I'll say it louder for those in the back. NOT PAYING SOMEONE FOR THEIR SPEECH IS NOT ANTI FREE SPEECH. Nobody is stopping you from starting a podcast and saying whatever you want except for the 350 million people in this country who would rather listen to microwave sounds than halfwits preaching moral superiority.
Ditto. The idea that the public should be required to pay, against their desire or interest, to hear someone's opinion is a particularly galling mindset.
Exactly. I have never listened to NPR. But it seems their listener base would support a paid service, or, horrors, they could sell ads. I have watched PBS since childhood, and likely would support a paid version. But why should any news or entertainment purveyor be granted taxpayer funding?
From the NYT Stiglitz piece which is worth reading in full:
"Ultimately, the dean of the Faculty of Humanities stepped in to provide the necessary money and I will deliver my lecture on Wednesday. If the school hadn’t had the resources, I would have gone anyway."
Seems to me this started a looong time ago, all the way back to the Piss Christ controversy of the 1980s. People objected to taxpayer funding for offensive art. Their opponents argued that not funding offensive art amounted to censorship. It seemed to me that throwing the artist in jail or preventing the display of the art would be censorship, but simply telling the artist to find other sources of funding was not.
When you started discussing doing a podcast, I first thought the 350 million number was your estimate of the number of podcasts currently up and going.
But hey, if Taylor Swift's boyfriend's brother's wife can have a podcast, it's open for those who wish to try.
Words themselves are only signs of the real problem, which is the mindset of the person using them.
Learning that someone despises you, or despises a class of people to which you belong, is a legitimate source of unease. You don't know what that person will do to harm you.
Yes. I really don't think we should be using those other words either, referring to men's bodies. As for the F word, I do try to avoid it, but as a verb, it really doesn't affect people as people, in my opinion.
And yet, if he'd called Stiglitz a dick, none of you would have objected even a bit. Writing on a platform seen by men, about a man's body part, and using it in a negative sense is perfectly fine. But a woman's body part? In a negative sense? Cue the smelling salts!
Objections like this play into the illusion that women are fragile, delicate, emotional. That we must be sheltered from any hint of unpleasantness lest we faint dead away.
Yeah, no. Either we're equal or we're not. If it's okay to use "dick" as a casual slur against people you dislike, then "cunt" is okay, too. Hypocrisy sucks. Even when women do it.
That is one word I tread carefully around. The rest of the words discussed here? Not so much. The N-word is the only one that I eliminate from my vocabulary. Have since I was an adolescent. Everything else is fair game.
I think when Matt used that word in a response to a writer defaming him, he referred to the fact that in England, toughs and cops call each other that word as the ultimate insult.
I have a whole list of words that I am forbidding everyone from using because of my feelings. Please wait; I'm assembling the list. (This era can't die fast enough)
Hey Matt, its Sunday, the kids are yelling, and I’m feeling a little lazy so I dropped your article into AI: “Your passage is written in a polemical style that exaggerates to make a cultural point. It contains several factual inaccuracies and oversimplifications:
• Yglesias left Vox voluntarily.
• Rowling didn’t sign the Harper’s Letter.
• Some of the “casualties” had complex or unrelated reasons for their dismissal.”
Here is another point about podcasts. They tend to brand someone as an "authority figure", Just as the articles by known journalists in MSM used to do.
Which is why those hustling Influencers out there use them.
As an example, we had Belgian professor of Psychology Mattias Desmet spring to life on our screens in various podcasts in 2021. Talking about bizarre ideas such as mass transformation. Which was not really bizarre at all if you knew the field. And that this concept was just one small part of a much larger psychological phenomenon. Or that it had been studied by many scholars for centuries. Not new.
But in the podcast versions....Prof. Desmet was some kind of prophetic genius, with all the answers to the crazy behaviour of COVID-mania, and he was going to give us the instructions about how to return it all to normal.
Only....he didn't. It was just a bit of podcast entertainment with one tiny piece of the puzzle. And that piece had been known already for eons. If a person cared to look.
We have to be very careful about fabricating New Media gods. Without understanding the wider context of the information they are offering.
When these land acknowledgements first started, I attended an Anglican cathedral service where we had to sit through it, with eyes rolled. I seriously considered standing up in my pew and responding to the clergyman:
"Well then sell off all of your lucrative property holdings immediately and donate the money to those you claim are the real property owners. Only honest thing to do if you believe this."
There would have been dead silence. And then an usher would have shown me the door.
It isn't Anglican to be exhibitionistic. Console yourself with the recognition that it would have been almost impossible for you to overcome the years of neuroplastic impression.
But I was not Anglican. Just there to support their choir for various reasons (they are a leftwing non-Christian church, but the high-Anglicans do produce sublime choral music).
Not that exhibitionism suits me anyway. Though it does have its uses.
In response to 'land acknowledgments'. All lands were conquered by some group at some point. To have to acknowledge the group you conquered (ages ago) is retarded.
I am part American Indian, and when I hear land acknowledgements, I see them as something of a taunt.
To minimize the disingenuousness of such statement, there should be a fee schedule associated with making one; all tribes should have go-fund-me pages, showing the record of all payments and payees. The minimum charge for making a LandAck should be about $1,000 - LandAcks made in the vicinity of Manhattan would, of course, cost a lot more.
But according to the indigenous peoples, land cannot be bought and sold. They cannot have it both ways.
Besides which, at the height, there were only about 200,000 Siberian descendants in North America prior to European arrival. Mainly in limited tribes.
Why would such a small number assume they and their descendants could own the entire continent? Seems greedy to me. Imagine if the early American colonists said "The door is shut...it's all ours!!"
If it weren’t about money, presumably being here and enjoying the surroundings would be enough. I certainly feel emotionally connected to my home province, distinguishably so as compared to elsewhere. I feel protective over it but I don’t then think it should be under my ownership. I do not accept this should be different based on being of a certain ethnic background.
For the most part I do too. There are some in this ‘movement’ who genuinely are trying to improve the lives of some very demoralized people. I can get behind that. What is plain as the nose on my face is that the overall movement is about vast, incalculable sums of money. IMO the land acknowledgment is a form of conditioning, acclimating people to a new normal where (not sure which!) tribes will become our overall landlords. Look what D. Eby tried to sneak through with land titles. I anticipate a tax akin to property tax on private dwellings, and I guess all Crown lands would be lost. Bafflingly, many people seem to (without knowing the costs and consequences) support this concept.
I consider the indigenous people to be in a Drama Triangle, a psychological concept Stephen Karpman most recently explained to the modern world in the 60s.
There are three roles -- victim/perpetrator/rescuer-hero.
The indigenous people will always be put into the victim role....which of course keeps them there. It is not doing anyone a favour to remain a victim. They will repeat that pattern unwittingly for life unless they consciously shake it off and gain personal agency. Heaping money on them will not change this.
Yes, I agree with you that the land acknowledgements are a normalizing of a destruction tactic. The frog in the pot of slowly boiling water,
The land-grabs are simply another form of totalitarian destruction. By the powers-that-be. Not even really about the indigenous peoples. They are being used as a vehicle. Just as women are being used as a vehicle by the feminists; it is not really about them....but they are made to think so in order to get them to jump on the bandwagon.
A large power wishes to destroy Canada, so that this power can move in and take over. That is my opinion.
The logistics of all of this are brought home to a greater degree in Canada, where there are 650 ethnic indigenous groups, all claiming that they are First Nations. With treaty rights and veto over legislation.
Well....if that ever came to pass, previous legal and governing structures would crumble. If would all have to be re-made. Prior contracts null and void.
I mean, look how quickly that crumbling happened anyway under the dark Troodo regime.
I've been lucky to have participated in sweat lodge rituals a few times over the years. It is a saying used when entering and exiting the lodge. If you get the opportunity I recommend it.
Let me recommend Edward F. Edingers commentary on Jung in EGO AND ARCHETYPE and Robert Moore's old men's movement work on establishing an ego archetype/self axis. (Or for a mind bender explore Jung's view on the enantiodromia built into the Christian myth.) I like Lyons. --Stay strong. Stay clear.
Once upon a time, Nova Scotia used to be a sensible place (apart from the relocated Colorado cultists), and Dalhousie used to be one of the top Canadian universities. By far.
Hard to believe. I actually started to play the embedded video of that poor RCMP woman reading those lines. I stopped after about 5 seconds because she was obviously under duress - parents being held i9n custody to ensure her compliance or some such. God, when law enforcement is so corrupted, you really have no chance. I think all universities North and South of the border are well beyond their use-by dates.
Can I get a particular custom land acknowledgement? My first ancestor from Britain to the New World arrived in Massachusetts in 1650. He later had family, who eventually had a large ownership in Block Island, Rhode Island.
Then, they were deprived of their land (without payment) and sent packing northward, because post-1776 they still sided with the British Crown. As many did. They were United Empire Loyalists. The first group of Americans in a mass deportation.
Remember that Canada has almost 650 indigenous group First Nations, most with treaty rights and a veto on legislation. Right now in Alberta, they are attempting to stop the referendum for other Albertans on whether or not they wish to separate from Canada.
Slaughter the cows. D.E.I., climate change, and gender are cult religions that are destroying our society. The marxist left derives its power from ideological subsidies through its iron grip on dark money NGOs, universities, and media: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/dnc-astroturf-pivot
I don't see how climate change fits the critique. The greenhouse effect is scientifically proven fact, not opinion. That it's "unpopular" in some quarters has everything to do with corporate power and money. Those who benefit from the status quo will do anything to protect it, including (as Exxon Mobil did) lie about their own findings regarding this urgent threat to civilization as we know it.
OK, there is a greenhouse effect. But science is not static. More than two scientists (Koutsoyiannis and Happner) have shown that rising atmospheric temperatures precede rising CO2 level in time. And rising temperatures, especially of the oceans release much more CO2 than our use of fossil fuels.
You don't have to believe research results funded by Exxon, but why then would you believe Federal government funded research by Michael Mann? He is largely a political scientist who discovered a way to scare the Hell out of us and secure boatloads of tax money. Which he has used for shouting down and filing lawsuits against anyone who disagrees with him (Steyn and Ball {RIP}.
And speaking of Dr. Mann of Penn State (or state pen, per Dr. Tim Ball), you're gonna love this! Dr. Mann lost a defamation law suit he brought against Dr. Ball because HE WOULD NOT SHOW THE SCIENCE BEHIND HIS INFAMOUS HOCKEY STICK. Now what kind of "scientist" REFUSES to show his work?!
A show of hands doesn't/shouldn't determine science. Please take a look at, for a moment, that effectively ALL climate research funding is secured by following the narrative of human-caused climate change. Nothing gets published in any major science journal unless it follows the narrative. There are quite a few climate scientists who don't believe it's cut and dried, yes, it's trending warmer, but the climate has always cycled, and it's questionable how much should be attributed to humanity. Forcing the narrative doesn't make it correct or incorrect, and is a very poor way to conduct research if your goal is a correct assumption.
Color me skeptical. Prove it with facts. Scientific research, open to challenge —- facts.
We have belonged to the usual environmental groups forever, but no more. It is obvious that these groups have been captured by politics (maybe they always were, and we believed).
Anyway, I have conducted my own research and determined that people flying on private jets, with more than one coastal mansion, with super yachts — the rich, the important — may have a “carbon footprint” bigger than everyone in my small town combined. Conclusion: They need to FO.
FO indeed! Celebrities love to be celebrated. Big causes that can get them camera time and attention are just too seductive to ignore. I don't disapprove of their lifestyle; if I could afford it, I'd probably do the same. But, like you, it pisses me off to be lectured to by hypocrites.
British Petroleum, BP, invented 'Carbon Footprint' to blame-shift the weight of climate responsibility to you, the consumer. Their marketing team thought it up right after the Gulf disaster where they oiled giga-tons of shrimp and Louisiana coastline.
You have 1/700 billionth the responsibility of an oil company, yet they've shifted you to this false narrative—quite easily. You see the hypocrisy, yet incorrectly blame the science instead of the marketing guilt-trip you've been sold. Your ire belongs with BP, not climate science.
