Remember the polarizing Gillette ad, 'We Believe the Best Men Can Be', released a couple of months ago? Looking at those ratios, it's clear that most of the vocal part of the internet, at least, male and female alike, found the ad very problematic. Toxic, even. As always, the best (worst?) content is always in the comments section -- it currently sits at 29.5 million views, with 418,608 comments, the easy majority of which are very derisive, with 1.4 million 'Dislikes' to 776 thousand 'Likes', a ratio of almost 2:1 negative. On top of this, many people are alleging that many of the YouTube comments have been deleted and dislikes significantly reduced, as well, suggesting the ratios for Gillette's ad are far worse, in reality (many commenters and articles noted they were as much as 10:1 negative).
Depending on their core political beliefs, you could fairly accurately determine a person's opinion of the ad, with some seeing the ad as a rare example of corporate social awareness and responsibility, a right-and-proper 'woke' calling-out of western men being outright guilty of, or at least complicit in, rampant 'toxic masculinity'. Others saw it as just another example of off-the-rails, dishonest feminist misandry and oversimplified or entirely inaccurate hyper-generalizations of western male culture, all while insulting their customers and pandering to third-wave (what I refer to as 'vulgar' as opposed to 'classical') feminist ideologues. While I initially found the ad to be a mixed bag, at best, I could definitely appreciate the arguments as to why it was interpreted as particularly misandrist, by so many.
Regardless of one's thoughts on the ad, it's safe to say it was a huge marketing blunder, and I'm not going to delve deeply into that, here -- it has been done well enough, elsewhere, already.
Today, Gillette released a new ad, titled 'Every Hero Sweats'. While still playing it safe so as to not undermine their infamous previous ad or irritate the virtue-signaling hordes of Leftists, they seem to be running to the opposite side of the spectrum in an all-too-transparent attempt to placate 'those' who could be 'the only ones' irritated by the whole ordeal -- blonde, white conservatives, 'obviously'! The ad even satisfies that old conservative trope of military 'hero' worship, putting it right in the title of the ad. It all seems a bit too contrived, misses the sticking-point entirely, and, also, is probably too little too late. Unfortunately for them, any potential good faith in the corporate executives and marketing teams at Gillette likely evaporated into thin air when they drew that line in the sand with their first ad.
I expect they realize this, because as one can plainly see -- they've disabled any method of directly commenting on the video. No comments, likes, or dislikes are allowed. In their reach for absolution, they have, once again, firmly placed themselves behind the line they've already drawn, just now utilizing the tool of censorship to try to shield themselves from the fallout of their short-sightedness.
Luckily, the time of politically biased content censorship is on its way to being over.
Look no further than the Mount Everest, peak-levels of cringe surrounding this issue in popular media and so-called science fiction and you'll see why this is increasingly becoming something worth addressing and talking about. Yes, it's lamentable that much of this has to be reiterated and more rigorously argued for, but here we are. Sex, gender, pronouns -- it's all being ripped apart and mashed together over social and popular media, with the (so-called) progressive, postmodern, CTRL-Left (the flipside of the collectivist, identitarian coin that also includes the ALT-Right) and their Social Justice Warriors increasingly latching on and doubling down, pushing for individual and institutional thought and speech control. Critical theory is their muse, which in a broad sense claims that all knowledge is historical and biased, that any claims to objective knowledge are illusory, and that it should all be maximally destabilized through various strategies and tactics. In arbitrary, subjectivist ideology, the ends justifies the means, as well -- this means that minimizing, obscuring or concealing any alleged truth up to engaging outright lies is a small price to pay to achieve a greater goal.
This is not to say that everyone who has been convinced of this mode of thought and speech is necessarily an underhanded activist (although it's relatively easy to spot the activist types). However, those who aren't are being tooled into useful idiots in doing so, and it's important to be equipped with the knowledge and integrity to avoid becoming an intellectual casualty of this ideology.
Appreciating where there are some clear, settled, and calm waters of knowledge, understanding, and communication so society can turn its focus to more pressing and important issues, it is the CTRL-Left's modus operandi to come along, dump a bunch of dirt and shit into it all, kick it up, and rub our faces in it. We might ask why they do this -- why this is their M.O. -- but to me, it seems pretty clear. Compared to trying to enact radical, social change in the face of established norms and accepted realities, it's much easier to do it amidst chaos and distraction -- especially if you can trip people up on what they think they know, their ability to understand the world around them, and how they're able to communicate.
This strikes at the heart of why the Orwellian deconstruction of knowledge and language is so effective. In the words of the infamous Lord Petyr 'Littlefinger' Baelish from Game of Thrones, "Chaos... is a ladder."
Part I: 'Sex' as an Empirical Construct and Exceptions that Prove the Rule
In the human species, sex is binary, permanent, and unchanging. This is readily, empirically observable -- male or female, man or woman, him or her, he or she -- all of these are both defined and conceptualized specifically according to an objective biological ‘sex’, identical across all times and cultures of human history. This isn't even referring to the superficial perceptions of someone's sex based on outward appearance or genitalia, this is in regards to the empirical, objective reality of an individual's DNA as genetically derived -- XX for female or XY for male.
"♪♫ 46 and 2, ahead of me. ♪♫"
When the Social Justice Warrior is confronted with the argument from the empirically observable, genetic reality surrounding sex, he will often want to point out either the development of a fetus as 'female by default' or the less than 0.01% of individuals with more complicated allosomal (referencing the sex chromosomes) profiles.
