You know the guilty pleasure you get from reading an email that obviously wasn’t meant for you? One of my seemingly-multiple female friends copied me in on one today, and it was very interesting.
See, my friend is the Viral Marketing Director for a prominent player in Europe’s educational-tourism industry. Die Deutsche Gruppengedankgruppe GmbH, or DGGG, specializes in running conventions and seminars in the groupscience space—which covers fields like scientific consensuology, the Consensus Sciences and Post Normal Epistemology.
The highlight of the academic consensuology calendar is, of course, the Vienna Circle Institute‘s Konferenz für die Kommunikation des Konsenses der Wissenschaft des Wissenschaftliches Konsenses. Not for nothing has VienCircSciConCommConCon been called ‘the BiMonSciFiCon of consensus science’: it’s massive.
If you haven’t been on at least one WienerSchaft (as those who’ve been on at least one WienerSchaft call WienerSchafts), then you’re nobody in the Climate and Majoritarian Sciences. Intellectually speaking, you’re a pygmy among midgets. A hobbit among dwarves. A ninth of a man in a world of half-men. The crap de la crap. I’m not saying you’re dim, but it generally takes you three or four metaphors to realize you’re being insulted.
Inevitably, the contract for SciConCommConCon ’18 was awarded to DGGG. And the rest is history: my friend is working on a draft conference program. She attempts to CC it to her boss, Brandt Keith. She fails.
That’s why you, reader, can now enjoy a sneak preview of one of this year’s conference highlights.
Special guest Professor Stephan Lewandowsky will introduce
sub|humanized
Language Incompatible with Human Dignity
as a Tactic to Silence, Stigmatize and Suppress:
A step-by-step guide
for scientists, educators and communicators
in the climate change context
We’ve invited the most recognized people in punitive communication to lead this intensive workshop. All our tutors are linguists of the stature of Paul Bain, George Lakoff and more.
As an example of what you’ll produce on completion of the learning objectives, the following student essay earned a Credit in last year’s exam.
What Fake Skeptic is That? Field Guide to a Few Faux Foes of Science
Deep in the Dark Continent, on the open savanna, we see a reputable scientist. It could be anyone, but let’s face it: it’s probably your daughter. She’s ivory-skinned with terror—as usual. But it isn’t the science that scares her.
Not today.
Today she’s being hounded by “skeptics.” They’re baying for her blood, bleating over every misplaced comma, monstering her in a dogged and rabidly pig-headed bid to cow the facts.
Science has a term for this ghoulish gynecomachy: Serengeti skepticism.
But to blame the recent spate of maulings on Luddite boors or dinosaurs who hate science would be to miss the complete picture. For those responsible, it’s not even about the science. It’s about the science, and the threat it poses to their dreams of a free market where dog eats dog and nary a regulation stands in the way of the Law of the Jungle. For all their howls about screening fallacies, hidden declines, arbitrary temperature adjustments and pal review, they’re just dog-whistling past the grave of an obsolete economic ideology.
Suddenly, from a smoky miasma smacking of bad faith and emphysema, an ageing Ball is trotted out by vested interests from the stable of lapdogs in their pocket. But do you think the masses of slavering frauditors pause, even for a second, to sniff the fishy pedigree of their alpha “scientist”?
Do bears crap in people-toilets?
No.
Not according to anyone serious.
And so it is that skeptoids—with their primal need to weasel out of the implications of science—never look a gift stalking-horse in the mouth. They can’t afford to.
Old man Ball is still braying to the choir of climate kuffar about some nit he thinks he’s picked when the sudden smell of Dick makes the pack change tack. Dick! Dick! Dick! To a man, homo negator is gay for Dick. Turning tail together, like birds of a feather they make a concerted, well-orchestrated beeline for Lindzen’s already-flawed “paper,” drooling to wolf down a fresh trough of expired denier-fodder.
But now a thousand ears prick up, for lo! It’s Murray, parroting howlers again. The running dogs of carbon capitalism trample their young to lap up the latest crock of Fox Science rattled off by “Snaky” Salby.
In the Medieval bestiary of fake doubt, one bedrock species is the only constant: the bottom-feeding attention-seeker that hogs the light like a stooltoad, the toadstool’s contrary cousin. When they’re not secreting disembowelled rats on your doorstep, they’re shedding something drier than a dead dingo’s donger: faux-crocodile tears for their precious Denied Debate. How they crave the live exchange of views, ravenous for a good consensus-cruelling!
Don’t take the bait—it’s actually a trap.
Scientists have a simile. Debating the evidence with a climate-Truther, they say, is like fæco-Roman wrestling with a pig. You can’t possibly compete; you just end up reeking of nightsoil like some halitotic caecotroph; and The Beast lords every turd-bemerded minute of it over you.**
Don’t even think of bitching about how you should have listened to me. I know you should. That’s what I’m saying.
To the “sceptic” rabble, the dismay of a respectable scientist is so much chum in the churning surf. Your curses are catnip to them. Endowed by nature with the rat cunning to ferret out a mole of fear-pheromones from as far as a furlong, even the cravenest sub-ilk of the science-eschewing kind comes flocking, borne on the tiny monkey-wings of buffalo, to gwk at your pwning. The teeming denialist horde shares a single, feral drive: to crow over the savaging of Science on the public stage.
