Sunday, August 21, 2011

Idiot comment of the day: listing right


David L. Hagen | August 20, 2011 at 2:24 pm | Reply

Joshua
Central planning already massively funds Darwinism. Why not equal time for major theories? PS The scientific alternative to Darwinism is Intelligent Design, not Creationism.


Yes, here's more fundy goodness from "Climate Etc"'s week in review. Like yesterday's, from the same thread, this comment illustrates the overlap between climate deniers and the religious right, which is quantified empirically in the Six Americas study, and driven home emphatically by the climate denier ravings of far-right terrorist and mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik.

Does no one come to global warming "skepticism" via an honest misappraisal of the evidence? Surely it's not so, but they seem to be a small -- vanishingly small -- minority. (Climate deniers identify as "conservative" as opposed to "liberal" at a rate of more than forty to one.) The political clot and media presence of deniers comes back to their support from this hard ideological core of rightists, for whom Planned Parenthood is a "eugenics experiment that is well funded by the state to kill" and the jury is still out on Darwin. These are people for whom the world is filled with "statists" and "parasites" dreaming of dragging the world into a Stalinist hell. This very naturally segues into climate change denial:

My claim to fame is having discovered the hidden structure of expressed thought (writing and speaking) or, in simple terms, how sentences fit together. This is science, Logic to be precise, not philosophy.


This is how David Wojick, a prolific global warming denier, presents himself as a meta-science expert. But if you push him a little -- I did, dear reader, I'm afraid I did -- the mask slips:

Robert, between 1966 and 2004 I analyzed and tracked the climate debate for Electricity Daily and several other publications, writing hundreds of articles about the great green menace. I also did a dozen or so major studies for the coal and oil industries. They, unlike rabid CAGW, provide an invaluable service, because our civilization is still based on fire. The coal burners are my heroes and I am proud of my advocacy work, especially as I am winning and you are losing.


If you believe Planned Parenthood practices eugenics and Darwinism is a big-government conspiracy, you are more likely to believe there is such a thing as "the great green menace." And if you do believe in "the great green menace," well, you're hardly going to listen to any concerns scientists have about our environment, especially concerns that imply the need to alter a major element of our economic system like the mass burning of fossil fuels.

5 comments:

  1. "Central planning already massively funds Darwinism."

    Wow. this guy can reach

    Why would intelligent design be an 'alternative' to science? Seems to me it would be inclusive of science and complimentary with it.

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  2. "Wow. this guy can reach"

    You gotta love a good slippery slope argument. As best I understand it 1. Teachers teach the science ---> 2. Teacher salaries come from the public school system ---> 3. The public school system is paid for by taxes ---> 4. Anything the government does except maintain order is socialism ---> 5. Socialism = central planning, therefore ---> 6. Darwinism is massively supported by central planning.

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  3. Some highly-enriched, bomb-grade stupidity there.
    A very minor quibble, but it's probably not accurate to lump Breivik in with Evangelicals or anything understood to be Christian in the American context, right-wing or otherwise. He describes himself as a "cultural Christian" rather than a believer, and dreams of the day when a national, nationalist Norwegian Church integrates Odin worship into their catechism. See the Heterodoxology blog if you're interested.

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  4. I am interested. Thanks for the tip.

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  5. Here's the link for interested readers: http://heterodoxology.com/

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