100% correct. And the wonderful irony is that the end result of ANY and ALL dissenting opinions never seeing the light of publication is an academic-journal landscape so uniform that the climate crazies will say, "See?? Virtually every published report and study confirms that climate change is real!" They're so naive, it'd be precious if it weren't so ridiculous and dangerous.
Add to that the perverse incentives to make human-driven climate change a thing. Imagine the total cost of carbon credits, the switch to wind and solar, the foolishness like stopping the Keystone pipeline for environmental reasons, and then shipping that petroleum by rail car. Then talk to millennials and younger who are deeply depressed because they're told the world isn't going to be inhabitable, possibly in their lifetime. I don't know if human-caused climate change is real or not, or to what extent, but I do know that ignoring the facts won't help us figure it out.
The authors I cited present evidence that rising ocean temperatures result in CO2 release and precede rising CO2 emissions in time. This is generally considered proof that rising temperature is causative of rising CO2, not the other way around. Potential causes of rising temperature is being studied as we speak, e.g. solar variation. It is my opinion you are being too certain anthropogenic (man caused) global warming is THE ISSUE?
That is correct. During periods of falling temps, the planet absorbs CO2, while during periods of rising temps, the planet emits CO2. From what I've seen, there is a 600-800 year lag. CO2 changes are a lagging indicator of temperature change, not a leading indicator.
Moreover, there a period of hundreds of millions of years of Earth's history where CO2 and global temps are non-correlated or NEGATIVELY correlated:
No, the oceans are releasing CO2 because temperatures are rising. Warm water holds less CO2 than cold water. A 1 degree C change in ocean temperature (which will vary greatly depending on the location of the ocean) will release lots of CO2 into the atmosphere because oceans cover more than 70% of the earth's surface. The fact that the earth began warming at about the same time as the start of the industrial revolution is what is known as a coincidence. The last time the Thames river froze in London was 1895.
It is NOT proven that CO2 increase is the driver of any temperature increase. It might have an effect on temps, but the extent to which it does is a non-falsifiable theory. There are ocean modulations that occur over decades or multi-decades that can account for changes in ocean temps:
Wow. Two scientists. 99 doctors out of 100 say I have cancer, but I'll listen to the one that says I don't. And then when the other 99 step in to emphasize their concern and demonstrate why that one is wrong and the consequences, I'll start whining about "shibboleths" and slaughtering "sacred cows". I guess one of those sacred cows being slaughtered now is the one about the solution to speech you don't like is more speech. Guess Matt's okay with that one being turned into a burger as well. Barbecuing on Memorial Day weekend is a sacred ritual after all.
Please tell me you're not referring to the repeatedly-debunked trope: "97% of climate scientists agree that the earth is warming dangerously, and human activity is the main cause of it." If so, I include the following for your continuing edumication:
I live in the American West on a mountain. In the 90's we had streams that ran year round and snowfall that would often close roads and highways in and out of a nearby major city. People could ride snow mobiles to the shopping center in the little town that serves our community. Today the streams are gone, the city sees almost no snowfall and each year the mountain sees less. Is it a weather cycle or desertification? (The state is in perpetual drought.) Old time Spanish settlers claim they've seen alternating 30 and 40 year drought/snow cycles. I have no idea, but that's what I'm witnessing. (Add bark beetle infestation and the constant threat of wildfires.)
Anger at "who knows what the truth is" control of people and the obfuscation and destruction of a truth/fact based national conversation to cover the looting of labor and
resources is why we're here
at RACKET. (Not aimed at you as a target.) Keep rockin' forward.
Reducing emissions is a technological problem, not a too many humans problem. The solution is nuclear energy.
The worst thing about climate advocacy is that it misunderstandings how humans work. It guilts people for existing and steals your care for what's local to what's global.
Environmental projects that directly affect the land people inhabit have the feedback mechanism of being able to enjoy and literally care about the results. Sucking everything into a blob of saving the planet just turns into fearmongering and a lot of "where did the money go?"
The worst thing about climate-change advocacy is that it is ridiculed, twisted and/or simply ignored. The best thing about it occurs when all the defensive blowback clears and sensible people resume talking about solutions. Climate change is indeed a blob, in that it is part of a much bigger problem, which is the outsized impact our species is having on the habitats of billions of other species on whom rely for our own survival. If "the web of life" is too complicated for you to get your head around, so be it, but once a person understands this surprisingly simple concept everything "environmental" fits into this big-picture understanding that you refer to as a blob.
There is a vast difference between climate-change as a descriptor of a phenomena and climate-change as a political agenda. The activists have taken a position that human activity is the cause, without any clear and undisputed facts to back their claim. It is, and has always been, a political ploy to establish further control over citizens. It has also, clearly, been used to swindle taxpayers out of more of their wealth. I won't argue whether or not the change exists. I, however, don't buy into the associated scam it has produced amongst the political class.
It is definitely just one more method for controlling us.
And they've been completely unhinged for years.
Remember when they were attacking Hummers? "Climate activists" glue their hands to the street in the UK, when they're not blocking traffic, or defacing art works.
Their most vocal adherents take private jets to "Climate Conferences" in spiffy locales, while not cruising around on yachts in the Mediterranean.
But I'm supposed to feel guilty for turning my thermostat down in the summer?
Underlying all this stuff, as Bonnie's comment above retails, is the (old) religious belief that human beings are bad. Until we stop these versions of self-hatred, the beatings will continue.
It's hard to take the climate change advocates seriously for they tune out the biggest issues- the Amazon forests being wiped out by globalists to create farms to feed the 300 million Chinese who fled their small family farms to live in polluted cities and many to work in the globalists' factories.
And China builds 95% of the coal-powered plants worldwide each year.
Every 2-1/2 years they add as much coal producing capacity as what we have. Crickets from the advocates.
And acres & acres of forests in Scotland being cleared of all trees in order to install wind turbines -- which slaughter birds of prey.
Meanwhile, the UK imports "biomass" (lumber) from British Columbia for burning instead of coal.
The environmental movement used to profess concern for all species, but now it's focused on man-made "climate change," wind turbines, and solar panels.
There is no way I can take any of these Climate Armageddon types seriously.
(It's kind of funny how they're now discovering remote shut-off capabilities in many of the solar panels from China.)
We wipe out other species in the ecosystem (solar panels fry birds also and are not recyclable) then invasive species take their place. Example: invasive mussels forming in the Colorado river (which provides drinking water for ~50 million people)
I believe that our approach to the environment should be based on principles we learned in kindergarten... "leave things nicer than you found them" and "don't be a litterbug"
It is a fact that average global temperature have been in a rising trend since the end of the last Ice Age ~14k years ago. Show us the study that breaks out the percentage increase in global temperatures that is attributable to the natural continuation of that multi-millennium trend vs the additional warming caused by human activity. Then we can target that percentage increase that we are responsible for vs the trend that we have no ability to control.
The study does not exist, btw. Why?
The current climate alarmism is nothing more than a money-laundering operation targeting heart-strings.
If the 'Emergency' was as dire as the alarmists would have us believe, then any and every bill proposed to enact change could and should have military-level satellite images and ordnance estimates for neutralizing every coal plant in operation and under construction in India and China. The fact that they do not tells you everything you need to know about how serious the people pushing these policies actually are.
Not really sure how linguistic nitpicking furthers contributes to the main point… unless distracting from the argument is the point?? You can do better Marty
If you read my words as "linguistic nitpicking," I not sure how to respond--or whether to. If, as is apparent, you yourself cannot do better, perhaps it is best to leave it as it is. Cheers!
China and India get it. Abundant and affordable energy is necessary to raise the living standard of their people to match what we in the USA and Europe have achieved by leveraging just that. Yet the globalists tell us that Africa cannot also participate in raising the living standard of their citizens by having access to abundant and affordable energy to replace the burden of burning wood and dung for energy.
100% correct. In Michael Shellenberger's (he of recent Twitter File fame, along with Matt and others) great book from a few years back, Apocalypse Never, he highlights and explores the fundamental immorality of rich Western elites telling third-world countries that they can't have access to the very same fossil fuels which were the engine of the massive increase in standard of living those elites have enjoyed forever.
And making their actions all the more despicable is the plain fact that those elites will NEVER have to experience a world without the fossil fuels of which they'd so blithely deprive the world's poor.
It absolutely does fit. Yes, it is a scientifically proven fact that atmospheric CO2, due to the nature of its chemical structure, does absorb and retain some of the energy Earth reflects back into the atmosphere after absorbing it from the Sun (the "greenhouse effect", or more scientifically, "forcing"). What is NOT proven (or "settled science") is the degree to which this dynamic actually effects global temperatures. It's true global temps have risen since ~ 1980 (after having fallen since ~ 1940) along with atmospheric CO2 levels. This is shown by both surface temperature stations (whose data is often corrupt due to urbanization) and satellite readings (more "reliable"). But legitimate scientists know that correlation does not prove causation. To conclude causation due to correlation is specious at best. (To wit: shark attacks and ice cream sales are strongly positively correlated.) There are millions of years when CO2 levels and global temps have shown no or negative correlation. (see link below)
"That it's "unpopular" in some quarters has everything to do with corporate power and money." That might be true in "some quarters", but the quarters I frequent are those of legitimate "climate scientists" who work diligently to understand the physics of climate change, and whose work extends far beyond the dogma of CO2 as climate thermostat. They don't deny the greenhouse effect, but they carry a healthy degree of scientific skepticism as to the degree of its effect, which skepticism exists because there is no REAL, falsifiable science to support the claims of the "alarmists". Computer projections and correlation are not science. This healthy, legitimate skepticism has earned them the label "deniers", or in historical terms, "heretic". There are some that contend the rise in global temps is mostly due to "natural variability", and that the effect of CO2 increases on this rise is mostly just "noise" in the data, and not very relevant.
This is a very informative and relevant presentation by one the climate scientists I follow, Dr. Judith Curry (also linked at bottom)
A research study done by Princeton professor emeritus Dr. William Happer indicates that the "greenhouse effect" of atmospheric CO2 is maximized after ~ 100 parts per million (ppm). (see below) Current levels are about 415 ppm, and have risen from a pre-industrial level of ~ 285 ppm - the result of which is a "greening" of the planet and correspondingly healthier, more drought-resistant plants. I had the pleasure to meet Dr. Happer and discuss his paper.
The following are links to three legitimate climate scientists. Drs. Roy Spencer and John Christy from the U. of Alabama @ Huntsville, and Dr. Judith Curry, who used to be an "alarmist" - until she reviewed the science and reversed her views. She has interesting stories of intimidation and "excommunication" after she "lost her religion".
There are scientists who question the "greenhouse effect" - see for example Ned Nikolov's presentation on Tom Nelson's podcast here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1GgmBIew9Y. If we allow climate scientists who challenge the alarmists' theories to speak, we will learn that there are very few "proven facts" about climate change.
"If we allow climate scientists who challenge the alarmists' theories to speak, we will learn that there are very few "proven facts" about climate change."
Indeed! But that would require legitimate scientific motivation, whereas most of green initiatives are about profit.
This is something that might be of interest. Remember the infamous "hockey stick" in Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" (love the irony of that title!) showing "unprecedented" rise in global temps? Well, there was a court case brought by the creator of that chart, Dr. Michael Mann of Penn State U, against Dr. Tim Ball. Ball won:
"Dr. Mann lost his case because he abused Discovery by refusing to honor the “concessions” he made to Ball in 2018 to finally show in open court his R2 regression numbers (Mann’s math ‘working out’) for his graph (see ‘update’ at foot of article).
Dr. Ball has always argued that those numbers—if examined in open court—would prove Mann was motivated to commit a criminal fraud."
So a "scientist", whose work is one of the foundations of Alarmists, would not show his work. Still waiting for Al Gore's retraction...
"Those who benefit from the status quo," you mean like every citizen who uses the light switch? Change is up to us, not some remote corporate power. Many that scream loudest about CO2 and cutting carbon are constantly on the go in either their cars or planes, traveling for fun or just "going places."
