A writer with the on-line magazine "climate change opinion" made a very interesting argument on September 0/08, which contends that scientists who promote AGW theory, as well as others, fail to win debates for severl reasons. http://climateprogress.org/2008/09/30/why-scientists-arent-more-persuasive-part-1/ and http://climateprogress.org/2008/10/13/why-scientists-aren%E2%80%99t-more-persuasive-part-2-why-deniers-out-debate-smart-talkers/
Among the points made, the author offers the following advice and observations to those who would want avoid losing debates to less informed or incompetent opponents:
1. Deny eloquence and accuse your opponent of being a rhetorician.
2. Fake straight talk. Straight talkers beat smart talkers.
3. Be blunt and ineloquent because this comes across as being honest and steadfast.
4. Don’t appear as a smarty pants, but rather a plainspoken man of the people.
5. Don’t talk smart or use big words.
6. Repeat simple words and phrases.
7. Claim that once you too were once shared your opponent’s viewpoints. This makes the listeners seem that you are just like them, and they become very interested as to why you changed your mind.
In short, debates are not won by the merits of the arguments presented or the volume of evidence presented, but by employing the tactics as outlined above. This is a valid and potent line of reasoning. Unfortunately, the un-named author uses the proponents of man-made climate change (AGW) as his self-evident example of scientists who are less than persuasive. The implication is that those who dare question climate change science are not scientists, but typically folks who have no such expertise. The issue is more complicated than that.
It may or may not be that only 2% of scientists oppose the AGW theory and that it enjoys the support of a “consensus” of scientists. But truth is not subject to a democratic vote. If 50 million scientists believe something to be true, it would not make it true. And if only one scientist in the world believed something to be true it would not necessarily make it false. A “consensus” of scientists once believed in the authenticity of Piltdown Man for four decades, until the truth emerged to discredit their beliefs as a hoax Only evidence can adjudicate the truth, and those who make scientific claims must first present those claims as an hypothesis. That is, their claim must offer a test that will prove its falsehood. Those who do not provide a testable proposition or persist in defending an hypothesis that evidence does not validate are not practicing science but religion. This is exactly what the “Friends of Science” would accuse AGW scientists of: http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/FOS%20Essay/Climate_Change_Science.html Given their contention, might another spin be put on why Michael Crichton’s debating team of AGW-deniers defeated a team that advanced the guardians of truth and light in 2007? In other words, was it that the scientists with IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) were not persuasive, or is it their theory that is not persuasive? Could it be that it is not so much that the American public is so ill-informed , but that IPCC scientists are unobservant and in denial?
Nullius in verba Take no one’s word.
Saturday, February 21, 2009
IT IS TIME THAT WE DEALT WITH THE GREEN BENEDICT ARNOLDS
I think, when this is done, that we should re-visit what I said in “The Old Boys Network”. Solomon Asch’s findings will come into play. I must open the whole question why Green Icons are locked into this mutual admiration society, swept off their feet in the presence of celebrities of their own social class, whom they feel most comfortable with. For them, meeting one of the Brotherhood Of Men Who Know Better is self-validation, it is looking in the mirror. To have a fellow Demi-God offer his name as an endorsement on the jacket of your new book is an accolade far more important to them than the support of the great unwashed.
Case in point. Bill Ryerson referred to Suzuki as “David” just after meeting him, and he presented the Asch hypothesis as alternative to my sordid revelations about Suzuki having been “bought off”. I told him that Canada has its David Gelbaums too, but they are powerful credit institutions not maverick billionaires. Now, yesterday, Ryerson’s bulletin features the 1992 Rio speech of Suzuki’s daughter, Severn. Severn is Suzuki’s star, his heir to the thrown. I sent Ryerson my essay of last August, the one you never commented on or printed, called “Severn Suzuki Did Not Invent Doomsday”, about how Severn’s west side life was vastly different than my working class east side life, and that she had no right to tell an international audience how “good” my life has been. Then I presented my essay, the one appended to it, about how I (and my generation) was terrorized by the threat of nuclear war, a threat that may yet materialize when the desperate scramble for resources ensues. “Confessions of a Cave Dweller”. Ryerson will likely never print that either. And now Robert Bateman just met with “David”. I still don’t have a report about that meeting. My fear is that David’s selective charm might have the same effect as Hitler did on our Prime Minister Mackenzie King. King was entranced by the Fuhrer’s graciousness and civility. ‘A reasonable fellow, that German Chancellor is.’ We after all, are members of the OLD BOYS CLUB. What Katherine Betts called THE NEW CLASS.
Charm, BTW, means squat to Mother Nature. She prefers an abrasive, gauche neo-Malthusian jerk to a cultured professor of urban planning and “smart” growth at UBC. Just ask Her in a decade or two, when she casts Her vote in the global referendum on over-shoot. Result: Humans, Ney, 8 billion. Mother Nature Yea. Winner Mother Nature. Gaia wins everytime.
I am beginning to appreciate Pol Pot now. First, cull the intelligentsia. The elite club of the Erudite Cosmopolitan Myopics and Quislings (ECMQ) who prefer to smooze with celebrities rather than roll up their sleeves and get down dirty in the trenches, at the grass roots level where the front line is. Who would Coulter prefer to speak to, a mass of protesters in Melbourne protesting growth, pickets protesting a new development that threatens kangaroos, or to a Premier holding a cocktail glass? If it is the latter, then he is a fully paid up member of the ECMQ club, one which includes our entire Green ‘intellegentsia’ in Canada. Even Farley Mowat has been corrupted, compromised and beguiled by the presence of a demi-goddess, Elizabeth May.