Ask not, therefore, why the swarms swarm. I just explained why: Denialists feed on Debate, which feeds straight into the hands of Delay.
A million deniers Trojan-horsing and Gish-galloping roughshod over consensus opinion: is this Mother Nature’s most sick-making display? Yes. And that’s saying a lot—she’s a vile old exhibitionist at the most G-rated of times.
So if you were on the trail of the Morally Or Logically Consistent Pseudoskeptic, you might as well put down the binoculars. There’s no such animal.
They’ve gone the way of the Honest Disinformer. In the rat-race of modern science, they’re rarer than hen’s testes.
DISCLAIMER
This essay is not about legitimate, scholarly criticism, which all scientists welcome at the appropriate time and place.
________
* If you must debate against the Merchants of Doubt, however, always use the lamest possible arguments; debating properly would be like casting pearls before swine.
** Source: ‘Monckton’s Monkeying Apes Guerrilla Tactics of Big Evil,’ scientific blog article, http://www.skepticalscience.com (cached 6 June 2008)
Perhaps you’ve dreamed of making the cover of ZooIntersectionality, the hard-social-sciences journal at the nexus of ethology and logothety, as the above essay did.
Or maybe you just want to communicate science more effectively, having reached the limits of what honesty can achieve.
Then this masterclass may suit your needs.
Remember, preregistration is essential as this is always our most popular stream.
Assumes knowledge equivalent to completion of Session 555: Engagement with Contrarians—The Solution, or Just A Tremendous Waste of Time? ◼︎`
OMG. I think I’m in lust.
So why am I sharing this awesome educational opportunity with you? Shouldn’t I have deleted the unintentional communication immediately and notified the sender?
Well, by an astonishing miracle, someone forgot to add the usual boilerplate at the end of the email—the stuff that admonishes you against reproducing the contents on pain of vaguely-adumbrated legal uglinesses. I know, I know, such threats are probably hollow, but I’ve always been the sort of superstitious, weak-minded, unquestioning rube they work on.
If I could afford it, I’d be on a plane to Austria before you could say Wienerseptemberbeginnenfest. If anyone needs a seminar like this I do. Lest you think this is just my usual false modesty, check out the following. It’s my utterly bestmost attempt at polemicizing in the style of the essay above, and it’s just lame.
For several years now, armies of irate pensioners have been swarming the countryside, spurred on by feverish websites, taking photographs of thermometers in the belief that this would invalidate concerns about climate change—and seemingly unaware of the fact that the utility of a thermometer derives from the accuracy of its measurement rather than anything captured by a colour photo.
Likewise, climate “sceptics” obsessively yelp at the alleged frailties of the surface temperature record and accuse respectable scientific agencies of “fudging” data, oblivious to the fact that multiple independent analyses of the temperature record give rise to the exact same conclusion. The further fact that the satellite data yield precisely the same result without any surface-based thermometers is of no relevance to climate “sceptics.” It is also of no relevance to climate “sceptics” that their claims about the absence of global warming are logically incoherent with their simultaneous claim that humans didn’t cause the warming.
And that’s as far as I got.
Believe me now? As a hateblogger I’ve never felt more amateur. Give generously, that I may receive the expert tuition I need.
Meanwhile, until the conference itself kicks off on Austrian Harvest Rot’s Eve, I’ll be drip-feeding you the hottest-looking snippoids from the program.
Update: The otherwise schmutzig tone of the comment thread below is marred by a single off-note in the form of this erudite poem by beththeserf:
Ode to intellectual modesty
Hey, u gotta heed Socrates,
wisest of men,* who says,
‘if it’s so ’tis only because
I do not ‘know.’ There’s also
Hamlet addressing Horatio,
more things above and below
heaven, e’en into middle earth,
that u can’t guess, let alone know.
And Rumsfeldt declaring ‘Unknown
unknowns;’ beware the ideas of Mann,
basing everything on one tree ring to rule them
all, a kind of Gruppengedankish-measurement.*Survey by Oracle of Delphi. ‘Recursive modesty.’
Note to Commenters: please resist guessing or “outing” my friend’s name. More importantly, please don’t retweet this post and tell all your Facebook contacts about it, let alone casually mention it in the top slot of a WUWT thread. My friend really loves her guerrilla-marketing job, and she really needs her guerrilla-marketing job. The more eyeballs this unfortunate leak gets, the more trouble she’ll get in. —B.K.
Climate Scepticism 
Regarding your note to commenter, how to spread the word about this not completly sane person then? You’ve already taken the first step.
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I too are so unworthy to post here. I cannot spend my filthy carbon credits receiving wisdom of this calibre. I shall go into the hills and perfect my climatic polyphony.
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As I peruse through the immense body of Bradalian work in this great hall of climate reason, I repeatedly come across heads of Naomi wriggensis writhing incessantly and repeatedly. They are like an infestation of woodworm. Further investigation reveals other infestations are rife, especially by Australian ticks.
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Don’t forget Naomi herself spent three years underground Down Under, in S.A. Who knows what ancient evil they awoke when they delved too deep in the BHP Moria mines?
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Never thought to look, does she wear a ring?
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Yes, but only to ward off workplace harassment.
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It’s the one that rules them all and in the darkness binds them.
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But is Bob Ward, Sméagol?
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..up the crack of doom and still paddling.