Yes, I do mean every citizen. This is why I have always promoted a policy of equitable rationing of greenhouse gases in the same way (and for similar reasons) our government deployed broad-based rationing during WWII. The objection to this idea has always come most strenuously from the private sector, which of course controls our public sector now too. Ordinary citizens have been lulled into complacency and confusion by incessant anti-science propaganda from these fascist elites.
Are you aware that CO2 concentrations (ppm) on Earth were once 15 times greater than their current level, long before Man's activities played any role? We are living in a period of extremely low CO2 concentrations.
Actually, it is indisputable, insofar as CO2 and methane absorb energy in the form of many electromagnetic wavelengths, and re-emit it as heat. That’s just quantum physics; even Arrhenius, before quantum physics, figured that out. Does it automatically mean climate change? Who knows, there’s s lot more to it than just that.
There is? If indeed Co2 and methane absorb solar radiation and release it as heat, then when there is more of those gases, there will be more heat * than there would otherwise have been*. If we were headed into a glacial period, that might be a good thing. But the glaciers are melting.
The reasons for cilmate cycles seem to be much debated, but to my mind, that last bit settles it.
As it stands, our children and grandchildren will, not might, deal with a much warmer world s- and a very rough transition. The direst concern is actually ocean acidification, which could kill everything within reach of the ocean by releasing cyanide. It has happened, in the distant past. It caused one of the mass extinctions. I suspect the eventual response, on an emergency basis, will be extremely authoritarian, and they'll wonder what was wrong with us. But that's what we're setting up.
I so appreciate this insight. Yes, there is no doubt in my mind that the response will be more authoritarianism, perhaps along the lines of the surveillance cameras we once disparaged for their widespread use in China but that are now ubiquitous here. They were used to apprehend the prisoners who recently escaped in the South. See also how the marketing of fear not of nature but of other humans has spurred demand and deployment by ordinary citizens of such surveillance devices in and around their homes. We are adopting the same products whose use we once decried—yes, people like Matt especially decried them—without comment. Shouldn't this seem more sinister to a free-speech advocate than Greta Thunberg speaking truth to power at Davos, or a fearless scientist like NASA's James Hanson turning activist (demonstrating in the streets). so frustrated is he by the denial of a phenomenon that was first predicted in lab experiments in the 19th century? Hanson has been studying climate breakdown since the 1970s. Rachel Carson also warned about it. I should also note that Matt's readers seem remarkably indifferent to the suffering of those most immediately threatened, the billions of people who live in the Global South. How can you console yourself with the argument that the rest of us (I live in Minnesota) won't have it so bad? We will ALL have it pretty bad, people. Hate to tell you, but the most terrifying aspect of this new weather is its violence and unpredictability, which those in the insurance business tell me is on the biurnk of blowing up their industry's business model. They can't plan for a future that is out of human control and therefore unpredictable.
The graph they built on a lie. The iconic 'climate' graph that's undermining industrial capitalism and taking our freedom...and it's 100 percent garbage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo0YrN4Nz_c GORILLA SCIENCE has been set up by rebels from the world of mainstream media. Our aim? To challenge the flagrant lies and double-speak of governments, the media, the educational establishment and others.
Is there though? It means temperature WILL rise, the only question is how much. A lot of bozos on the right, like most of the right, denies even this fact. I never understood why. The science and the policy response are two separate questions. It’s perfectly reasonable to say humans are increasing global temperatures AND the cost of mitigation isn’t worth the benefit. Why doesn’t anyone say that?
Or that a warming planet and more CO2 is a good thing for humans https://dailycaller.com/2023/01/21/opinion-heres-why-the-world-is-producing-more-food-vijay-jayaraj/ 'Countries all over the world are surpassing previous records for production of food crops. This is good news that stands in stark contrast to the apocalyptic picture that the media paints daily in reports on climate and weather.' 2023 article
Bonnie, while the greenhouse effect is real, the amount of impact it has on our climate for the next few centuries and on our weather today is based totally on assumptions. Anyone who claims that they have conclusive proof of how much influence the greehnouse effect has on our temperature is a fraud. It's unknowable, as are all climate predictions, whether benign, catastrophic or otherwise. I don't give a rat's rump about corporate power or money, because I've not benefited a whit from them.
I understand the scientific method. If we cannot experiment on climate-related phenomena under controlled circumstances, we cannot reach truly scientific conclusions. I also understand mathematical modeling. While models can appear to be very sophisticated, using complicated mathematical tools, they are all limited by the same inherent weaknesses: a reliance on assumptions to simplify an unmanageably complex reality.
At the end of the day, if we only use models and incomplete data sets, we can only voice opinions about the matters of science that are limited to those tools. We should all be aware that a consensus is nothing more than a widely held opinion. All the carping in the world about Science when used in defense of the "existential threat" theory of climate change resembles nothing so much as a group of 3-year-olds in a sandbox talking past one another. When people claim that their knowledge of the climate is "settled science," they are just saying that they agree with certain opinions and that they are unwilling to marshal facts and principles to support their conclusions.
"The greenhouse effect is scientifically proven fact"
Says the person who's car/house/food all relies on fossil fuels..
Faux Virtue signalling and obfuscation pops into the thread....
Sigh..
The urgent "threat to civilisation" that never happened?
That one?
Or..The urgent "threat to civilisation"is the destruction of native forests to place subsidised windmills and solar farms in them to produce energy at a loss hence the requirements for public funds.
The article is about groupthink and the consequences of stepping outside that.
How did you not understand that???
Thanks for a perfect example though..!
Sceptics are not arguing that the greenhouse effect per se doesn't exist..ffs
Tell us how much the global temperature has stalled after hundreds and hundreds of billions of $$ has been spent "fighting" climate change over the last 30 years???
Cricket sounds..no one knows or cares...
Because "its to save the children"
"...That it's "unpopular" in some quarters has everything to do with corporate power and money..."
God..its almost like your channelling the New York times...
Have you ever had an original thought or done any research outside your little "newspapers are my research thingy"
We will gloss over the fact that the vast majority of the corporate/political power and $ is behind "climate change"..
All western govts support the narrative.
All universities support the narrative.
Most, have the same facile, asinine understanding of "climate change" as you have.
And the “Exxon knew” meme is just so tiresome.
Try and read a little before you post “cool” and wrong memes.
And if you want to know about how bad the actual science is behind the temperature reconstructions (I am being sarcastic here as you have zero interest in the actual science) go to climate audit run by mathematicians.
Thanks for that. Glad to know there are others like me who have exhaustively searched for truth in this arena.
To twist a phrase from Bill Clinton, "it's the water vapor, stupid!"
"During at least the time period when water vapor (WV) and carbon dioxide (CO2) have been accurately measured worldwide, 1988-now, and apparently for centuries, WV increase has been responsible for the human contribution to Global Warming with no significant net contribution from CO2 or any other greenhouse gases."
Gorilla science https://watchgorillascience.com is taking the bull by the horns and making funny videos that challenge the Climate Scam in a fun and well presented way - for instance 1000 years ago Greenland used to be hotter and Vikings lived there and grew crops! Dr Willie Soon exposes the climate scam in his coal-powered Time Machine. https://watchgorillascience.com/video/vikings-vs-greens-willie-soon
Is it a proven scientific fact? Who proved it and where is the proof? Science in the area of climate tends to be no science at all. It's mainly fudged data compiled for a price the government pays and uses and the college reaps the benefit as does the so-called scientist. Is that science or is that the business of science?
There is a physicist at Princeton U. Who puts climate change and all its arguments to shame. I suggest you look him up as he’s done some recent interviews. He has zero interest in politics. He slays climate hysteria with facts.
The problem is folks trying to solve climate change “with other people’s money”. The “central planning” is resulting in billions/trillions being wasted with no impact on climate. Why not nuclear instead of solar/wind. It can be scaled up and works 24hrs in all seasons.
Well, there’s climate change, or, as is usually intended, human-caused climate change. That exists and is probably detrimental if it continues, but also has benefits such as the frost line moving North. One may reasonably guess that the speed of such change makes it a net detriment, as there will be indirect effects, such as the range of insects moving many hundreds of miles North. But Nature may well have some feedback mechanism we don’t estimate correctly, how much and how likely is above my pay grade.
I think what’s being referred to is Climate Change™, the political/activist/kleptocrat phenomenon which demands unlimited expense from the taxpayers directed into entities enmeshed with the government/NGO axis. This demand is only directed at the USA & Europe, not the larger CO2 emitters of Asia nor the industrializing nations of Africa. It also results in lower quality of life for the average person.
For example, the new-and-improved electric system which is missing the big old multi-ton turbines and electromagnets is less stable than the OG system, including after patches and fixes. The average person won’t have a generator, the connected will. To that end, California has outlawed small generators. Units large enough for, ohh, a Governor’s mansion are exempt. That and a dozen other such slights have people very sour on Climate Change™.
While there is a great deal of ideological claptrap and junk science wrapped up in the term "gender", there are still some useful and important aspects to the concept. Notably in the idea, and brute facts, of sexually dimorphic -- AKA feminine and masculine -- personality and behavioral traits.
As the late great US Justice Anton Scalia once put it:
AS: "The word 'gender' has acquired the new and useful connotation of cultural or attitudinal characteristics (as opposed to physical characteristics) distinctive to the sexes. That is to say, gender is to sex as feminine is to female and masculine to male."
Thank you for the Scalia quote. His observation is spot on, elaborated upon in much greater detail in:
"The End of Gender: Debunking the Myths about Sex and Identity in Our Society" Hardcover – August 4, 2020
by Debra Soh (Author)
Lack of understanding of both the difference between, and relationship between, gender and sex has greatly hindered discourse on a very important matter. Trans “activists”, in particular, dismiss the eloquent definition Justice Scalia provides. Instead, they substitute, “You are what you feel (literally subject to change from minute to minute)”, as dogma. The result: millions of lives scarred by the use of powerful medications with no ethical indications, along with mutilating cosmetic surgeries. The complicity of many in my medical profession is indefensible.
In every culture throughout human history there have been modes of behavior, dress, occupation, sexual attraction, body "art" (hair styles, body painting/makeup/tatooing/piercing), speech patterns and other characteristics which the majority of women and men in that culture manifest. This is gender. It is both different among cultures and also changes within every culture over time. One can be "gender typical" or "gender atypical" for any of these things. Biologically, except for the rare intersex states, you remain female or male. Tomboys whom everyone acknowledges to be girls, not trans boys. We should respect and welcome all girls/women and boys/men regardless of how "gender typical" or "gender atypical" they are. I just wish we could realize the appropriateness of treating the whole gender thing this way.
Unfortunately, a certain percentage of people are very unhappy within that approach. I think that, along with the ethic you sketch out, we should acknowledge a right to be who you are, and to decide that for yourself. That would mean some of us would have to restrain their judgemental tendencies, as Jesus commanded. Note that it's framed as a universal - a right we all need.
At the same time, there are limitations, mostly to do with age. Allowing irreversible procedures on minors makes nonsense of the age of consent. Children literally don't know who they are; that's what they're working out. But I would only apply that to irreversible measures like surgery and some drugs. If a kid wants to experiment with hrair, name, etc. - well, I was a hippy. And that's part of what youth is for.
My impression is that the subject is so emotional that some advocates have flown to bizarre extremes - then insist that we all follow them, or be labelled haters. The backlash has now arrived.
Thanks for the quote of Soh from her 2020 book. Particularly intrigued that she had apparently used the Scalia quote -- you have a page number?
Though curious as to how and when she ran across that quote -- I'd first seen it somewhat prior to my Welcome post (July 2022) in a Wikipedia article on "gender". Rather amused to note that the Scalia quote had been deleted within 6 months after that:
Sadly, on virtually anything to do with gender Wikipedia's editors are hardly better than the acolytes of Judith Butler. Though they at least retain records of various smoking guns.
But nice to see that Soh was a bit clearer on the difference between sex and gender in her book -- her earlier (December 2017) article in Playboy (only available in an archived version) gave some evidence of some "muddled" thinking:
DS: "In reality, no one is 100 percent male or 100 percent female in terms of who we are, just as no one is 100 percent gender-conforming."
