Naming Names
We had a bit of a spat her not long ago about the use of Certain Terms of Abuse. I was deeply disappointed to see valued contributors and commenters threatening to leave and not come back because of mere words. The storm has blown over, but to avoid a repetition, I thought it would be nice if we could come up with some replacement vocabulary that would be satisfactory to all.
I was looking for some acceptable synonyms – words that would describe people who want to lock you up, ban you from expressing your opinions, and force you to wear a degrading label – without actually referring to people who have done just that. But my Roget’s Thesaurus doesn’t seem to have been updated since the 1920s, since it doesn’t even have “Nazi.” For “Fascisti” it offers “Freemasons, Knights Templars, Odd Fellows, Ku Klux Klan etc.” Calling Ken Rice an Odd Fellow seems unnecessarily hurtful. I’m sure he’s as normal as a 97 pence note.
John Cook once complained that he was obliged to describe his tribe of global warming worriers as “Warmists” because no-one had come up with a better term. Now that the Guardian has banned the word “warming” he is in trouble. “Hottists” is silly. “Boils” is short and to the point, and apt, since it suggests something painful and possibly fatal. But I’m sure you can do better.
Coming to the Covid crowd, the best I could think of was “Viralists” and “Swabs.” More suggestions please. And do wash your hands before attacking the keyboard.
Climate Scepticism 
“Taking Offence” in a debate is a form of bullying
To me it shows the person is playing a power game.
The standard is “I am offended”
to which the reply is “I don’t care” (Stephen Fry)
Jordan Peterson adds more (3 minute clip)
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STEW
The Peterson video is a good one, in that his interlocutor is listening to what he says and challenges him in a rational way.
I suspect that in this case Peterson would be on the side of the non-use of the terms “Nazi” and “fascist,” on the same grounds as those argued on a couple of threads here – that their use trivialises that which shouldn’t be trivialised. At the same time he wouldn’t support suppression of their use.
Steven Fry’s “I don’t care” doesn’t impress me, because it’s coming from a position of power. I could express all the hatred I feel for Fry and his kind, despite the pleasure they’ve provided me by their wit, their talent, their provocative iconoclasm, and of course he wouldn’t care, because I’m a deplorable on a powerless little blog.
But this thread was meant to be about something else: finding words to describe them. I’m not trying to avoid offence – rather the contrary. My motivation is to avoid the irrelevance of demands for self censorship. Surely we can find something ruder than outdated references to long dead ideologies? Now, can anyone find a really apt description of these charred snowflakes?
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The death of ideologies is interesting.
Since history is being rewritten, it implies that a new set of winners, or wannabe winners, is setting out to claim editorial control.
For a long time I have rejected the labels of “socialism” and “communism” in general.
None of the movements claiming those mantles, excepting for small voluntary communities, have ever actually run a government. Nothing being pushed today including the CCP is even close to those labels.
The same is especially true for “fascism”.
What is descending on us may we’ll be as bad as any of the nasty kleptocratic tyrannies that have claimed those names in the past. We need a new set of nouns to help us describe the evil that this way comes.
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Maybe ye neo-feudalists- ye globalist shift to a society of declining mobility and energy poverty…a large subservient class ruled over by a tech- expert class, yr modern cleric equivalent of ye olde feudal aristocracy? https://www.medievalitas.com/post/medievally-speaking-reviews-kotkin-the-coming-of-neo-feudalism
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Perhaps one of the most offensive things you can say about a person or group is that they are simply (or mind-numbingly) wrong. The rest is flummery.
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ALAN KENDALL
That’s a profound psychological truth. Yet admitting you might be wrong is the basis for any activity which depends on the use of reason. Doctors and lawyers are forced to admit their mistakes every time they lose a case or a patient. I knew a biologist researching tropical diseases who was wrong all through his career, which didn’t stop him from being a top expert in his field.
The danger comes from those whose careers depend on never admitting their mistakes – journalists, politicians – and anyone whose reputation is based on appearing on the telly.