While easily dispatched, the 'female default' fetal development claim is, unfortunately, far too often one we still hear and have to put up with. The claim is partly that because a penis on an XY fetus doesn't form until about the 9th week, then that means an XY fetus prior to that time is a 'female' with a 'vagina' and 'ovaries', with the alleged implication being that XX or XY chromosomes must then not necessarily be what determine sex, and that sex is more 'biologically fluid' than is being acknowledged. Also, a quick Google search of 'female as default sex' yields quite a bit of content of people continuing to propagate this error based on decades old and very limited research in the field of fetal sex differentiation. The reality is that prior to the 9th week where sexual differentiation actually takes place, there are neither 'female sex organs' nor 'male sex organs' -- merely as-of-yet undeveloped, non-functional 'buds' that will eventually form according to allosomal profiles, ceteris paribus.
Research on sex determination (the differentiation of the embryonic bipotential gonad into a testis or an ovary) traditionally focused on testis development. Andrew Sinclair’s 1990 Nature paper famously identified a Y-chromosome gene as the Sex-Determining Region Y (SRY). Female sexual development, by contrast, was thought to proceed as a "default" in the absence of Sry. In the case of sex determination, "default" became the prevailing concept for female pathways—i.e., an ovary results in the absence of other action. The active processes controlling ovarian development remained a blind spot. The notion of a "passive" female fit with current scientific theories and gender assumptions in the broader society.
Around 2010, questioning the notion of "default" led to the discovery of a cohort of genes required for ovarian function. Gender analysis led to three innovations in this field:
Recognition of ovarian determination as an active process. These investigations have also enhanced knowledge about testis development, and how the ovarian and testicular pathways interact (see chart).
Discovery of ongoing ovarian and testis maintenance. Research into the ovarian pathway revealed that the transcriptional regulator FOXL2 must be expressed in adult ovarian follicles to prevent "transdifferentiation of an adult ovary to a testis." Subsequently, researchers found that the transcription factor DMRT1 is needed to prevent reprogramming of testicular Sertoli cells into ovarian granulosa cells.
New language to describe gonadal differentiation. Researchers have dismissed the concept of "default" and emphasize that, while female and male developmental pathways are divergent, the construction of an ovary (like the construction of a testis or any other organ) is an active process. Each pathway requires complex cascades of gene products in proper dosages and at precise times. [1]
Further, in fewer than 0.00001% of XX and XY fetuses, the sex organs may fail to develop, leading always to infertility and what are called 'streak gonads' (non-functional, usually cancerous, fibrous tissue) as well as a failure of secondary sex characteristics to develop during puberty. This is called gonadal dysgenesis and, depending on the form, can include complications such as deafness, eye disorders, and cancer (at the site of the streak gonads during infancy).
The counter-argument regarding more complicated allosomal profiles is far more interesting and more important. Notable examples include combinations such as XXXXY, XXXY, XXYY, XX/XY Chimerism, XXY (Klinefelter Syndrome), XXX (Triple-X Syndrome), XYY, XX Male (de la Chapelle Syndrome), X (Turner Syndrome), and more. These are all extremely rare, and apart from one or two non-intersex profiles, they're all very unfortunate disorders that have complications ranging from sterility, to deafness, to eye disorders, to deformalities, to cognitive or physical developmental disorders, and in many cases shorter to much shorter lifespans and cancer. Most often, you'll find a combination of these unfortunate complications.
While still extremely rare, other intersex individuals often referenced are those historically known as true hermaphrodites, and more clinically referred to these days as having ovotesticular disorder of sex development. While their external genitalia are often ambiguous and they usually grow up sterile, these individuals typically have far less severe complications than the previously mentioned syndromes and can usually live normal lives.
The 3 Primary Karyotypes for True Hermaphroditism are XX with genetic defects (55-70% of cases), XX/XY (20-30% of cases) & XY (5-15% of cases) with the remainder being a variety of other Chromosomal abnormalities and Mosaicisms.[2]
It's important to bring up true hermaphroditism, since at first glance, this seems to possibly propose a problem for the idea of the empiricism of binary, clear-cut sexes. However, reality still reaffirms this. In the cases where true hermaphroditism isn't expressed through one of the previously mentioned severe syndromes, most are simply cases of the XX/XY chimerism -- being that what was initially to be separate twins actually ended up with one XX or XY twin absorbing the opposite sex twin at a very early stage of development. Where there would have been two clear-cut opposite-sexed individuals -- an extremely rare, developmental fluke took place, instead.
In consideration of all of this, how does it follow, then, that 'more than two sexes actually exist', or that this justifies genetically healthy and normal folks to claim that sex isn't based on one's chromosomes? If over 99.99% of individuals follow the standard genetic profile of sex as 'male' or 'female', and the further an individual unfortunately genetically drifts away from the standard blueprint of a healthy, fully functional individual brings more and increasingly severe complications, then it would actually follow that our conclusion should be the exact opposite. Simply put -- there are two sexes, and the more genetically intersex an individual is, the worse off he or she will be.
Ultimately, the subject of one's sex is a matter of an empirical, binary reality for 99.99% of all individuals born -- male or female. As for the remaining 0.01% of genuinely intersex individuals, it makes sense to refer to them as intersex, but not because there is a 'third sex', or no sexes, or some other arbitrary number of sexes other than 'two', but because there are two sexes. They are the extremely rare exception that proves the rule. If these weren't complications, and additional sexes were necessary or even just possible in the sexual reproduction of the human species, then intersex could be considered an additional 'sex'. Further, it's a particularly strange line of reasoning to fall on the argument of pointing out these intersex individuals and those with genetic complications as some justification for transgendered individuals to be able to claim to be the opposite sex, when they were, in fact, born genetically healthy and normal.