If one goes by the standard biological definitions -- which Trump's EO on "restoring biological truth in government" more or less endorses -- then to have a sex is to have functional gonads of either of two types, those with neither being, ipso facto, sexless. We are, all of us, either "100 percent male or 100 percent female", or zero percent male and female -- about a third of us, at any one time, in the latter category. See those standard definitions here:
Sadly I'm older and remember the hysteria about the incoming ice age which morphed into global warming which morphed into climate change. The models have been modified so many times, I believe they are useless. I'm all in for clean air but trying to say the coasts will be underwater soon is insane. The climate has changed since before people were here, so I am skeptical about all of those claims.
This is by far the best piece you've ever written. It is absolutely dead on. Slaughter, I say.. If they can convince people they are right with logic, go for it. But this idea that they have the "objective truth" and they have a right to impose that "truth" on everyone with no debate was becoming terrifying. Trump going after the actual perpetrators of all this is not the same thing as what they were doing. But I do worry, this has been so brainwashed into our youth at these universities, it is far from over, as you say. I'll be sending this everywhere. Thanks, Matt.
Nah. :) What he is addressing in this piece is to me the real crux of democracy and the real threat to it. All his pieces are good or at least raise interesting debates. But to me, this one really got into the depths of this problem that transcends lighter things on free speech. It was great.
We agree to disagree. While I agree that the issues addressed in this article are of fundamental importance to democracy, I also believe getting accurate information is a prerequsite of democracy. It's like the old coding saying "garbage in, garbage out" in real life, IMHO.
But that piece wasn't about misinformation except in passing; it was about habeas corpus and rights of foreign students (and I think illegal aliens) -- and due process. Mostly. And I didn't agree with Matt on some of it, though it's worth discussion. So this piece was fabulous and right on.
That we can read the same article and have different takes is what makes this conversation worthwhile. I'm all for being exposed to different perspectives. When I read Ode to Scum I found the publishing of lies and dishonest narratives to be the primary focus, but I don't discount the possibility of my personal bias in that direction affecting my take on the article in general. Thank you for this respectful exchange, I hope you're having a great day!
Read it again. It was not about that. Matt was saying Stephen Miller was all about that when it affected him, but then was not allowing the same rights to illegals. I think. Matt is an independent I think and doesn't have a political home at the moment, so I expect him to entertain a lot of issues. But affording illegals the same rights American citizens have is over-simplifying. Matt was sure Trump people would claim it was an "emergency." Not at all, but none of this was raised when Obama and Clinton deported people. They did not all get full on court cases and the rights an American would get. Which we can't afford and shouldn't have to when they are either here illegally or have broken the rules of their visas. Which is much more complicated. Not that it's not worth debate, but nowhere near the great article this was which gets to some really nuanced positions about what went on here. It was brilliant. :)
If that other guy— refuse to look up his name— doesn’t take the written beating he deserved— then I propose Mr T VS big C I’ll call him in a ring somewhere!
Already might have the perfect Referee— Tom Hardy— let’s just say my $ is clearly on Taibbi— I pity the fool
Nicely done. The scary thing about the last ten years is, in contrast to the pushback on what Trump is doing, how much acceptance that censorship found. In a sane world there wouldn't have even been a conversation about giving ideological viewpoints the gravitas of fact and shutting people up based on that, but we became an insane world. And the insanity isn't gone by a long shot. It's trying to re-form itself.
"A paper whose journalism appeals to only half the country has a dangerously severed public mission. ...Imagine what would be missed by journalists who felt no pressing need to see the world through others’ eyes."
Yeah, the authoritarian academic Far Left always runs for the "hey, we're just trying to hear all sides" argument when they are threatened, even as they systematically shut down opposing views.... Another reason to loathe them.
I have been following this story/trend for years, and yet the idea that "objectivity has got to go" in favor of "diversity" leaves me speechless. What does that even mean?!
I have a friend who works with kids. Apparently now, the objective observation of a child with head lice and reporting this to the parents for remediation is now verboten because diversity has to be respected and somehow pointing out head lice on the child is tantamount to calling the child's race inherently 'dirty'. I guess head lice are a cultural thing now.
> "Probably no three terms in the English language are more associated with groupthink-truisms or “shibboleths” than D.E.I., climate change, and gender."
Indeed. And relative to "gender", it would be hard to find a more toxic and "problematic" case of "2+2=5" than "trans women are women". Which the Democrats are most responsible for and still continue to endorse and promote one way or another -- an albatross that they'll have to wear for a long time.
Good question. Reminds me of a classic tale from Mark.Twain:
MT: "Men think they think upon great political questions, and they do; but they think with their party, not independently; they read its literature, but not that of the other side; they arrive at convictions, but they are drawn from a partial view of the matter in hand and are of no particular value. They swarm with their party, they feel with their party, they are happy in their party's approval; and where the party leads they will follow, whether for right and honor, or through blood and dirt and a mush of mutilated morals."
Something have noticed is so many people are not so much Stupid as they are Ignorant. By that I mean they don't know what the other side (really) says and why they say it. I find this Mainly, but not Exclusively on The Left.
“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that."
I'll say it louder for those in the back. NOT PAYING SOMEONE FOR THEIR SPEECH IS NOT ANTI FREE SPEECH. Nobody is stopping you from starting a podcast and saying whatever you want except for the 350 million people in this country who would rather listen to microwave sounds than halfwits preaching moral superiority.
Great point. He isn't bemoaning the fact his lecture was cancelled. He is bemoaning the fact he won't be paid for it
Ditto. The idea that the public should be required to pay, against their desire or interest, to hear someone's opinion is a particularly galling mindset.
Especially when it's such a stupid opinion.
By taxpayers. If he and his product are so wonderful then let him sell it to his audience.
My argument exactly for defunding NPR and PBS.
I agree, it applies to almost everything government touches
Really. I've been listening to them for almost 50 years.
They've established their audiences, gained their market shares, and should be able to sustain themselves by now. "Free of advertising"? Puh-leeze...
Exactly. I have never listened to NPR. But it seems their listener base would support a paid service, or, horrors, they could sell ads. I have watched PBS since childhood, and likely would support a paid version. But why should any news or entertainment purveyor be granted taxpayer funding?
From the NYT Stiglitz piece which is worth reading in full:
"Ultimately, the dean of the Faculty of Humanities stepped in to provide the necessary money and I will deliver my lecture on Wednesday. If the school hadn’t had the resources, I would have gone anyway."
Chuckling at "necessary money."
Me too. Oh my
Mr Stiglitz is stunningly and bravely willing to put your money where his mouth is.
Seems to me this started a looong time ago, all the way back to the Piss Christ controversy of the 1980s. People objected to taxpayer funding for offensive art. Their opponents argued that not funding offensive art amounted to censorship. It seemed to me that throwing the artist in jail or preventing the display of the art would be censorship, but simply telling the artist to find other sources of funding was not.
Do you think the left would be as enthusiastic about government funding of "art" that involved micturating on a Koran?
Forcing us to pay for his speech is compelled speech and anti-freedom of speech
Trump's "thought police." LOL.
When you started discussing doing a podcast, I first thought the 350 million number was your estimate of the number of podcasts currently up and going.
But hey, if Taylor Swift's boyfriend's brother's wife can have a podcast, it's open for those who wish to try.
Stiglitz: What a cunt.
Hey, I know you're just being funny, but Matt doesn't think that and neither do I. Stiglitz means well.
And the word is a problem for women everywhere. That's the word men who abuse women use to make the women they abuse feel small. Steer clear. Please.
I wasn’t talking about a woman. Or to one.
But you were writing on a platform seen by women, about a woman's body part, and using it in a negative sense.
words only have the power you give them
If only I were that powerful.
Words themselves are only signs of the real problem, which is the mindset of the person using them.
Learning that someone despises you, or despises a class of people to which you belong, is a legitimate source of unease. You don't know what that person will do to harm you.
So people should never use "cock" or "dickhead" on a platform seen by men, because it's a man's body part, used in a negative sense?
We should definitely never use "fuck" if it could be seen by people who are able to have sex, if we're using it in a negative sense.
Do you see the problem?
Yes. I really don't think we should be using those other words either, referring to men's bodies. As for the F word, I do try to avoid it, but as a verb, it really doesn't affect people as people, in my opinion.
Actually, it WOULD be nice if we didn't use any of those words...
Stiglitz is still a cunt.
And yet, if he'd called Stiglitz a dick, none of you would have objected even a bit. Writing on a platform seen by men, about a man's body part, and using it in a negative sense is perfectly fine. But a woman's body part? In a negative sense? Cue the smelling salts!
Objections like this play into the illusion that women are fragile, delicate, emotional. That we must be sheltered from any hint of unpleasantness lest we faint dead away.
Yeah, no. Either we're equal or we're not. If it's okay to use "dick" as a casual slur against people you dislike, then "cunt" is okay, too. Hypocrisy sucks. Even when women do it.
You seem like a Karen,
She's not the first Karen I've seen being a "karen." Funny and fascinating.
Well, I'm married to one who is not one ...
That is one word I tread carefully around. The rest of the words discussed here? Not so much. The N-word is the only one that I eliminate from my vocabulary. Have since I was an adolescent. Everything else is fair game.
Neighbor please.
The Longhouse is smoldering is the final verdict on such words.
Burn the Longhouse is Official Puritan ™️ approved policy since the Pequot War of 1637.
🔥 The Longhouse so we can be Free 🇺🇸🦅.
Now I wasn’t talking about a woman or to one, however there’s my answer 🔥. At least bad language can be avoided.
Amen 🙏🏻
I think when Matt used that word in a response to a writer defaming him, he referred to the fact that in England, toughs and cops call each other that word as the ultimate insult.
Seems like Karen and Pariah missed Matt's "Ode to Scum" article.
I have a whole list of words that I am forbidding everyone from using because of my feelings. Please wait; I'm assembling the list. (This era can't die fast enough)
Yes, and the Longhouse long has an American solution since the Pequot War; Puritan Executed and so Approved;
🔥The Longhouse. ⛺️🔥
Doesn't free speech mean you're doing it for free, not getting paid? Or is that the point?
Hey Matt, its Sunday, the kids are yelling, and I’m feeling a little lazy so I dropped your article into AI: “Your passage is written in a polemical style that exaggerates to make a cultural point. It contains several factual inaccuracies and oversimplifications:
• Yglesias left Vox voluntarily.
• Rowling didn’t sign the Harper’s Letter.
• Some of the “casualties” had complex or unrelated reasons for their dismissal.”
AI is trained on Reddit data, so there's that.
cf. NPR, PBS, and CPB's screeching about losing taxpayer money...
Here is another point about podcasts. They tend to brand someone as an "authority figure", Just as the articles by known journalists in MSM used to do.
Which is why those hustling Influencers out there use them.
As an example, we had Belgian professor of Psychology Mattias Desmet spring to life on our screens in various podcasts in 2021. Talking about bizarre ideas such as mass transformation. Which was not really bizarre at all if you knew the field. And that this concept was just one small part of a much larger psychological phenomenon. Or that it had been studied by many scholars for centuries. Not new.
But in the podcast versions....Prof. Desmet was some kind of prophetic genius, with all the answers to the crazy behaviour of COVID-mania, and he was going to give us the instructions about how to return it all to normal.
Only....he didn't. It was just a bit of podcast entertainment with one tiny piece of the puzzle. And that piece had been known already for eons. If a person cared to look.
We have to be very careful about fabricating New Media gods. Without understanding the wider context of the information they are offering.
It wasn’t free to the taxpayer, Joey.
I'm afraid I can't take this article seriously because Matt failed to offer a land acknowledgement in his opening paragraph.
When these land acknowledgements first started, I attended an Anglican cathedral service where we had to sit through it, with eyes rolled. I seriously considered standing up in my pew and responding to the clergyman:
"Well then sell off all of your lucrative property holdings immediately and donate the money to those you claim are the real property owners. Only honest thing to do if you believe this."
There would have been dead silence. And then an usher would have shown me the door.
Aren't you sorry you didn't?
Actually.....yes. The look on their faces would have been a memory worth a million bucks.
And I would not have allowed them to get away with false virtue.