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Sorry to go off topic, but I couldn’t resist responding to this:
“Doctors and lawyers are forced to admit their mistakes every time they lose a case or a patient.”
I was never much of a litigator during my legal career, but I did fight quite a few employment tribunal cases on behalf of my employer. Perhaps because I was risk-averse, I persuaded my employer to settle those cases where I thought my employer might be wrong and to have behaved badly towards the employee (and, more relevantly, to have broken employment law along the way). Because I had a good employer, they were usually happy to settle any cases where I explained their errors, and in some cases even reinstated dismissed employees.
Of the remaining cases we fought, I won the vast majority at employment tribunal, and lost a few. Of those few, I successfully appealed the majority to the Employment Appeal Tribunal. In other words, when I lost the case, I wasn’t mistaken – the employment tribunal was.
Apologies for the digression.
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MARK HODGSON
That’s most interesting, and not a digression at all. If it proves that I was wrong, so be it. I stand by what I said about the telly though.
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To go even further off topic: one of the features of Cliscep that I most value is its tendency to go off topic, to venture into new pastures, simply because they are interesting and because they tickle the interest of the readership. Long may we be diverted from the true path laid out before us by the Magnificent Sixteen (= Contributors [phewff]).
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The year is 2218. Debate is raging about the use of the archaic, almost forgotten term ‘eco-loons’ to describe the people who enslaved the human race to an unsustainable technocratic agenda back in the 21st century, killing billions in the process and decimating the natural landscape. Some people are getting ‘offended’ (itself a rarely used term – especially in relation to a perceived third party) on behalf of the victims of that global atrocity. It’s happening – again.
What doesn’t change is: good and evil. When the world becomes overly complex, it becomes top-heavy and starts tripping over itself, and those who have laboured under the cover of complexity to enrich and empower themselves come to the fore – events then suddenly start to resolve themselves into the age old battle between Good and Evil and folks find that they must choose one way or the other. They must take sides. There’s no sitting on the fence when you meet a fork in the road. You must move on. Doing nothing is not an option. We’re at that point – again.
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Geoff,
“mere words”
We are bloggers. Mere words are our children and they are all we have. When we start to abuse them we have nothing. That said, it was not the abuse of words or even the abuse of people through the use of words that troubled me recently. It was the readiness with which the argument degenerated into factionalism, in which my intended meaning was discerned from the group I was perceived to be in rather than what I had actually said. The argument that ensued was not fun and, as they say, when the fun stops – stop. You may be optimistic in thinking the storm has blown over.
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Geoff, it’s said that “He who has the best memes wins”
That is in connection with the US people that came up wit the comebacks
“OrangeManBad”, “FakeNews” and “NPC”
(non-player character refers to non-player character, a term used in video-games
they have “no internality, agency, or capacity for critical thought”, they rely on scripted lines
behaving like zombie robots)
Those LABELS are very powerful they sum up pages of ideas
You get some outsider screaming abuse at Trump, and people on his side look across and say
“does that look like a robot character saying OrangeManBad ?, Yep it does, let’s move on”
and thus they are not worn down by the shouting.
Yet conversely when they shout “denier” at us , that doesn’t phase us cos that shows that rather that turn up with logic, their first mode of behaviour is to behave like a school bully gang, using a smear label to monster their opponent.
A label that clearly invokes the Holocaust, and co-opts the idea that people who DENY it, are the baddest of the baddies.
By coincidence in English words often have two or three meanings
and in 1970’s English a “Nazi” was an officious rule enforcer like the Park Keeper
So when I say that yesterday on TalkRadio the anti-car guy Darroch was an “eco-Nazi”
you know exactly what I mean. He was a ranting bigot.
And on Twitter people were able to quickly identify him as the loser cos of the behaviour associated with that label
.. and then people identified that he’d had a habit of making great pronouncements yet had flown to India for Climate Workshops, and newspaper photos show him in hi Hackney home in front o his roaring log burner.
However outside one sided groups I think invoking Nazi/Fascist as labels is really bad cos the main meaning of the words is not merely dogmatic and officious.