Part II: 'Gender' as a Social Construct and its Relative 'Elasticity'
Gender, on the other hand, is a subjective, social construct, albeit still based on a bimodal distribution of ‘masculinity’ vs ‘femininity’. It's a social construct because while expressions of gender are typically tied closely to the sexes across cultures, the cultures themselves express masculinity and femininity in sometimes wildly different ways. It's a bimodal distribution because while an individual would be on the spectrum of more or less masculine or feminine expression, there would be a peak concentration around a typical degree of masculine expression amongst the general populace, and a separate peak concentration around a typical degree of feminine expression amongst the general populace. In the middle of these peaks you'd have a very, very deep trough with a small connecting point representing essentially the androgynous, alienesque Mechanical Animals (his, ahem, best album, obviously) incarnation of Marilyn Manson, or Ziggy Stardust-esque androgyny.
Lurking around on Twitter, today, naturally sucked me into yet another black hole of a host of 140-character 'exchanges'. Not having initially realized that a lot of the chatter was due to the new Netflix production, pretentiously named 'Bill Nye Saves the World', I'd expressed my increasing disdain for Bill Nye. Some rando had the nerve to honestly try to compare him to a modern-day Carl Sagan. How anyone could even remotely consider such a comparison is a stretch beyond belief.
Carl Sagan has rightfully earned his place in the pantheon of science popularizers. His long list of qualifications and experience working in academia, deep engagement with NASA, SETI, and the scientific community in general and receiving numerous scientific awards, having written multiple acclaimed science fiction books (one of which, 'Contact', was turned into a great movie), and creating the widely popular and effective show, 'Cosmos', leave no question as to his contributions. Further, he's long posthumously solidified his place simply based on how many prominent figures in science he's inspired.
... And then you have someone like Bill Nye. A lot of us fondly recall him as 'Bill Nye the Science Guy' on PBS from our childhood, who made scientific experiments look fun and interesting. I remember looking forward to watching his show wheeled in on a big CRT television, played from a VHS tape with poor tracking during science class in elementary school, and tuning in while staying at my grandparents' house. How fleeting such sweet nostalgia can be as you witness Bill Nye continue his fall from grace, but even I was not prepared for the shameful train wreck I was about to witness.
I'd already come to my own conclusion that his scientific mind and approach to things didn't seem to have aged well. Relying purely on nostalgic celebrity from (fellow) millenials as some kind of implied claim to scientific authority should almost be sufficiently disqualifying, but Bill Nye seems utterly relentless about whittling away at any perception of authority he has left. When live and in the hot seat and not following a script, his either remarkably obtuse or remarkably dishonest attempts to debate scientific issues he portrays himself as an authority on show a greater degree of intellectual vacancy than I would have thought. Unfortunately, what little respect I'd had left for him had been mostly drained, flowing from nostalgically positive, to now negative territory, especially after having finally seen a clip from his new show.
Seemingly, the SJWs have hollowed out and infected this man's mind, turning him into a veritable husk of his former 'Science Guy' self. Do you think I'm being a little overdramatic? Well, then... Please brace yourself, for we have now reached Mount Everest, peak-levels of cringe...
Oh, my, how far the mighty have fallen.
Let us have a moment of silence for what little dignity remains for this man, once a titan in our young, hungry, curious minds. What was once someone teaching and showing us about objective, empirical science has now crossed over into a sideshow of bizarro-world, gender-fluid theory, as so artfully and tastefully displayed by 'Rachel Bloom', from 'Crazy Ex-girlfriend', whoever the fuck that is, anyways. Seeing ole Bill Nye dancing around so creepily to it all is just cheap icing on this cringe-cake I wouldn't serve even to my worst enemy.
So how could this have happened? Let us top said cringe-cake with some sour grapes, to boot. Of course, Bill Nye was never a real 'Science Guy', anyways. He actually just has a Bachelor's in Mechanical Engineering and merely played a 'Science Guy' on TV, according to a script. Being intellectually vacant and willing to do anything for money and some sad vestige of fame is what has turned Bill Nye into the Kim Kardashian of science.
Now, if some think I'm cherry picking only one cringey piece from an otherwise great or even mediocre or even sub-par show, I'm really not. Out of the sake of pure, morbid curiosity, I invite you to flip on Netflix and actually put yourself through an episode or two of this. I've watched a bit and there's really only so much I could take. With that being said -- I really, truly do hope that Progressive SJWs continue pumping out trash like this. They've become a parody of themselves, and they're too delusional, tone-deaf, and stuck in their sad little echo chambers to realize it.
Oh, and don't forget -- almost half of the fun of watching any youtube video is reading the comments!
It's definitely hard being a true-scotsman 'libertarian' in this world and I wanted to share something I read that really struck a chord with me and motivated me to slam around a bit on my keyboard...
"... I have no sympathy for weeping democrats. We libertarians live every day, every election, seeing horrible people get elected, and good ideas shot down. We are always the minority, we always lose, our rights are always trod upon. The democrats who are weeping crocodile tears because they have to live under Trump's Presidency for 4-8 years -- suck it up -- that's how it feels to be a libertarian all the time." -- N. Stephan Kinsella, author of 'Against Intellectual Property' and contributor to C4SIF
Of course, it's one thing to 'have no sympathy for weeping democrats' and another entirely to engage in a thorough bout of Schadenfreude, but I think it's well-deserved. Progressives have been, hands-down, one of the greatest threats to advancing and protecting liberty for as far back as libertarians can remember. During the past 8 years, SJW culture (the abominable love-child of Progressivism and political correctness), has relentlessly tried to shame and silence any and all dissent into this madness, using every social and economic tool at their disposal at both an individual and collective level. One might try to argue that they're just using social pressures to try to get their way, and 'at least they're not using the state' -- but it would be a trip into self-delusion to think that institutionalizing their ideas into the state and imposing them by the force and consequence of law is not the end-game, here.