But I am certain they would have made me (and my family) pay. Not everyone likes the truth.
It isn't Anglican to be exhibitionistic. Console yourself with the recognition that it would have been almost impossible for you to overcome the years of neuroplastic impression.
But I was not Anglican. Just there to support their choir for various reasons (they are a leftwing non-Christian church, but the high-Anglicans do produce sublime choral music).
Not that exhibitionism suits me anyway. Though it does have its uses.
Then even more so: you were a guest. You have manners.
"You were CONQUERED. Suck it up."
I am not the sort who does well in the conquered state. Besides which, we cannot all just roll over and play dead with the leftwing nonsense. Can we?
In response to 'land acknowledgments'. All lands were conquered by some group at some point. To have to acknowledge the group you conquered (ages ago) is retarded.
Yes, I know. I am playing devil's advocate, my friend.
Do play along.....see where this leads.
You selling tickets? I’m in.
Precisely. Our church publishes ‘land acknowledgments’ in the Sunday program occasionally- it’s so obnoxious.
I have been known to leave comments like, "If you're living on stolen land, get off."
I have been known to leave comments like, "If you're living on stolen land, get off."
I have been known to leave comments like, "If you're living on stolen land, get off."
I am part American Indian, and when I hear land acknowledgements, I see them as something of a taunt.
To minimize the disingenuousness of such statement, there should be a fee schedule associated with making one; all tribes should have go-fund-me pages, showing the record of all payments and payees. The minimum charge for making a LandAck should be about $1,000 - LandAcks made in the vicinity of Manhattan would, of course, cost a lot more.
But according to the indigenous peoples, land cannot be bought and sold. They cannot have it both ways.
Besides which, at the height, there were only about 200,000 Siberian descendants in North America prior to European arrival. Mainly in limited tribes.
Why would such a small number assume they and their descendants could own the entire continent? Seems greedy to me. Imagine if the early American colonists said "The door is shut...it's all ours!!"
If it weren’t about money, presumably being here and enjoying the surroundings would be enough. I certainly feel emotionally connected to my home province, distinguishably so as compared to elsewhere. I feel protective over it but I don’t then think it should be under my ownership. I do not accept this should be different based on being of a certain ethnic background.
I have always considered this to be about money.....no matter the high-minded excuses used for the money grabs.
For the most part I do too. There are some in this ‘movement’ who genuinely are trying to improve the lives of some very demoralized people. I can get behind that. What is plain as the nose on my face is that the overall movement is about vast, incalculable sums of money. IMO the land acknowledgment is a form of conditioning, acclimating people to a new normal where (not sure which!) tribes will become our overall landlords. Look what D. Eby tried to sneak through with land titles. I anticipate a tax akin to property tax on private dwellings, and I guess all Crown lands would be lost. Bafflingly, many people seem to (without knowing the costs and consequences) support this concept.
I consider the indigenous people to be in a Drama Triangle, a psychological concept Stephen Karpman most recently explained to the modern world in the 60s.
There are three roles -- victim/perpetrator/rescuer-hero.
The indigenous people will always be put into the victim role....which of course keeps them there. It is not doing anyone a favour to remain a victim. They will repeat that pattern unwittingly for life unless they consciously shake it off and gain personal agency. Heaping money on them will not change this.
Yes, I agree with you that the land acknowledgements are a normalizing of a destruction tactic. The frog in the pot of slowly boiling water,
The land-grabs are simply another form of totalitarian destruction. By the powers-that-be. Not even really about the indigenous peoples. They are being used as a vehicle. Just as women are being used as a vehicle by the feminists; it is not really about them....but they are made to think so in order to get them to jump on the bandwagon.
A large power wishes to destroy Canada, so that this power can move in and take over. That is my opinion.
I actually love that idea!
The logistics of all of this are brought home to a greater degree in Canada, where there are 650 ethnic indigenous groups, all claiming that they are First Nations. With treaty rights and veto over legislation.
Which is just one more reason Canada would make a lousy ‘state’ 😂
Well....if that ever came to pass, previous legal and governing structures would crumble. If would all have to be re-made. Prior contracts null and void.
I mean, look how quickly that crumbling happened anyway under the dark Troodo regime.
Ho Mitakuye Oyasin ;)
Ich spreche nicht.
Lakota: "For all my relations."
I've been lucky to have participated in sweat lodge rituals a few times over the years. It is a saying used when entering and exiting the lodge. If you get the opportunity I recommend it.
Manhattan was sold by its inhabitants to the Dutch. Similar stories across our great continent.
Should do a sea acknowledgement, while we’re at it.
Good one- I really want Substack to add a "Ha Ha" reaction!
🤣
Yes, but I can't figure out how to use emojis on my laptop/desktop.
I just love Substack, especially Matt and his readers.
Go graze your sacred cow on someone else's pasture?
Get a load of this one....double-barrelled:
"RCMP puts land, African Nova Scotian acknowledgements before missing kids"
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/terry-newman-rcmp-puts-land-african-nova-scotian-acknowledgements-before-missing-kids#:~:text=After%20stepping%20to%20the%20microphone,Article%20content
I read the article. Yikes!
N.S. Lyons is beginning to get some Youtube airplay. Give him an hour if you've got it. (It relates to this RACKET piece.)
Let me recommend Edward F. Edingers commentary on Jung in EGO AND ARCHETYPE and Robert Moore's old men's movement work on establishing an ego archetype/self axis. (Or for a mind bender explore Jung's view on the enantiodromia built into the Christian myth.) I like Lyons. --Stay strong. Stay clear.
Once upon a time, Nova Scotia used to be a sensible place (apart from the relocated Colorado cultists), and Dalhousie used to be one of the top Canadian universities. By far.
Can you believe it?
Hard to believe. I actually started to play the embedded video of that poor RCMP woman reading those lines. I stopped after about 5 seconds because she was obviously under duress - parents being held i9n custody to ensure her compliance or some such. God, when law enforcement is so corrupted, you really have no chance. I think all universities North and South of the border are well beyond their use-by dates.
I am on to another excellent Substack, out of Canada. By Julius Ruechel. He is a thinker.
I will share:
https://juliusruechel.substack.com/p/artificial-nations/comments#comment-119509981
Ah, well, comments paywalled.
I would say this might be the time, then, to make good on their land acknowledgement promises by selling up.....
Lowlife! I should cancel my subscription immediately. But maybe I'll write a sternly worded comment first...
MLB needs to acknowledge the Colorado Rockies this year.
Can I get a particular custom land acknowledgement? My first ancestor from Britain to the New World arrived in Massachusetts in 1650. He later had family, who eventually had a large ownership in Block Island, Rhode Island.
Then, they were deprived of their land (without payment) and sent packing northward, because post-1776 they still sided with the British Crown. As many did. They were United Empire Loyalists. The first group of Americans in a mass deportation.
Where can I send the bill....with interest? 😁
I think the rest of us would be willing to cede Providence, RI, and much of Massachusetts to you in reparation for that indignity.
😂
Only one paragraph? Piker.
Thanks for the LOL, rjt. I needed that. %-)
;) !!
I had to look up "Land Acknowledgement", then I laughed my ass off. Thank you.
Remember that Canada has almost 650 indigenous group First Nations, most with treaty rights and a veto on legislation. Right now in Alberta, they are attempting to stop the referendum for other Albertans on whether or not they wish to separate from Canada.
That’s a Canadian thing hey!
You mean you in the U.S, have not had the pleasure of listening to land acknowledgements yet? You haven't lived!
The lefties in Australia use them too.
Sacred cows make the tastiest hamburgers. -Abbie Hoffmann
Slaughter the cows. D.E.I., climate change, and gender are cult religions that are destroying our society. The marxist left derives its power from ideological subsidies through its iron grip on dark money NGOs, universities, and media: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/dnc-astroturf-pivot
I don't see how climate change fits the critique. The greenhouse effect is scientifically proven fact, not opinion. That it's "unpopular" in some quarters has everything to do with corporate power and money. Those who benefit from the status quo will do anything to protect it, including (as Exxon Mobil did) lie about their own findings regarding this urgent threat to civilization as we know it.
OK, there is a greenhouse effect. But science is not static. More than two scientists (Koutsoyiannis and Happner) have shown that rising atmospheric temperatures precede rising CO2 level in time. And rising temperatures, especially of the oceans release much more CO2 than our use of fossil fuels.
You don't have to believe research results funded by Exxon, but why then would you believe Federal government funded research by Michael Mann? He is largely a political scientist who discovered a way to scare the Hell out of us and secure boatloads of tax money. Which he has used for shouting down and filing lawsuits against anyone who disagrees with him (Steyn and Ball {RIP}.
And speaking of Dr. Mann of Penn State (or state pen, per Dr. Tim Ball), you're gonna love this! Dr. Mann lost a defamation law suit he brought against Dr. Ball because HE WOULD NOT SHOW THE SCIENCE BEHIND HIS INFAMOUS HOCKEY STICK. Now what kind of "scientist" REFUSES to show his work?!
https://climatechangedispatch.com/tim-ball-defeats-michael-mann-lawsuit/
1) ocean temperatures are rising BECAUSE of CO2
2) I DO believe EM's findings, which supported climate change theory and were covered up to protect the oil industry's business model.
The question isn't whether there are arguments for climate change. The question is whether people should be silenced for not agreeing with them.
Exactly, it can’t be just out of bounds…
Who is silenced for not agreeing with them? My God, Trump is constantly referring to climate change as a hoax and he is our president!
A show of hands doesn't/shouldn't determine science. Please take a look at, for a moment, that effectively ALL climate research funding is secured by following the narrative of human-caused climate change. Nothing gets published in any major science journal unless it follows the narrative. There are quite a few climate scientists who don't believe it's cut and dried, yes, it's trending warmer, but the climate has always cycled, and it's questionable how much should be attributed to humanity. Forcing the narrative doesn't make it correct or incorrect, and is a very poor way to conduct research if your goal is a correct assumption.
Covid. Science. Greta.
Color me skeptical. Prove it with facts. Scientific research, open to challenge —- facts.
We have belonged to the usual environmental groups forever, but no more. It is obvious that these groups have been captured by politics (maybe they always were, and we believed).
Anyway, I have conducted my own research and determined that people flying on private jets, with more than one coastal mansion, with super yachts — the rich, the important — may have a “carbon footprint” bigger than everyone in my small town combined. Conclusion: They need to FO.
FO indeed! Celebrities love to be celebrated. Big causes that can get them camera time and attention are just too seductive to ignore. I don't disapprove of their lifestyle; if I could afford it, I'd probably do the same. But, like you, it pisses me off to be lectured to by hypocrites.
British Petroleum, BP, invented 'Carbon Footprint' to blame-shift the weight of climate responsibility to you, the consumer. Their marketing team thought it up right after the Gulf disaster where they oiled giga-tons of shrimp and Louisiana coastline.
You have 1/700 billionth the responsibility of an oil company, yet they've shifted you to this false narrative—quite easily. You see the hypocrisy, yet incorrectly blame the science instead of the marketing guilt-trip you've been sold. Your ire belongs with BP, not climate science.
100% correct. And the wonderful irony is that the end result of ANY and ALL dissenting opinions never seeing the light of publication is an academic-journal landscape so uniform that the climate crazies will say, "See?? Virtually every published report and study confirms that climate change is real!" They're so naive, it'd be precious if it weren't so ridiculous and dangerous.
Add to that the perverse incentives to make human-driven climate change a thing. Imagine the total cost of carbon credits, the switch to wind and solar, the foolishness like stopping the Keystone pipeline for environmental reasons, and then shipping that petroleum by rail car. Then talk to millennials and younger who are deeply depressed because they're told the world isn't going to be inhabitable, possibly in their lifetime. I don't know if human-caused climate change is real or not, or to what extent, but I do know that ignoring the facts won't help us figure it out.
The authors I cited present evidence that rising ocean temperatures result in CO2 release and precede rising CO2 emissions in time. This is generally considered proof that rising temperature is causative of rising CO2, not the other way around. Potential causes of rising temperature is being studied as we speak, e.g. solar variation. It is my opinion you are being too certain anthropogenic (man caused) global warming is THE ISSUE?