We have to respect the victims.
Labels that work : DramaGreens, to invoke greens dramaqueening
Boris the Bottler ..encapulates him
The Blue Islington Socialist Party
& The Red Islington Socialist Party
encapsulates how there isn’t much difference
They went to university together
All are in their metroliberal globalist, greendream, great reset wokeSupremacist bubbleworld
And those are labels that work
metroliberal, Guardianista, Guardianlalaland ecapsuates the way society is split in 2
with them in their Guardian bubbleword lording it over the rest of us living in the realworld.
They are the “Massas”, and we are the slaves (with respect to actual beaten slaves)
Likewise greendreamers, green-supremacist, woke-supremacist sums them up
The label Virtue Signallers is also powerful as it shows us that often people say things to stay in with their gang, rather than cos they truly believe what they are saying
Similarly we have #GreenCrap, BiasedBBC, PRtrickery, #PRasNews, Fakegreens that help us recognise what’s going on.
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. . . . . ‘talked about how publishing the book will negatively affect their non-binary friend’. Good grief! The offence/cancel culture has reached new dimensions with Peterson. Anyone would think he is Trump’s evil twin brother and not just the Devil incarnate!
“He is an icon of hate speech and transphobia and the fact that he’s an icon of white supremacy, regardless of the content of his book, I’m not proud to work for a company that publishes him,” a junior employee who is a member of the LGBTQ community and who attended the town hall told VICE World News.
Another employee said “people were crying in the meeting about how Jordan Peterson has affected their lives.” They said one co-worker discussed how Peterson had radicalized their father and another talked about how publishing the book will negatively affect their non-binary friend.
Just sack the snowflakes! This ‘offence-taking by virtue-signalling proxy’ has reached epic proportions.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/g5bv3x/penguin-random-house-staff-confront-publisher-about-new-jordan-peterson-book
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I wondered why his name was trending on Twitter
.. I forgot to include Snowflake in my list of useful labels.
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Jaime,
Re: The Peterson reaction
I think the perfect response to this was provided in one of the tweets that followed: Perhaps book burners shouldn’t work for book publishers.
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Names hurt and many are commonly created to achieve exactly that. The nursery rhyme “Sticks and stones” couldn’t be more wrong and almost certainly is and was used by those abused by name-callers simply to relieve the pain (like a mantra). Those who spout the fiction that names cannot offend, commonly are the source of ever new and ever more offensive cachet’s.
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In the holiday spirit, I nominate them as covid grinches. After all their slogan is: “We’re not happy until you’re not happy.”
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Alan,
Sticks and stones hurt because they expose a certain frailty, a physical weakness – i.e. skin and bone. If you’re wearing armour, they don’t hurt. Likewise, words hurt because they exploit a certain psychological vulnerability which we all have in varying degrees. Some words don’t hurt because we arm ourselves against them. Most sceptics are invincible to the term ‘denier’. Trump is probably invincible to the accusation of ‘OrangeManBad’. Peterson is probably invincible to most of the verbal abuse he gets from enraged wokes. Fortifying oneself against attack is a known survival tactic. The woke generation have turned this on its head. They welcome all slings and arrows, they let them pierce their very heart and when it bleeds they say ‘Look, you made me bleed and my heart bleeds not just for myself, but for others too. You must be a very, very bad person. I am now going to cancel you – Nazi scum!’
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Mark,
Your anecdote reminds me of an exchange I once had, as the H&S manager, with my employer’s lawyer. It went something like this:
Me: “I have a case in which an individual has returned to work following a serious illness and they are complaining about their treatment after returning to work. In fact, they are threatening a tribunal.
Lawyer: “Did we conduct a risk assessment upon their return to work?”
Me: “No. He insisted on it but the company refused.”
Lawyer: “In that case, for God’s sake don’t let it go to a tribunal because, if it did, I wouldn’t be in a position to defend the company. Anyway, who was this person?”
Me: “Me. Thank you for the advice”.