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Wow, specific character names? Nothing wrong with your memory, Alan. I should declare right up front that I only watched the first one (‘The Ideas Accepted By The Fellowship of Experts’), and that was, what, 15 years ago?
I don’t know who Smeagol was but Bob Ward has more of a Glum vibe, I think. (Unless Monbiot is available and interested.) Ward would make a serviceable Dildo if the need arose. Yeah, the more I think about it, the more I see him as a Dildo. Or is Bob Geldolf? Or is Bob Geldof Geldolf?
Since I’m never going to watch the whole thing, who wins the trilogy? Was it the Gelflings? Or did the Skeksies wipe them out? Did that giant vagina of fire make an appearance later in the series? That was the funniest bit, I thought. The rest of the jokes were a bit too sophisticated for my taste.
All in all not the best comedy of 2002, but by no means the worst.
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Brad Would you revise your opinion if I tell you that Sméagol becomes Gollum under the influence of the ring (or climate change)?
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My opinion of the kind of future we’re locking in for our kids’ kids’ kids as we approach and pass 500ppm might need revision, since I’d never before taken into account the possibility that magic could exist and act as a positive feedback or “anabolic steroid,” greatly amplifying the toll warmth takes on the human soul.
I don’t think I’d feel any need to rethink my casting choices, however.
In the end, though, we can’t know for sure what my reaction will be until you go ahead and tell me that Sméagol becomes Gollum under the influence of the ring (or climate change).
Any time you like.
Take your time.
Ready when you are.
Take all the time you need.
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Brad, don’t think I’ll bother.
Somewhat bored. Think I’ll find out what others are doing.
Didn’t know who Sméagol was, Gee-ssse!!!
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Bother? You need merely have cut and pasted everything after “What if I told you….”
Heck, I almost accidentally told myself that Sméagol (have I got the accent right?) became Gollum under the influence of the ring (climate change).
Don’t tell me you’re lazier than me, Alan! I’ll have a lot of trouble believing that, I bet.
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Brad. Lazy? Once you begin to ache in more than one place at a time, fall down, forget things, words and why you have entered a room with that bicycle-pump in your hand (you haven’t got a bicycle) and common words illude (elude,allude? who cares!), laziness becomes a continuous stream.
In actual fact, I always have been lazy but in patches. Most attention in literature is given to the meticulous and dedicated scientist, who is the dead opposite of lazy [you know, the sort of person who refines tonnes of pitchblend for a few grammes of brightly shining product that eventually will give you jaw cancer]. But there’s another type – the essentially lazy and that’s me. Someone who bored with a meticulous task abandons it using a shortcut newly developed for the task, or faced with a routine task will abandon it for something much more interesting and promising. Guilty on both counts. But for the science I am best known for, it arose originally from laziness and boredom.
I reckon a plot of laziness against age is a hockeystick. Which is just as well, isn’t it?
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Unlike Dr. Marvel’s loss of faith in Science (1) my doomsday clock has been moved back in time this week. Not because of the recent successes in the field of cloning, funded by Ms. Streisand, but due to a life extending chuckle provided by your post.
1) https://onbeing.org/blog/kate-marvel-we-need-courage-not-hope-to-face-climate-change
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Kakatoa, that’s a really interesting article by Kate Marvel, thank you. As far as I know I’ve never come across the On Being site before. Know anything more about it than I do?
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Richard,
You probably know more than I do on the details of the site by now. My uncle Harry would of liked the site- he lived in NY a few times getting his muse.
I came across the site a few days ago- during one of my puppy sitting shifts. Some puppy shifts aren’t contusive to my preferred method of filing things away-“JACR”. Rather than writing down some details (electronically) on how and why I saved the data/references in bits and bytes in my draft folder(s) we are stuck with my less than perfect neurological storage (short term memory) which is not returning S…. sorry about that.
My 3 am dash into the night, puppy in tow, was successful. I am ready for the snow and cold to end in my neck of the woods.
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Thanks K. Will think about doing a post on the Marvel.
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Richard please do write about Marvel and the O being site. I would be most interested in your comments. I dipped my toe in the water. I found her earlier post of greater interest
https://onbeing.org/blog/the-stepping-stones-of-integrating-emotions-into-practicing-science/
because it reminded me of a most interesting talk I heard at UEA many years ago. Then the staff of the Environmental Science school at UEA held an annual conference. During one a volcanologist colleague gave a talk about her work in Montserrat where she had to give advice predicting what the erupting volcano would do. What made this presentation so memorable was that it was combined with that of the Chief Police Officer at the time. The two of them eventually, in collaboration, had to make the decision to abandon the entire beautiful island. Details of the talks have now gone, but I recall it as the best presentation I had ever experienced.
Whereas I mostly enjoyed the two Marvel essays I read, I cannot say the same for “On being”. Very hippy and sensuous – all so 1970s-80s California. A post on California’s redwoods was in equal parts hilarious and sad – the author didn’t know that the wood has within it a fire retardant and so doesn’t burn and that rings of trees arise from the ring of roots when an old tree dies – nothing mystical, magical yes, but not mystical. I stopped reading On Being shortly afterwards.
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Her tweets are interesting – she’s a relentless self-publicist. She says she’s been overwhelmed by the response to her article. One tweet just says “Abandon all hope“.
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Just as sea-level rise will hit—and is already hitting!—short people the hardest, it’s the most neurotic and easily-overwhelmed members of our community who are the first to feel the impacts of blog comments.