As I am tired of saying, our first stumbling block is not the developers, nor the ethnic spokesmen, nor any of the political parties. It is these revered green mouthpieces who capture our anger, our donations, our time and our energy and then use it strike up a mutual back-scratching bargain with our enemies on the QT. Therefore the Green Establishment IS our enemy. Our public enemy Number One. You can’t move forward until you turn and deal with the “friends” who are stabbing you in the back.
Case in point. Bill Ryerson referred to Suzuki as “David” just after meeting him, and he presented the Asch hypothesis as alternative to my sordid revelations about Suzuki having been “bought off”. I told him that Canada has its David Gelbaums too, but they are powerful credit institutions not maverick billionaires. Now, yesterday, Ryerson’s bulletin features the 1992 Rio speech of Suzuki’s daughter, Severn. Severn is Suzuki’s star, his heir to the thrown. I sent Ryerson my essay of last August, the one you never commented on or printed, called “Severn Suzuki Did Not Invent Doomsday”, about how Severn’s west side life was vastly different than my working class east side life, and that she had no right to tell an international audience how “good” my life has been. Then I presented my essay, the one appended to it, about how I (and my generation) was terrorized by the threat of nuclear war, a threat that may yet materialize when the desperate scramble for resources ensues. “Confessions of a Cave Dweller”. Ryerson will likely never print that either. And now Robert Bateman just met with “David”. I still don’t have a report about that meeting. My fear is that David’s selective charm might have the same effect as Hitler did on our Prime Minister Mackenzie King. King was entranced by the Fuhrer’s graciousness and civility. ‘A reasonable fellow, that German Chancellor is.’ We after all, are members of the OLD BOYS CLUB. What Katherine Betts called THE NEW CLASS.
Charm, BTW, means squat to Mother Nature. She prefers an abrasive, gauche neo-Malthusian jerk to a cultured professor of urban planning and “smart” growth at UBC. Just ask Her in a decade or two, when she casts Her vote in the global referendum on over-shoot. Result: Humans, Ney, 8 billion. Mother Nature Yea. Winner Mother Nature. Gaia wins everytime.
I am beginning to appreciate Pol Pot now. First, cull the intelligentsia. The elite club of the Erudite Cosmopolitan Myopics and Quislings (ECMQ) who prefer to smooze with celebrities rather than roll up their sleeves and get down dirty in the trenches, at the grass roots level where the front line is. Who would Coulter prefer to speak to, a mass of protesters in Melbourne protesting growth, pickets protesting a new development that threatens kangaroos, or to a Premier holding a cocktail glass? If it is the latter, then he is a fully paid up member of the ECMQ club, one which includes our entire Green ‘intellegentsia’ in Canada. Even Farley Mowat has been corrupted, compromised and beguiled by the presence of a demi-goddess, Elizabeth May.
As I am tired of saying, our first stumbling block is not the developers, nor the ethnic spokesmen, nor any of the political parties. It is these revered green mouthpieces who capture our anger, our donations, our time and our energy and then use it strike up a mutual back-scratching bargain with our enemies on the QT. Therefore the Green Establishment IS our enemy. Our public enemy Number One. You can’t move forward until you turn and deal with the “friends” who are stabbing you in the back.
SEVERN SUZUKI DID NOT INVENT DOOMSDAY
“In my life, I have dreamt of seeing the great hearts of animals, jungles and rainforests full of birds and butterflies, but now I wonder if they will even exist for my children to see.” The then twelve year old daughter of Dr. David Suzuki, Severn Suzuki, then asked,
“Did you have to worry about those little things when you were my age?
No Severn, I didn’t, actually. I only had to worry about living long enough to see out the end of the week. You see, my twelfth birthday came on October 14, 1962. Smack in the middle of the Cuban missile crisis. Every day and every night we were riveted to our tiny TV sets in our tiny working class homes on the poor east side of Vancouver, a world away from the upscale west side of town you grew up in, where celebrity environmentalists oblivious to our hardship travel about to scold us for over-consumption. As you will read in the following testament, my generation too, had its “little things” to worry about.
THE GENESIS OF A CAVE-DWELLER
My life as a cave-dweller really began during the cold war while I was in my mother’s womb. Our house had the misfortune of being situated just two blocks from the air raid siren on the water tower that dominated the hill, which was in fact a 750 foot mountain.
Like a Pavlovian dog I was trained to drop everything, turn and run in full flight for home when that siren went off, and it went off randomly about once or twice a week for the first dozen years of my life. At times I felt that I was living in a firehall, except I never was guaranteed a block of four days respite with union pay.
Most of the time I kept within a five minute sprint of home base, but when I started kindergarten at age five, I was three blocks away down the hill, and had to content myself with taking cover under one of Mrs.Yorston’s desks, along with the other children. In September of 1955, just one month shy of my sixth birthday, I had to make the long one mile trek down the other side of the mountain to the elementary school to Grade One. I was so terrified of being that far away from my mother’s protection that she accompanied me to school everyday for the first ten days and actually sat in the classroom with me. When the siren finally went off, the teacher, Mrs.Gillespie, had all the kids hide under the desks just as in kindergarten. But somehow, I felt safer with my mother there as an added psychological buffer.
A year later I was walking home from school with my neighbour and girlfriend Daphne, whom I had promised to marry. We had managed to get within just two blocks from home when that damned siren went off again. We ran for our lives. By the time she reached her mother she was in hysterics. Welcome to the 1950s. The Golden Era.