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Jaime. Really, so it’s the victim’s fault entirely if they are psychologically damaged by the hurtful jibes of another? Good grief. Woke is becoming an immensely valuable word in your vocabulary isn’t it? It can act as a modern-day indulgence excusing much. Over and out, I don’t want to cause you any more upset.
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Alan,
“Really, so it’s the victim’s fault entirely if they are psychologically damaged by the hurtful jibes of another?”
I said that? Wow. You’re doing a Cathy Newman on me, aren’t you?
“Woke is becoming an immensely valuable word in your vocabulary isn’t it? It can act as a modern-day indulgence excusing much. Over and out, I don’t want to cause you any more upset.”
Why so angry and defensive? It seems like I’m the one causing you upset rather than vice versa.
I can stop using woke if it offends you so much. How about emotionally incontinent offendotron snowflakes to describe those people such as above who are so keen to take offence at the alternative views expressed by Trump, Peterson or even us humble sceptics of man-made global warming? I use language as an expression of thought, nothing more, nothing less. My thoughts. Not as an indulgence, not as an excuse. It’s not an exact science.
Over and out.
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I think the climate debate comes down to Malthusianism vs Cornucopianism. Malthusian seems to be a pejorative that doesn’t rile up the other side and, frankly, I’m a bit irritated that it doesn’t. They just shrug it off. The first time (a decade ago) that I jumped into a blog comment discussion, someone called me a cornucopian. It was the first time I’d ever heard the term:
https://web.archive.org/web/20140809221837/http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/12/18/the-bottom-line/#comment-694116
Wow, I was a bad speller!
I was familiar with Thomas Malthus, having remembered learning about him from Thomas Sowell in a radio interview about his book, A Conflict of Visions. The Wikipedia entry had Malthusian contrasted with cornucopian. I often see cornucopian used as a pejorative. I actually think it’s a flattering label. I’m an unabashed cornucopian! I think the world’s foremost cornucopian is Alex Epstein. He’s promoted the positive concepts of human flourishing and industrial progress.
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Alan wrote: “Really, so it’s the victim’s fault entirely if they are psychologically damaged by the hurtful jibes of another?”
If someone is psychologically damaged by the words of another, then that must be assault. The only question left to answer is what punishment is required? I’m interested to know where the line is drawn in an age where you can get a knock on the door from the police for “hurtful” things said on Twitter. At some point, you’re no longer protecting the vulnerable, you’re aiding the abuser. How do you tell the difference?
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Seems quite mild actually, even oddly formal.
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ATTP
It was meant mildly, though ironically. From Wiki:
Sounds like your kind of chap.
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Geoff,
Thanks, I was unaware of that association.
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Slightly off topic, but the real lawsuits, as opposed to the red herring bullshitters in the media, are being filed to deal with democrats industrializing voter fraud.
https://www.docdroid.com/e3rhDCz/complaint-cj-pearson-v-kemp-11252020-pdf
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Hunterson,
Sidney Powell and Lin Wood are formidable and the evidence for massive fraud resulting in a stolen election is exceptionally compelling. This is not going to just go away, as the MSM and Democrats still hope. Quite rightly, Team Trump are fighting tooth and nail for justice for the American people. It’s not an exaggeration to say that if this fraudulent election is allowed to stand, it will amount to a successful bloodless coup against America by foreign enemies in collaboration with treasonous insiders. Good luck preserving the Land of the Free. The UK has already fallen to the globalists. We don’t have a Trump or Sidney Powell to fight for our freedoms.
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HUNTERSON7
Glad you went off-topic because it allows me to make a point I haven’t seen made anywhere. Both parties claim that they won and the other has tried or is trying to overturn the result by illicit means. But while pro-Trump media are laying out in enormous detail the means their opponents used, the pro-Biden media are imposing an omertà on the efforts of their rivals, claiming simply that they have no evidence, and that the evidence they don’t have is merely conspiracy theories.
