’ve read his bio and education; like Torcello, he not a climate expert, or even a scientist. How then can this unimpressively educated, narrow-interest journalist be so sure that the scientific majority on this subject that he barely comprehends at an Al Gore level (that is to say, “Duh”) is so right, when so many other scientific conclusions have been proven so wrong?
He can’t. He just wants to end the argument by threats and force, that’s all. Just like authoritarians, dictators, bullies and tyrants always have, even though Weinstein presumably knows the carnage and horror the enslavement of human thought has always wrought.
By Adam Weinstein’s own logic, there should be a law to protect us against him.
Of course, he is the idiot here, along with Prof. Torcello and Gawker. What does it say about the state of journalism, though, that someone with this anti-American, anti-democratic, autocratic mindset can carve out a career writing for the New york Times, Wall Street Journal, New Yorker and other sort-of respectable publications? What does it say about Gawker and Mother Jones that they would employ such an arrogant, ignorant, incompetent fool as an editor? I don’t really care about his silly, silly essay; a fifth-grader could rebut it. What I find frightening is how many others like him lurk beneath the floor boards of our culture like termites, just waiting for their chance to force their ideology on us by rigging the rules.
______________________
Pointer: Fark
Sources: Science, Mother Jones, Gawker, Bad Journalist
Ethics Alarms 
If I can resist the urge to laugh, I ask people like that about how warm it was during the dinosaur era before the last ice age? The climate has changed and will continue to change until the sun burns out.
I consider these to be among the worst bullies.
If by worst you mean arrogant, intolerant, doctrinaire, repressive, insulting, dishonest, and coercive, yeah, I’d agree with that.
I get the best quiet glee, when a Man Made
Global WarmingClimate Change hypochondriac points out things like “the Earth is warming, now long frozen plants are growing again in the arctic or Antarctic”….“Uh…. so you are saying that some time long ago, before green house gasses, that the Earth was warmer than it is now?”
“Well…yes…”
“So….. what can we logically conclude from this?”
This is a perfectly natural reaction from a hustler who sees that his money-making con game is dissipating.
And of course, Weinstein doesn’t realize that free speech is there precisely because we can’t trust governments (or society, really) to fully ever know the truth, and that a government with the power to ban Nazis also has the power to ban Jewish organizations.
I find the entire piece, unless it’s bad satire, signature significance of a defective mind. After this, no one should take anything he writes seriously.
Judging from the comments of both him and a number of his readers, it’s all too real.
Honestly, if this is what progressivism has become, we should just learn dark magic and sacrifice their part of Congress in order to resurrect FDR and Truman.
It was a hidden characteristic of Progressivism (not an emergent bug).
Let’s be frank, it’s a hidden bug of any ideology outside of good old fashioned classical liberalism and its most obvious descendent, straight-forward libertarianism. Unfortunately, the latter I am not, so I shall have to do with the dingbats on my “side” for the time-being.
I fucking dare the bitch to come try it.
Indeed.
If cops actually try to enforce his suggestions, cops will die.
Well somebody’s got to carry the spear for Al Gore. I’ll probably see him at a “New Age” conference flapping his jaws while the dolts in the front of the room are mesmerized by his ‘brilliant logic’.
Fortunately, we have Second Amendment solutions in case the government comes up with the brilliant idea to follow Weinstein’s advice.
This is much worse than what Sandra Korn had advocated. Korn did not advocate infringing on the First Amendment (Harvard is a private institution) and the worst that could happen from following her advice was that Harvard degrees would become worth less than toilet paper. By contrast, following Weinstein’s advice could result in police officers being justifiably killed by freedom-loving patriots.
Weinstein seems to be siding with Westboro Craptist Church (sorry, can’t help misspelling there, every time), just on another issue: “God Hates ACC* deniers.” If ever an ideology does become liable for prosecution under RICO statutes, we can be assured that the prosecution will be led by the ideologues of the ideology which first, best, and most deserved such prosecution, but which escaped its just desserts by “immunizing” itself.
It really is no wonder why history repeats itself.
*ACC = Anthropogenic Climate Change
There’s that pesky quote again – pops up every time I write something like what I wrote above: “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.” (Voltaire)
That quote is becoming increasingly familiar on the internet. Little wonder, too.
Of course, I don’t know their “game” so well, but the racketeer media seem to be putting on their Final Four version of a full-court press:
http://news.yahoo.com/global-warming-dials-risks-un-report-says-001136062.html
“While the problems from global warming will hit everyone in some way, the magnitude of the harm won’t be equal, coming down harder on people who can least afford it, the report says. It will increase the gaps between the rich and poor, healthy and sick, young and old, and men and women,…”
There they go: If you don’t get on board NOW with ALL that the world’s governments want to DO about climate change, then YOU are a sexist, age-ist, anti-public health, classist gap-ist. In other words, a CRIMINAL.