That is correct. During periods of falling temps, the planet absorbs CO2, while during periods of rising temps, the planet emits CO2. From what I've seen, there is a 600-800 year lag. CO2 changes are a lagging indicator of temperature change, not a leading indicator.
Moreover, there a period of hundreds of millions of years of Earth's history where CO2 and global temps are non-correlated or NEGATIVELY correlated:
https://climatechangedispatch.com/an-examination-of-the-relationship-between-temperature-and-carbon-dioxide/
To twist a phrase from Bill Clinton, "it's the water vapor stupid!"
https://watervaporandwarming.blogspot.com/2019/11/abstract-during-time-periodwhen-water.html
A lot of people believe it, Bonnie, they are people like you who take biased and fabricated reports for truth, but that doesn't make it true.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/06/06/ocean-indicators-suggest-co2-isnt-the-strongest-driver-of-climate/
I'm a follower of Anthony Watts too. I had the pleasure of meeting him at Heartland Institute Climate Conference.
You might find this informative concerning Dr. Michael Mann of "hockey stick" fame:
https://climatechangedispatch.com/tim-ball-defeats-michael-mann-lawsuit/
Thanks.
You're joking right?
Someone who subscribes to Racket News believes in the CO2 scam and "Climate Change"?
Really?
Hardly the only one.
No, the oceans are releasing CO2 because temperatures are rising. Warm water holds less CO2 than cold water. A 1 degree C change in ocean temperature (which will vary greatly depending on the location of the ocean) will release lots of CO2 into the atmosphere because oceans cover more than 70% of the earth's surface. The fact that the earth began warming at about the same time as the start of the industrial revolution is what is known as a coincidence. The last time the Thames river froze in London was 1895.
"The fact that the earth began warming at about the same time as the start of the industrial revolution is what is known as a coincidence."
Yup. Correlation does not prove causation; that's what falsifiable theories are there to prove!
So roughly 700 million people will convince roughly 7.2 billion people to stop burning coal.
Good luck with that
I was going to share some work from serious scientists who disagree, but the ALL CAPS convinced me. Thanks for keeping safe from delusion.
It is NOT proven that CO2 increase is the driver of any temperature increase. It might have an effect on temps, but the extent to which it does is a non-falsifiable theory. There are ocean modulations that occur over decades or multi-decades that can account for changes in ocean temps:
https://climatedataguide.ucar.edu/climate-data/atlantic-multi-decadal-oscillation-amo
https://climatedataguide.ucar.edu/climate-data/pacific-decadal-oscillation-pdo-definition-and-indices
Wow. Two scientists. 99 doctors out of 100 say I have cancer, but I'll listen to the one that says I don't. And then when the other 99 step in to emphasize their concern and demonstrate why that one is wrong and the consequences, I'll start whining about "shibboleths" and slaughtering "sacred cows". I guess one of those sacred cows being slaughtered now is the one about the solution to speech you don't like is more speech. Guess Matt's okay with that one being turned into a burger as well. Barbecuing on Memorial Day weekend is a sacred ritual after all.
Please tell me you're not referring to the repeatedly-debunked trope: "97% of climate scientists agree that the earth is warming dangerously, and human activity is the main cause of it." If so, I include the following for your continuing edumication:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/02/15/97-an-inconvenient-truth-about-the-oft-cited-polling-of-climate-scientists/#26ef5ca8205a
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2014/03/16_not_97_agree.html
I have plenty of others as well. Just say the word...
I live in the American West on a mountain. In the 90's we had streams that ran year round and snowfall that would often close roads and highways in and out of a nearby major city. People could ride snow mobiles to the shopping center in the little town that serves our community. Today the streams are gone, the city sees almost no snowfall and each year the mountain sees less. Is it a weather cycle or desertification? (The state is in perpetual drought.) Old time Spanish settlers claim they've seen alternating 30 and 40 year drought/snow cycles. I have no idea, but that's what I'm witnessing. (Add bark beetle infestation and the constant threat of wildfires.)
Anger at "who knows what the truth is" control of people and the obfuscation and destruction of a truth/fact based national conversation to cover the looting of labor and
resources is why we're here
at RACKET. (Not aimed at you as a target.) Keep rockin' forward.
You’re welcome to join an anarcho primitivism commune.
Most climate advocates solutions are idiot anti-human garbage like "degrowth" and blotting out the sun:
https://www.bbc.com/weather/articles/c5ygydeqq08o
Reducing emissions is a technological problem, not a too many humans problem. The solution is nuclear energy.
The worst thing about climate advocacy is that it misunderstandings how humans work. It guilts people for existing and steals your care for what's local to what's global.
Environmental projects that directly affect the land people inhabit have the feedback mechanism of being able to enjoy and literally care about the results. Sucking everything into a blob of saving the planet just turns into fearmongering and a lot of "where did the money go?"
I refuse to take seriously any climate change activist who also opposes nuclear energy. It saves me a ton of time.
This ^^^^^
The worst thing about climate-change advocacy is that it is ridiculed, twisted and/or simply ignored. The best thing about it occurs when all the defensive blowback clears and sensible people resume talking about solutions. Climate change is indeed a blob, in that it is part of a much bigger problem, which is the outsized impact our species is having on the habitats of billions of other species on whom rely for our own survival. If "the web of life" is too complicated for you to get your head around, so be it, but once a person understands this surprisingly simple concept everything "environmental" fits into this big-picture understanding that you refer to as a blob.
There is a vast difference between climate-change as a descriptor of a phenomena and climate-change as a political agenda. The activists have taken a position that human activity is the cause, without any clear and undisputed facts to back their claim. It is, and has always been, a political ploy to establish further control over citizens. It has also, clearly, been used to swindle taxpayers out of more of their wealth. I won't argue whether or not the change exists. I, however, don't buy into the associated scam it has produced amongst the political class.
It is definitely just one more method for controlling us.
And they've been completely unhinged for years.
Remember when they were attacking Hummers? "Climate activists" glue their hands to the street in the UK, when they're not blocking traffic, or defacing art works.
Their most vocal adherents take private jets to "Climate Conferences" in spiffy locales, while not cruising around on yachts in the Mediterranean.
But I'm supposed to feel guilty for turning my thermostat down in the summer?
Underlying all this stuff, as Bonnie's comment above retails, is the (old) religious belief that human beings are bad. Until we stop these versions of self-hatred, the beatings will continue.
It's hard to take the climate change advocates seriously for they tune out the biggest issues- the Amazon forests being wiped out by globalists to create farms to feed the 300 million Chinese who fled their small family farms to live in polluted cities and many to work in the globalists' factories.
And China builds 95% of the coal-powered plants worldwide each year.
Every 2-1/2 years they add as much coal producing capacity as what we have. Crickets from the advocates.
And acres & acres of forests in Scotland being cleared of all trees in order to install wind turbines -- which slaughter birds of prey.
Meanwhile, the UK imports "biomass" (lumber) from British Columbia for burning instead of coal.
The environmental movement used to profess concern for all species, but now it's focused on man-made "climate change," wind turbines, and solar panels.
There is no way I can take any of these Climate Armageddon types seriously.
(It's kind of funny how they're now discovering remote shut-off capabilities in many of the solar panels from China.)
We wipe out other species in the ecosystem (solar panels fry birds also and are not recyclable) then invasive species take their place. Example: invasive mussels forming in the Colorado river (which provides drinking water for ~50 million people)
Fossil fuels are limited. Moving to other sources seems like a reasonable thing. Nuclear energy seems pretty reasonable.
I believe that our approach to the environment should be based on principles we learned in kindergarten... "leave things nicer than you found them" and "don't be a litterbug"
It is a fact that average global temperature have been in a rising trend since the end of the last Ice Age ~14k years ago. Show us the study that breaks out the percentage increase in global temperatures that is attributable to the natural continuation of that multi-millennium trend vs the additional warming caused by human activity. Then we can target that percentage increase that we are responsible for vs the trend that we have no ability to control.
The study does not exist, btw. Why?
The current climate alarmism is nothing more than a money-laundering operation targeting heart-strings.
If the 'Emergency' was as dire as the alarmists would have us believe, then any and every bill proposed to enact change could and should have military-level satellite images and ordnance estimates for neutralizing every coal plant in operation and under construction in India and China. The fact that they do not tells you everything you need to know about how serious the people pushing these policies actually are.
Humans ARE "natural."
Indeed -- and we are also the carbon they want to reduce.
Not really sure how linguistic nitpicking furthers contributes to the main point… unless distracting from the argument is the point?? You can do better Marty
If you read my words as "linguistic nitpicking," I not sure how to respond--or whether to. If, as is apparent, you yourself cannot do better, perhaps it is best to leave it as it is. Cheers!
The point is that the almost 14k year trend line goes from lower left to upper right… regardless of the presence of us ‘natural’ beings.
The onus is on the climate alarmists to show if we have in fact exacerbated that pre-existing trend with our 300year old carbon combusting habit.
No one seems to be able to do that.
To add to what you’ve written:
China and India get it. Abundant and affordable energy is necessary to raise the living standard of their people to match what we in the USA and Europe have achieved by leveraging just that. Yet the globalists tell us that Africa cannot also participate in raising the living standard of their citizens by having access to abundant and affordable energy to replace the burden of burning wood and dung for energy.
100% correct. In Michael Shellenberger's (he of recent Twitter File fame, along with Matt and others) great book from a few years back, Apocalypse Never, he highlights and explores the fundamental immorality of rich Western elites telling third-world countries that they can't have access to the very same fossil fuels which were the engine of the massive increase in standard of living those elites have enjoyed forever.
And making their actions all the more despicable is the plain fact that those elites will NEVER have to experience a world without the fossil fuels of which they'd so blithely deprive the world's poor.
It absolutely does fit. Yes, it is a scientifically proven fact that atmospheric CO2, due to the nature of its chemical structure, does absorb and retain some of the energy Earth reflects back into the atmosphere after absorbing it from the Sun (the "greenhouse effect", or more scientifically, "forcing"). What is NOT proven (or "settled science") is the degree to which this dynamic actually effects global temperatures. It's true global temps have risen since ~ 1980 (after having fallen since ~ 1940) along with atmospheric CO2 levels. This is shown by both surface temperature stations (whose data is often corrupt due to urbanization) and satellite readings (more "reliable"). But legitimate scientists know that correlation does not prove causation. To conclude causation due to correlation is specious at best. (To wit: shark attacks and ice cream sales are strongly positively correlated.) There are millions of years when CO2 levels and global temps have shown no or negative correlation. (see link below)
https://climatechangedispatch.com/an-examination-of-the-relationship-between-temperature-and-carbon-dioxide/
"That it's "unpopular" in some quarters has everything to do with corporate power and money." That might be true in "some quarters", but the quarters I frequent are those of legitimate "climate scientists" who work diligently to understand the physics of climate change, and whose work extends far beyond the dogma of CO2 as climate thermostat. They don't deny the greenhouse effect, but they carry a healthy degree of scientific skepticism as to the degree of its effect, which skepticism exists because there is no REAL, falsifiable science to support the claims of the "alarmists". Computer projections and correlation are not science. This healthy, legitimate skepticism has earned them the label "deniers", or in historical terms, "heretic". There are some that contend the rise in global temps is mostly due to "natural variability", and that the effect of CO2 increases on this rise is mostly just "noise" in the data, and not very relevant.
