In a society of “believers” & “deniers” we all become Inquisitors
Catte Black
Light often arises from a collision of opinions, as fire from flint & steel”Benjamin Franklin, 1760
“The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.” John Stuart Mill
The “collision of opinion” so endorsed by enlightenment thinkers, is not currently encouraged. If someone says something stupid or blatantly false our first response is no longer to try to prove them wrong – it’s to silence them.
To quote Jonathan Pie we focus on “stopping debates instead of winning them.” A good recent example of that is the bizarre trial-by-media of Polish right-wing MEP Janusz Korwin-Mikke.
Let’s be clear. JKM seems to hold a pretty reactionary and unpleasant set of views, about women and much else. Speaking as a woman, I’m not a fan of that. Here is the gentleman, talking about the gender pay gap, in the discourse that ignited the current eruption of outrage:
His English is broken, his reasoning shaky and his conclusions pretty flawed. He’s a self-created straw man, waiting to be knocked over by any reasonably intelligent or astute opponent. But what has the response in the media been?
Yes, that’s right, not a series of rational refutations, but a chorus of offended people hurling abuse and demanding the clown be censored.
Piers Morgan, who invited Korwin-Mikke on to Good Morning Britain did little more than exchange playground insults with the man. Korwin-Mikke says his opinions are based on “scientific studies”. Did Morgan bother to ask what these “studies” might be? Did he offer counter-evidence that proves the nonsense Korwin-Mikke is talking?
No. He just called him “stupid” and a “sexist pig”.
Ok, maybe JKM is both those things, but that’s not the point. If he’s wrong he should be shown to be wrong, with rebuttal, not ad hominem. What Morgan did, and was lauded for, isn’t debate, it’s an ignorant brawl, or the two-minutes hate. The fact the hate-figure on this occasion is some man with unpleasant ideologies and dodgy data does not make it a great day for democracy.
The call is mounting for Korwin-Mikke to be “kicked out” of the European parliament. The Soros-funded fake grassroots group Avaaz is leading this campaign, and lying about him into the bargain, publishing photos of him doing a Nazi salute, without bothering to tell anyone he was, as the Independent grudgingly confirms in its text, doing this as a derogatory commentary on current German policies, and not as a tribute to Hitler (yes, it was still inappropriate, but that doesn’t justify a blatant falsehood being propagated in pursuance of a witch hunt).
Avaaz’s campaign already has over 700,000 signatories. And indeed Korwin-Mikke is going to be dealt with by the EP itself, who have promised:
…a penalty commensurate with the gravity of the offence”
Offence?
Is it actually illegal now to say untrue things about women? We’re going to punish this guy, not prove him wrong?
So, who cares, right? So, one misogynistic fool gets falsely maligned and hounded in the tabloids and maybe even “kicked out” of parliament, who is any the worse for it?
To which the obvious reply is – do you really think it will end there? Do you think the neoliberal press and toxic propagandists such as Avaaz are busy fostering this atmosphere of anti-intellectual intolerance just so they can deal with a handful of women-haters or other nasties?
The point is, once you have installed the culture of suppression, you can use it in any way you like.
The insidious new meme being developed in “progressive” places like the Guardian, and other neoliberal strongholds is that free speech is all very well, but has its limits. Not, you understand, the already established limits defined by law which make it clear free speech does not include the right to threaten, defame or incite violence. No, these are new and woolly limits that involve misty concepts like “hate” (not hate-speech, which is also defined by certain laws, but “hate”, which isn’t), and “consensus facts.”
We are told that people who transgress these vague new limits need to be stopped – for the good of society. We are told we are living in a time of unprecedented “hate”, even though prosecutions for hate-crime are dropping. We are told we need to take a stand, “stamp out” this “hate” and make a statement of zero tolerance.
On the surface that’s a reasonable thing. No one sane wants to encourage hate or to be a “hater”. But what we may not notice is that the “progressives” advocating this approach never say exactly what they mean by “hater”.
“Hater” of what exactly? Ethnic minorities? Women? Trans people? White men? Oligarchs? Israel? Corrupt politicians? The NSA?
What if the corrupt politician is a woman?
What if the NSA spokesman is black?
And exactly how far can we go to stamp out “hate”? Is it acceptable – for example – to rescind an elected representative’s right to sit in the European Parliament if he’s branded a “hater”? Who would be empowered to make this decision? The parliament itself? Oligarch-funded pressure groups with hordes of unverified signatories? What are the exact definitions? Where is the line drawn? We aren’t told, and that’s probably not an oversight.
“Denier” is another word like “hater.” “Deniers” are the boogeymen to sell us the idea that free speech is dangerous, not just for minorities, but also for the preservation of truth. The same people who talk about “haters” frequently ask how we can allow “deniers” to keep muddying the argument about [insert contentious issue here], when the world/human health/the future of the universe is at stake.
The starting point is always the fallacy that we can establish truth to a degree that makes further discussion of evidence unnecessary and doubt a sort of crime. Once we know the Truth, the argument goes, we don’t really need free speech any more. In fact free speech in a time of established Truth becomes a regressive force, since it will enable those who don’t believe the Truth, or who are paid to besmirch it, to lead the unwary from the path of certainty into darkness and doubt.
If that sounds like religious fundamentalism it’s because essentially that’s what it is. It’s the fundamentalism of a post-deist world. Just as anti-rational, just as anti-factual, just as atavistic as any other expression of certitude that requires unqualified acceptance as the first article of faith.
But this particular “fundamentalism” is being used cynically as another way of levering public opinion away from real free speech and toward “modified” free speech, where the right to air your opinion is conditional upon a lot of poorly defined, and often faith-based ideas about public health and social responsibility.
Let’s pause for a moment and evaluate.
Why do so many of the same neoliberals who support environmental disasters such as global wars and nuclear energy, also swarm the issue of climate change, and so vocally agitate for the silencing or denigration of “deniers”?
Why when the absolutely not “denialist” IPCC is openly admitting there can at present be no certainty about the extent or direction of longterm global temperatures, is any kind of demurring from the belief that manmade climate change is not only real but deadly, presented to us in the liberal media as something malign or insane that should not be given airtime?
If the IPCC’s 2013 report on everything from the net warming potential of C02 to the true extent of ice-loss in the Arctic, is a long list of best guesses ranging from “high probability” to “low probability”, with no mention of certainty, how do we even begin to justify dismissing and demonising people whose views of these probabilities may be different?
Note, I’m not saying “why do people believe in the reality of manmade climate change”? I absolutely understand why they do. It’s a very reasonable thing to believe. I’m asking specifically why we are being encouraged to consider doubt or even nuance should be expunged, when the IPCC and scientists on both sides acknowledge that doubt and nuance of varying degrees, and indeed complete absence of knowledge, inevitably goes with the territory?
Is the demand for the exclusion of certain points of view based on a) the fear the public may get confused by conflicting viewpoints and accidentally let the planet burn up, or b) the recognition this is a nice thin end of a very thick wedge?
Just as no one sane wants to encourage hate, no one rational wants to destroy the planet. It’s a pretty easy sell to persuade us that we shouldn’t listen, or give air time, to lunatics or shills who apparently want to let the oceans swallow the land and the skies boil.
I mean, I don’t want that to happen, do you?
Faced with a stark alternative, where we either censor the bad guys or let them usher in the end of the world, which side are we going to pick? Green David versus Goliath the Oil Monster, is a no-brainer; add in George Monbiot, or someone, pointing to the undeniably egregious suppression of the connection between smoking and lung cancer as proof that narrow special interests can confuse arguments and hinder progress, and we’re sold.
Let’s silence the pesky deniers and save the planet.
The argument is superficially persuasive because it’s partly true. Big Tobacco did use its clout to suppress inconvenient research and pay off scientists to lie or obfuscate, and this had a very negative impact on public health over many years. It’s reasonable to want to avoid that in future.
But let’s stop and think for a moment. How, in heaven’s name, is the fact Big Tobacco managed to suppress research and manipulate the debate an argument for censoring anyone?
What this case proves is the need for more openness and debate, not less. It proves that good science will win out over false representation, when both sides are given equal opportunity to be heard. It was Big Tobacco’s big bucks that kept the truth from coming out, not the principle of free speech. Imagine, forty years ago, Philip Morris International had been able to not simply suppress and distort but to label its critics “tobacco deniers” and demand their voice be banned from the airwaves for the good of humanity?
Are we supposed to believe this kind of suppression is a step forward, just because right now the perceived “good guys” are doing it? Or that the new age of “consensus-driven”, Avaaz-sponsored grass-roots endorsed censorship would only be used by the weak against the strong, truth against lies?
Are we supposed to believe, once we have set a precedent of denying the “deniers” and the “haters” their platform, the neoliberal media won’t pretty soon be labeling anyone their bosses don’t like a “denier” or a “hater” and demanding they be silenced or sent to jail?
And, if we can be persuaded to stop listening to one side of this argument can’t we most likely be persuaded to stop listening to one side of any argument.
Are we supposed to overlook the fact that while Goliath the Oil Monster certainly does fund climate skeptics, “Green David” is backed by some of the richest and most influential people on the planet?
No, once again, I’m not saying manmade climate change isn’t real. I’m saying, quite specifically, that the current drive to politicise and censor this debate has nothing to do with protecting truth or saving the planet and everything to do with attacking the most important principle of freedom.