The 'Referendum Creep' on Progressivism
Luckily, the election of Donald J. Trump as the President of the United States (no, that still hasn't quite sunk in, yet), along with the continued majorities in the House and Senate and safeguarding the SCOTUS likely for generations (along with the implications this has on past, present, and future law), has been an unbelievably devastating upset of a defeat that they may never recover from. Particularly so, when you consider the 'decimation' noted by The Washington Post regarding not just the presidency and congress, but of state legislatures and governorships throughout the country:
"We tend to focus on the loss of the presidency as the example of Democratic failure. That's blinkered. Since 2008, by our estimates, the party has shed 870 legislators and leaders at the state and federal levels -- and that estimate may be on the low side. As Donald Trump might put it, that's decimation times 50."
Stated differently, there has been an ongoing kind of 'referendum creep' on the Democratic Party for the past 8 years and it just recently culminated in the election of Donald Trump. Progressivism hasn't been in such a weakened position in many, many decades, but we can't let ourselves get too complacent and comfortable about all of this. This was a grave mistake they made and one of many reasons why they lost -- they were so easily duped by bullshit, skewed polling, smug talking heads and other political hacks, that it resulted in a thick fog over a vast rift between political reality and their delusional perspective of it.
A Black Hole of Identity Politics
Identity politics, despite its vacuousness of actual ideas, has been a mainstay of Progressive, SJW, and Democrat strategy for a long while, now, with Hillary and her surrogates doubling-down on this, thinking it would secure the presidency. Identity politics obviously didn't secure her a win, so maybe it can excuse her loss? Van Jones, et al, want to paint an early narrative that this all was some kind of racist 'whitelash'. Ah, of course -- this is the great revenge of the slave-owning white man! Isn't thatright?
"Or maybe not. The exit polls are remarkable. Would you believe that Mitt Romney won a greater percentage of the white vote than Donald Trump? Mitt took 59 percent while Trump won 58 percent. Would you believe that Trump improved the GOP’s position with black and Hispanic voters? Obama won 93 percent of the black vote. Hillary won 88 percent. Obama won 71 percent of the Latino vote. Hillary won 65 percent. Critically, millions of minority voters apparently stayed home. Trump’s total vote is likely to land somewhere between John McCain’s and Romney’s (and well short of George W. Bush’s 2004 total), while the Democrats have lost almost 10 million voters since 2008."
Okay, well... men are obviously threatened by a woman leading the country. Even though women did the right thing of voting with their vaginas, men did the wrong thing of voting with their penises, right? In the articulate words of Donald Trump, "Wrong".
"In fact, Trump beat Clinton among white women 53 percent to 43 percent, with white women without college degrees going for [Trump] two to one."
Fine, so it wasn't the 'white male patriarchy', but what about those nefarious third parties? If not for their election spoiling and the irresponsible, short-sighted, liberal non-Hillary-voters voting for them, Hillary would have dominated, correct? Nope -- Wrongagain.
"CBS News' exit poll posed the hypothetical question of who third party voters would support if the race were only Clinton and Trump, and both Johnson and Stein supporters appeared to support Clinton over Trump by about 25 percent to 15 percent. But 55 percent of Johnson's supporters would have just sat out the election, as would 61 percent of Jill Stein supporters. According to New York Times exit polling, a whopping 63 percent of voters who declined to cast their ballot for the two major party candidates said they would have not voted at all in a two candidate race."
Conclusively, simply not enough people were willing to turn out to vote for Hillary and her Democratic Party, and that fact cuts across sex, race, and class. The 'referendum creep' struck in her loss and it struck again in all of the contrived excuses for her loss. Identity politics is an abject failure in every meaningful way and the people have come to recognize that -- so much so that they have handed the Republican party almost complete free reign to do as they please (remember, they still don't have a super-majority).
In light of recognizing the political reality of this 'new normal', some Progressives in the fourth and fifth estates have taken this all better than others. Some have engaged in a well-deserved deep reflection of their journalistic failures (see here, here, here, here, and here) whereas others think they should retreat further into their anti-intellectual swamp of delusion and dishonesty (here, here, here, here, and here). Even the November 11th episode of 'Real Time With Bill Maher' shows Bill actually starting to understand and articulate a part of 'what happened' and their inability or unwillingness to see it. Unfortunately, his entire panel regularly drowns him out, retreating back into their swamp, dragging him along with them. Sad!
Yet, while I'm sure there may be some genuine feeling from these kinds of folks regardless of how they're rationalizing the news, I do believe that both approaches of self-reflection and self-delusion serve different tactics of self-preservation (likely depending on the political environments they work in) and, thus, should be taken with a giant heaping of salt.
That salt, of course, should be harvested from their tears.
So Where Do We go From Here?
It's important to note that while Progressivism as an ideology may be much more 'hardy' and take a couple more knock-out hits before going down for the count, SJW culture has still been in its infancy. As such, we need to turn the tables and do what we can to strangle it in its crib while it's in such a weakened state and while we still can. It's not a serious threat (and even less so after the election), now, but if and when such a movement were to mature and place its hands on the levers of state power? The consequences and slippery slopes for protecting, let alone advancing liberty, will be dire.