This is a very informative and relevant presentation by one the climate scientists I follow, Dr. Judith Curry (also linked at bottom)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqsZV8i3O1E
A research study done by Princeton professor emeritus Dr. William Happer indicates that the "greenhouse effect" of atmospheric CO2 is maximized after ~ 100 parts per million (ppm). (see below) Current levels are about 415 ppm, and have risen from a pre-industrial level of ~ 285 ppm - the result of which is a "greening" of the planet and correspondingly healthier, more drought-resistant plants. I had the pleasure to meet Dr. Happer and discuss his paper.
https://clintel.org/the-greenhouse-effect-summary-of-the-happer-and-van-wijngaarden-paper/
His research is also supported by the logarithmic effect of CO2.
https://holoceneclimate.com/the-logarithmic-nature-of-the-co2-greenhouse-effect.html
The following are links to three legitimate climate scientists. Drs. Roy Spencer and John Christy from the U. of Alabama @ Huntsville, and Dr. Judith Curry, who used to be an "alarmist" - until she reviewed the science and reversed her views. She has interesting stories of intimidation and "excommunication" after she "lost her religion".
https://www.drroyspencer.com/
https://judithcurry.com/
There are scientists who question the "greenhouse effect" - see for example Ned Nikolov's presentation on Tom Nelson's podcast here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1GgmBIew9Y. If we allow climate scientists who challenge the alarmists' theories to speak, we will learn that there are very few "proven facts" about climate change.
"If we allow climate scientists who challenge the alarmists' theories to speak, we will learn that there are very few "proven facts" about climate change."
Indeed! But that would require legitimate scientific motivation, whereas most of green initiatives are about profit.
This is something that might be of interest. Remember the infamous "hockey stick" in Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" (love the irony of that title!) showing "unprecedented" rise in global temps? Well, there was a court case brought by the creator of that chart, Dr. Michael Mann of Penn State U, against Dr. Tim Ball. Ball won:
"Dr. Mann lost his case because he abused Discovery by refusing to honor the “concessions” he made to Ball in 2018 to finally show in open court his R2 regression numbers (Mann’s math ‘working out’) for his graph (see ‘update’ at foot of article).
Dr. Ball has always argued that those numbers—if examined in open court—would prove Mann was motivated to commit a criminal fraud."
So a "scientist", whose work is one of the foundations of Alarmists, would not show his work. Still waiting for Al Gore's retraction...
https://climatechangedispatch.com/tim-ball-defeats-michael-mann-lawsuit/
Google "European Climate Exchange".
It's a big Marxist operated money grab.
"Those who benefit from the status quo," you mean like every citizen who uses the light switch? Change is up to us, not some remote corporate power. Many that scream loudest about CO2 and cutting carbon are constantly on the go in either their cars or planes, traveling for fun or just "going places."
Yes, I do mean every citizen. This is why I have always promoted a policy of equitable rationing of greenhouse gases in the same way (and for similar reasons) our government deployed broad-based rationing during WWII. The objection to this idea has always come most strenuously from the private sector, which of course controls our public sector now too. Ordinary citizens have been lulled into complacency and confusion by incessant anti-science propaganda from these fascist elites.
Are you aware that CO2 concentrations (ppm) on Earth were once 15 times greater than their current level, long before Man's activities played any role? We are living in a period of extremely low CO2 concentrations.
As if the public sector does not proceed from the private sector. LOL! (Check out the Preamble to the Constitution if you are confused.)
'The greenhouse effect is scientifically proven fact, not opinion.'
It's not that simple, and then layering on the antigenic bit makes it even more complicated.
Greenhouse effect is indisputable, but there’s a lot more to it than just that.
No, it isn't indisputable. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1GgmBIew9Y
Actually, it is indisputable, insofar as CO2 and methane absorb energy in the form of many electromagnetic wavelengths, and re-emit it as heat. That’s just quantum physics; even Arrhenius, before quantum physics, figured that out. Does it automatically mean climate change? Who knows, there’s s lot more to it than just that.
There is? If indeed Co2 and methane absorb solar radiation and release it as heat, then when there is more of those gases, there will be more heat * than there would otherwise have been*. If we were headed into a glacial period, that might be a good thing. But the glaciers are melting.
The reasons for cilmate cycles seem to be much debated, but to my mind, that last bit settles it.
As it stands, our children and grandchildren will, not might, deal with a much warmer world s- and a very rough transition. The direst concern is actually ocean acidification, which could kill everything within reach of the ocean by releasing cyanide. It has happened, in the distant past. It caused one of the mass extinctions. I suspect the eventual response, on an emergency basis, will be extremely authoritarian, and they'll wonder what was wrong with us. But that's what we're setting up.
I so appreciate this insight. Yes, there is no doubt in my mind that the response will be more authoritarianism, perhaps along the lines of the surveillance cameras we once disparaged for their widespread use in China but that are now ubiquitous here. They were used to apprehend the prisoners who recently escaped in the South. See also how the marketing of fear not of nature but of other humans has spurred demand and deployment by ordinary citizens of such surveillance devices in and around their homes. We are adopting the same products whose use we once decried—yes, people like Matt especially decried them—without comment. Shouldn't this seem more sinister to a free-speech advocate than Greta Thunberg speaking truth to power at Davos, or a fearless scientist like NASA's James Hanson turning activist (demonstrating in the streets). so frustrated is he by the denial of a phenomenon that was first predicted in lab experiments in the 19th century? Hanson has been studying climate breakdown since the 1970s. Rachel Carson also warned about it. I should also note that Matt's readers seem remarkably indifferent to the suffering of those most immediately threatened, the billions of people who live in the Global South. How can you console yourself with the argument that the rest of us (I live in Minnesota) won't have it so bad? We will ALL have it pretty bad, people. Hate to tell you, but the most terrifying aspect of this new weather is its violence and unpredictability, which those in the insurance business tell me is on the biurnk of blowing up their industry's business model. They can't plan for a future that is out of human control and therefore unpredictable.
It’s a result of the industrial revolution, which put the population at 8 billion. Otherwise, less than 2 billion. What else can one say?
The graph they built on a lie. The iconic 'climate' graph that's undermining industrial capitalism and taking our freedom...and it's 100 percent garbage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo0YrN4Nz_c GORILLA SCIENCE has been set up by rebels from the world of mainstream media. Our aim? To challenge the flagrant lies and double-speak of governments, the media, the educational establishment and others.
Is there though? It means temperature WILL rise, the only question is how much. A lot of bozos on the right, like most of the right, denies even this fact. I never understood why. The science and the policy response are two separate questions. It’s perfectly reasonable to say humans are increasing global temperatures AND the cost of mitigation isn’t worth the benefit. Why doesn’t anyone say that?
Oh, check out Bjorn Lonborg or Roger Pielke for starters.
Or that a warming planet and more CO2 is a good thing for humans https://dailycaller.com/2023/01/21/opinion-heres-why-the-world-is-producing-more-food-vijay-jayaraj/ 'Countries all over the world are surpassing previous records for production of food crops. This is good news that stands in stark contrast to the apocalyptic picture that the media paints daily in reports on climate and weather.' 2023 article
https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2025-5-21-new-york-times-on-climate-change-two-candidates-for-quote-of-the-day
Bonnie, while the greenhouse effect is real, the amount of impact it has on our climate for the next few centuries and on our weather today is based totally on assumptions. Anyone who claims that they have conclusive proof of how much influence the greehnouse effect has on our temperature is a fraud. It's unknowable, as are all climate predictions, whether benign, catastrophic or otherwise. I don't give a rat's rump about corporate power or money, because I've not benefited a whit from them.
I understand the scientific method. If we cannot experiment on climate-related phenomena under controlled circumstances, we cannot reach truly scientific conclusions. I also understand mathematical modeling. While models can appear to be very sophisticated, using complicated mathematical tools, they are all limited by the same inherent weaknesses: a reliance on assumptions to simplify an unmanageably complex reality.
At the end of the day, if we only use models and incomplete data sets, we can only voice opinions about the matters of science that are limited to those tools. We should all be aware that a consensus is nothing more than a widely held opinion. All the carping in the world about Science when used in defense of the "existential threat" theory of climate change resembles nothing so much as a group of 3-year-olds in a sandbox talking past one another. When people claim that their knowledge of the climate is "settled science," they are just saying that they agree with certain opinions and that they are unwilling to marshal facts and principles to support their conclusions.
"The greenhouse effect is scientifically proven fact"
Says the person who's car/house/food all relies on fossil fuels..
Faux Virtue signalling and obfuscation pops into the thread....
Sigh..
The urgent "threat to civilisation" that never happened?
That one?
Or..The urgent "threat to civilisation"is the destruction of native forests to place subsidised windmills and solar farms in them to produce energy at a loss hence the requirements for public funds.
The article is about groupthink and the consequences of stepping outside that.
How did you not understand that???
Thanks for a perfect example though..!
Sceptics are not arguing that the greenhouse effect per se doesn't exist..ffs
Tell us how much the global temperature has stalled after hundreds and hundreds of billions of $$ has been spent "fighting" climate change over the last 30 years???
Cricket sounds..no one knows or cares...
Because "its to save the children"
"...That it's "unpopular" in some quarters has everything to do with corporate power and money..."
God..its almost like your channelling the New York times...
Have you ever had an original thought or done any research outside your little "newspapers are my research thingy"
We will gloss over the fact that the vast majority of the corporate/political power and $ is behind "climate change"..
All western govts support the narrative.
All universities support the narrative.
Most, have the same facile, asinine understanding of "climate change" as you have.
And the “Exxon knew” meme is just so tiresome.
Try and read a little before you post “cool” and wrong memes.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/09/18/exxonknew-more-correction/
Around the same time we were also worried about the ice age coming.
https://youtu.be/cnsp_DGA_Xk
And if you want to know about how bad the actual science is behind the temperature reconstructions (I am being sarcastic here as you have zero interest in the actual science) go to climate audit run by mathematicians.
All open source and anyone can comment.
https://climateaudit.org/
Thanks for that. Glad to know there are others like me who have exhaustively searched for truth in this arena.
To twist a phrase from Bill Clinton, "it's the water vapor, stupid!"
"During at least the time period when water vapor (WV) and carbon dioxide (CO2) have been accurately measured worldwide, 1988-now, and apparently for centuries, WV increase has been responsible for the human contribution to Global Warming with no significant net contribution from CO2 or any other greenhouse gases."
https://watervaporandwarming.blogspot.com/2019/11/abstract-during-time-periodwhen-water.html
Gorilla science https://watchgorillascience.com is taking the bull by the horns and making funny videos that challenge the Climate Scam in a fun and well presented way - for instance 1000 years ago Greenland used to be hotter and Vikings lived there and grew crops! Dr Willie Soon exposes the climate scam in his coal-powered Time Machine. https://watchgorillascience.com/video/vikings-vs-greens-willie-soon
Is it a proven scientific fact? Who proved it and where is the proof? Science in the area of climate tends to be no science at all. It's mainly fudged data compiled for a price the government pays and uses and the college reaps the benefit as does the so-called scientist. Is that science or is that the business of science?
There is a physicist at Princeton U. Who puts climate change and all its arguments to shame. I suggest you look him up as he’s done some recent interviews. He has zero interest in politics. He slays climate hysteria with facts.
I also like the work of Dr Willie Soon who travels back to the time of the dinosaurs to debunk this global warming whopper. Are we really in a period of record heat? Or is that claim a load of dino dung https://watchgorillascience.com/video/dinosaurs-versus-doom-mongers-willie-soon-time-traveller/
https://www.cato.org/blog/solyndra-case-study-green-energy-cronyism-failure-central-planning
The problem is folks trying to solve climate change “with other people’s money”. The “central planning” is resulting in billions/trillions being wasted with no impact on climate. Why not nuclear instead of solar/wind. It can be scaled up and works 24hrs in all seasons.
Well, there’s climate change, or, as is usually intended, human-caused climate change. That exists and is probably detrimental if it continues, but also has benefits such as the frost line moving North. One may reasonably guess that the speed of such change makes it a net detriment, as there will be indirect effects, such as the range of insects moving many hundreds of miles North. But Nature may well have some feedback mechanism we don’t estimate correctly, how much and how likely is above my pay grade.
I think what’s being referred to is Climate Change™, the political/activist/kleptocrat phenomenon which demands unlimited expense from the taxpayers directed into entities enmeshed with the government/NGO axis. This demand is only directed at the USA & Europe, not the larger CO2 emitters of Asia nor the industrializing nations of Africa. It also results in lower quality of life for the average person.
For example, the new-and-improved electric system which is missing the big old multi-ton turbines and electromagnets is less stable than the OG system, including after patches and fixes. The average person won’t have a generator, the connected will. To that end, California has outlawed small generators. Units large enough for, ohh, a Governor’s mansion are exempt. That and a dozen other such slights have people very sour on Climate Change™.