I’m saying Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, George Soros, Richard Branson, Reid Hoffman, Tom Steyer, the UN, NASA, NOAA, the IPCC, the EU, the Democratic Party et al can probably compete on equal terms with Big Oil.
I’m saying their message is getting across and the idea that manmade global warming is some underfunded grassroots campaign that needs special pleading to defend its corner is just another way of persuading people that censorship can be progressive.
I’m saying let’s stop buying that schtick.
I’m saying we need to reassert the fact that truth doesn’t require to be defended by censorship, government prosecution, or simplistic one-sided arguments.
Truth thrives in open debate and the exchange of ideas. It dies when one side is denied a voice because “If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”
And that is only more true when the truth may have a dozen billionaires and the entire neoliberal establishment advocating for it.
I’m saying that in a society of “believers” and “deniers” we all become Inquisitors, of each other and ourselves. We are currently encouraged by our betters to be Brown Shirts, dumb as a bag of hammers, zero-tolerant and proud of it, beating down unacceptable minority views with a big populist stick.
We are urged, not to arrive at opinions through analysis, but to just know what’s true, because the right people say so, because our Facebook friends give it a lot of likes, because it just is ok?
We don’t engage with different opinions any more, we scream at them until they go away or get put down.
I’m saying that as a modern day Milgram experiment this push to get intelligent, caring people to act like Salem witch hunters is interesting, demonstrating that the smartest, sanest person can be enjoined to act against their deepest ideals and even common sense, if given the proper cues.
We’re forgetting that the point of free speech is it guarantees a voice to the weaker party, the oppressed, the otherwise disenfranchised. And in the age of the internet this principle can be put into practice to a degree unimaginable.
This is why the powerful and the wealthy are currently trying to persuade us to fear and distrust each other. To hate in the name of anti-hate, silence in the name of progress.
Bit by bit. Voice by voice. Until the only sound left is the dispossessed lunatic scream.
The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp George Orwell, 1984
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Yeah, yeah, I know I’m late to this debate but I’m going to post this anyway. The current wave of liberal anti-debate sweeping the western world is a complex phenomenon but it does have many similarities with the moral panics of the 1960s and 70s, as well as the disputed reaction to the Orson Welles War of the Worlds radio hoax of the thirties. Formerly reasonable people who have spent time in higher education reacted to the Trump phenomenon with all the perspective of a group of 5th year vegan kids who have just discovered that farm animals are used for food. It was a very 21st Century witch-hunt. They pointed fingers at imaginary racists, dropped the pathetic Hitler bomb at every turn and parroted cliches that sounded like something that might have fallen from the mouth of a 1973 Miss World contestant. And then they marched, well wandered about… Read more »
Oh, and man-made climate change. Of course it’s a lie, or mostly a lie. Come on people, you don’t seriously still buy into these fantasies do you? No-one has ever protesteth so much.
I thought it was generally excepted in scientific circles that global warming is a natural phenomenon that is being accelerated by human activity. The main argument seems, at least to me, to be how much humans are effecting this natural process. For example, if it was natural for the next ice age to be triggered in about 2000 years, human activity effecting the climate by a mere 3% beyond normal could trigger it much sooner if the normal cycle is every 60,000 years. (That’s the off the top of my head example just to make a point. Don’t bust a spleen checking ice age records). So, whether global warming is purely a natural phenomenon or a purely human one is a red herring. Tree hugging hippies will argue it’s human and oil guzzling fat cats will argue it’s natural if you pose the argument in those terms. Nothing would be… Read more »
You illuminate one important thing about the ‘global warming crusade’ and that is its capture and usurp of the environmental movement. Such is the cultivation of any true movement of being as form for a subverted distortion. So mock not the movement in the heart – but mark the mimicry of deceits by which power of support seems to come to those who are fooled unknowing of their betrayal. Joy in life and love of all that lives is no fairy tale, yet under deceit are the living made golems of their own destruction – even as they reach to save themself entraps them to such a course. As for the science – consider that that which is fit for public consumption is released to such, and that which holds knowledge of such fundamental import as to change Everything from scare cities and debt to life more abundant – keeps… Read more »
When you write these replies are you sitting with your legs crossed inside a pentagram? I just had that image as I read your reply and made me laugh. Seriously, I might need to decompress your response one word at a time to figure out what you’re saying.
The symbology of your imagining me is your own – but my response is direct and not via any kind of magical invocation or ritual. The trick of the mind IS magic – or an appeal to magical solutions that redistribute psychic-emotional energy so as to SEEM to have solved a conflict – when actually it has merely been redefined – or re-framed in ways that accord a temporary power to the aligning in its judgement. I think it was in reply to you that I noted the power of illusions as distinct from the illusion of power (?) – but in any case the image, symbol and concept of reality – of YOU aware of your existence – however you conceive and perceive this to be – is the power of illusion – for these are always changing and nothing abides or ‘survives’ even from one moment to the… Read more »
Better late than never.
What I don’t understand is why this word liberal is used to pin everything that’s wrong in the world on like a 21st Century witch-hunt?
‘Liberal’. Meanings of terms mutate and change – particularly as a result of mind reframing and scapegoat-projection or name, blame and shame (invalidate or kill). Naming is spelling is magic. That is – an imaginative (augmentation of) Reality – operated from AS true. Mind-framing aka ‘narrative control’ could be seen as a war on Consciousness – but note – there is no outside by which to lever – but there is the framing or setting up of conflicting exclusive polarities of split self-identity – each of which is the ‘death’ of the other, and both of which unite against being brought together in an embracing whole of conscious acceptance. Thus the protection from Consciousness is a split identity, kept in secret, whose conflict is more openly asserted as a sense of righteous justification predicated upon seeking and finding all that is wrong with the Other. That secrets and lies operate… Read more »
I’d make global warming denial a crime against humanity. Why shouldn’t it be?
stupidity is a bigger crime against humanity, but you’re walking around free.
It’s not stupid to want to stop people dying from global warming, is it?
It’s stupid to think you can punish people for their opinion and not end up in a Big Brother state.
Have you even studied global warming? Do you even know what the science is about? Or are you just kneejerk hating people the MSM has told you to hate?
That’s why you’re stupid.
So you don’t think people should be jailed for holding the opinion that all people who are members of some religion or ethnicity should be eradicated? You’d have Hitler wandering around spreading his hate with impunity. Have we learned nothing?
And then you ask me a load of questions and call me stupid without even having the courtesy to wait for an answer.
If what you call global warming was in fact the depopulator you are led to believe – it would likely be kept secret.
Corporate pollution – well there’s a KILLER! Go after them CherryRedGuitar and get them to stop!
The air, the water, the soil, the food – oh and sort out the Media for selling their readers toxic ‘news’ that poisons the mind with managed despair. Why do you watch that stuff?
Why shouldn’t I go after them for both pollution and for global warming?
“I don’t”, is the answer to your last question.
Because pollution is genocide and GW is a cover story with no actual deaths, deformities, disease or disabilities. Its in your head because someone put it there – and you let them. The true nature of genocidal corporate cartels and banksters is not in your awareness or you would not be so open to being manipulated with what seems on surface to make sense – saving lots of people from dying. Surely anyone who doesn’t support that WANTS all these people to die? Can you not see how false flag works? Cry “Wolf!” and point – “over there!”, and while everyone attends over there – you are the wolf – or its ‘asset’. I learned that as a basic course in blame diversion of getting away with it while also scoring over another while they take the blame. Its the use of the lie to support a wish to be… Read more »
Sorry, I didn’t know that you were a tinfoilhatter.
I used to argue with a guy who seriously thought that nuclear weapons and nuclear power both didn’t exist. The conspiracy needed for his theory to be true was absolutely enormous, but it was still smaller than the conspiracy needed for global warming to be false.
Beneath another post, you write: According to all the natural forcings the Earth should be cooling slightly, but our actions are instead causing it to warm. That means that all of the current warming is man-made. To that I more or less replied: Does your research include the results of Svensmarks’s study? Can you enumerate all the natural forcing agents for us, that is, itemize them as a list while assigning to each one of these natural forcing agent its relative weight (in percentage terms) in the overall category of “all the natural forcings?” And since you claim that in the absence of all human activity, we would be observing a “cooling” trend, you are saying that CO2 is responsible for more heating of the atmosphere than currently observed, that is to say, more than 100%. By what percentage, then, has CO2 warmed the atmosphere of the earth? Would it… Read more »
Simple answer. Because denying something that doesn’t exist – that all the evidence says is a lie – cannot be a crime. But that’s how the system messes with people’s minds – for obvious reasons. First tell a big lie, then denounce anyone who challenges it as a “conspiracy theorist”, or – even worse – a “denier”. We are then made to live in a topsy-turvy world where black is white and 2+2=5. All it takes is for there to be an original conspiracy – the one engaged in by those (always powerful interests) who want to concoct the lie for commercial, political or other reasons – then for their concoction to be adopted and massively, endlessly promoted and repeated by the servile MSM and political, academic and other prostitutes … until the lie takes on the appearance of truth and the guilty (or mad) are those who refuse to… Read more »
My comment was a response to CherryRedGuitar’s “making global warming denial a crime”. I don’t know why it appears as a response to NP’s excellent comment!
Denier = One who denies.