As Sun Tzu said, 'opportunities arise as you seize them'. So how do we do this? How do we 'turn the tables' on SJWs and Progressives to maximize this opportunity? Apart from actually going out and voting (and getting as many others to vote as possible), one thing I've found that they always used much more consistently and effectively than anyone else has been shaming, ostracism, and boycotting. This has been their primary social tactic and it, all too often, has shut down debate and silenced the opposition of good ideas and counter-arguments. It's high time we put an end to it. No more having to go on the defensive from dishonest charges of 'racism', 'sexism', 'hate', and other such nonsense. It's all an intellectual retreat, and they know it. We're smarter, more knowledgeable, wittier, and we have reality on our side. We've allowed them to be shameless with their dishonest tactics for too long, having overplayed their hand and rendered toothless and virtually meaningless some very important concepts to signal legitimately bad people in society. So while we must continue to intellectually destroy their arguments, we should especially focus on helping them rediscover their shame and turn their charges around on them at any and every opportunity we find. We should take a page from their own playbook and they should be mocked, shamed, and boycotted back into that brain-dead and dishonest swamp they crawled out of.
I definitely don't support Trump. With that being said -- I most certainly prefer him over Clinton.
Why? Well, for the most part, I actually find both of their politics to ultimately be mere inches apart -- a trend of recent presidencies that show Republican and Democrat nominees for federal office (less so at the state level) have been moving closer to 'the center' from either side, with constituencies and the hoi polloi moving increasingly to the margins of progressivism and libertarianism. I actually think this recent phenomenon is due to the distillation of ideas due to the (sometimes crude, but still effective) purification process from the internet -- but that's a discussion for another time.
However, we do have some important differences between these two that are factors in my preference...
The SCOTUS, Obviously
A big one and definitely a contender for the most important issue, is that of the next Supreme Court Justice to be appointed for life due to the recent passing of Antonin Scalia. There are a fewother SCJ's getting a bit longer in the tooth, and with likely two full terms for the next president (which has been another trend for decades, now), we're looking at more than enough time for another SCJ or two to leave empty seats. SCJ's have not, in the history of the United States, broken more than 90 years of age, leaving fairly high chances for some more to be replaced within the span of the next eight years.
Plumb-line, true-scotsmen, small-l libertarian SCJs are of course most preferable, but the least likely. That leaves us with 'liberals' (which at this level and in this day and age seem to be more Progressive leaning as opposed to 'liberal', anyways) and Conservatives -- which really just means that leaves us with conservatives, since 'liberals' and especially Progressives are much more likely to centralize increased power to the federal government.
So imagine a Clinton Presidency, likely for the next two terms, and potentially two or three of her picks (likely during an inevitable flip of control of the legislative branch to the Democrats) bringing about an easy Progressive majority in the SCOTUS. Consider for a moment that this will thrust the SCOTUS to consistent Progressive interpretations of the Constitution and other laws for the next 30-or-so years and the long-lasting effects that will have on legislation in the past, present, and future and the entire structure of the US Government. Really, just let that sink in for a moment.
Right, I thought so. It is what it is.
Critical Mass
The other big difference is one of paramount importance and is, for me at least, a great silver lining in a Trump Presidency, unique to Trump vs the other possibilities throughout the primary season. Progressive heads will explode the world over when he wins. Actually, they've already lost. It's done. It's been done for weeks, if not months, now, and the writing is on the wall. Their ideology is completely unworkable, unrealizable, and incoherent. They're so out-of-touch with the American people that they're still nowhere near realizing it. A Trump presidency will not be a surprise to anyone but them. Their sad, washed-up vanguard is pushing a failed, desperate narrative -- and they keep pushing it and failing, regardless, even with the media above-and-beyond mostly on their side. The incessant hammering of politically correct social pressures has created some thick hides and rendered many immune to it. So many people are over the politically correct, third-wave feminist, SJW, whiny, entitled bullshit and they're not afraid, anymore -- they can't be shamed, and the shaming has completely switched directions. Progressives and their vanguard have overplayed their hand for far too long, and the final rejection of this bastardization of liberalism has finally reached critical mass with the campaign of Donald Trump.
Desperation
Again -- Progressives are a bit slow on the uptake for a lot of this. Naturally, they'll be the last to know, and all this flailing about we've seen from recently is to be expected. The unbelievable arrogance of trying to spin the recent DNC email leak and make themselves (and supposedly, the American people, by extension) out to be the victims of Russian agents and hackers to control the election in favor of a Manchurian candidate? Well, okay, then. Don't at all pay attention to the fact that they were the ones blatantly exposed for lies, corruption, and hypocrisy to their own donors, activists, and constituents -- whether it was even done by the Russians or the Chinese or a DNC leaker or martians is completely besides the point .
They're really starting to reach at straws, though. The sad new spin attempt today was actually quite an impressive coordination of "Quick, run to the phones!"-style, shameless, false propaganda. Following Donald Trump's recent Press Conference on Hillary Clinton, the shilling for ole Hillary reached great heights. Within the span of minutes, I suddenly saw dozens of extremely click-baity articles (a short list of examples here, here, here, here, here, here, and here) of center to left news pages (and even many supposedly non-political technology pages!) jump on claims that he essentially engaged in treason by explicitly and publicly asking the Russian Government and Putin to hack the US to get emails on Hillary. Of course, this was taken completely out of context, words were twisted to mean something completely different, and they tried (and failed) to blow it up into a much bigger deal than it was. All he said was that if the Russians do in fact have Hillary Clinton's missing 33,000 e-mails (and he didn't know if they did, and doubted they did), then he hopes they give them to the press. He never said he wants them to hack the US or a major party. He actually stated on Twitter (hours before the statements in the conference in question) that whoever has the e-mails, if they do, that they "should share them with the FBI." It's all right in the video, embedded below.
