Tuesday, 10 November 2009

Chill, dude...

...to add to the literature exposing the fraud of climatastrophe is Peter Taylor's book Chill. Taylor scrutinises the scientific research that underpins concern about global warming and finds that it is unconvincing. As a life-long environmental campaigner Taylor is well placed to consider the role that activist organisations have played in this process. UK blogger Harmless Sky has published a chapter (link below) from Chill, inviting the following comment...

...This fascinating chapter by Peter Taylor... raises a subject little discussed in the AGW debate: the vocabulary and debating style of many warmists, and the extraordinary prevalence of Marketspeak borrowed from the world of commerce. The most frequently encountered sociological analysis of the warmists is the Watermelon theory, which holds that greens are reds in disguise, frustrated lefties latching on to a pseudo-scientific theory as a replacemant for Marxism, in order to further their programme of world domination. I’ve long felt that a more convincing theory could be found by looking at the social and educational changes which have led to the number of university educated leaping from near nothing to 30% of the population in a couple of generations. The French sociologist Emmanuel Todd has remarked on the profound inegalitarian results of this. Whereas the acquisition of universal literacy had obvious democratic and egalitarian effects, the rise of a large university educated class has the opposite effect, leading to a proportion of the population inhabiting a kind of elitist cultural ghetto, cut off from the masses. He applied this analysis to the sorry state of the Socialist Party in France, but the same kind of analysis could be applied to the Green movement and its obsession with global warming. My generation of the newly university educated often drifted into marketing and advertising. Being overpaid and over-educated, we aped our intellectual betters by adopting the posture of the social sciences, pretending to be psychologists or social anthropologists, and developing a pseudo-science of marketing jargon to justify our existence.The current generation of environmental activists, journalists, NGOers etc. are following the same route. The old social structures of church, trade union and political party no longer attract, and a new social structure is being constructed around science (the only solid basis remaining). The Greens’ adoption of a business model and its associate jargon is due to their cargo-cult-like belief that the jargon is responsible for the success of the model (i.e. the modern technological capitalist world) rather than being an unimportant and irritating offshoot...
...so there we have it. Not all greens are reds, many are just simple minded jargon addicted yuppies, looking for a sensitive new age utopia...

3 comments:

MathewK said...

"so there we have it. Not all greens are reds, many are just simple minded jargon addicted yuppies, looking for a sensitive new age utopia."

It's true, a lot of today's left movement doesn't even know the real nasty side of their group, they trundle along merrily oblivious of what their freedom-eroding ideology is really doing.

Personally i find a lot of them are lazy and unable to focus on something to really understand it.

Ayrdale said...

Well, you have to wonder if the deliberate dumbing down of the populace, starting with the neglect of basic skills at school level, is a deliberate move...

Anonymous said...

...and the relative decline in educational skills for boys, together with the fact that large numbers of boys (very rarely girls) are put on f***ing Ritalin at a young age. WTF does that do to their educational and psychological development ?