This is the second article I’ve read in my short time here which seeks to insert doubt into the global warming debate. Global warming deniers have to ignore a mountain of evidence to arrive at their views. They deserve the name.
The real message of this article has completely passed you by hasn’t it
I was commenting about the one part of the article which caught my eye. Am I only allowed to comment on what you think is “the real message”?
You’re free to comment in any way you choose, but it might be helpful if you read what you’re commenting on first.
‘Well a man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest”
~ Simon and Garfunkle – The Boxer
Doubt is a fact of life in climate science. Everyone who knows anything, from the IPCC to the most complete skeptic KNOWS doubt is a fact of life in this discipline. The only people who think there is no doubt are the non-scientists who get their “science” from newspaper headlines and popular documentaries.
Even the IPCC is only prepared to claim around half the recent warming is (with 95% confidence) due to man, Which means even the gurus of AGW accept up to 50% of the current warming could be due to natural forces.
Yes – I missed it first time – but the framing of ‘inserting doubt’ into (a) global warming (debate). Assumes there otherwise is NONE – in which case there is of course no ‘debate’. Once UN-settled by fear and guilt – the mind may be unable to stay open but feels compelled to ‘DO something!!!” as a fight or flight response. Hence I feel to examine the fear and guilt so as not to be manipulated by them. Fear of catastrophe? CO2 is hardly a toxic candidate. The greenhouse effect is a very simplistic model within a much more complex living system. As I indicate elsewhere on this page, I feel there are many candidates of a more toxic and catastrophic nature – that this issue operates diversion from. Guilt for messing up our Planet… is not altogether unfounded – but indulging guilt while persisting in the same mindset is… Read more »
Yes, stick to healthy margerine and ETC! and trust to corporately managed mind-capture. Why do people – institutions and media participate in lies? Because a false self-interest operates within denial of true or ‘narrative control’. I don’t need to ‘deny’ climate change, to give no time to a fear-mongering and guilt tripping agenda. Regardless the ‘facts’ – such as completely derailing and subverting genuine environmental issues. I hold freedom sacred. I see we mostly run scared of freedom – because freedom to feel and know upsets the world enforced by denial. But in truth – if given a chance – it would enliven and enrich. Change may be feared, and totally over-managed and thus blocked – but it is also life’s unfolding. False and forced emotionalism veils a loveless agenda. I don’t suppose you are really listening – but then you can wield the ‘denial’ judgement in righteous alignment with… Read more »
The real argument is whether human-induced global warming due to carbon dioxide is dangerous or not.
Climate has warmed and cooled for millions of years without the help of humans. It has done so over temperature ranges far greater than the changes since 1650.
The hypothesis you have to prove is that the rate of warming and its amplitude is unprecedented.
You will have a significant challenge, me thinks…..
One man’s – or woman’s – denier is another person’s pursuer of truth. Slapping a stupid label like ‘denier’ on someone is meaningless if the labeller hasn’t taken the trouble to look at the evidence, but is just slavishly following some dogma. This kind of mindless, uninformed, knee-jerk reaction to challenge and refusal to question ‘authority’ is what allows oppressive political, religious and other systems to flourish.
WHAT AN EXCELLENT ARTICLE! Thank You!
This analysis goes really deep: “The starting point is always the fallacy that we can establish truth to a degree that makes further discussion of evidence unnecessary and doubt a sort of crime. Once we know the Truth, the argument goes, we don’t really need free speech any more. In fact free speech in a time of established Truth becomes a regressive force, since it will enable those who don’t believe the Truth, or who are paid to besmirch it, to lead the unwary from the path of certainty into darkness and doubt.
If that sounds like religious fundamentalism it’s because essentially that’s what it is. It’s the fundamentalism of a post-deist world“.
Most of humanity is being herded into the NWO global plantation, where original thoughts, lively debates or even books that show a different history other than the one that has been dripped incessantly into our minds, get beaten, jailed or Amazon will burn your books.
Take to the streets to peacefully assemble, and you’ll have state-backed goons tagging along, causing property destruction, giving the police the excuse to stomp in, swinging clubs and spraying tear gas.
Go online and offer up a different view, and your thoughts will be wiped away, and you’ll be banned from further discussion, as if you didn’t exist and in a way, you no longer do.
Such is life in the Gulag which we are all being assigned.
Tell a story enough times, you start to believe it…
I have to agree here, Greg: all too often in the last two years my comments have simply been wiped out of existence, especially if I post books to back my views.
Trolls have been assigned to denigrate, insult & harass & I have grown to enjoy these encounters.
I remember once my remarks being wiped in front of my eyes as I was typing!
The book I was recommending was Merchants of Despair by Robert Zubrin, which shows the Malthusian/Darwinian/Eliteist Brit Empire backgroud of the present overpopulation/climate scam. It also shows how safe & clean nuclear power is being demonised through the now discredited mainstream media & suppressed through over-regulation.
Zubrin is a PhD nuclear engineer with 9 patents to his name or pending.
Anyone who thinks we have free speech now, apart from one to one conversations, labours under a misapprehension.
John Doran.
So a) Zubrin is not a “specialist” on the effects of low level radiation on the biosphere, and especially not on its disruptive and illness inducing effects once low level radiation emitters have been synthesized into a living organism; and b) with 9 patents pending to his name, there is absolutely no possible “financial” incentive behind his enthusiastic pro-nuclear stance?
Since you are all about evidence and expert testimony, consider this:
The ICRP’s radiation risk model is bogus science — Chris Busby
and
Aspects of DNA Damage from Internal Radionuclides — Dr. Christopher Busby
Hiroshima & Nagasaki were habitable one year after being bombed. Fukushima & Three Mile Island, zero radiation deaths. Chernobyl was a poor Soviet design wrecked by dumb technicians. Max deaths? Perhaps 4000. The US has had safe clean nuclear submarines since the 1950s. Research Galen Winsor on youtube. Go to www,cfact.org & look up there was no fukushima nuclear… Read Zubrin’s & Simon’s books & get back to me. Both are more than well worth the read. Coal -fired power stations emit more radiation than nuclear ones. Radiation Doses from Natural & Artificial Sources Blood (human)…20mrem/yr Building Materials…35mrem/yr food…25mrem/yr soil…11mrem/yr Cosmic Rays (sea level)…35mrem/yr Cosmic Rays (Denver Alt)…70mrem/yr Medical X-rays…100mrem/yr Air Travel (NY to LA round trip…5mrem Nuclear power plant (limit at property line)…5mrem/yr Nuclear ” plants ( dose to General Public)…0.01mrem/yr Average annual dose to general public…270mrem/yr Human blood contains potassium 40. Nuclear, IMHO, is demonised to keep us… Read more »
Please. The physicists make their claims. The experts in biology and medicine make theirs. The physicists, who have a stake in the nuclear power industry, are in charge of the “medical and environmental risk models.” So what do you think will be the most likely BIAS of those risk models? And low and behold, wouldn’t you know it, the experts in medicine have EMPIRICAL data to back up their claims, whereas the physicists simply ignore that data because it doesn’t fit in with their professional preconceptions. Who do you think has a better grasp on the incidence and causes of diseases? The most cogent explanations? The most complete data on the incidence and distribution? The guys who build the machines and get rich from building the machines, or the guys who study organisms and whose research and conclusions are actively suppressed? Do you think Busby has no clue about natural… Read more »
Nuclear energy is clean??? Don’t let me pop your world. I can’t demand anyone listen – or allow my voice. I venture freedoms as I feel them – and for freedom as I recognize it. In a film I haven’t seen, Richard Gere is acting the part of someone being taught to dance. His teachers says; “don’t move until you feel the movement!”. The past cannot control the present but the attempt to do so loses awareness of presence. There is a ‘world’ out of its timing, in displaced, misidentification. The attempt to force it into shape, CANNOT dance – but only mimic life in macabre and grotesque simulation – against which we make symbols of a life we can’t completely cover over or deny. Freedom does not exist outside of relational being – and the belief it does – is your loss of awareness of relational being in attempt… Read more »
Read Zubrin’s book & get back to me.
I also recommend Julian Simon’s The Ultimate Resource 2
Enjoy.
Yes, and because Zubrin is also and without doubt and expert in radiological-epidemiological research, those reads should be accompanied by these articles and others like them as well as by the sources they reference:
Chernobyl Death Toll: 985,000, Mostly from Cancer
&
<a href=”http://www.globalresearch.ca/chernobyl-genetic-damage-and-the-uk-nuclear-bomb-tests-justice-at-last/5523757>Chernobyl, Genetic Damage, and the UK Nuclear Bomb Tests – Justice at Last?
I like GR.ca – on politicss & economics only.
On the environment & nuclear? Worse than useless. This scare story is about the least scientific reporting I’ve ever seen, reminiscent of the worst warming/climate lies. The 4000 figure I’ve quoted derives from a definitive IAEA 2005 report. I’ll see if I can find a ref.
JD.
The Chernobyl Forum, Chernobyl’s Legacy: Health, Environmental, &Socioeconomic Impacts (Vienna, Austria: IAEA, 2005), page 16
Zubrin, interestingly, does not mention the liquid salts options: his focus is fusion.
If you read around a subject a little, you spot this stuff. 🙂
JD.
My reply was just disappeared.
Go on youtube & put in Witness the nuclear fear scam. Scientist eats Uranium
6 mins
Yes, references are a good thing.