The pro-Biden camp ‘(i.e. the mainstream media of the Western world) won’t tell their readers what their opponents are claiming, and why it’s wrong. They’re like someone who claims they’ve been robbed, but they won’t say what’s missing, and won’t be making an insurance claim or calling the police. That’s the action of a receiver of stolen goods.
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“Some big numbers are being tossed about in the election within the state of Pennsylvania. For one thing, the state sent out 1.8 million mail-in ballots but they counted 2.5 million. That makes 700,000 votes that must be illigitimate.
The most recent number that has been exposed, caused the audience to gasp when they heard it.
In one series of votes, the total tally was 603,200. Biden got 600,000 votes to just 3,200 for Trump. That’s virtually impossible according to many experts.”
Either miracles happen or Biden and the Democrats are as bent as a two bob note.
https://djhjmedia.com/steven/audible-gasps-and-laughter-from-crowd-and-panel-at-pa-hearing-when-witness-says-vote-spikes-went-nearly-600000-for-biden-and-3200-for-trump-video/
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What to call folks you disagree with depends on the context. Are you discussing them in an academic forum with others, or do you want to:
Engage them in debate
Demean them
Ridicule them, or just
Shut them up?
If a sceptic wants anyone to listen to them, the only possible way forwards is respectful engagement. The other three options only work win you’re winning. If you create an emotional response, you’ve jerked the bait out of the fish’s mouth before it took the hook. The other side are in the “shut up” game, but we cannot be. We could not be even if we were crushing them rather than the other way around.
The other side have also expended a lot of energy in trying to figure out how to persuade “deniers” to leave the dark side. None of these schemes will work on the likes of us. Are we dogmatic, stuck in our ways, seeking only confirmation of what we already think we know?
Once, I was one of the alarmed. In the late 80s global warming was an exiting threat. In my PhD I cited a paper by Phil Jones. Some of the work therein had a global warming link. Why? Easily answered. Because the grant that funded my work included the magic words “global warming.” Did I become disillusioned by time wearing on with not much bad happening? Not really. A sceptic colleague kept badgering me about CO2 absorption bands being saturated (they aren’t, at the flanks at least). But one day when answering another “denialist talking point” I happened to see a reconstruction of phanerozoic CO2 levels. I had a simple picture in my mind of Precambrian decline, asymptoting to “pre-industrial” levels. But the reconstruction was nothing of the kind. It was all over the place. The levels in the Triassic were 1750 ppm or more. Immediately on sighting this graph, one sees that “runaway” climate change is impossible, and that life obviously thrived at 4 or more times today’s CO2. Apocalypse of the biosphere was cancelled.
What is the point of this narrative? Is it that I was receptive to data that went against my existing worldview? Or that I am now a born-again evangelist, and if I wasn’t stuck in my ways before, I must be now?
I call an alarmist an alarmist because that is what they are. Alarmed. I reject the label “denier” but I have adopted it for my little book of climate scepticism, which is still not published, dammit. Calling someone a “denier” seems to me to assume bad faith or stupidity. So I prefer “sceptic”. But everyone in the world should be a sceptic.
However, I won’t use labels to insult anyone I disagree with if I’m talking to them. I will use the term “alarmist” freely here so that we know what we are discussing.
We can though insult those who look down on us, and throw in a snarl for good measure. For our glorious leader, there are many appropriate terms. And sceptics can afford to use them liberally, ‘cos plenty around us hate him for reasons other than his climate obsession. “Moron” seems to be quite satisfying (somewhere far away in the lost caves of my mind a bell rings when I see Boris and say “Moron!”), but not very accurate. Boris isn’t dumb. “Bovine Johnson” likewise suffers from the fact that he isn’t stupid. Perhaps in that he is easily swayed, “Ovis Johnson” is more appropriate.
Perhaps finally we should keep at the forefront of things that those we disagree with are actually our friends and neighbours, and at the very least, conspecifics. You don’t have to look far to see the “runaway” effects of petty hate. What was it Michelle Obama said? “They go low, we go high.” Seems like a good motto to me.
Sorry for the essay.