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Whose upset you now Brad? I have soft towels and soothing balm ready.
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“Whose [sic] upset you now Brad?”
This weasel.
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I offer consolation and you sic on me. “Whose” did seem odd, and I did contemplate punctuation, but my laziness genes (previously discussed) took command. Rotten spell checker offered no help. But you understood my meaning didn’t you? So why all the fuss?
Towels and balm securely stowed away.
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Now I really have to protest at the links some people post. I’ve got vomit on my keyboard from the On Being site, so icky is the sentiment there. ‘Histrionics’ is the word that springs to mind with a side order of ‘untreated depression’. Their drippy hand wringing prose makes me shudder. Of course she’s not so worried about the planet that she actually does something about it. Her concern is that her son might be socially isolated by her putting their CO2 where her mouth is. I think the poor kid has a blighted future because his mother is a Greek tragedy.
Brad, your comic writings are brilliant but how can you hope to surpass something that is already its own parody?
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Is On Being even a pun? If not, how does that title justify its existence?
Maybe it should be called The History of Onyx, with a suitably abbreviated URL.
I own a book called On Reflection. It’s about the way 17th—19th C painting evolved with advances in optics. I think it ended on a poignant note with the question of whether the mirror in The Wedding of the Arnolfini would, or could, ever be surpassed now that artists have lost their scientific innocence.
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“I offer consolation and you sic on me.”
So use the towels and warm water. It’s nothing a soothing balm won’t get out. It isn’t as if I bled on you.
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Could you elaborate on this please, Alan:
“rings of trees arise from the ring of roots when an old tree dies”
Do you mean a tree’s rings arise from the rings of its roots when it dies?
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Tiny,
On some other thread I can’t locate, you explained the natural history of your loss of climate faith.
That was in response to my curiosity about the way you called the conversion from skepticism to believalism “returning to the fold,” as though all skeptics must have been believers at some earlier stage of life.
My question was not so much whether you’d been a believer, which I already knew, but why you assumed any given skeptic would once have been a believer: in particular, is this because every skeptic you’ve met (besides me) was once a believer? I want to know how unique my Never Believer* status is.
*By analogy with Never Smoker, i.e. a person who’s never touched a pack in his life.
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I don’t assume that all sceptics were once believers, I think it’s more of a cultural thing. Some countries started earlier than others in pushing the AGW agenda. People were taken by surprise. Steve McIntyre was triggered to think more deeply about the claims when he saw them on a leaflet but he started with questions not certainty. He’s still less of a sceptic than many of those who read his blog. Some countries’ public are more dismissive of anything that comes out of government, especially if the party they didn’t vote for is in power. The US politicians are much more polarised on the issue than the UK MPs. In the US they believe the government tells sophisticated lies all the time but in the UK it’s easier to believe that our governments are riddled with incompetance. The US was also predisposed to shy sway from CO2 reduction given their larger average footprint. Europeans daftly thought that their smaller footprints were evidence of their greater love for their environment and smarter, more virtuous populations. The real truth is less land and/or less money. It is shocking to those people to discover that cutting CO2 is both hard and painful. The higher up the mountain you start, the sooner the climb starts to hurt.
Lots of people vaguely believe or disbelieve, with almost no justication for their position, which is why the ‘consensus’ is so powerful. The public farm their thinking out to someone else. With all the things we could or should examine further, lots of people reasonably just put a placemarker position in and then move onto something more urgent. That snap judgement will be influence by your experiences, knowledge and nature. So if you live in an areas where climate has changed rapidly, then you’re more inclined to believe than in an area where temperatues have been more static. If you’ve knowledge of the sciences involved or the power industry, you’re better equipped to start questioning the official lines.
So Brits and younger climate scientists are more likely to start out as believers of the consensus because they’ve been immersed in it. It takes effort to justify moving away from that position. As the pain of believing in CAGW (ie green taxes, etc) gets bigger than the pain of independent thought, people are more inclined to be sceptical.
So the question should be, why didn’t you go through a beleiver stage?
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According to Marvellous Kate – and no doubt several of her esteemed colleagues – there should be a sign up at the gates to The Institute of Climate Science which reads ‘Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here’. I’m sure they can find a decent sign writer to oblige that requirement but they might have more difficulty finding a three-headed hound. Sorry, I’d offer to help out, but all the hounds I know of who might qualify in the fierceness department sadly have just the one head. Climate Science is literally Hell on a log haul flight to Hawaii – and the poor folks who elect to enter this ludicrously over-funded profession, who pass unwittingly through those Dread Gates, those poor souls end up being prodded and poked by all manner of hot irons and pesky demons in the lower circles of Dante’s CO2 Inferno. We Purgatorial sceptics have no idea of how being aware of “the behaviour of every small thing” is such mental torture. Ignorance of science is truly bliss.
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Brad. Trees in the rings have sprouted from the outermost tips of the circle of roots of the old tree. This happens often in many varieties of tree but is most spectacular in the coastal redwoods such as occur in Muir Woods which our touchy-feely blogger visited and gushed over.
Ingratitude noted.
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I never had a strong position on AGW, and I still don’t.
But as for CAGW, or even the need to Do Something About AGW, I don’t remember ever being given a valid reason, at any point in history, to believe in it. Do you?