That one’s gibberish, I’m afraid. 🙁
Please.
Tell us “who” is in charge of the “IAEA” risk model? The medical community or the physicists and representatives of the nuclear industry.
Why don’t we start with just that question before getting down and dirty with the “gibberish,” as you dismissivle call it.
I meant that literally. I click on that link, all I get is a page full of gibberish, whatever. The link does not work for me.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmJN-LMPnX0
Witness the nuclear fear scam. Scientist eats Uranium
6 mins
Perhaps you’d care to research this & tell me?
Be patient. The information is coming. One little thing at a time. This is an important issue on which to engage. I’m glad you brought it up.
Why dilogue when you make a book list instead?
There are innumerable accounts of leaking radiation – denials and cover ups, failure to properly dispose of contaminants and the astronomical costs of decommissioning the earlier generation of power stations.
Are you carbon-blind?
There is also a cartel-corporatocracy that suppresses rival development of energy supply – unless it owns and controls and decides to use it in a way that preserves its revenue stream and related privileges.
As an opening gambit, to pinpoint the issue of contention between the “medical community” and the so called “health pysicist,” a longish but accessible quote (and hopefully the formatting isn’t going to end up to badly mangled): Quote begins: The question of the health effects of internal radionuclide exposures began to be asked in the early 1950s when there was widespread fallout contamination of food and milk from atmospheric nuclear tests. It quickly became the subject of disagreements between two committees of the newly formed International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP)[1]. The questions of the equivalence of internal and external radiation exposure, which were the basis of these disagreements, have still not been resolved. In the West, up to very recently, the whole spectrum of health effects from internal incorporated radionuclides has focused on animal studies of Radium, Plutonium and Strontium-90 and human retrospective studies of those individuals exposed to… Read more »
It strikes me that we continue to discuss and debate “Free Speech” as though we actually have it. If there is one thing you are forbidden from saying (all clichés about “shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theater aside, since that shout is only “speech” in the most literal sense), you have no “Free Speech”… and there are dozens of things, that I can think of, that are taboo… shading from the mildly-controversial (something about “overweight models”, for example) to the generally offensive (something about concentration camps, for example).
As I’ve stated before, around these parts: what we have is “Cheap Speech”. “Free Speech” we don’t have. We should talk about that.
I agree with you. These efforts to constrain public discourse are all part of the same attack. Self-censorship is as important as literal censorship. But we do at least at the moment have the principle of free speech still regarded as sacrosanct. Once we’re persuaded to abandon that things will only get rapidly worse.
“But we do at least at the moment have the principle of free speech still regarded as sacrosanct.”
That’s the trick, isn’t it? We defend the Virtual Version of a Real Supposed Right like vigilant goal tenders, in dramatic stances, in front of a goal stuffed with balls! Laugh
“Free speech” is first and foremost a state of mind. If it were to become a widespread “cultural” state of mind, what could the ruling establishment really do about it? And anyway, the ruling establishment cannot extirpate it entirely, otherwise they would be denying themselves of the potential of ever truly “knowing” anything or of learning anything new, and their power and their bureaucracies and their institutions of learning would grind to halt in terms of their usefulness. So as much as they try to contain the fire, they must of necessity keep it burning here and there, always running the risk that it might spread out of their control, for they do need of necessity a segment of their working force to be both highly educated and free thinking and dedicated to standards intellectual integrity that implicitly brings this segment of the workforce potentially into conflict with a manipulative,… Read more »
“If it were to become a widespread “cultural” state of mind, what could the ruling establishment really do about it?” Well, “Free Speech” (the virtual edition) has become exactly that; so the “what could they do about it?” is really the question “what have they done?” They knew they didn’t have to burn books or forbid certain words (those aren’t the best ways to do it); all they had to do was generate millions of hours of Cultural Programming, for a few decades, to promote certain moods/attitudes and anathematize others and: voila: a quick check on Faceborg proves that certain statements will get you shouted down, shunned and “reported” immediately, no debate allowed. The perfect opposite of “Free Speech” and they didn’t have to pass much new legislation to make it happen; NeoLiberal Stasi-land is self-policing. There was a temporary glitch when “Conspiracy Theories” began to take on an aura… Read more »
Too bleak! It’s not as polarised and absolute as that. Look at how mainstream narratives struggle to get across now. Look at the fracture between ATL and BTL in most neoliberal online publications.
Yes the dumbest masses are easily managed now, but they always have been. Looking at the current situation seems to suggest something we didn’t previously guess. That brainwashing the dumbest masses isn’t the goal. It’s the smaller groups of less dumb people that the elites are trying so hard to reach/convince. And they are significantly failing.
Why do the elites care about this relatively small number? I don’t know, but they obviously do, and are prepared to turn things upside down just to persuade or censor them. I suggest we don’t give in to the second tier of propaganda and believe ourselves less empowered than we really are.
You don’t think our situation is bleak? Not impossible… but… shading towards bleak, I should think, for sure. I think we should assess our status frankly.
“Why do the elites care about this relatively small number? I don’t know, but they obviously do, and are prepared to turn things upside down just to persuade or censor them. I suggest we don’t give in to the second tier of propaganda and believe ourselves less empowered than we really are.” I would think that it’s the ongoing task of the lower end of the control apparatus to police dissent wherever it crops up. But just because we need to be crushed or persuaded doesn’t mean that we should congratulate ourselves, now, that we have more power (in our specific numbers, which are not vast) than we thought we already did. We need, first of all, to learn to be brutally clear-eyed and clear-minded about the situation, I feel. The situation, as I see it, is that the biggest news of 2016 was that a Vulgarian 1%-er beat a… Read more »
The situation is depressing. But it is not forgone. It is not forgone because history, that is to say, the eternal process of change, cannot be stopped. Reality is a composite of interacting systems, some small, some large, but they all influence each other. Think of the climate about which we have been talking about. Tiny but sustained variations can over time lead to huge changes that then stabilize into entire geological epochs. It is the same with human formations. But with this difference: although social processes are “mostly” unconscious, they aren’t completely so. Some people, some groups of people, as small as they maybe, sometimes rise to an awareness of things as they in some respects “stand,” and from this understanding, see a direction in which conditions could really be changed so as to be better permit the realizations of their conscious intentions and desires. Capitalism in Europe didn’t… Read more »
Norman, “education” is not a precise term. As far as I can tell, the “education” that the vast majority receives is a bundle of half-truths, obfuscations and deliberate lies… mixed in with enough technical information, in some cases, that an educated Serf is able to run and service the machines properly. I started educating myself after my official education ended, and it was a long process, 25 years of hit-and-miss, blind alleys, and pseudo-eye-opening moments that led, eventually, to what I felt were genuine epiphanies. I think you’re being remarkably optimistic about “education” when discussing the Serfs (us) who live outside of the castle. Also: the bourgeoisie are not famous for their ability to use weapons. But the Bankers/ Industrialists certainly had the wherewithal to buy the politicians and finance guerrilla mercenaries to depose the old bloodlines. Don’t fall for the romances they try to sell us, Norm. If you… Read more »
“Norman, “education” is not a precise term. As far as I can tell, the “education” that the vast majority receives is a bundle of half-truths, obfuscations and deliberate lies… mixed in with enough technical information, in some cases, that an educated Serf is able to run and service the machines properly.” Education is literacy. Literacy is the ability to read and to “potentially” reflect. Implicit in “grammar” and “syntax” is the seed of “logical, and therefore, critical thinking.” The people in control of education may not want to inculcate ‘philosophical insight,’ but the ground of ‘philosophical insight’ is literacy, grammar and syntax, and this is being provided aplenty to the serfs, and here and there the inevitable awakening is happening, not matter how much the those who control the curriculum exert themselves to confound those they “educate.” Furthermore, “thinking” is what humans “can” do. It’s a natural impulse. The more… Read more »
“When the people begin to suffer en mass and the suffering becomes sufficiently intolerable, that is the time of possible mass upheavals, and there is no telling how turbulent the coming storm might be or what it may leave in its aftermath.” Norm, how long would you reckon suffering has been intolerable in the “Black Community” in North America…? Isn’t the trick, of keeping the whole thing running, in letting conditions get a lot less tolerable for some than others? Re: Literacy: wouldn’t you consider most of HRC’s (and BHO’s) fans literate? What special good does literacy do them if the texts are used to deliver propaganda? I’m not saying being able to read isn’t good, I’m just saying that “education” is not, in and of itself, a path to enlightenment. If you’re raised in a field of powerful propaganda, “education” means what? ” the capitalist economy is prone to… Read more »
Only someone deeply in the grips of the capitalist mindset could not imagine how anything, including revolution, could ever happen without “money.” And only someone who imagines that “indoctrination” can be perfect and render people uneducable can believe that once people achieve a certain degree of literacy, they somehow become beyond the reach of reason. “Isn’t the trick, of keeping the whole thing running, in letting conditions get a lot less tolerable for some than others?” Do you understand “the trick?” Do you “get” the “trick?” If you “get” the “trick,” what makes you think that it’s impossible for others, too, to “get” the “trick?” Shouldn’t you endeavor, you who “get” the “trick,” to help others understand what you think you understand? And if you’ve tried but failed, maybe you need to re-think your pedagogical strategy, no? Maybe you are too aggressive. Maybe you come on too strong. Maybe you… Read more »
As exercises in futility go, this has certainly been a fun one. But, re: “Question: When the American establishment decided to extirpate the Indians in the 19th Century, did the Indian warriors who “organized” en masse to put up resistance do so only for “money.” Was money their only means of availing themselves of the provisions and materials they needed to engage with the force of arms they could muster? Question: what happened in Detroit in 1967? Was that momentary disturbance staged? Did those who rioted do it for “money?” 1) That’s just it: we’re not talking about Aboriginal Americans. 2) If you want to do the research, Norm, even the mainstream sources offer (profoundly low-balled) estimates for the material costs of the various “Revolutions” under discussion. For example, the bit about the gunpowder supplied to the insurgents of America’s Revolutionary War: they were severely lacking in gunpowder; no gunpowder,… Read more »
Before replying, did you a) muse for more than half of one second over the bit from Guerin? b) take the time to listen to the interview with Amin.