The fact that they're now using such weak and pathetic claims to try to control the narrative so cheaply, despite how easily debunked it all is -- shows how weak and tenuous they know their position has become. They're flailing and lashing about, like a small child who hopelessly knows he is not about to get his way.
And really, you gotta hand it to the guy... The sheer cojones to take unfiltered questions from a very hostile press, who are all or mostly very clearly trying to prop up Hillary -- and happily stump them... Just totally epic.
He truly is 'a nimble navigator' (hat-tip, the_Donald Subreddit). I suggest watching the whole thing -- he's very good at dealing with the press on his own, he doesn't hold back much, and it's really quite entertaining, to boot.
When reality finally hits them -- it will all be absolutely delectable. And it couldn't come soon enough.
Just a moment ago I prepared, once again, to masochistically tease myself too close to the event horizon of the super-massive black hole of the ideology of yet another pro-regressive on the internet. Why I continue to do this to myself -- I couldn't tell you. I'm apparently a glutton for mental anguish, punishment and frustration.
As it goes.
Anyhoo, this zealous ideologue spouted a quote from an article about how "[McDonald's] chief executive, Steve Easterbrook, brought home a whopping $7.91 million last year — a 368% raise over his 2014 salary of $1.69 million —while low-wage McDonald’s workers are striking around the country for a livable income." and naturally followed up with a predictably inane, "Sure, they obviously can't afford to pay people better." Of course, in the bizarro world of a pro-regressive ideologue where basic math and common sense don't apply, this means that McDonald's can afford to pay their line-level workers $15/hr. Obviously.
Of course, Steve Easterbrook didn't merely get some kind of merit pay-raise just for being a good chap. He actually got a massive promotion from 'Chief Brand Manager' to Chief Executive Officer -- an important tidbit of information the ideologue conveniently ignored that was found within his own citation. Additionally, this doesn't tell the whole story, as it turns out that the vast majority of that $7.91 million is in stock options -- which is usually how a CEO's pay is structured for large, publicly-traded corporations. It's done this way to tie the CEO's pay very closely with the performance of the company. His base rate in 2015 was actually $1.1 million, and he received an 18% pay raise in March, 2016 to $1.3 million. If the performance under McDonald's tanked by the end of 2015, quality dropped, customers stopped coming and employees lost their jobs as a result of said tanked performance -- then he would have made far less along with probably having to step down in abject shame.
McDonald's is a company that took in $25.41 billion dollars in revenue last year. CEO Steve Easterbrook has taken on one of the most important jobs in a modern economy. This means taking on the ultimate responsibility of managing a massive entity consisting of '1.9 million employees and around 68 million customers daily in 119 countries across 36,535 outlets'. His mere words, actions, and inactions could anywhere from destroy to sustain to improve the jobs of its employees and the customers who enjoy their food -- very much so including myself. And while I'm more of a Wendy's man, I'm actually a solid fan of their 'Number 6' Crispy Chicken Club sandwich meal (hold the mayo!), add bacon, add ranch dressing, with large fries, a large Diet Coke (gotta watch my girly figure), and always add in the 4-piece chicken McNuggets... but I digress, and no I'm not a paid shill. I'm just here, calling out the bullshit.
As noted, executive pay is often tied directly to stock performance in large, publicly traded companies -- so while pro-regressive ideologues will naturally point out the increased income CEOs get, you'll never find them point out a CEO's massive drop in income for when their company doesn't perform. It's the same old story with 'speculators'. Pro-regressives absolutely love -- love, love -- to pounce on faceless 'speculators' when prices go up. But of course, you'll find them suspiciously, shamefully silent when speculators push prices down.
Now, on to the fast-food meat of the matter. Of the 1.9 million total employees, let's play super nice and give a very conservative estimate that only 1.5 million of them are primarily line-level employees making under $15/hr, whereas the remaining 400,000 could be corporate employees and managers. McDonald's ended 2015 with $4.53 billion in net profits, so let's say we were to try to make pro-regressive ideologues happy (it's impossible, btw, there's always something they feel entitled to) and eliminate all profits and turn it directly into a raise for all line-level employees -- since this is the 'extra fat' or 'surplus value' that the company has nefariously, unjustly 'stolen' from them and 'should not have' and 'should go back to the workers'. Since line-level McDonald's workers typically make anywhere from $8/hr to $10/hr, let's say they make $9/hr. Now, let's take the $4.53 billion in oppressive profits, cut it up intointo 1.5 million cute, little, socially-just slices, and hand them right out so very equitably (!) to all of the line level employees.
So what have we effectively accomplished by wiping out the profits of one of the largest companies in the world and handed it over to the 1.5 million line-level employees? What we've done is signed its death warrant.
Here's the simple math. $4.53 billion into 1.5 million employees means that we've only given these people an additional $3,020 into their gross (that means pre-tax for you entitled folk) yearly earnings. Since the pro-regressive argument goes that it 'should be' a 'livable wage' (we'll get to the consequences of a raise to $15/hr soon enough, trust me) -- they should consider this their full-time job to live decently off of. Full-time means 40 hours per week for 52 weeks, which brings us to a massive raise of -- drum-roll, please...
... an additional $1.45/hr, bringing their new wage to $10.45/hr! Social justice secured!