Yet I was being told I had to believe in it. That, to me, is a gross affront. Acceding to it would have been incompatible with dignity.
When they started quoting Oreskes04. that was the final straw—I went from doubt to denial. As a philoshophy graduate with a major in epistemology, I knew that in scientific debates, the argument from consensus was not merely invalid, ineffectual, irrelevant or fallacious but fraudulent. It’s logically impossible for an *honest* school of scientific opinion to passively endorse a consensualist marketing strategy. It’s nothing less than a return to pre-scientific, delusional reasoning. So the lack of protest from supposed scientists over such an insult to their entire way of life was damning.
Real scientists would have put a fatwa on Oreskes’ head and burned Science magazines on the streets in simultaneous worldwide demonstrations. Climate scientists didn’t.
By modus tollens, climate scientists aren’t scientists.
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Alan,
thanks (NOTE GRATITUDE) for that explanation.
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The ‘valid reason’ as I received it was that CAGW was assured and that reducing CO2 was essential and urgent. It had to be true, they had graphs and earnest scientists 😉 It had obviously warmed since I was a kid. With no tools to determine the ‘C’, I couldn’t reject the idea. What I could reject was the intended solutions, especially as I’d already tried many of the individual energy reduction suggestions, finding them limited or useless and had connections to the electricity industry to have severe doubts about renewables. It jarred with me that they presented flawed solutions with as much confidence as the science. I also knew how business was affected by energy prices/reliability. Changing how we provide energy wasn’t the ‘no brainer’ they pretended it was. What kind of idiots thought it was?
For you Oreskes was the final straw, which suggests that like me you saw a few straws before you properly rebelled. I didn’t hear about her till I was already a denier. I am a denier – I deny the warmists the right to do my thinking for me.
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“History of Onyx” groan, I just got that. LOL. Yes, the perfect name for the site.
[PM: Took me a while too. I think he got his revenge over the Nicholas Parsons incident!]
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Jaime “Purgatorial sceptics have no idea of how being aware of “the behaviour of every small thing” is such mental torture”
We really are very different people to them. I think that they are missing a trick in not realising that those they fail to convince are influenced by different things to themselves. All their sales pitches are geared towards those who are likely to already support their message.
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Jaime and Tiny, I suspected the reaction to Kate Marvel’s post on Climate Change but I was more impressed by her discussion of situations where science and emotions come together. As I previously mentioned this reminded me of the experiences of a colleague forced to interact with people threatened by a volcanic eruption and who had to contribute to making major decisions on their behalf. Normally a geologist has little to no need to consider emotions – the nearest I can recall being involved was when called to be an expert in a trial and when I testified on behalf of setting up a National Park in southern Saskatchewan (resulted in loss of land ownership for some). So I was interested in her viewpoint and one of her conclusions that scientists who need to sympathetically interact with the public could learn much from the medical profession. Obvious when you think about it, but I wonder just how much interaction there is outside of the On Being orbit in California.
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My memoir was a bit incoherent, because I didn’t make it clear (or have it clear in my own mind) whether I was talking about CAGW or AGW.
To disambiguate:
AGW, a hypothesis that predates the current, corrupt incarnation of “climate scientists,” never alarmed me, nor was I ever sure it was correct/incorrect. It just bored me.
I never believed the arguments for CAGW, because as far as I could tell there were none.
What Oreskes did was made me go from a sort of private, amused incredulity about CAGW (and incredulity that anyone could believe it) to nauseous hatred of the entire Cause of pseudoscience, which eventually led to my jihad of Deride and Conquer against people I increasingly understood as inimici humani generis.
As a function of my initial apathy on the whole subject, though, I don’t think I watched An Inconvenient Truth (wherein I first heard of Oreskes) until it was several years old. 2009 maybe?
I often tell believalists that I went into the cinema a fan of Gore but left it shaking my head at his shameless, money-grubbing mendacity—and this is all true except that there was no cinema involved. I watched AIT at home, on DVD.
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I still haven’t got “History of Onyx” but this has been a fun discussion. For the record, Brad, I have never been persuaded by CAGW, from 1988 onwards, as necessitating much policy at all. I’m glad people have paid some attention to the Kate Marvel piece and I’m interested and moved to hear Alan’s recollection of a presentation that rightly merged emotion with science. It reminds me of Tim Berners-Lee and the scientists at CERN in the early days of WWW. But this, sadly, is an expression of great appreciation for Cliscep as I feel I must withdraw for a while, like Danny and Alex, and perhaps Ian and Ben, to pay attention to other stuff. See you’all at some point!
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How did you first hear about C/AGW? For me there was very little detail before I went looking. There wasn’t enough fact/fake to reject. Late 90s I was too busy working. Early 00s I was too busy not working and having a good time. I can’t remember exactly what finally made me start investigating it but it might have been a BBC Horizon programme about global dimming (Jan 2005). in 2005/6 there was a cloud experiment in modelling climate that almost immediately went wrong, with the models heating way too fast. I read Climate Audit mid 2006 and found WUWT Christmas 2006. I was already a sceptic by the time The Great Global Warming Swindle came along in March 2007. Like you I didn’t see Al’s movie until well after and I never did watch it all. It was a big pity party for having lost the election.