If you did, it was done in record time. So the futility of which you speak seems to me to stem from an obvious refusal on your part.
You didn’t parse much of the content of my reply, but you have a ready answer to counter it. How does that work, exactly?
Norm, chill. I’m watching the vid now. I responded to the bits I could respond to immediately; I do the extra reading or watching at my leisure. I can respond piecemeal if I choose to, no…?
Yes, of course. BTW: I have to attend to other business for the next while, so replies may be slow coming. Take your time. I also want to think about what you wrote a bit more deeply.
My french and poor typing and editing skills are getting in the way today. I meant to write:
“Just because you are not seeing immediate and dramatic results doesn’t mean you aren’t helping to incubate the conditions that will eventually erupt in precisely the dramatic ways in which you would hope them to happen.
Anyway, I’m not saying I have The Answers… I’m saying that all the Old Hypothetical Answers won’t work. I’m saying: the only way to think up some Fresh New (Possibly Functional) Answers is to shake off the old dreams, the old romances, the old heroes, especially. I’m saying we were given those dreams and heroes to keep us exactly where we are.
“Why do the elites care about this relatively small number? …”
The Powers That Be are following traditional marketing strategy of targeting small groups of people perceived to be so-called opinion leaders. In marketing, opinion leaders represent the forefront of change or acceptance; marketing studies done in the past showed such people to be influential within their social groups.
People studying marketing and advertising learn about a concept called the Product Life Cycle which is based on patterns of consumer acceptance of new products, services or trends. The critical part of this life cycle for marketing PR is to pinpoint likely opinion leaders who will spread news about the item to lay the groundwork for general public acceptance. The PTB are applying something similar in pushing the propaganda but in a blunt way.
Not so – you can act and accept the consequence. Or you may find you simply cannot and will not for your own reasons – and the consequence is a cover story for not being who you are – or even for being true to who you are and finding no support within yourself to venture at this timing in this circumstance. If you want someone or something Else to give you freedom – you’ve missed something. While I don’t hide behind it – the Christian idea of true witness was associated in part with the experience of persecution or of not being received or understood. This is just describing the territory of being truly moved – amidst a rule-bound society where movement of true will is ruled out. (Note I did not say ruled out from). I invite people to check in, listen or feel within themselves – before… Read more »
Well, to the extent that Free Speech means actually saying whatever we may choose to, without facing punishment for the mere fact of saying it”, we don’t have Free Speech. Free Speech in one’s own mind, or at home, in the safety of one’s own kitchen, is meaningless… the Virtual Free Speech we’ve been gulled into “defending” while we abdicated the Right to *actual Free Speech a long time ago (with being “good” the excuse).
(not sure why the italics function went nuts there! Ooops! laugh)
If you feel a driven reaction to speak that is not representative of who you accept yourself to be – then you are free to withhold it. If you act or fail to act in self-betrayal then that result is a consequence of your act through which you grow in alignment. I feel a willingness to listen – this is both within myself and to you or to my experience of the world. Truly there is one thing going on but to the mind it seems many. I choose and feel a freedom in discerning and embodying the movement I feel resonant with – such as joining with you in this theme now. The idea of freedom of speech as a cultural or political right is the shared idea of the value of communication – of relationship and taking or being taken into account. But as well as the taboos… Read more »
“If you feel a driven reaction to speak that is not representative of who you accept yourself to be – then you are free to withhold it.”
Binra, I agree with a not negligible amount of what you often have to say, but there are times when the gnomic and the Delphic, no matter how profound seeming, become fortune-cookie filler.
You are demonstrating your freedom to accept what resonates in you and ignore what doesn’t. If you feel the need to invalidate what you don’t prefer, then that’s your choice too – but you can just leave what you don’t want on the plate. You don’t have to diss on what you don’t prefer in order to justify leaving it. You also illuminate that no matter what someone feels free to speak, others are no less free to hear as their own minds determine. So freedom of speech is no guarantee anyone is listening to anything but their own message. If you believe you are not free – then you choose to limit yourself and blame someone or something else for it. If you choose not to validate the belief – you leave your consciousness open to discovering the nature of freedom in a more profound appreciation than thinking about… Read more »
“If you believe you are not free – then you choose to limit yourself and blame someone or something else for it. If you choose not to validate the belief – you leave your consciousness open to discovering the nature of freedom in a more profound appreciation than thinking about it.” Binra, that’s not only silly, but it’s a shopworn sophistry recycled from the heyday of such sophistries, when eye-catching, Oh Wow paperbacks of the early 1970s cluttered the Earth. Yes, and a man in prison is “free” to the extent that he never strains against the bars of his tiny cell; he’s free to fantasize when not doing exactly what the guards tell him to do. This is breakthrough stuff. You should write a pseudo-philosophical bestseller called One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest! That would be just the thing. “What you appreciate, appreciates and a negative appreciation grows a… Read more »
You merely repeat your judgement of me as if demonstrating your superiority. As you choose to invest in such – so must you defend your investment. But is it not your CHOICE as to where to invest your energy and attention? Regardless the thinking by which you believe it meaningful to do so. If you assign ‘freedom’ to power OVER life – then that is the power you have the glory of being subjected to. Who values freedom – will give as they would receive – for otherwise they cannot have it. This is the core of honouring freedom in each other as a basis of relationship and communication. To assign freedom at the level of body is to suffer a life of driven compulsions and passing gratifications. The enacting of fantasy gratifications upon the body under false associations is ‘using people’ or relationships as merely something to get from.… Read more »
Binra, please stop generating kilometers of nonsense. Thanks.
Repeating yourself in terms of derogatory personal assertions – as if your are not free to choose what to engage with but have to ‘suffer’ the ‘offence’ of a my freedom to share views that do not require you or anyone else to be vilified or laughed at – in order to seem to be something. If there are issues you want to address – do so. If you don’t want to then dont. But to crap on something as you shut the door and point at the crap – is exactly the kind of behaviour you SAY that you don’t like in the ‘elites’. Of course you can imagine scenarios where YOU cannot believe any freedom can be found. Such is torture, terror and the threat of terror. But it may be because you are not growing freedom where it truly is – but live under the illusion you… Read more »
Binra, I characterized specific texts among your texts, not you.
Oh – which were they ? Only the long ones? You are free to make clear your communication if you choose. But while you may hide behind ‘plausible deniability’ – your insinuated intent and meaning by was very clear.
However, no offence taken as you obviously got the wrong end of the stick. Have a good day!
“If there are issues you want to address – do so. If you don’t want to then dont. But to crap on something as you shut the door and point at the crap – is exactly the kind of behaviour you SAY that you don’t like in the ‘elites’.”
A) I tend to express myself pretty directly, Binra. I referred to a couple of your recent responses to me as “nonsense”. That was precisely the issue I meant to address.
B) Nowhere have I accused “elites” of letting their collective patience run thin with my less-clear-minded screeds. I’m not “crapping” on you, I’m telling you that I don’t like reading extremely long texts that don’t, in the end, say very much.
A few days ago you responded to a joke Norm made about Bill Gates. The language you used was clear; I thought it was good.
One man’s failure to meet is another man’s passion. So you had expectations of me that I failed to live up to! I’ll see what I can do about making you read what you don’t find meaningful. OK – just don’t give it a second thought. While dense – what I write is of felt meanings – that resonate in me as an articulation of something tangible – and relevant to the themes being raised. Believers or deniers is the same expressed within mutually reinforcing polarities. True believing has no need to assert – for one simply lives from what is stood in with both feet. True denial doesn’t even react to what isn’t at all acknowledged. I have NO doubt as to the ‘territory’ of existence – being a definite example – but when I meet what doesn’t at first make sense, I sense into it without forcing my… Read more »
This is becoming both a bit too personal and slightly repetitive, no?
Not to mention jaw-droppingly inconsequential. But if you’d care to do a word-count comparison, in this dialogue between Binra and I, you’ll see that I have a few hundreds words of credit remaining.
So, what were we discussing, anyway? Ah, yes….