Understand -- when a company makes profits, those profits don't suddenly all go into the pockets of executives. Most of that money is either,
a) tucked away into savings for a rainy day of bad performance so they can still pay their bills and continue employing 1.9 million people,
b) to expand the scope of their operations by opening more locations to bring more jobs to more workers and more food to more consumers at low prices,
c) to invest in existing infrastructure to improve working conditions and/or quality of the food and/or the experience for the customer,
d) pay out into shareholders of various ages and classes (oftentimes including the employees themselves if they opt for 401k plans, IRA accounts for retirees, et al), or
e) some combination of these.
In the end, these profits are needed to sustain and/or expand the company -- not for some nefarious, oppressive, exploitative purpose, whatever pro-regressives dogmatically believe is considered so by attaining profits.
So what does this all ultimately mean? What about the demand for a so-called 'livable wage' of $15/hr if wiping out their current profits only means achieving an average wage of $10.45/hr?
If, let's say, McDonald's ever caved into these destructive, economically ignorant demands (hint: they won't) and gave these employees a raise from $9/hr to $15/hr -- for a conservatively estimated 1.5 million 'line level' employees, they would need to absorb $18.72 BILLION in additional costs. We're talking a necessary revenue increase of 73.7% -- revenues they've never achieved and likely won't for many, many years into the future where other costs will continue to grow as well. If they had to suddenly absorb these costs, without a change to their prices, and with last years' performance, they would be operating at a yearly loss of OVER $14 BILLION. Not only does that mean that they would not be able to expand and add more locations and thus hire more employees around the world, but they would absolutely go out of business. To shore up revenues an additional $18.72 billion to both maintain $15/hr line-level workers as well as achieve $4.53 billion in profit to continue business as usual, they would have to raise prices significantly and somehow manage, with said prices, in the face of serious competition,to achieve the same amount of demand for their food. No one in their right mind would put up with the massive price hikes necessary to generate $18.72 billion in additional revenue for their existing setup, and I'm even less convinced that $15/hr 'just because' workers are suddenly 67% more productive than their $9/hr former selves (which still assumes their locations would get the requisite over 67% uptick in demand).
That's bad for everyone, all around. That means 1.9 million people out of work, and a more concentrated market share into the remaining big fast food companies. It also means less competition for both customers and employees, which translates into higher prices for customers and less negotiating power for employees at the remaining fast food companies. Less leverage for employees and less leverage for customers means everyone loses, everywhere.
Oh, and I'm not even done, yet. Believe it or not -- you thought $18.72 billion in additional costs is rough? That was actually another super-nice, extraordinarily conservative estimate, as it doesn't include significant additional costs needed for each and every employee due to the higher rate. I'm talking about Workers Compensation, Unemployment Benefits, and Tax Liabilities -- all of which are a heavy burden placed upon businesses both large and small that are charged as rates according total wages earned, risk of injury or unemployment, and other factors. These additional expenses would effectively grow by about 67%, putting another nail into the coffin of the $15/hr minimum wage.
They say that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but I don't think this analogy is entirely accurate with pro-regressives. The pro-regressive road to hell is paved with a hack-job, fly-by-night, scummy operation built on willful economic ignorance and dogmatic ideology -- and it uses the livelihood and dreams of the poor as the asphalt.
So how do you pro-regressives and 'democratic socialists' like your precious democracy, now? How is that working out for you, exactly, what with Trump absolutely slaughtering his opponents in the debates and primaries, and the idea that he will most likely be your next President? This is democracy. This is the mob. This is how it works. Democracy is your 'God that Failed' (hat-tip, Hans-Hermann Hoppe). The idea that the 'sock in the wind' of 'public wisdom' can decide on good government representatives and policy decisions is one of the most absurd notions, ever, and history and this entire election reflect exactly that. The irony that 'democracy' ends up ushering in what seems like the antithesis incarnate of almost everything pro-regressives stand for is truly sublime.
But the vast majority of them don't seem to be getting it. Pro-regressives are so unbelievably out of touch and just not understanding why Trump is so popular -- with the Republican rank-and-file, with centrists, independents, and even some right-leaning Democrats. It has far less to with his 'policies' or how 'liberal' or 'conservative' he is (or isn't) than other factors, and attacking him over ignorant, incoherent, or flip-flopping statements that he constantly makes is actually counter-productive. A lot of it is an act, of course, and the guy is a social genius, whether you want to admit it or not.
In the end, the more people from 'the left' (whatever that even means, anymore), 'the right' (whatever that even means, anymore), 'big media', 'the establishment', et al attack him, the stronger his support gets and grows. His support is a referendum on big media, the establishment of both parties, the way politics is conducted, how support for presidential candidates is manufactured, and on political correctness in general. He says what a lot of these people are already thinking, and his support continues to grow because it only makes them feel empowered when they've felt so weak and so powerless for so long. It may all end up being short-sighted, but since when has the mob not been?
Yes, Donald Trump is the culmination of GOP policy and pandering and flame-fueling for years, now. They are greatly responsible for creating this monster. I won't bother getting into why, because that's already been widely established and talked about elsewhere, and it should be obvious in the first place.
But what further adds to all of the irony is that we can't just thank the GOP for this. We have to thank Pro-regressives in particular, and even some Democrats as well -- what with their ridiculous political correctness, elitism, condescension, fueling the flames of (arbitrarily-drawn lines of) 'racial' and 'class' tension, and constant, non-stop explicit and implicit personal attacks on those who have now become Trump supporters. These attacks have been the norm for a long time. They've felt manipulated and powerless and hopeless for so long, and he is tapping in to that -- which is exactly why attacks against them and him just make them that much stronger and rally and dig in their heels that much more fervently. Trump supporters are lashing out in the most angry and unified way, now, by supporting and voting for someone like Trump. They don't like the way the table is set (and has been set for a long time), and so they're flipping the table.