While there is a great deal of ideological claptrap and junk science wrapped up in the term "gender", there are still some useful and important aspects to the concept. Notably in the idea, and brute facts, of sexually dimorphic -- AKA feminine and masculine -- personality and behavioral traits.
As the late great US Justice Anton Scalia once put it:
AS: "The word 'gender' has acquired the new and useful connotation of cultural or attitudinal characteristics (as opposed to physical characteristics) distinctive to the sexes. That is to say, gender is to sex as feminine is to female and masculine to male."
https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep511/usrep511127/usrep511127.pdf
Thanks for the Justice Scalia quote.
Thank you for the Scalia quote. His observation is spot on, elaborated upon in much greater detail in:
"The End of Gender: Debunking the Myths about Sex and Identity in Our Society" Hardcover – August 4, 2020
by Debra Soh (Author)
Lack of understanding of both the difference between, and relationship between, gender and sex has greatly hindered discourse on a very important matter. Trans “activists”, in particular, dismiss the eloquent definition Justice Scalia provides. Instead, they substitute, “You are what you feel (literally subject to change from minute to minute)”, as dogma. The result: millions of lives scarred by the use of powerful medications with no ethical indications, along with mutilating cosmetic surgeries. The complicity of many in my medical profession is indefensible.
In every culture throughout human history there have been modes of behavior, dress, occupation, sexual attraction, body "art" (hair styles, body painting/makeup/tatooing/piercing), speech patterns and other characteristics which the majority of women and men in that culture manifest. This is gender. It is both different among cultures and also changes within every culture over time. One can be "gender typical" or "gender atypical" for any of these things. Biologically, except for the rare intersex states, you remain female or male. Tomboys whom everyone acknowledges to be girls, not trans boys. We should respect and welcome all girls/women and boys/men regardless of how "gender typical" or "gender atypical" they are. I just wish we could realize the appropriateness of treating the whole gender thing this way.
We did, until quite recently.
Unfortunately, a certain percentage of people are very unhappy within that approach. I think that, along with the ethic you sketch out, we should acknowledge a right to be who you are, and to decide that for yourself. That would mean some of us would have to restrain their judgemental tendencies, as Jesus commanded. Note that it's framed as a universal - a right we all need.
At the same time, there are limitations, mostly to do with age. Allowing irreversible procedures on minors makes nonsense of the age of consent. Children literally don't know who they are; that's what they're working out. But I would only apply that to irreversible measures like surgery and some drugs. If a kid wants to experiment with hrair, name, etc. - well, I was a hippy. And that's part of what youth is for.
My impression is that the subject is so emotional that some advocates have flown to bizarre extremes - then insist that we all follow them, or be labelled haters. The backlash has now arrived.
Thanks for the quote of Soh from her 2020 book. Particularly intrigued that she had apparently used the Scalia quote -- you have a page number?
Though curious as to how and when she ran across that quote -- I'd first seen it somewhat prior to my Welcome post (July 2022) in a Wikipedia article on "gender". Rather amused to note that the Scalia quote had been deleted within 6 months after that:
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/welcome
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gender&oldid=1099419611
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gender&oldid=1134933937
Sadly, on virtually anything to do with gender Wikipedia's editors are hardly better than the acolytes of Judith Butler. Though they at least retain records of various smoking guns.
But nice to see that Soh was a bit clearer on the difference between sex and gender in her book -- her earlier (December 2017) article in Playboy (only available in an archived version) gave some evidence of some "muddled" thinking:
DS: "In reality, no one is 100 percent male or 100 percent female in terms of who we are, just as no one is 100 percent gender-conforming."
http://www.playboy.com/articles/gender-neutral-trend
Archive link: https://archive.ph/2U8qB
If one goes by the standard biological definitions -- which Trump's EO on "restoring biological truth in government" more or less endorses -- then to have a sex is to have functional gonads of either of two types, those with neither being, ipso facto, sexless. We are, all of us, either "100 percent male or 100 percent female", or zero percent male and female -- about a third of us, at any one time, in the latter category. See those standard definitions here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20221214064356/https://academic.oup.com/molehr/article/20/12/1161/1062990?login=false (see the Glossary definitions)
https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_3063-1
https://web.archive.org/web/20190608135422/https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/male
https://web.archive.org/web/20181020204521/https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/female
https://web.archive.org/web/20190326191905/https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/sex
Sadly I'm older and remember the hysteria about the incoming ice age which morphed into global warming which morphed into climate change. The models have been modified so many times, I believe they are useless. I'm all in for clean air but trying to say the coasts will be underwater soon is insane. The climate has changed since before people were here, so I am skeptical about all of those claims.
Succinctly & accurately stated.
This is by far the best piece you've ever written. It is absolutely dead on. Slaughter, I say.. If they can convince people they are right with logic, go for it. But this idea that they have the "objective truth" and they have a right to impose that "truth" on everyone with no debate was becoming terrifying. Trump going after the actual perpetrators of all this is not the same thing as what they were doing. But I do worry, this has been so brainwashed into our youth at these universities, it is far from over, as you say. I'll be sending this everywhere. Thanks, Matt.
I liked your comment, but I like Ode to Scum a lot more.
Nah. :) What he is addressing in this piece is to me the real crux of democracy and the real threat to it. All his pieces are good or at least raise interesting debates. But to me, this one really got into the depths of this problem that transcends lighter things on free speech. It was great.
We agree to disagree. While I agree that the issues addressed in this article are of fundamental importance to democracy, I also believe getting accurate information is a prerequsite of democracy. It's like the old coding saying "garbage in, garbage out" in real life, IMHO.
But that piece wasn't about misinformation except in passing; it was about habeas corpus and rights of foreign students (and I think illegal aliens) -- and due process. Mostly. And I didn't agree with Matt on some of it, though it's worth discussion. So this piece was fabulous and right on.
That we can read the same article and have different takes is what makes this conversation worthwhile. I'm all for being exposed to different perspectives. When I read Ode to Scum I found the publishing of lies and dishonest narratives to be the primary focus, but I don't discount the possibility of my personal bias in that direction affecting my take on the article in general. Thank you for this respectful exchange, I hope you're having a great day!
Read it again. It was not about that. Matt was saying Stephen Miller was all about that when it affected him, but then was not allowing the same rights to illegals. I think. Matt is an independent I think and doesn't have a political home at the moment, so I expect him to entertain a lot of issues. But affording illegals the same rights American citizens have is over-simplifying. Matt was sure Trump people would claim it was an "emergency." Not at all, but none of this was raised when Obama and Clinton deported people. They did not all get full on court cases and the rights an American would get. Which we can't afford and shouldn't have to when they are either here illegally or have broken the rules of their visas. Which is much more complicated. Not that it's not worth debate, but nowhere near the great article this was which gets to some really nuanced positions about what went on here. It was brilliant. :)
I didn't realize I was addicted to ATW until you guys took a week off
No doubt—hopefully Mr T took care of all the cunts out there and the boys can get back to the microphones
We must all work together on systemic cunt-removal; it will take a long time--if it can be done at all.
If that other guy— refuse to look up his name— doesn’t take the written beating he deserved— then I propose Mr T VS big C I’ll call him in a ring somewhere!
Already might have the perfect Referee— Tom Hardy— let’s just say my $ is clearly on Taibbi— I pity the fool
Tom Hardy!
Ha!
I know!
I've just felt a bit "off" all week.
SRSLY Matt! Get to work!!!
no kidding!
Is it off for sure this week as well?
According to a recent post by Walter on X there will be no ATW tomorrow either. He does say that they will be doing them next week tho
Do you think they just want us to beg? Ok, I'll beg...
Thank you, Biff!
Dunno...waiting impatiently for my next fix
Nicely done. The scary thing about the last ten years is, in contrast to the pushback on what Trump is doing, how much acceptance that censorship found. In a sane world there wouldn't have even been a conversation about giving ideological viewpoints the gravitas of fact and shutting people up based on that, but we became an insane world. And the insanity isn't gone by a long shot. It's trying to re-form itself.
That's true.
Just a casual conversation with a friend revealed her support for censorship during the Covid era.
Just in my tiny corner of the world, the self-suppression, suppression and repression I have witnessed is insane.
"A paper whose journalism appeals to only half the country has a dangerously severed public mission. ...Imagine what would be missed by journalists who felt no pressing need to see the world through others’ eyes."
That was written by Liz Spayd, the "public editor" at the NYT in 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/24/public-editor/liz-spayd-the-new-york-times-public-editor.html?unlocked_article_code=1.JE8.16lP.Wruaq6ZreVe0&smid=url-share
A year later, the NYT eliminated Spayd's position. And here we are with the NYT where 95 % of its readers identify as Democrats.
That speaks volumes about the sheer stupidity of a once great newspaper now speaking to less than half the nation.
95%. Had not seen that statistic..
This has some good stats and says NYT readers are 91% Democrats, but I've send seen higher percentages than that. https://letter.ly/new-york-times-readership-statistics/
Yeah, the authoritarian academic Far Left always runs for the "hey, we're just trying to hear all sides" argument when they are threatened, even as they systematically shut down opposing views.... Another reason to loathe them.
Thanks for the moral clarity, Matt.
The most dishonest motte-and-bailey imaginable.
Cutting funding for programs that have only existed for 10 years means "the end of democracy."
Certainly it depends on the program.
Well, do you think Democrats have become so infatuated with double-speak they no longer realize they do it?
Some know what they're doing. Most are useful idiots.
I think they’re fully conscious of what they’re doing. From their point of view, the ends justify the means.
Great nuanced piece. It this kind of thoughtful analysis that some journalists will never be capable of.
I have been following this story/trend for years, and yet the idea that "objectivity has got to go" in favor of "diversity" leaves me speechless. What does that even mean?!
I have a friend who works with kids. Apparently now, the objective observation of a child with head lice and reporting this to the parents for remediation is now verboten because diversity has to be respected and somehow pointing out head lice on the child is tantamount to calling the child's race inherently 'dirty'. I guess head lice are a cultural thing now.
My daughter had head lice in 4th grade - all the girls in her mostly-white school did, after a sleepover. It's just a bug!
My kids never got them but my neighbors kids did. Seemed pretty straight forward back in the 90's and no one got butthurt about it.
No one got butthurt about a lot of things back then. Oh how I miss those days.
Given that head lice seem to be ubiquitous it seems more like a feature... :)
Mostly peaceful head lice.
It means "don't say anything we don't like, or we will form a mob & make your life hell."
Fantastic article, Matt. I can't tell how how reassuring it is to read your work.
"Himpathy"???!!
Good lord.
I learn something new every day on Substack.
Sounds a lot like simp-pathy.
Nice!
> "Probably no three terms in the English language are more associated with groupthink-truisms or “shibboleths” than D.E.I., climate change, and gender."
Indeed. And relative to "gender", it would be hard to find a more toxic and "problematic" case of "2+2=5" than "trans women are women". Which the Democrats are most responsible for and still continue to endorse and promote one way or another -- an albatross that they'll have to wear for a long time.
I'm Still tying to figure out Why they want to die on That Hill.
Good question. Reminds me of a classic tale from Mark.Twain:
MT: "Men think they think upon great political questions, and they do; but they think with their party, not independently; they read its literature, but not that of the other side; they arrive at convictions, but they are drawn from a partial view of the matter in hand and are of no particular value. They swarm with their party, they feel with their party, they are happy in their party's approval; and where the party leads they will follow, whether for right and honor, or through blood and dirt and a mush of mutilated morals."
https://www.paulgraham.com/cornpone.html
"a mush of mutilated morals" seems of cover a lot of ground.
Something have noticed is so many people are not so much Stupid as they are Ignorant. By that I mean they don't know what the other side (really) says and why they say it. I find this Mainly, but not Exclusively on The Left.
“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that."
John Stuart Mill
That's because people on the right are unable to escape the views of the other side, which permeate popular culture in film, literature, theater, etc.
For the same reason that That Hill was featured so prominently in 1984.
If you can make people affirm an obvious lie, you win everything.