QED
Laugh
Make every word count, and there is nothing inconsequential whatsoever. Even the seemingly trivial can yield new perspectives. Education is the willingness of learning – and the demonstration of teach what you have learned. We all ‘are this’ – all the time – but not necessarily in a clearly directed focus. Especially when we think we already know – and I don’t direct that at you – but include us all. In the theme of believers and deniers – we so easily are triggered against what we think we see in the other – and can then act in ways that invoke polarized ‘exchange’ if not dialogue. Freedom of speech is a matter of trust – for who speaks the truth of their heart to that which cannot or doesn’t see them – or listen? No we present something else. There are various aspects to freedom of relating and communicating… Read more »
In the spirit of the stated intent of this article it would merit refraining from personal invalidations and accusations – in a longhand willingness to illuminate the issue rather than resort to in-house mythological shorthand. I expect the strategy behind the climate for primates agenda to be subtle in its operation – so as to seem to give victories of no consequence while installing legal and corporate structures that de-facto embody the change regardless the red rag of the media to the bull. As with the corporatisation and regulatory capture of ‘medical science’ by Rockefeller/Carnegie et al, the few who know what is happening find no voice and no funding to match the immense resources of the will to possess, or control both wealth and knowledge. The new world order is not for the older who see the ruse, for they die off while the young grow within the conditionings… Read more »
“I expect the strategy behind the climate for primates agenda to be subtle in its operation – so as to seem to give victories of no consequence while installing legal and corporate structures that de-facto embody the change regardless the red rag of the media to the bull.” The push is toward a renovated Control Structure, yes. Whereas they normally use “terrorists” to herd the populace toward the desired chutes, with AGW they use “global extinction” as the motivator… which is both bigger than “terrorists” but more abstract, less visceral. It’s taking longer to really “take”. Meanwhile, since They control “information”, they can keep ramping the scare tactics (alarming new reports of polar bears with skin cancer? Baby penguins baking alive in the heat?) and use current technology to goose the weather, here and there (chemtrails…?) to heighten minor, temporary (but narratively significant) anomalies. Eg: A few years ago, BHO… Read more »
I still hold that we meet our reflection, individual and collective. In another thread here genes and environment came up. The ability to define reality (distort our experience of it to serve our own thought) set up the need to adjust to such reality experience. Thus we are conditioned by our self-imposed but unconscious conditioning. So up to a point, one can say ‘they’ have the power to make all these things operate or serve their agenda – and up to a point one can say that believing that gives power to such a narrative and in acting as if true – reinforces it and is conditioned by it. The mindset that most everyone loves to hate… in others, is not so hard to find in oneself. This page could be seen as an experiment as to opening the possibility of dialogue without polarising to the point of breakdown of… Read more »
A rather well reasoned article defending the paramount need for free speech. Bravo & thanks, Catte. Also a most apt reference to the Inquisition: we are in a parallel situation. The Roman Catholic church had become totally corrupt & instituted the Inquisition to preserve its command & control position of the Middle Ages. It was a period of tortures, wars & wholesale deaths. In the name of the Lord? No, in the name of money & power.. The command & control position of our present paradigm is held by Big Money: the Banksters, the Multinationals, the Mega-rich individuals who own & control our mainstream media & politicians. This paradigm is failing: more & more people have lost faith in our corrupt politicians, political institutions & media. Witness the birth of this website, the rise of Farage & Brexit. The Big Hate is Big Money’s Inquisition, their attempt at shutting down… Read more »
In the UK, more young women are leaving secondary education with university entrance qualifications than are young men. I believe a similar situation to this is taking place in the USA too.
In the UK, more young women are now entering on to degree-awarding courses than young men.
What does that say about relative levels of intelligence between young women and young men?
It may by now be the case that young women are exceeding young men as degree graduates too.
For all I know, this could the same situation in Poland too.
Maybe Mr Korwin-Mikke MEP feels threatened by all these bright young women?
He would not be the first.
Men are the people with the highest IQ according to the vast majority of available studies, and are 90 percent of people who earn more than 1 million per year (IQ and earnings are correlated), 95 percent of pilots, 90 percent of surgeons, 90 percent of nobel laureats, 98 percent of science nobel laureats, 95 percent of inventors, 80 percent of professors, 66 percent of MENSA members, 98 percent of Fields Medal medalists, and 98 percent of Turing Award recipients, as well as the vast majority of human geniuses. This is because smart men have more children that smart women. According to various studies, intelligence is having negative impact on female fertility and marriage prospects, but is having neutral to positive impact on male reproductive fitness and marriage prospects. The smarter the woman, the lower the fertility, which means that lack of intelligence increases reproductive fitness among women, tand nature… Read more »
So a smart man and a dumb woman tend to have smart boys and stupid girls? Don’t both genders share their parents’ genes somewhat randomly? I think your argument is that intelligence heritability is gender-related in the sense that the mother passes on intelligence genes to the girl and the father to the boy, but you’d have to verify that that’s what you’re saying. If not that, what are you saying about reproductive fitness and the lowering of female intelligence?
And why put so much store in only a very slim measure, culturally and possibly gender configured, of total human intelligence in any case? This is the measure that has brought the planet to the edge of destruction. How smart is that?
Hi D, not much free time, there are various conflicting studies about what parent is the primary source of intelligence genes, or whether there is primary source at all. Currently there is no consensus about this issue. I will just say that the source of intelligence genes does not matter that much, whether the mother or the father is the primary source, or they are both. What matters is if the boy/girl needs those genes, not only if the parent is smart. The boy will most likely receive more intelligence genes than the girl, even if both parents have equal IQ, or the mother have higher IQ. In the case of high IQ mother, the mother will (more often than not) pass more intelligence genes to the son, and restrict those genes from her daughter. Sexual antagonism is a situation where one sex receives genes that are not received by… Read more »
So, you, as a man, are probably smarter than Catte, the author of this article and a woman?
I have to say I’d be wary of that hypothesis if I were you.
Just one question, if you could indulge me: the “intelligence genes” you speak of, where in the human DNA sequence are they located, and are we talking something like a football team of genes, or something more analogous to a curling team?
Yes, that’s a compound question, I know. But if you only answer one, hey, that’ll be one answer to something I didn’t know about.
Into the ideas – if not the ‘argument’ : I hold environment – as defined, and as defining, as the primary conditioning of what then grows – yet life is some capacity to re-evaluate our definitions and make some changes to our environment. Nearly all of our current ‘mind’ focuses exclusively in the latter. I hold that the gene genie is epigenetically activated according to ‘environmental’ factors – including the nocebo effect – (belief in a negative outcome). But the wish to believe oneself escaped of self-transformational responsibility may assert ‘hard-wired reality’ as a kind of protectionism, regardless anything brought to communication. That may be broadly identified as fear of change running an impossibility or futility of change or ‘non-negotiable reality’. If ‘studies were to prove’ that free will has no basis in life – I would be free to disregard it as part of my experience of existence –… Read more »
“I hold environment – as defined, and as defining, as the primary conditioning of what then grow”
Yes.
“I hold that the gene genie is epigenetically activated according to ‘environmental’ factors”
There is no “gene genie.” There is no thing that is “intelligence.” This is a mystification. Even the “individual” is an illusion, although for sure there is that seemingly discrete creature which is imagined and imagines itself to be an “individual.” But you will notice that no human can truly subsist in isolation from others. “We” are more a collective “organism” than we are “separate beings.” We are both, never only one or the other, but sometimes more of one than the other, depending on the situation we are in.
That we are both AND More – is of an embracing Intelligence – at least I am aware of relationship and communication and assign these qualities to Life. It doesn’t matter to me so much the symbols used as the intent. Relationship is the Nature of the extension and reflection of Creation. We love our ‘brother’ as ourself – which is to say – we don’t recognize and truly share the Law of life in ‘loving’ to judge, reject, hate, attack another’s being – but it shines on all equally regardless how it can at different times seem to be. Our acceptance of relationship is made a choice by an active choice to refuse it. When I see a figure from my past where you are – I don’t see or relate to you but to my past. You likely couldn’t tell me that – for that’s just the underhand… Read more »
Hi, Politically incorrect foreigner, You write: “The second cause for intelligence differences between the sexes could be that high status people (and there is some correlation between high status people, earnings, and IQ) have more boys, while low status people have more girls (the Trivers-Willard effect).” Would that explain the higher numbers, in absolute terms, of male homosexuality among high status people, or at least in the neighborhoods where they tend to live and congregate together? Probably it does. And if it doesn’t, it’s probably because no one has yet noticed the logically necessary disproportion. But I have. Just now. Right here. On the basis of the “facts” you’ve just provided. I mean, where there are more boys per capita, there is probably a very good chance that there will be a higher absolute relative incidence of male homosexuality, assuming a natural invariant rate of incidence of that particular sexual… Read more »
“Are you a Marxist?”
He writes like a German AfD-er.
Ah! A Marxist AfD-er
Dear Politically Incorrect Foreigner,
While it may be true that there are more males than females with very high IQs, statistically there are also more males than females with the lowest levels of intelligence as measured by IQ. Women’s intelligence varies less than men’s intelligence and that applies as much to people at lower levels of intelligence as at higher levels.
If there are more male geniuses, there are also more male idiots.
And that’s assuming that “geniuses” even exist at all.
“While it may be true that there are more males than females with very high IQs…”
Just think: a test designed, implemented, validated and normalized by White Males… generally validates White Males. Miraculous.
I’m sure the “IQ Tests” given by Israeli Psychologists, to Palestinians, measures something other than various gaps between the vanquished and the victors, too.
To be brutally frank, by Camile Paglia’s yardstick, most people these days, if left to themselves, would be living in grass huts. There are over three billion men alive today and I suspect the vast majority of them have invented very little. Despite having a Y-chromosome, most of us guys have a lot more in common with the gals, creativity wise, than we do with Thomas Edison.