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I suspect there are many like me who really never progressed from believer to sceptic
After working for petroleum companies (boo, hiss!!) I spent several years in Toronto teaching petroleum geology (more boo, hiss!). When I transferred to UEA (boo hissing from a different direction) I slowly became aware of the climate dimension – previously it had not penetrated my ken and I was truly ignorant, so not a believer. I still remember the time I became climate conscious – when a colleague informed me that there was debate about the geographical extent of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. I vowed to do some reading upon this, but never got around to it. So up to the time I read Crichton’s “A State of Fear” and was set on the sceptical path, I was neither a believer or sceptic.
With climate science dogma being taught in state schools there will be very few like me now and in the future, – although I suspect there will be some who progress from “couldn’t give a fxxk” to believer or to sceptic.
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I was feeling special there for a while (for being a Never Believer). As in, uniquely smart.
But I suppose it’s also good to know I’m not alone.
Not quite as good as feeling special though.
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The turning point of the issue is what is believer or non believer? Since most belief and disbelief is a vague support for one side or the other it’s hard to pinpoint where ‘don’t know’ flips into a true position. Sometimes the stated choice is as much political as anything. Those who think mankind is a stain on the planet could easily add one more sin to society’s door. Doubly so if the door shelters white Westerners. Whereas those who admire mankind’s superiority and ingenuity might reject any idea that we might be sawing off the branch we’re sitting on. I thought that it was possible we were doing something catastrophic but reject any guilt concept. Did that make me a believer, a sceptic or a don’t know?
On an opinion survey we might be labelled believers because the warmist side takes whatever it can get to demonstrate relevance but when we post on the internet we are immediately tagged as deniers. Just the act of asking questions back in the mid noughties defined me as the enemy. In the absence of powerful evidence it wasn’t hard to pick sides.
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Brad Keyes says:03 Mar 18 at 7:58 pm
I read your reply to Kate Marvel @//onbeing.org/blog/. Does She have any science whatsoever? Now there is a complete dildo! It is nowhere evident in her insulting babble of heat or temperature. Her comments on the generation and power transfer of spontanious electro-magnetic flux (often denoted Φ or ΦB), are complete and utter nonsense! At least James Hanson had an excuse for blaming CO2 as that is all oxidizing COAL produces; and COAL is still the predominant competitor to vast financial interests of he and AlGore in natural gass production!
Richard Drake says:”For the record, Brad, I have never been persuaded by CAGW, from 1988 onwards, as necessitating much policy at all. I’m glad people have paid some attention to the Kate Marvel piece”; and wants to promote such trite posturing From NASA GISS!
Brad Keyes says: 06 Mar 18 at 3:30 pm
Aw Brad! You are truly special!! 🙂
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Jaime Jessop says: 06 Mar 18 at 12:52 pm
“We Purgatorial sceptics have no idea of how being aware of “the behaviour of every small thing” is such mental torture. Ignorance of science is truly bliss”.
Can you clearly state what a ‘Purgatorial sceptic’ might be? I take it that may even refer to ‘an individual’ rather than das gruppengedank ‘we are all individuals’. Scientifically even some polite ‘thank you’, from a CAGW zelot remains chock full of ignorant nits!
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This is becoming a fascinating thread.
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Hunter. You are the second person to write that this thread is especially fascinating or interesting. But why? Since I find almost all cliscep threads fascinating (for varied reasons), I don’t understand why this one is special. What I find almost unique about this site is the fact that I can go back, reread an entire thread, and find enjoyment in doing so.
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Wissenschaft? L – o – l.
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Why is German science so funny Beth?
This stupid competition to challenge others to unravel puzzlements (“history of onyx” for deity’s sake) has got to stop). Everyone knows squinting at a puzzlement after creme-de-menth chasers does it every time.
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Ode to intellectual modesty.
Hey, u gotta heed Socrates,
wisest of men, * who says,
‘if it’s so ’tis only because
I do not ‘know.’ There’s also
Hamlet addressing Horatio,
more things above and below
heaven, e’en into middle earth,
that u can’t guess, let alone know.
And Rumsfeldt declaring ‘Unknown
unknowns;’ beware the ideas of Mann,
basing everything on one tree ring to rule them
all, a kind of Gruppengedankish-measurement.
*Survey by Oracle of Delphi.
‘Recursive modesty.’
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Alan,
I spent a couple weeks in SF, visiting a relative, in the mid/late 70’s. A lot of the hippy movement had moved on by then. I recall being recruited by a “long haired freaky eyed” fellow at a Richmond district bar to visit a commune in the north bay somewhere. My hair was rather long back then, some book I was reading was likely stuck in a pocket. Back then it might have been Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance or maybe one of Asimov’s works…. In any case, I must have had the look of a recruit to the freaky fellow. I am narrow faced-see photo/graphic above. I am fairly sure my INTP inquisitiveness must of thrown the recruiter for a loop. I always wondered if the freaky fellow was affiliated with Jim Jones.
My older brother went through the 60’s and 70’s with a very low draft number. I never saw Pete Seeger play, but my family and I listened to his tunes in the day on the FM band of the radio. His ballads were noted recently (1) and it reminded me a bit of what things were like in the day. I was glad to see that he, like my dad, had hope for the future-
“The 93-year-old Seeger talked with the awestruck Colbert about his new book, Pete Seeger: His Life in His Own Words, and then performed his song, “Quite Early Morning,” on the banjo. The song begins, “Don’t you know it’s darkest before the dawn. And it’s this thought keeps me moving on.” Unlike “Big Muddy,” it is a song of hope, urging people to abandon cynicism and look forward to more “singing tomorrows.”
