ANNOYING SELF-RIGHTEOUS CANADIAN ALERT!
No… not Justin Trudeau. Or even David Suzuki. Although both would easily qualify.
No, this time it’s life of the Party, Naomi Kline. And she has travelled thousands of miles in a huge, fossil fuel guzzling, CO2 spewing jet (business class no doubt)…. has been driven back and forth between airport, luxury hotel and media studios in fossil fuel guzzling, CO2 spewing cars… getting treated like a VIP…. eating well and often….. all so she can lecture average working people in Australia about how they are obliged to feel ashamed of their lifestyle and modest standard of living.
Yes folks. It’s climate change again. You’d forgotten about it, hadn’t you? What with all the hysteria about the US election and Donald Trump taking up so much oxygen for the past several months.
Naomi hasn’t forgotten about it. Nope. Naomi never forgets about it. And she considers it her business to make sure you don’t forget about it either.
Professional obnoxious, self-righteous bores like Kline and Suzuki seem to really embolden the amateur obnoxious, self-righteous bores that are out there.
Below is the response from one of these self-anointed, amateur intellectual powerhouses to a comment of mine that expressed my reasoned disinclination to obediently submit to the judgements of the hypocritical academic class of which Kline is a privileged member.
B B : Imagine this for a moment: let’s say in a month from now, having made a genuine effort to listen and learn and think, you find that you have changed your mind and that climate change is in fact real and desperately, frighteningly urgent. How would you look back on your previous attitude? Would it be with shame or anger? To what extent would you blame yourself? Or should you blame others? I can answer that for you: it’s not really your fault. You have been actively misled by businesses that make *trillions* of dollars out of fossil energy production. You have also been ‘in denial’ in a way that is common to all human beings, i.e. we deny our fear of death. Think of it this way: clinging to ultimately false and foolish disinformation is not rare: it’s normal. What is rare is science: a disciplined approach to knowledge that in some ways is only 250 years old. The fact that you haven’t yet understood what makes science different from all other human beliefs is therefore not surprising. There are thousands like you. Don’t be angry. Just see what you can learn. The evidence and information, and patient people who can teach you, are available.
The dripping condescension and the assumption that anyone who doesn’t share his uncritical devotion to the ‘catastrophic man-made climate change narrative’ must never have heard the various slogans, clichés and ‘go-to’ talking points they all rely on is pretty standard. The weird faux-Freudian ‘denial of death’ stuff is a nice innovation though.
Here’s how I slapped him down:
– Going to Getugly: If you’re going to use fallacious arguments, at least try to come up with an original one… don’t just parrot standard clichés like “you’ve been brainwashed by oil companies and all of their anti man-made climate catastrophe propaganda !”
I’m always amused by people who mindlessly regurgitate that one as if it’s some devastating insight.
Because we are constantly being bombarded with oil funded, anti-climate change propaganda, right? It’s everywhere! I mean, we can go back to that multi-million dollar , Oscar-winning movie by a former American vice president that promoted the anti-man made climate change message…..
Oh wait. That was promoting the concept of man-made climate change.
Well, there’s all the messaging in schools indoctrinating children into disbelieving in man-made climate change….
Oh wait. That’s all promoting the unquestioning belief in man-made climate change.
Well, there’s the mass media which has spent the last 15 years legitimising only one side of the argument and promoting the belief that the ‘science is settled’ and proves that man-made climate change is not true….
Oh wait. They’ve done that for the pro man-made climate change side.
Well, at least we can point to all of the major politicians in the world who refuse to get on-board with the pro man-made climate change agenda! That’s why there’s been no carbon tax programs introduced anywhere. No cap-and-trade programs. No taxpayer subsidised ‘green initiatives’. No wind turbines erected anywhere etc. And of course there was that huge gathering last year in Paris when all of the world leaders got together to formalise their total rejection of the catastrophic man-made climate change premise and signed documents pledging not to pretend they can control the temperature of a planet to within fractions of a degree, 20 years into the future!
Oh, wait….
So essentially we’ve had 10-15 years of consistent, unified and exclusively pro man-made climate change messaging from the mass media, the education system, the entertainment industry and the political class (in other words, society’s elites). But your conclusion is that people such as yourself whose position on the subject conforms precisely with that wall of single-focused messaging are the people who are free from the effects of propaganda and manipulation……and it’s people like me whose perspective is at odds with messaging that is constantly streamed from every easily accessible source and yet maintain that there are legitimate reasons for remaining sceptical despite overwhelming pressure to conform… it’s us who are the weak-minded victims of a program of propaganda that is nowhere to be found.
Yeah, yeah Brenton… there’s absolutely nothing about that premise that is in spectacular defiance of simple logic or is in any way hilariously ironic.
No seriously… the depth of your insight and the potency of your reasoning skills totally justifies your pose of intellectual superiority which otherwise would just come across as adolescent and embarrassing.
Not surprisingly, he gave up after that.
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