I managed to hold it together until my twelfth birthday, which I sincerely thought was going to be my last. October 14, 1962. Yes, I truly believed, along with most of my classmates and I surmised, many adults, we were all going to die very soon. The Cuban missile crisis. This was it. 9/11 Terrorism.Y2K. Bird Flu. Al Gore’s Global Warming were a piece of cake. Nothing in life will ever match the feeling of despair and doom of those ten days in October of 62. For most of my boyhood I begged my parents to build a bomb shelter. But sensibly, they refused to build one. They had many reasons. But their main one was, “What if we are the only ones with a shelter and the bombs drop--- are you going to keep your friends out--- can you keep them out?”
I never realized how the Nuclear Terror affected me until about a year ago, that’s right, four decades later, when I observed my dog Barney. That requires an explanation.
As a boy, I would frequently do a disappearing act. My mother would call me without success and then two brothers, a father and two grandparents would scour the house and the yard looking for me. Invariably they would find me sleeping in a cupboard or a drawer with a pillow or blanket even when I was as old as nine years. My father would not build a bomb shelter, so apparently I would find a place that would give me that feeling of safety.
Barney, I notice, is much the same way. I offer him the very best and most capacious of three different beds. But when I turn my back I often find him curled up in the cramped , dark confines of the back of my car where he feels it is safe and cozy. The first seven months of his life were spent in a crate like that.
To this day I must sleep in the inner most recesses of the house, in the basement, in the darkest room, with the windows covered with cardboard and foam to block out the light. I feel threatened by light, brightness and brilliant sunshine---a nuclear blast is my definition of hell. “Gloomy” landscapes inspire comfort. The venues of the Bronte novels, dark stately manors, overcast skies that shadow dark moors also soothe me. There is also nothing that tempts me more than a trail through a dark forest. The Munsters were the first normal family I ever saw on television. When I arrived on Quadra my doctor suggested that I buy a special lamp from the drug store to counter-act SADS (depression) during the winter. On the contrary, I really need a dark shroud to cover the house to combat depression during the summer. Or better still, build a bomb shelter and live in it. Hitler’s residence in the dark forest of East Prussia, “The Wolf’s Lair” would be my Dream Home. The last place I would ever go for a vacation would be sunny Mexico. The last thing I would ever wear would be sunscreen.
That is what the Cold War did for me. I am a Cave-Dweller. Only my dog understands.
POSTCRIPT:
Every generation, it seems, faces a unique test, and emerges stronger or traumatized. Those that follow sometimes arrogantly assume that they invented the end of the world. Biodiversity loss and climate change are indeed calamities that could deal our species out of the game. But so was nuclear war, and it is in our fixation on environmental threats, that we have forgotten to notice the gathering storm clouds. I look over my shoulder at Iran, Israel and the White House, the probability of resource wars, and I just can’t get the monkey of fearing the Bomb off my back. Much in the way my parents couldn’t forget living through the Depression. Like a huckster at a carnival, the Grim Reaper may be playing a shell game with us. We are looking at the two shells labeled climate change and species loss. But the pea is under the one that says “all-out nuclear free-for-all”. Wouldn’t that be the irony. Both Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon lose their bet. To Dr. Strangelove.
Tim Murray
Quadra Island, BC
August 30, 2008
“Did you have to worry about those little things when you were my age?
No Severn, I didn’t, actually. I only had to worry about living long enough to see out the end of the week. You see, my twelfth birthday came on October 14, 1962. Smack in the middle of the Cuban missile crisis. Every day and every night we were riveted to our tiny TV sets in our tiny working class homes on the poor east side of Vancouver, a world away from the upscale west side of town you grew up in, where celebrity environmentalists oblivious to our hardship travel about to scold us for over-consumption. As you will read in the following testament, my generation too, had its “little things” to worry about.
THE GENESIS OF A CAVE-DWELLER
My life as a cave-dweller really began during the cold war while I was in my mother’s womb. Our house had the misfortune of being situated just two blocks from the air raid siren on the water tower that dominated the hill, which was in fact a 750 foot mountain.
Like a Pavlovian dog I was trained to drop everything, turn and run in full flight for home when that siren went off, and it went off randomly about once or twice a week for the first dozen years of my life. At times I felt that I was living in a firehall, except I never was guaranteed a block of four days respite with union pay.
Most of the time I kept within a five minute sprint of home base, but when I started kindergarten at age five, I was three blocks away down the hill, and had to content myself with taking cover under one of Mrs.Yorston’s desks, along with the other children. In September of 1955, just one month shy of my sixth birthday, I had to make the long one mile trek down the other side of the mountain to the elementary school to Grade One. I was so terrified of being that far away from my mother’s protection that she accompanied me to school everyday for the first ten days and actually sat in the classroom with me. When the siren finally went off, the teacher, Mrs.Gillespie, had all the kids hide under the desks just as in kindergarten. But somehow, I felt safer with my mother there as an added psychological buffer.
A year later I was walking home from school with my neighbour and girlfriend Daphne, whom I had promised to marry. We had managed to get within just two blocks from home when that damned siren went off again. We ran for our lives. By the time she reached her mother she was in hysterics. Welcome to the 1950s. The Golden Era.
I managed to hold it together until my twelfth birthday, which I sincerely thought was going to be my last. October 14, 1962. Yes, I truly believed, along with most of my classmates and I surmised, many adults, we were all going to die very soon. The Cuban missile crisis. This was it. 9/11 Terrorism.Y2K. Bird Flu. Al Gore’s Global Warming were a piece of cake. Nothing in life will ever match the feeling of despair and doom of those ten days in October of 62. For most of my boyhood I begged my parents to build a bomb shelter. But sensibly, they refused to build one. They had many reasons. But their main one was, “What if we are the only ones with a shelter and the bombs drop--- are you going to keep your friends out--- can you keep them out?”
I never realized how the Nuclear Terror affected me until about a year ago, that’s right, four decades later, when I observed my dog Barney. That requires an explanation.