Did Edison invent things? I thought he just filled a warehouse with real inventors and patented everything they came up with while working for him 🙂
I wanted to make a similar remark. But before making it, knowing that Edison had been born into the “middle class” of the 19th Century, I wanted to get a fix on the magnitude of that wealth in terms of what it would be today in nominal terms, but I could not find anything at hand, so I decided to take a pass.
However, there can be no doubt that he was born into “money” and therefore into the “industrial American capitalist” class, which would have put him in a position to, as you put it, fill a warehouse with real inventors and patent everything that they produced under his name — kinda like that guy, Bill Gates, the “inventor” of something or other, too.
What did Gates invent??? A marketing phenomenon? An icon of himself?
The sacred history of scientism is worthy of revision to open a more balanced perspective.
When I first read more of Tesla I cast Edison in less than a light giving contribution – but I don’t now feel to throw the baby out with the bathwater. A lot of people with means don’t make anything of it – and I believe Edison was not well connected within the academic or cultured elites of his day – excepting to have pushed in by bringing inventions that attracted money and fame.
That’s a joke. Is there anyone anywhere who can take credit for “inventing” anything? Are not “inventions” the result of collective efforts, both contemporaneous and between the generations of the past and those of the present?
Genius is collective. It’s not individual, although individuals will delude themselves into believing that what was refracted through them was all of their own doing, and not the result of a myriad of interactions between themselves and the people they borrowed from and with whom they collaborated.
I can see, Norman, that you’ve never heard of George de Mestral or Arthur Fry…!
Who dat?
How quickly you forget, Norm! A) velcro B) post-its! Tell me your World would be worth inhabiting without either!
On the serious side: Antonio Meucci
Who dat, too?
Ach, I forgot… no Google in Canadia…! Larf
The individual serves a role within a collectively whole movement. What you talk of I read as egocentricity. That also serves a role within a collective insanity! I feel you want to throw out the baby with the bathwater? If you have no will but to operate a collective dictate then there IS no will – and life but a machine. If you choose to accept that – that is your will – or a substitution for will by a tricky mind. When the charge builds up enough , a circuit is found. This can be manipulated – but that too is a circuit operating. The physics of consciousness is experience, ‘Need to know’ drives all. Needs can be anything given priority – and so the felt need to NOT know, can operate an obfuscation by all and any means available. So something ELSE is ‘known’ instead of being. Dislocation.… Read more »
Genius is collective. It’s not individual That’s a very thought provoking statement, Norman. The obvious comeback would be, how collective? Obviously you are not talking of the entire human collective sharing a collective Nobel Prize for Inventiveness regardless of their individual contributions. And for the men’s and women’s teams take special pride in the achievements of their own gender is also a bit rich when it takes two genders to create the next generation of geniuses. I’m old enough to remember when the British took a lot of pride in things that made them the envy of lesser underachieving lands, which included being the homeland of an impressively long list of geniuses. So I can see the point that genius requires a cultural milieu in which to come to fruition. Jethro Tull, for example, would probably never have invented the seed drill if he hadn’t been educated and well-travelled as… Read more »
Are we really saying anything very different? Without a given set of cultural and material preconditions, no one particular invention can ever see the light of day. And one essential ingredient in those preconditions are, of course, the actual humans participating in the activities or practices that ultimately and fortuitously result in “invention.” But no so called “genius” ever created or will ever create anything whole cloth, and that is the better part of the explanation of all human “invention.” So that’s what I mean when I say, and I think we actually agree, that “genius” is collective, that it is as much or more so the expression of broad cultural preconditions than of anything any one individual could muster on his own , that “genius” as we normally understand it, that is to say, as a designation for people we imagine to have godlike attributes, is actually a mystification… Read more »
The term genius may be applied to persons – rightly or wrongly but it points to qualities that are describable. Egocentricity always ascribes to persons or to a personal capacity, qualities that are embodied in life – for that is the personification of life as a sense of being under our control and according to our word. Reading of Nicola Tesla currently, the degree of dedication and passionate pursuit for his exploration and discovery in the fields of electro-magnetic principles and applications, became the overriding focus of his life and the subordinating of most all else to the endeavour could easily have cost him his life and nearly did. But regardless his intensity and persistence, he also had great aptitude for learning – and an eidetic memory – in which the working details of an envisioned mechanical device would be trialled and adjusted in specification – from working within his… Read more »
Ah but Frank, You have NO sense of the richness of living close to the Earth. No sense of the tangible richness and depth of communion and communication within the Feeling of being. No awareness of the Mother of being – without whose denial and subjugation your lording ‘mind’ could not play out its strut. You surely confuse inventiveness with creativity and intelligence with manipulation. I happen to be reading a history of Nikola Tesla – amongst a few other things – and note the familiar patterns of conflicted self extending through technological innovation to corporate cartels of closed systems of control. Some professed to believe that labour saving machines would enable everyone to cultivate their creative capacities. Steve Jobs seemed likewise until perhaps meeting ‘the Man’ behind Disney and attending the market demand for unconsciousness and the ‘duty’ of Power to supply it. (sic). I’m not anti-invention so much… Read more »
So it’s all genetics, eh. Nothing to do with the collective intelligence implicit in a person’s “cultural context” and a contingency of interests and accidental cognitive attributes? A person is just “born” with a high IQ, right? Actually inherits as a matter of course for being a scion of a long line of genetic geniuses? So if, for example, physicist Paul Marmet, in the years that he was alive, had been brought up in the Canadian arctic and been raised according to a traditional Inuit life style, he yet would have scored the same IQ test score as he in fact did raised in a modern urban setting? And money is a function of brains, right? So that if a kid were born in some backwater mining town where there were no books or libraries to speak of, no one in his family who had an education higher than the… Read more »
NP, Intelligence is 40 – 80 percent heritable, according to the latest studies. The rest is affected by the environment. For example black children raised by white parents will usually have lower IQ than their parents. Earnings are correlated with IQ. In other words, not all people with high IQ will earn more than people with low IQ, but most high IQ people will earn more than most low IQ people.
Other than that, i’m relatively talkative person, so i see nothing wrong with several comments on topic that is interesting to me. Good night to you too.
Do you have any references to the studies that “establish” that rate of 40% to 80% heritabiliy of intelligence? I’m curious as to how that gets “established.” And what is that? A black child raised by whites will usually have a lower IQ than his — what? Genetic parents? Or his white adoptive parents. It’s not clear for a low IQ individual just what it is you mean, eh. IQ is correlated to earnings? So what’s your take on that? Is it the 40% to 80% difference that makes the difference or is it something else? Maybe the color of someone’s skin? I’m talkative, too. So lets talk, eh. I’m fascinated by all of these deep insights you bring to a discussion of “intelligence” as it relates to different “types” of people. I didn’t you could tell so much from just looking at a person. I’m eager to learn. Will… Read more »
Think the climate denier point is a good place to find the soft edges of Catte’s article. And I don’t have any but bespoke solutions. The question that arises for me on the one hand is why, in the press, is there a privileging of ‘climate-deniers” points of view when this issue has a scientific consensus perhaps greater than on any other issue? Is not the frustration of people wishing to silence these views based on the amount of time and space given them, determined by capitalist interests and organs of information, rather than the fact that these views have been aired? How much time should we give to, say, a view which attributes to Jesus the current change in climate? Wouldn’t it be absurd to pretend this is the ‘other side’ of the argument? Because details aside, global warming as a phenomenon is the more than settled consensus. Opposing… Read more »
Nice try at fake-issue hawking.
The “denier” position is NOT “privileged” in the media. It’s censored. By people who claim it’s privileged in order to rationalise censorship.
The BBC isn’t refusing to cover alarmists. It’s refusing to cover deniers.
Your bogus claim that “settled” issues don’t need to be discussed and should be censored is already covered and needs no further refutation.
No one needs to censor stupid or insane claims, they are filtered organically by the process of free discussion. They relegate naturally to the hinterland.
As you may well discover from personal experience.
“The question that arises for me on the one hand is why, in the press, is there a privileging of ‘climate-deniers” points of view…”
I “love” people who boldly state the opposite of the obvious truth and expect to get away with it! Very Orwell, but didn’t you get the memo that “Brave New Worldisms” works better?