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This particular thread supposedly was a reaction against the ill humour spread across multiple threads and an attempt to deflect it by considering alternative names for words that have resulted in such ill humour. Instead we now have a diversion into discussing the recent US election and statements are being made without evidence. There are numerous sites across the blogosphere where these topics are explored in inexorable detail, thus leaving this precious site to matters climatique. It almost seems as if certain people have been offended and are now determined to destroy Cliscep in revenge.
I therefore become a grieving lurker, no longer a contributor, and go into mourning for something being lost.
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Towards the very end of one’s life, one really only needs one label for people with whom one does not see eye to eye: arse.
(How, then, does one explain Lord Morgan’s ‘nancy-boy communist poofter poets’, I hear you ask. To which I reply: Don’t be such an arse.)
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“This particular thread supposedly was a reaction against the ill humour spread across multiple threads and an attempt to deflect it by considering alternative names for words that have resulted in such ill humour. Instead we now have a diversion into discussing the recent US election and statements are being made without evidence.
It almost seems as if certain people have been offended and are now determined to destroy Cliscep in revenge.”
This post enquires whether there are alternatives to the more emotionally charged terms of abuse used by certain commenters on this site (not naming names). Which is fair enough. But when certain commenters (naming no names) dare to use the term ‘woke’ – which is fairly standard terminology nowadays – that too is deemed to be an ‘indulgence’ too far. Then when we dare to digress onto unrelated content, we are admonished for doing so. It’s beginning to feel a lot like the real world here at the moment; the one we woke up one dark morning and found ourselves in, that is. The one I hated then and hate even more now. The one which certain other members did not.
I’m not going to shut up – ever. But it might be best if certain people didn’t keep needling me, then I would shut up a bit more and not ‘dominate the conversation’.
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Alan,
How is referring to an actual lawsuit and providing a link to that suit an evidence free diversion?
One of the many things to cherish about CliScep has been it’s free wheeling flow of consciousness culture.
Certainly things have been tense lately. The entire West has been tense since late January of this “annus horriblus”, to borrow a phrase from HRH.
As to alleging that the discussion going on here in the US has no evidence is a circular.
Sadly sort of like “climate policy” or the covid-19 response.
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@ Alan, Hunterson7 & Jaime
Perhaps it would have been wise for someone with author privileges to start a “big big steal thread” where all matters relating to the extent and significance of fraud in the US Federal election could have been discussed, along with sundry matters such as whether voters ought to produce ID at polling stations, & whether them there mechanical balloteers are to be trusted, or if instead a cross made with a pencil would be more appropriate, whether the US is a democracy or a necrocracy, & the extent of re-dating of postmarks, mass postal vote fraud, etc.
This is an interesting story, whether there is much truth in it or not. A void opens up under your feet when you consider the potential ramifications if true. But there is a lot of wishful thinking going on too. Whatever the facts are, it would have been better to keep them in one place, rather than larding them throughout threads on other subjects!
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Jaime,
>”I’m not going to shut up – ever. But it might be best if certain people didn’t keep needling me, then I would shut up a bit more and not ‘dominate the conversation’.”
I didn’t say ‘dominate the conversation’, I said ‘dominate the airwaves’. Good conversationalists are not normally committed to never shutting up and they will refrain from response even when ‘needled’. Or, as the great English essayist, William Hazlitt, put it:
“Silence is one great art of conversation. He is not a fool who knows when to hold his tongue; and a person may gain credit for sense, eloquence, wit, who merely says nothing to lessen the opinion which others have of these qualities in themselves.”
I try to live up to those standards but I don’t always succeed.
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John, yes, you did say airwaves – so shall we now have a debate about whether ‘airwaves’ is an appropriate synonym for ‘online conversation’? Probably not. I shall maintain ‘radio silence’ on this particular thread from herein and instead practice the art of conversing without conversing!
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Being banned from doubting the 2020 election is likely to become law soon, so I guess I’ll just practice it here to get used to it.
All hail His Fraudulency Joe Biden.