As a boy, I would frequently do a disappearing act. My mother would call me without success and then two brothers, a father and two grandparents would scour the house and the yard looking for me. Invariably they would find me sleeping in a cupboard or a drawer with a pillow or blanket even when I was as old as nine years. My father would not build a bomb shelter, so apparently I would find a place that would give me that feeling of safety.
Barney, I notice, is much the same way. I offer him the very best and most capacious of three different beds. But when I turn my back I often find him curled up in the cramped , dark confines of the back of my car where he feels it is safe and cozy. The first seven months of his life were spent in a crate like that.
To this day I must sleep in the inner most recesses of the house, in the basement, in the darkest room, with the windows covered with cardboard and foam to block out the light. I feel threatened by light, brightness and brilliant sunshine---a nuclear blast is my definition of hell. “Gloomy” landscapes inspire comfort. The venues of the Bronte novels, dark stately manors, overcast skies that shadow dark moors also soothe me. There is also nothing that tempts me more than a trail through a dark forest. The Munsters were the first normal family I ever saw on television. When I arrived on Quadra my doctor suggested that I buy a special lamp from the drug store to counter-act SADS (depression) during the winter. On the contrary, I really need a dark shroud to cover the house to combat depression during the summer. Or better still, build a bomb shelter and live in it. Hitler’s residence in the dark forest of East Prussia, “The Wolf’s Lair” would be my Dream Home. The last place I would ever go for a vacation would be sunny Mexico. The last thing I would ever wear would be sunscreen.
That is what the Cold War did for me. I am a Cave-Dweller. Only my dog understands.
POSTCRIPT:
Every generation, it seems, faces a unique test, and emerges stronger or traumatized. Those that follow sometimes arrogantly assume that they invented the end of the world. Biodiversity loss and climate change are indeed calamities that could deal our species out of the game. But so was nuclear war, and it is in our fixation on environmental threats, that we have forgotten to notice the gathering storm clouds. I look over my shoulder at Iran, Israel and the White House, the probability of resource wars, and I just can’t get the monkey of fearing the Bomb off my back. Much in the way my parents couldn’t forget living through the Depression. Like a huckster at a carnival, the Grim Reaper may be playing a shell game with us. We are looking at the two shells labeled climate change and species loss. But the pea is under the one that says “all-out nuclear free-for-all”. Wouldn’t that be the irony. Both Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon lose their bet. To Dr. Strangelove.
Tim Murray
Quadra Island, BC
August 30, 2008
WHEN LEFT-WING GROWTHIST GATE KEEPERS WILL NO LONGER STIFLE OUR VOICE
So the editor of Canadian Dimension, Cy Gonick, will not publish the neo-Malthusian perspectives of Brishen Hoff, President of Biodiversity First, because they are too “simplistic”. http://biodiversityfirst.googlepages.com/index.htm
As a university student in the early seventies and late sixties, I subscribed to Cy Gonick’s Canadian Dimension, and read HIS simplistic socialist message until I could stand no more. Don’t you know? To him and his stable of contributors, the world’s problems are all down to “capitalism”. Not industrial civilization or civilization itself. But to this particular form of industrial civilization. There is enough to go around, you see. Just as Marx was trying to tell Malthus more than a century ago. All we have to do is to re-arrange industrial civilization so that the have-nots share the “bounty”. The earth is just bursting with treasures, but the corporate capitalists are holding the key to this Fort Knox of plenty. There is enough food to feed everyone-----but it just isn’t being distributed fairly or efficiently. There is enough room for everyone too. It just requires proper “planning” to protect designated areas of park, farmland, nature etc. Oh yes, in 2009, Marxists are on the green bandwagon too. So there is no space for Hoff’s kind of “simplistic” reasoning. That is, his reactionary idea that population growth is the multiplier of all evils, and that whether you have a socialist or a capitalist agenda, every problem from feeding, housing and educating the masses to defending agricultural and biodiverse lands and oceans is made so much harder to tackle in the context of too many people.
Yep, it is all the fault of “capitalism”. And when socialist regimes in the Soviet Bloc, China, North Korea or Zimbabwe make an even bigger mess of the environment than the capitalist ones, well, you see, it is because “they aren’t really socialist”, but examples of “state capitalism”. Or simply because one individual and the personality cult that develops around him, hijacks the revolution and governs as a dictator. Funny how that always seems to happen though, isn’t it? Funny because socialists, as we see in Canada, Britain, Australia etc. are such paragons and champions of free speech, always willing to let “a hundred flowers bloom and a thousand thoughts contend”. That is of course, if those thoughts aren’t “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic ad infinitum”. And what objective criteria exists for identifying whether opinions are “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic ad infinitum”? Why, the objective criteria of the socialists’ subjectivity, naturally. It all depends on whether one of the identity groups that make up the socialist coalition chooses to be offended by your remark. Then the remark becomes the simplistic expression of bigotry or ignorance, and must be shut out to protect authentic democracy. Only “progressive”, “constructive” speech is to be permitted. This is known as “Repressive Tolerance”, the doctrine articulated by the father of contemporary Western left-wing totalitarianism, Herbert Marcuse. No free speech to “fascists”.