Here, Google the term “Climate Denial” and have a look at exactly which POV is “privileged” (that is, let’s try to find a search-result which doesn’t smear “Denialism” as a mental illness):
https://www.google.de/search?q=Climate+Denial&oq=Climate+Denial&aqs=chrome..69i57.4847j0j8&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
(erratum: “WORK better”)
This “climate denier” idea is worth an article or maybe a graduate thesis all on its own. When we call someone an “alarmist” or a “climate alarmist”, it is fairly clear that they are seeking to sound or spread alarm about what’s going on with the climate. So the terms in themselves are accurate descriptors, and can only be seen as pejoratives if one disagrees that alarm is warranted. When you call someone a “denier” or a “climate denier” or even a “climate change denier”, you are no longer using accurate speech. You’ve twisted it. First of all, using the term “denial” brings strong moral undertones into what is supposedly a scientific issue. It carries the strong implication that the “denial” in question is either pathological (because the denier has psychological issues), contrarian (because the denier is denying for the sake of argument) or dishonest (because the denier has a… Read more »
Well said. Thankyou! My points here arise from but are not specifically addressed to you or yours. I note that the corporate body of fear-driven ignorance operates a ‘reversal’ – so that the natural good is demonised and the artificial toxin is promoted as protection. (By ‘corporate body’ I include the willing consumption of such toxicity.). Sunlight and sunscreens (aluminium), saturated fat and margarine (industrial grease), Carbon dioxide and weather modification technology (nano particles of toxic industrial waste) – and global cultural deprivation under a corporatocracy. The hijacking of the environmental movement to ‘reducing carbon footprints’ is an amazing feat. And tragic unless used to illuminate the device in consciousness by which such deceit operates, to then use fear to draw more illumination and alignment rather than shut it down to a protection racket. But while something is believed protection it will itself be protected as self. Fear of Life… Read more »
Religious fundamentalism is returning in a big way in the West, despite the fact that no one believes in God or religion anymore. Our god is an overlapping trinity; Democracy, Truth and Freedom. As the ruling elite lose their mandate to rule and legitimacy they are striking back at heretics, people who deny the… Facts. This is Nick Cohen mashing-up Hitler, Stalin, Chomsky, Assange, Trump and, no kiddin’ Nigel Farage. Normally this kind of paranoid raving would be called a ‘conspiracy theory’, but, as usual, conspiracy is in the eye of the powerful and especially those with access to high-profile meida platforms. Cohen is so full of hate for the enemies of his sacred ‘facts’ that he crosses into something that’s close to self-parody here. There’s a vast threat here to our bourgeois democracy, typified by Nigel Farage, not from the revelations about the Secret State just published by Wikileaks.… Read more »
When I have looked at such writing, it exemplified the ruse of accusing others of what one’s own (side) already does. ‘Religious fundamentalism’ can mean different things – but as the sign of a locked in offence that turns any and all communication to a weapon to use against the communicator – in self-justified ‘grievance’ – it is antithetical to true religious or spiritual Feeling. For there is no democracy of communication, no honouring of truth nor freedom of choice… in a locked mind – or in the reaction of those polarised against it.
The propagation of personal identity assertions operates obfuscation of the underlying issues – and indeed what the left hand does while the right takes attention.
Well, JKM, women may not be among the top 100 players of “official” chess in the world, but I’m pretty sure you you aren’t either. In fact, I just checked, and nope you aren’t there. I don’t know where you would rank in the “Polish Physics Olympiad,” either. But just going by the chess and little speech, there, could it be that as a man you might be a bit overpaid? And I know I shouldn’t be saying this in public, but Christ oh good gosh darn, do I know more than just a few men who are dumber than an electric doorbell. At least the latter makes a connection from time to time. Now I realize that my evidence for thinking that some women (by no means all) are every bit my equals in some respects is purely anecdotal, but it never really occurred to me that I should… Read more »
The IQ Framing operates hierarchy, competition and conflict. A highly effective elitism of such hierarchical aligning of identity operates a self-destruct for humanity. No wisdom there – but blinded in a false light. The balancing within a wholeness of being is NOT the enforcement of ideas of balance or cohesion by all the king’s horses and all the king’s men – which operate to maintain off-balance and disorder AS IF Humpty is Fallen. Fear of something substitutes for belief in something and acts to correct it compound the belief as real in the minds that do so. If you didn’t have dumb people in your world – but only ‘smarter’ than you – without any change in yourself – you would be the dumb one. However, the self-invalidation carried and transmitted in such evaluations is – as I see it – the fundamental issue. While we believe we cannot, are… Read more »
Intelligence, in my opinion, is not individual, but collective. Nothing anyone “knows,” or rather holds in memory — and that is all of which an IQ test is ever a very poor and rarefied approximation — is not an artifact of culture. Furthermore, the so called IQ test, which is “presumed” to be a measure of something “objective” called “intelligence,” is actually a collection of questions generated out of a specific cultural context applicable only in that context, and then only to a very limited aspect of that context, narrowly pertaining, in fact, to both the sorts of activities performed in academia and those commercial functions subserved by the technocratic and bureaucratic segments of the capitalist workforce. It’s a filtering tool, in other words, to select individuals who may require less investment in training (i.e., in time and money) to fit them to a very general domain of very specific… Read more »
Perhaps you sing to the choir here – but of course the setting of terms of ‘intelligence’ and the setting up of testing and ability to pass tests – is what might be more aptly seen as the elevation of some qualities or attributes at the expense and rejection of others – by the collective interests of the established institutions of the culture of the day. (Including compliance under inducements or threats by which self-interest abandons it representative role). When people seem most to presume themselves intelligent is in judgement over those whom they despise, have no feeling for and have no penalty from using as a means of self-justification. As always how we define something in the light of our purpose, determines the result. If we do not know our purpose we default the conditioned patterns or our particular path and strategy in life. Clearly a conditioned reaction can… Read more »
Hi Catte, I’m not sure why you needed to emphasise so strongly that you’re NOT denying man-made climate change. The effect was to give the impression that you actually believe the myth. Afraid of being labeled a “denier”? Denying a lie is an honourable thing to do. Why not try to get your head round the science – and I mean the real [em] science? AGW melts like icicles in the sun when it’s exposed to the facts. It’s a question of science – not of emotion. It might feel [em] right to believe that our reckless treatment of the planet must [em] be having negative consequences – it is! But warming isn’t one of them and CO2 would not be the culprit even if it was!
Just on the issue of fact: can you provide references for your assertion that “Goliath Oil” definitely [em] funds “climate skeptics”?
The intention behind the editorial decision to make it clear this article is not a refutation of manmade global warming is to avoid dilution of the main point.
The point of this article is that “deniers” or dissenters should not be censored even if they are wrong. It’s a discussion of the principle of free speech, not climate science.
There are several places on this site where the truth or not of manmade global warming is being debated. Please confine that discussion to these threads.
If the article was not about climate science, but only about the principle of free speech i.e. specifically the right to have and express ones own opinions – “even if they are wrong” (but who decides that?) – then that was the only point – a general one – that needed to be made. But the writer chose to use the specific example of AGW and include a specific allegation (subsequently qualified by Norman Pilon) that ‘deniers’ were being paid by Big Oil to challenge the theory. Was that an objective – neutral – position to adopt? Was it not intended to cast doubt on the integrity of (at least some) ‘deniers’? And then there was the point I made in an earlier comment about the unusual emphasis placed on denying that the author was a denier! The effect was actually to suggest that the author leaned towards accepting AGW… Read more »
Yes indeed. ‘Free speech’ if it means the freedom to engage in communication, is not merely of being allowed to speak – but of being able to persist in the communication without being reframed and diverted or ‘rationalized’ away in terms that invalidate or mark out the speaker as a legitimate target for blocking with ridicule or attack. Schopenhauer wrote on a list of 38 tricks he noted while debating or arguing issues that were being used to appear to ‘win’ the argument without debating the issue. He originally and somewhat naively thought that publishing such deceits would make them transparent and unworkable – but they have been extrapolated and commercialized as ’38 ways to win an argument’ – as a study guide. One of the reasons we talk of mind-control is a result of such techniques of the ‘dark arts’ being implemented as a discipline ’em’ in place ’em’… Read more »
Em… I tried ’em’ – maybe /em emphasis /em (testing)
Perhaps I should have stayed with my original use of CAPS for the emphasis of key words.
“Just on the issue of fact: can you provide references for your assertion that “Goliath Oil” definitely [em] funds “climate skeptics”?” And please, everyone on both sides of this issue, do note that the funds received from “Goliath Oil” by the skeptics in this instance was less than 1/2 of one percent of what the “promoters” of the AGW hysteria received in half as many years. So the next time you hear all about the liars being bought and paid for by Big Oil, compare the amount of research money received in absolute terms by the “hysterics,” and ask yourself where, on which side of the debate, the real money making opportunities really are. According to the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, during the past 10 years, promoters of the man-made global warming hypothesis received more than $50 billion in funding in the United States alone. On… Read more »
The resort to vilifying and criminalising perceived rival or challenge to a reality investment gives power to the mob – as in shaming and blaming and for example forcing out of a career position, – and the mob – as in calling on the power of state to ban or penalise such a one. The former can be propagated by PR and media but the latter power is backed by the state. That communication COULD arrive at a win win outcome is not risked or considered by the breaking off and shutting down of communication behind attack on the person. And so increasingly a currency that could serve better outcomes is corrupted by marketing and weaponising a pre existing agenda. And a New Babel ‘descends’ upon the towering apex of ‘Civilisation’ in which specialised and compartmentalised bubble realities speak only to themselves. For if true communication were allowed – we… Read more »
I signed the petition – and now regret doing so. As you point out, this individual’s use of a Nazi-style salute was not as it was presented by his detractors. I still think he is stupid in claiming that women are less intelligent than men. When women have been suppressed by patriarchal systems for millenia, how can anyone know the truth? I think there is an unfortunate trend in modern-day society fueled by a rapacious 24/7 mass media. That trend is to rush to judgment. Everyone, including me, must take time to establish the true facts of any situation before coming to a judgment. Like you, I support free speech in full. The only time it should be constrained is when the person abusing it does so to cause physical harm. Urging others to physically attack other others is justifiably banned. One final point: I remember studying Gustave Le Bon’s… Read more »