I am not a “denier,” but anyone who trusts the UN on this issue is nuts.
Here is a quote.
I wonder why we would have a closing window of opportunity. do we not have the resources to trigger a nuclear winter at any time? Unlike global warming, nuclear winter theory is based on the soundest of sciences. Any notion that we are running out of time to deal with this alleged problem was disproven back in 1983.
Anyone who wants to trust that Club for Dictators funded by Commercial Republics on ANY issue, is nuts.
Tex, I agree: Anyone who denies that truth you just shared is nuts.
this does beg the question of why the racketeer media is taking sides in this.
1) It comes naturally, given the preponderance of the particular ideology shared by the racketeer media (“r.m.”) and their chosen, favored topic- and cause-promoting “leaders.”
2) The r.m. want to preserve their access to those “leaders,” since their jobs depend on same, so they fall all over each other with fawning and boot-licking.
3) Symbiosis. The “leaders” need the r.m. as much as the r.m. need the “leaders.”
4) Mass gullibility. In theory at least, you can fool enough of the people enough of the time to have most of the power over most of them, most of the time. Occasionally over history, there are brief intervals when the theory doesn’t work, and there is chaos with attendant suffering for all (more for some than for others), until there is sufficient re-alignment of the gullible and the beguiling to repeat the cycle.
How’s this any different than this? http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/10/19/259346/-We-Can-Outlaw-the-Republican-Party#
One of the more interesting things about the Viet Nam war was it’s ending. Once the communist North took over one of it’s first goals was to track down and execute something like 1.4 million people, among them the V.C. who had fought for them for so long. I suspect that if Mr. Weinstein’s desire ever comes to fruition, he will be one of the first to go. The Far Left has never been known for it’s loyalty.
That’s actually a good point. And the process started as far back as the Tet Offensive. The North Vietnamese Army (NVA) used Viet Cong forces as their spearhead troops deliberately so as to achieve maximum casualties among them with an eye toward making their conquest of the South easier afterward. While the NVA suffered a devastating defeat, the Cong was virtually wiped out. What remained was scattered bands of conscripted kids under the tight control of the North. This is an extreme, but inclusive example of the “useful idiots” strategy.
Oh, it goes back farther than that. The other side to the Katyn Forest Massacre was the Russians holding back from the ghettos long enough for the Nazis to take care of the resistance, so there’d be no one to object to their postwar plans.
In my mind at least, Mr. Weinstein is solidly in the “useful idiot” category.
It’s interesting that the obviously ultra-liberal Weinstein isn’t pointing his finger at the industries and companies that send American jobs to countries that essentially have no climate laws that they enforce. China being the top of the heap. That country is becoming the coal burning capital of the world. Weinstein, I’m sure, couldn’t possibly point his finger at his Marxist handlers that are empowering that Communist empire.
LOOK! Russian troops massed on Ukrainian border!
Don’t worry. The President asked Putin to pull back, and John Kerry is on the case.
(You’re not the only one who can be sarcastic.)
Yes, I’m certain our feckless Secretary of State and his boss are too dense to parse Lavrov’s comment that Ukraine cannot function as a unified state.
But hey, glorious leader Putin has demonstrated reasonability by reducing Russian troop strength on the border from 40,000 to 39,500 (which our media reports as “Russians withdrawing forces from Ukrainian border” – OK class, please tell me what that SOUNDS like the media wants us to think)….
Look, Obama gave a speech – everything is solved.
“We are in the very best of hands…”
I must bow and concede to you and Jack for your sarcasm (superior to mine) today.
But ONLY for TODAY.
Perhaps tomorrow, I shall comment on my newfound, all-American comfort with the Russians due to that cozy relationship between Vlad Putin and Steven Seagal.
The best part of course, is that the reflexively anti-American left seem to forget their “progressive” principles when dealing with international matters involving America; Putin may be ex-KGB, but he’s really a nationalist who pals with loyalist oligarchs and doesn’t give a shit about Marx (he’s surprisingly popular among paleo-cons for this reason as well), and “socialism-with-Chinese-characteristics” is even less progressive than the capitalism of Taiwan, whose own plight the hard left press seem happy to ignore (including Taiwan’s recent protests against a prospective trade deal with China, even though that’s supposed to be a stereotypically leftist cause).
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Wow. Check out this article that puts Adam Weinstein in his place, as well as the Church of Climatology:
http://21stcenturywire.com/2014/04/07/gawker-says-arrest-climate-change-deniers-but-where-would-we-put-them/
An update on this issue:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-fossil-fuel-industrys-campaign-to-mislead-the-american-people/2015/05/29/04a2c448-0574-11e5-8bda-c7b4e9a8f7ac_story.html