Getting a neo-Malthusian article printed in Canadian Dimension would be like the Catholic Weekly printing an article from Watchtower magazine. Far too disturbing to their comfort zone. Why, they might have start thinking and observing what is happening around them, and Good God, they might have to then go shopping for a new paradigm. Better to hold fast to the old one. After all, it has only been around since 1848 and the world hasn’t changed a bit since then, has it? Marx only died yesterday, in 1883. He had ALL the answers then so let’s just confine ourselves to repeating and fine-tuning them. As the leading monk in “The Name of the Rose” warned the protagonist, played by Sean Connery, knowledge must consist of merely repeating the revealed truth of the past, not trying to break new ground with fresh discoveries. That is vanity at its worst. For there is nothing new under the sun. And the villainous monk said something else too. To respect God we must fear Him, but laughter undermines that fear. This is something I have taken to heart. I never dare to tell politically incorrect jokes or write satire. Humour is a form of art, and art must serve the revolution, that is, the politically correct agenda of the month.
Who shall then judge art? Well those who KNOW BETTER of course. The gatekeepers of expression. The editors of left wing rags and the government bureaucrats who censor and threaten you on the one hand, and on the other hand use taxpayers money to subsidize bohemian dead beats so that we may have “art” as they define it. The concept of cutting arts funding so that you or I might benefit from lower taxes and therefore purchase OUR kind of “art” is something quite unacceptable to them. We have what Marx called “false consciousness” you see, that is a belief system not in harmony with “our” true interests as they see them. In other words not consistent with their world view. The view of those who KNOW BETTER. We are the rednecks, the great unwashed, the ignorant, and we are not to be trusted with our own judgment. Is it any wonder then, why they are not impressed with our demands for direct democracy? To them, direct democracy is just “mob” rule. And we can’t have that. Because we are inherently “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic etc etc.” And they are enlightened.
Pity then that their party will soon be over. For the mechanisms of censorship, thought persecutions and the manufactured consent of state broadcasting and public education all depend on the inflated tax revenues from a fossil fuel economy. “Progressive” McCarthyism has been living high on the hog for the last four decades because all the Human Rights Tribunals, the government anti-villification watchdogs, the Womens Studies (Fem-Nazi indoctrination) College courses, the “Hostile Work Environment Thought Police”, the Multicultural state-subsidizied propaganda to engineer our attitudes----all of this machinery of social sculpting and intimidation---requires generous taxpayer funding. When that collapses with Kunstlerian certainty, “soft” totalitarianism will collapse with it, like a House of Cards, like the regimes on the other side of the Berlin Wall suddenly did. Then Mr. Gonick and his ilk will have to find real work and become one of the working class in whose name he has written for so long. And then we will no longer approach them as supplicants, but instead look to our own devices to “educate” people on a more even playing field. As horrible as the Long Emergency may be, the pleasure of seeing those WHO KNOW BETTER knocked off their perch will be compensation enough for me.
As a university student in the early seventies and late sixties, I subscribed to Cy Gonick’s Canadian Dimension, and read HIS simplistic socialist message until I could stand no more. Don’t you know? To him and his stable of contributors, the world’s problems are all down to “capitalism”. Not industrial civilization or civilization itself. But to this particular form of industrial civilization. There is enough to go around, you see. Just as Marx was trying to tell Malthus more than a century ago. All we have to do is to re-arrange industrial civilization so that the have-nots share the “bounty”. The earth is just bursting with treasures, but the corporate capitalists are holding the key to this Fort Knox of plenty. There is enough food to feed everyone-----but it just isn’t being distributed fairly or efficiently. There is enough room for everyone too. It just requires proper “planning” to protect designated areas of park, farmland, nature etc. Oh yes, in 2009, Marxists are on the green bandwagon too. So there is no space for Hoff’s kind of “simplistic” reasoning. That is, his reactionary idea that population growth is the multiplier of all evils, and that whether you have a socialist or a capitalist agenda, every problem from feeding, housing and educating the masses to defending agricultural and biodiverse lands and oceans is made so much harder to tackle in the context of too many people.
Yep, it is all the fault of “capitalism”. And when socialist regimes in the Soviet Bloc, China, North Korea or Zimbabwe make an even bigger mess of the environment than the capitalist ones, well, you see, it is because “they aren’t really socialist”, but examples of “state capitalism”. Or simply because one individual and the personality cult that develops around him, hijacks the revolution and governs as a dictator. Funny how that always seems to happen though, isn’t it? Funny because socialists, as we see in Canada, Britain, Australia etc. are such paragons and champions of free speech, always willing to let “a hundred flowers bloom and a thousand thoughts contend”. That is of course, if those thoughts aren’t “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic ad infinitum”. And what objective criteria exists for identifying whether opinions are “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic ad infinitum”? Why, the objective criteria of the socialists’ subjectivity, naturally. It all depends on whether one of the identity groups that make up the socialist coalition chooses to be offended by your remark. Then the remark becomes the simplistic expression of bigotry or ignorance, and must be shut out to protect authentic democracy. Only “progressive”, “constructive” speech is to be permitted. This is known as “Repressive Tolerance”, the doctrine articulated by the father of contemporary Western left-wing totalitarianism, Herbert Marcuse. No free speech to “fascists”.
Getting a neo-Malthusian article printed in Canadian Dimension would be like the Catholic Weekly printing an article from Watchtower magazine. Far too disturbing to their comfort zone. Why, they might have start thinking and observing what is happening around them, and Good God, they might have to then go shopping for a new paradigm. Better to hold fast to the old one. After all, it has only been around since 1848 and the world hasn’t changed a bit since then, has it? Marx only died yesterday, in 1883. He had ALL the answers then so let’s just confine ourselves to repeating and fine-tuning them. As the leading monk in “The Name of the Rose” warned the protagonist, played by Sean Connery, knowledge must consist of merely repeating the revealed truth of the past, not trying to break new ground with fresh discoveries. That is vanity at its worst. For there is nothing new under the sun. And the villainous monk said something else too. To respect God we must fear Him, but laughter undermines that fear. This is something I have taken to heart. I never dare to tell politically incorrect jokes or write satire. Humour is a form of art, and art must serve the revolution, that is, the politically correct agenda of the month.