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Can you guys get on with the job in hand, which is to show a bit of climate scepticism? Some of the comments on this thread are more akin to arguing over how many angels are on the head of a pin, for all their relevance to the casual observer.
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Re Princess Nuts
In 2020 Britain, Carrie AntoinNUT
dictates to the peasants
“let them drive electric,
.. let them buy a £3,000 hydrogen boiler instead of a cheap gas one
.. let them pay triple to cover solar/wind costs”
etc.
or is it Carrie AndTheNUT
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going off topic as usual (but treading lightly 🙂 & thanks to post by “HUNTERSON7 26 Nov 20 at 2:43 pm”
I see “William M. Briggs – STATISTICIAN TO THE STARS!” is involved in vote rigging case.
I remember him from the old “Climate Audit” hockey stick days posts.
but the latest post on his blog caught my eye – “Old Lodge Skins’ Prayer Of Thanksgiving”
https://wmbriggs.com/post/6705/
the last line seems apt for our times – “Take care of my son here,” he says, “and see that he does not go crazy.”
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JIT 26 Nov 10.10pm
Exactly. Note my exchange with ATTP upthread. I was unfairly rude about him in the post (and obscure with it) since he is far from being a typical proselytiser. When he turned up, we exchanged polite words.
ALAN TOOKER
Hope to oblige soon, but it doesn’t depend on me. I’m the only one currently posting here (I think) who is retired and therefore doesn’t have to spend time earning a living. What you’re seeing is displacement activity due to the general situation with jobs, social life, and our psychological wellbeing threatened in unusual ways.
The climate hysteria machine is stalled at the moment, stationary, but still whirring away uselessly. What will happen next is anyone’s guess. It may depend on Biden or the virus, but it may equally depend on something quite different, like a war with Iran sending oil prices rocketing, or an economic crisis leading governments to think hard about insanely expensive energy policies. That’s why anything and everything seems up for discussion.
I’m full of admiration for the Anthony Watts and the Paul Homewoods who can press on regardless, ploughing this thankless furrow. We don’t seem to be disciplined like that here. We depend on our readers to bring us back in line, which is why I don’t like to see them taking offence.
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It appears that Grantham has made some bad bets lately, betting against the US economy
https://climateerinvest.blogspot.com/2020/11/granthams-short-call-cost-his-hedge.html?m=1
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How about another example of “not true Fascism”?
https://twitter.com/toadmeister/status/1332743445979541505?s=19
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MAN IN A BARREL
Thanks for the video. I followed up on Twitter, and it was good to see a Conservative MP protesting forcefully in the Commons a few minutes after having witnessed an old lady being carted face down into a police van. Until they actually ban us from seeing this stuff we’d better call it proto-fascism, I suppose.
I’m just reading an account of Vienna before the first world war. It was the capital of the Hapsburg Empire at the time, as multi-ethnic as London or Paris today, and the most civilised place on earth – the intellectual home of Wittgenstein, Freud, Schoenberg, Canetti and Karl Kraus – also of Adolf Hitler. It’s being complex wot makes the world such an interesting place, which is why it seems a mistake to get het up about what words people use to describe it. Global Warming, Global Heating – does it matter? I shall continue to refer to the current Climate Crisis as Monbiot’s Trouser Event.
Meanwhile, in Paris today, a demonstration – partly against a new law which would limit the right to photograph the police, partly in protest against a recent racist beating up by Paris police which was fortunately filmed – “degenerated,” as they say. Nothing much to report – only a few shops and a branch of the Banque de France set on fire, a policeman downed and kicked, tear gas and water cannon, and six arrests. No elderly people pushed to the ground and forcibly handcuffed as in London though.
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Are making progress with The Magic Mountain, Geoff?
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MiaBarrel
Over half way up, in – what? – six months? Which means I’m going slightly faster than the book itself. I paused to read another 700 pager – the first volume of Victor Hugo’s private diaries, plus Jordan Peterson’s Maps of Meaning, which was very hard going. VH is a good example of what Peterson is on about – Hans Castorp less so – so far.
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