1) http://prospect.org/article/recalling-pete-seeger%E2%80%99s-controversial-performance-on-smothers-brothers-show-50-years-ago
I am sure Pete would of enjoyed reading Hue 1968. So far the work is ok with the characters who are on the lookout for bull shit(ers) while still looking forward to the future(s). I am only up to page 60 so the author’s view point may change, or my interpretation of his story may change. I am not through part 1 entitled “The Infiltration” yet. I am looking forward to Part III: “Futility and Denial’.
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Wissenschaft is funny, Alan, because it is a word with
Macbeth like connotations and, oh, u know … Did u ever
watch ‘The Producers’? )
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Herewith a smidgeon.
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In what way can any word have “Mackbeth-like connotations”? May I not say “Wissenschaft” aloud; is it cursed? The word retreats from mirth by the minute. Creme-de-menthe is of no use.
Never saw “The Producers”.
Perhaps if I knew to what post you were linking to I might gain some insight. Else it will remain yet another unfathomable.
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Yikes, Alan, DON’T say ‘Wissenschaft’ out loud!
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Ah ha I see my problem. Odd that, it only becomes undecypherable as a wittie when you DO say it out loud (Richtig). Beth, Sie haben einen schmutzigen Mund.
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On Being very silly. One shouldn’t mock someone’s name, but this Marvel comic is quite mind bogglingly weird. She sees herself as a modern day Cassandra.
Perhaps Cassandra Lang: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassandra_Lang
“While working with the Heroes for Hire, Cassie has further adventures, accidentally activating the Super-Adaptoid and receiving horrifying visions of things to come. The H4H easily defeated Super-Adaptoid, and Cassie’s participation in these dark events help her father and his allies defeat Master of the World in a battle for the fate of the Earth”
To infinity and beyond…
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‘Fair is foul and foul fair,
Hover through the fog and fithy air,’
Hockey – sticks, broom – sticks,
Wissens – schaftliches Konsenses
– Sceance everywhere.
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I elevated your previous ode above the line, but as this one is uncomfortably redolent of the Scottish play, superstition forbids me to give it the honor it merits. Wonderful, nevertheless.
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Why thankee Brad!
A serf who dwells upon the littoral
Is chuffed if raised to higher ground.
… ‘Stars hide your fires.’
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Brad it’s OK I walked around three times as fast as I could, spat over my left shoulder, said an obscenity (OreskeCookLew) then waited to be invited back into the building. I’m still waiting.
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Kakatoa, apologies, your 10:57 am comment yesterday got stuck in the spam filter. Maybe wordpress has got something against Pete Seeger.
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Kakatoa. Thank you for your thoughts about San Francisco. I arrived in 1982 and stayed for three years. Some of the best years of my life, I earned a lot but spent it all on ballet, opera, the symphony and travel. At that time the flower movement was in terminal decline, confined to a few streets (but elements had migrated north into Marin County (I still fondly remember the hippy wedding of a colleague in a commune) although the gay movement was in full ascendancy just before the devastation of AIDS (and service in restaurants was superb). I went back for a short visit a few years ago. A mistake, I should have left my memories intact. Thank you for causing me to relive the best.
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ACT I SCENE I.
A desert place (becoming greener).
Thunder and lightning (more extreme due to carbon dioxide pollution).
Enter three Witches (Oreskes, Cook, Lew)
First Witch
When shall we three meet again In thunder, lightning, or in rain? (Methinks I must consult the latest GCM model).
Second Witch
When the debate’s begun,
When the battle’s lost and won.
Third Witch
That will be ere the set of sun (and the CO2 control knob is acknowledged by all).
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Poetry from Beth and now Shakespeare. This is a quality site.
There must be a scene where Malcolm orders his soldiers to cut down the trees of Birnam Wood only to discover the trees have been pelletised and burnt as bio fuel.
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Alan,
you can come back in if that will put an end to your confusing “on the outside waiting to be invited back in” allegory. I’m begging you.
Beth,
as they say: life’s a beach, and then you marry one. (Not to be taken littorally.)
Richard,
FYI, we’re all ignoring your farewell message in the hopes that if we do, you won’t really mean it.
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No problem Paul,
I think I had a typo, or maybe it was a Freudian slip, in one version of that comment anyway.
The algorithm(s) would of been stressed out, causing an elevated carbon footprint, trying to figure out if an alternate reference to that post- entitled “The Point” as in Harry Nilsson’s song or the narrated u-tube post -was spam or not.
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Alan Kendall says: 07 Mar 18 at 10:38 am
“Why is German science so funny Beth?”
“Wise-craft”!.. Ask Brad to describe A. Einstein! Das wort Wissenschaft ist nicht Forschung; aber Leren, autodidaktisch Technologie und Fortschritt.
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beththeserf says: 07 Mar 18 at 12:22 pm
‘Yikes, Alan, DON’T say ‘Wissenschaft’ out loud!”
The word/wort cannot be translated to any that have not the ‘Deutsch/e’ attitude; ..’tis like wort ‘gerade’;(correct, right, proper, smooth, straight, even, nice critter) vs (incorrect, wrong, improper, bumpy, crooked, odd, nasty varmint)! None get it quite correct!