Who shall then judge art? Well those who KNOW BETTER of course. The gatekeepers of expression. The editors of left wing rags and the government bureaucrats who censor and threaten you on the one hand, and on the other hand use taxpayers money to subsidize bohemian dead beats so that we may have “art” as they define it. The concept of cutting arts funding so that you or I might benefit from lower taxes and therefore purchase OUR kind of “art” is something quite unacceptable to them. We have what Marx called “false consciousness” you see, that is a belief system not in harmony with “our” true interests as they see them. In other words not consistent with their world view. The view of those who KNOW BETTER. We are the rednecks, the great unwashed, the ignorant, and we are not to be trusted with our own judgment. Is it any wonder then, why they are not impressed with our demands for direct democracy? To them, direct democracy is just “mob” rule. And we can’t have that. Because we are inherently “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic etc etc.” And they are enlightened.
Pity then that their party will soon be over. For the mechanisms of censorship, thought persecutions and the manufactured consent of state broadcasting and public education all depend on the inflated tax revenues from a fossil fuel economy. “Progressive” McCarthyism has been living high on the hog for the last four decades because all the Human Rights Tribunals, the government anti-villification watchdogs, the Womens Studies (Fem-Nazi indoctrination) College courses, the “Hostile Work Environment Thought Police”, the Multicultural state-subsidizied propaganda to engineer our attitudes----all of this machinery of social sculpting and intimidation---requires generous taxpayer funding. When that collapses with Kunstlerian certainty, “soft” totalitarianism will collapse with it, like a House of Cards, like the regimes on the other side of the Berlin Wall suddenly did. Then Mr. Gonick and his ilk will have to find real work and become one of the working class in whose name he has written for so long. And then we will no longer approach them as supplicants, but instead look to our own devices to “educate” people on a more even playing field. As horrible as the Long Emergency may be, the pleasure of seeing those WHO KNOW BETTER knocked off their perch will be compensation enough for me.
WHEN WILL CANADA FIND RELIEF FROM INTELLECTUAL TERRORISM?
US College Speech Code Enforcers Face Penalties
http://chronicle.com/daily/2009/01/9630n.htm
At last a victory for free speech. But Canada does not have the 1st amendment, and America does not have a state broadcasting network to smother intellectual independence. The task of rooting out political correctness from our public education system, and CBC Pravda, is most probably an insuperable challenge. Only the collapse of our fossil fuel-based economy offers hope, for the mechanisms of totalitarian intimidation and mind-bending---the human rights tribunals, the workplace harassment guidelines and the ubiquitous CBC---are utterly dependent on the revenues that a post-carbon world will not yield. Judges, complaint officers, trade union ideologues and other factions of the Thought Police will not work for free. They demand the salaries and perks that this artificial economy has provided them. When the power down occurs, those who have made it their life to look for reasons to be “offended” will suddenly have to learn to grow a hide and experience the cold wind of an authentic democracy. They have lived in the hothouse environment of complete immunity from criticism for so long that the shock of freedom will kill them.
Imagine having to endure a dumb blond joke, a judgment on your lifestyle, a critique of your cultural heritage, or a surrender of the victim-role that you used as a club to beat down critics. Life is tough. Especially when you have relied upon the state funded propaganda machine to shield you. Finally you will learn that tolerance was never meant to require mandatory approval. Of course the collapse of state intellectual coercion from under-funding will also mean the starvation of the health and educational systems. Good deal. Then perhaps people might have a chance to get healthy and smart.
If I valued security, free medical care and access to approved information at the cost of my freedom, I would have arranged to be the guest of one of our federal prisons. They guarantee socialized medicine, free housing and access to the approved books of the prison library to all their inmates. The catch is you give up your freedom. Sounds like the bargain all Canadians made a decade or so ago.
http://chronicle.com/daily/2009/01/9630n.htm
At last a victory for free speech. But Canada does not have the 1st amendment, and America does not have a state broadcasting network to smother intellectual independence. The task of rooting out political correctness from our public education system, and CBC Pravda, is most probably an insuperable challenge. Only the collapse of our fossil fuel-based economy offers hope, for the mechanisms of totalitarian intimidation and mind-bending---the human rights tribunals, the workplace harassment guidelines and the ubiquitous CBC---are utterly dependent on the revenues that a post-carbon world will not yield. Judges, complaint officers, trade union ideologues and other factions of the Thought Police will not work for free. They demand the salaries and perks that this artificial economy has provided them. When the power down occurs, those who have made it their life to look for reasons to be “offended” will suddenly have to learn to grow a hide and experience the cold wind of an authentic democracy. They have lived in the hothouse environment of complete immunity from criticism for so long that the shock of freedom will kill them.
Imagine having to endure a dumb blond joke, a judgment on your lifestyle, a critique of your cultural heritage, or a surrender of the victim-role that you used as a club to beat down critics. Life is tough. Especially when you have relied upon the state funded propaganda machine to shield you. Finally you will learn that tolerance was never meant to require mandatory approval. Of course the collapse of state intellectual coercion from under-funding will also mean the starvation of the health and educational systems. Good deal. Then perhaps people might have a chance to get healthy and smart.
If I valued security, free medical care and access to approved information at the cost of my freedom, I would have arranged to be the guest of one of our federal prisons. They guarantee socialized medicine, free housing and access to the approved books of the prison library to all their inmates. The catch is you give up your freedom. Sounds like the bargain all Canadians made a decade or so ago.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Shhh!!! IN CANADA MOST EVERYBODY NOW IS A SCHOOL LIBRARIAN
Shhh! You can’t say that. This is Canada. You might offend someone! God forbid if he should have his beliefs questioned. In a democracy of all places. We once were a nation of two solitudes, English and French. Now it seems to be the ambition of government, in all its guises and agencies, to create a Canada of 33 million solitudes, each defended from incoming ideas that might disturb his comfort zone. A Canada where no one can talk to anyone, a democracy that cannot have a real national conversation about anything of fundamental importance. Like the role religion should play in our lives. Our right to make our own choices. Or our right to determine what our population level should be.
Case in point. The Halifax Transit Authority recently refused to place an ad from “Humanist Canada” that did not even question the existence of God, but only the need for God. It simply wanted to tell the people of Halifax that “You can be good without God”. To the bus company, that message is too incendiary. After all, too many of the 75% of Canadians who believe in God and His importance might experience a sudden outbreak of goodness from 8 million non-believers and have their whole belief system rocked. At the very least, they might become upset. Oh dear me, imagine becoming upset. That clearly violates our Constitution under the Section reading, “As a Canadian you are guaranteed the absolute right never to be upset by contrarian opinions.” That is reflective of our more famous assertion that our country is devoted to “Peace, order and good government”. A dream never realized in any of those categories. But still a dream worth pursuing obviously. Not like the American commitment to “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Who needs liberty? It only upsets the peace.
One appreciates the fact, of course, that Canada is not the only beneficiary of this British attitude. After all, last year the town council of Peterborough, England, saw fit to spend the taxpayers’ money on prosecuting and fining a man who dared to wear a T-shirt adorned with a slogan they thought inappropriate for the tender eyes of his fellow citizens. But hey, we invented Official Multiculturalism for Darwin’s sake, and enshrined the concept that citizens have the right never to be offended.
The fallacy is, though, that citizens of any kind are offended. Rather, they choose to take offence, and are encouraged and programmed to look for opportunities to be offended by, that is, to take offence at. After all, if one can offended enough times, it earns persecution points in the quest to have your chosen identity category be certified as a legitimate and officially designated “victim” group. Once you earn that status, you are guaranteed state immunity from criticism. Thereafter, any legitimate criticism of your group can only be tolerated if it comes from within your group. That is quite a recipe for a healthy democracy, isn’t it?
On the contrary, a healthy democracy is not a Diversity Hyper-Sensitivity session. Its mission is to encourage a diversity of opinions, thoughts and ideas. Not to smother expression of differences in the name of harmony, for harmony does not follow from censorship but from the full ventilation of differences. Don’t believe me? Ask the people in the former Yugoslavian Republic of Serene Tolerance. Only by having those differences defined by public debate can they be resolved. But tell those in government that, or the agencies of government, like the Halifax Metro Transit Authority. They insisted that they will not advertise a message that is “controversial or upsetting”, leading the President of Humanist Canada, Pat O’Brien, to ask:
“It would be interesting to see what vegans think about the KFC ads---I mean, at what point do you stop offending people?”
Case in point. The Halifax Transit Authority recently refused to place an ad from “Humanist Canada” that did not even question the existence of God, but only the need for God. It simply wanted to tell the people of Halifax that “You can be good without God”. To the bus company, that message is too incendiary. After all, too many of the 75% of Canadians who believe in God and His importance might experience a sudden outbreak of goodness from 8 million non-believers and have their whole belief system rocked. At the very least, they might become upset. Oh dear me, imagine becoming upset. That clearly violates our Constitution under the Section reading, “As a Canadian you are guaranteed the absolute right never to be upset by contrarian opinions.” That is reflective of our more famous assertion that our country is devoted to “Peace, order and good government”. A dream never realized in any of those categories. But still a dream worth pursuing obviously. Not like the American commitment to “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Who needs liberty? It only upsets the peace.
One appreciates the fact, of course, that Canada is not the only beneficiary of this British attitude. After all, last year the town council of Peterborough, England, saw fit to spend the taxpayers’ money on prosecuting and fining a man who dared to wear a T-shirt adorned with a slogan they thought inappropriate for the tender eyes of his fellow citizens. But hey, we invented Official Multiculturalism for Darwin’s sake, and enshrined the concept that citizens have the right never to be offended.
The fallacy is, though, that citizens of any kind are offended. Rather, they choose to take offence, and are encouraged and programmed to look for opportunities to be offended by, that is, to take offence at. After all, if one can offended enough times, it earns persecution points in the quest to have your chosen identity category be certified as a legitimate and officially designated “victim” group. Once you earn that status, you are guaranteed state immunity from criticism. Thereafter, any legitimate criticism of your group can only be tolerated if it comes from within your group. That is quite a recipe for a healthy democracy, isn’t it?
On the contrary, a healthy democracy is not a Diversity Hyper-Sensitivity session. Its mission is to encourage a diversity of opinions, thoughts and ideas. Not to smother expression of differences in the name of harmony, for harmony does not follow from censorship but from the full ventilation of differences. Don’t believe me? Ask the people in the former Yugoslavian Republic of Serene Tolerance. Only by having those differences defined by public debate can they be resolved. But tell those in government that, or the agencies of government, like the Halifax Metro Transit Authority. They insisted that they will not advertise a message that is “controversial or upsetting”, leading the President of Humanist Canada, Pat O’Brien, to ask:
“It would be interesting to see what vegans think about the KFC ads---I mean, at what point do you stop offending people?”