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Perhaps Cliscep might consider a discussion on the Gemeinschaft–Gesellschaft-Wissenschaft trichotomy. Then extend that to how\why this academic meteorology, climatology, atmospheric physics is none of that; but instead ‘Theologie’ with no need for any craftsmanship!.
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At this rate our multinational output is going to need a translation button or at least a glossary. Brad already has me Googling at least one word a day I refuse to have Google Translate on standby too. LOL. If you persist I’ll have to unleash some native British words such as gruts, ginnels and chincough. Not to mention ee by gum, by ‘eck and reet gradely.
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TinyCO2 says: 09 Mar 18 at 1:16 am
Perhaps your excelent translate button idea needs some verniers! (A) ‘my cultural background’. (B) Their cultural background. (C) Political party of writer\speaker\spouter. (D) Range from ‘attempting to politely inform’ else way over to deliberate SCAM! Where is this needed modern technology? 🙂
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Beththeserf, I truly admire your wordmanship; and remain in awe of that of Brad! I remain your ‘umble engineer, unsure of best to now scratch watch, or quickly wind @ss, so as not to appear ‘drowsy’! 🙂
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Perhaps we need to examine both ISO-9001 and ISO-9002 for both craftsman and skilled repair folk! None is ‘pearfict’! Both easily identify own error (oops), resulting in “piece of sh*t”that MUST be discarded via ethical craftsmanship! Such same folk reluctantly admit, “hell, dats close enough for government work!”
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Beththeserf, unt Brad,
Please consider the expression for the most precious feminine virtue; ”charity”! the immediate (now), that cannot be delayed, The evil that now abounds would invert that into ‘gullible’. Can we now ‘understand why the female of every Earth species is also the most deadly?
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For more than one reason I now deeply, deeply regret asking Beth why she found German science funny. See what I unleashed. On threads like this both my Bing translate and glossary run red hot, and my spell checker doesn’t. Can we return to a simpler, happier lifestyle, where we could spleenvent on those we have come to despise? Brad sets an admiral example in this regard. Never has so much verbal vomit been projected as upon the hapless Oreskes. B.t.w. has anyone else noted the absence of Len?
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Alan Kendall says: 09 Mar 18 at 6:52 am
“For more than one reason I now deeply, deeply regret asking Beth why she found German science funny. See what I unleashed.”
Beth makes fun of your fool replacement amerikanischer pseudoscience bull shat of CAGW that has nothing to with Kraut ‘science’! Verstehen sie? Abandon your ivory tower and observe this full of wonder IS!
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Dat be double- barreled Polnisch Fledermaus Scheiße Janoschka. My anti CAGW creds are without pier (or peer). Your post-vomit threatens to overwhelm us with its hypervoluminousness.
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Alan Kendall says: 09 Mar 18 at 8:25 am
“Dat be double- barreled Polnisch Fledermaus Scheiße Janoschka. My anti CAGW creds are without pier (or peer). Your post-vomit threatens to overwhelm us with its hypervoluminousness”
Perhaps you are correct! My apologies for anyL:offense, Would you please re-iterate your anti-CAGW creds with any actual ‘scientific’, not political, basis? If your argument is only of the social sciences, I again apologize for this misunderstanding of this Beththeserf issue! 🙂
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Will. I realized immediately after sending my last post that I had missed something off it – 😃. No apology necessary. Banter needs no apologies.
Google my name + climategate for cred rating, but don’t bother, it’s history. 😇
My question to our dear surfette was because I didn’t understand her darling combination of the german word for science and the abbreviation LOL and requested enlightenment. To my deep regret.😥
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Brad,
Do I now have profound apologies from Scheißkopf Alan Kendall?
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“Do I now have profound apologies from Scheißkopf Alan Kendall?”
From whom? Does Alan have a scheißköpfiger Doppelgänger I haven’t had the dubious pleasure of meeting? Cos the Alan I know is a top bloke, whose dissent from climate catastrophism cost him the enmity of such coprocephalic specimens as Phil Jones.
If you somehow formed the impression that AK was a believer, don’t feel bad—so did I at first—though I’m proud to say our conversations, even then, never descended to the use of the scharfes S. Manners please, Will!
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Heh, stop talking about moi behind moi’s back. 😃
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Hey Brad, I love to read what you write but this latest petit oeuvre has me beat. It’s beyond my reading comprehension without me making an extreme effort in the grey matter dept. and even then I might only grasp the essentials. Could you come down a rung (or two or three) to my intellectual level so I can better appreciate your genius? If that cramps your style, how about a concise summary after the main opus for numbskulls like myself? A kind of Brad For Dummies. Fanks.
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Point well taken, Jaime. Thanks for being the voice of prosaic sanity. It’s not genius on my part, just indiscipline, that makes this stuff impenetrable. I’m not sure if you read it before or after I moved a large chunk of the preamble to the post-post postamble, but I did that to let readers get into the substance of it (the academic papers accepted for presentation at VienCircConSciCommConConf2018) with minimal delay. Is there still too much preamble? Do you follow the main, middle section of the post at least?
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Oh wait I misunderstood. Sorry Jaime: you were talking about this week-old Gruppengedank, as opposed to today’s Zweiter Teil, is that right?
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That’s weird. I thought I commented on your latest post Brad. Apologies. See, you have me so confused I don’t even know which post I’m commenting on!
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