BROWN LIVING TIPS----A Million Acts of Unkindness to Save Species From Human Population Growth
According to Brishen Hoff, essentially,“Buying local means buying more environmental degradation”. This would make a good chapter in a broadside called “Bring on the Apocalypse”. Included: Gentlemen, “Idle Your Engines” and “A Neo-Malthusian Garbage Strike”. Inside this anthology must also be“Brown Living Tips—a million acts to save species from daily Human growth”. I will say that I too made a life style change. I pulled out my CFL lights, I now buy regular and not premium gasoline, I mix my garbage and I eat as much beef as I can. I also discourage tourism by being gratuitously unfriendly to outsiders and giving them bum directions. I don’t report fallen trees across the hiking trails so that they may not be quickly repaired by the Sierra Club whose trail maintenance only attracts more tourists and potential residents. If a tourist is gay I will pretend to be homophobic. If he is homophobic I will pretend to be a member of a thriving gay community. If he is Christian and wants to know if there are many welcoming churches in the area I will tell him that atheists drove them off the island and that the only meeting hall is run by humanists. If he is Jewish like one tourist I met last June and asks me if there is any anti-Semitism here I will tell him that there isn’t anymore after all the Jews left town. If he is anti-semitic I will tell him that I am president of the local 500 member chapter of B’nai Brith. If a stranger asks me where he can buy a fishing licence I will tell him that none are sold because our lakes have been fished out. The possibilities are endless. The number of Brown living tips are too many to count. But they will all serve one Higher Environmental Purpose. TO KEEP OUR NUMBERS DOWN. Each day 200 species die out because we live on---and keep growing.
Which makes me suggest yet another statement for our Biodiversity First Vision Statements. That we believe in the establishment of an Anti-Tourism Department which will discourage people from coming to Canada. Slogan “Come to Canada, Where you will either FREEZE YOUR ASS in the winter or be EATEN ALIVE by black flies in the summer.” Or “Canada, Not Where You Want to Be, Believe Me”. An aggressive marketing plan by the Ministry of Immigration to highlight all the negative facts of life about our country posted across the four corners of the earth should be started. Instead of encouraging people to come with their culture intact we will announce restrictions that would make their life here impossible. American immigration applicants would be told that they will be arrested if heard speaking without putting an “ly” after adverbs and saying “Huh” when they should say “eh”. And all would have to swear off 4-down football. The Germans won’t be welcome unless they laugh audibly at jokes none of which they seem to get. Italians will be fined for using hand gestures while talking. Poles will be told that they must keep an even keel and never go into the plumbing business. Irish newcomers will be told that no drinking is allowed on the premises. Anywhere. Australians will be informed that they are prohibited from skiing or partying. And so on. Life in a straight jacket. A prohibition customized for every group. Accompanied by films about the horrors have having children, especially by teens, who will be shown as young parents who have no life. Unwed mothers will once again be stigmatized and those who sired their children social outcasts.
At the very least we should have billboards like they did in Oregon in the early seventies. “Come to Oregon for a visit, but don’t stay”. Unfortunately the research indicates that tourists do stay. Permanently. What is called for to contain local growth is an “Unwelcome Wagon” which drives up to the motel of a prospective buyer and heaps scorn on him. Visitors will be presented upon arrival will be greeted by a booth of Visitor Disinformation. Unhelpful maps and guides will be offered to all those who are confused. Such booths should also be placed at every airport to discourage immigrants. A brochure in several languages should enumerate Canada’s shortcomings. The extreme temperature variations, the lack of professional jobs, gang violence, biodiversity loss etc. And those in the tourist service sector will be required to take courses on how to be surly. Then one fine day we will be able to call it the Inhospitable Industry . Canada’s slogan will become not “Canada, Home to the World” but “Canada, Do not Disturb”.
Which makes me suggest yet another statement for our Biodiversity First Vision Statements. That we believe in the establishment of an Anti-Tourism Department which will discourage people from coming to Canada. Slogan “Come to Canada, Where you will either FREEZE YOUR ASS in the winter or be EATEN ALIVE by black flies in the summer.” Or “Canada, Not Where You Want to Be, Believe Me”. An aggressive marketing plan by the Ministry of Immigration to highlight all the negative facts of life about our country posted across the four corners of the earth should be started. Instead of encouraging people to come with their culture intact we will announce restrictions that would make their life here impossible. American immigration applicants would be told that they will be arrested if heard speaking without putting an “ly” after adverbs and saying “Huh” when they should say “eh”. And all would have to swear off 4-down football. The Germans won’t be welcome unless they laugh audibly at jokes none of which they seem to get. Italians will be fined for using hand gestures while talking. Poles will be told that they must keep an even keel and never go into the plumbing business. Irish newcomers will be told that no drinking is allowed on the premises. Anywhere. Australians will be informed that they are prohibited from skiing or partying. And so on. Life in a straight jacket. A prohibition customized for every group. Accompanied by films about the horrors have having children, especially by teens, who will be shown as young parents who have no life. Unwed mothers will once again be stigmatized and those who sired their children social outcasts.
At the very least we should have billboards like they did in Oregon in the early seventies. “Come to Oregon for a visit, but don’t stay”. Unfortunately the research indicates that tourists do stay. Permanently. What is called for to contain local growth is an “Unwelcome Wagon” which drives up to the motel of a prospective buyer and heaps scorn on him. Visitors will be presented upon arrival will be greeted by a booth of Visitor Disinformation. Unhelpful maps and guides will be offered to all those who are confused. Such booths should also be placed at every airport to discourage immigrants. A brochure in several languages should enumerate Canada’s shortcomings. The extreme temperature variations, the lack of professional jobs, gang violence, biodiversity loss etc. And those in the tourist service sector will be required to take courses on how to be surly. Then one fine day we will be able to call it the Inhospitable Industry . Canada’s slogan will become not “Canada, Home to the World” but “Canada, Do not Disturb”.
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