His supporters just don't care about 'the usual stuff' -- how liberal or conservative he is (or isn't), what his policies are, his 'substance' (or lack thereof), what he's said about people, who he's supported politically in the past or done in his life and how he got to where he is, et cetera. It's that he's a protest vote that can actually win -- and the outright disruption he and his supporters are causing among both parties really is quite a thing to behold. He can flip-flop on the issues all he wants, and it will barely hurt him -- if at all. It might even strengthen him by giving more people who hate Hillary some hope somewhere else. It's basically all a kind of political nihilism, which almost warms even my ice-cold, Vantablack void of a political heart.
Almost.
I think Trump is pretty damned horrible, policy-wise, but this is the reality we're facing. Barring any extremely ruthless (and short-sighted of their own) GOP shenanigans, he absolutely will be the GOP nominee, and he has a strong chance of becoming the next president, whether we like it or not. Dismiss and underestimate his chances at your own peril.
Basically, it comes down to this, as it always does. Democracy is the idea that the People know what they want. And they deserve to get it, too -- good and hard.
But enough of my rant. I don't entirely agree with him, but Louis C.K. seems to be one of the few Pro-regressives who (mostly) gets it. He recently gave a (mostly) good to maybe even great rant on Donald Trump, from his perspective -- as a kind of love letter to his supporters. It's one for the ages. You've got the typical overdramatic Hitler and Nazi comparisons going on (thank you for satisfying 'Godwin's Law', by the way, like every other head-exploding pro-regressive out there, recently), but hey, when are pro-regressives not overdramatic? Here's a snippet of this that I particularly enjoyed from him...
"And that voting for Trump is a way of saying “f--- it. F--- them all”. I really get it. It’s a version of national Suicide. Or it’s like a big hit off of a crack pipe. Somehow we can’t help it. Or we know that if we vote for Trump our phones will be a reliable source of dopamine for the next four years. I mean I can’t wait to read about Trump every day. It’s a rush. But you have to know this is not healthy.
If you are a true conservative. Don’t vote for Trump. He is not one of you. He is one of him. Everything you have heard him say that you liked, if you look hard enough you will see that he one day said the exact opposite. He is playing you."
Go read the whole thing, though. Seriously. Check it out, here.
I'm so over Bernie Sanders and Progressives spreading lies and misinformation about their unrealizable ideals regarding socialismand so-called 'Democratic socialism'. First off, there actually aren't many countries governed by democratic socialist parties. The ones that are, such as Venezuela, Ecuador, Honduras, Brazil, and Greece -- are complete and total social and economic shit-shows. There actually isn't much difference between plain ole Vanilla Socialism and so-called 'Democratic Socialism' -- they share the same exact ends while differing merely in the strategy on how to get there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_socialism
"No, no, no... I'm not a Socialist. I'm a DEMOCRATIC Socialist!"
As it turns out, I'm not the only one -- it also looks like Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen of Denmark is sick and tired of these claims as well...
Danes apparently have grown weary of Sen. Bernie Sanders insulting their country.Denmark is not a socialist nation, says its prime minister. It has a “market economy.”
Sanders, the Democratic presidential candidate who calls himself a socialist, has used Denmark as the example of the socialist utopia he wants to create in America. During the Democrats’ first debate last month, he said “we should look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway, and learn from what they have accomplished for their working people.”
While appearing in New Hampshire in September, Sanders said that he had “talked to a guy from Denmark” who told him that in Denmark, “it is very hard to become very, very rich, but it’s pretty hard to be very, very poor.”
“And that makes a lot of sense to me.”
So because something makes sense to him, he has the right to force that system on people who don’t want it? Isn’t that what he’s saying?
But we digress. This is about Danes being offending by Sanders using the word “socialist” to describe their form of government. And who can blame them, especially when the free world has had enough of national socialists and Soviet socialists and North Korean socialists and Cuban socialists?
While speaking at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, the center-right Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen said he was aware “that some people in the U.S. associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism.”
“Therefore,” he said, “I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.”
Rasmussen acknowledged that “the Nordic model is an expanded welfare state which provides a high level of security to its citizens,” but he also noted that it is “a successful market economy with much freedom to pursue your dreams and live your life as you wish.”
To that we’ll add that Sweden, another of Sanders’ inspirations, has for decades quietly moved away from its cradle-to-grave form of government welfare. And the Swedes are better off for having done so, just as the Danes will continue to be better off as their government overhauls its welfare state.
Source, here. You can also see the full youtube video in reference of the Danish PM,here. In addition to this, if Sanders, his supporters and Progressives in general would like to move towards an economy more like 'the Nordic Model', then they should also be prepared to accept some, what they would consider, 'radical free market concepts' such as absolutely no government-mandated minimum wage, a far lower corporate tax rate than than the US, a majority of privatized roads like in Sweden, lower taxes on the wealthy, higher taxes on the poor, radically higher taxes on the middle class, and far, far fewer economic regulations in general. Of course, because Sanders and his supporters are more socialist than they'd care to admit, the vast majority of them would probably never be willing to accept such relatively low economic regulation and 'radical' free market concepts. These are a major piece of the puzzle as to why these countries can prop up such a system in the first place. Another possible explanation of this behavior by Progressives and socialists is that many of them know all this, and that it's actually desirable and beneficial for them to have real, 'state ownership of the means of production' style socialism (which includes democratic socialism) be conflated and muddied up regularly with welfare statism (which isn't technically socialism). In this regard, it could be simply a matter of dishonest marketing through disinformation -- the ideological equivalent of a bait-and-switch tactic.
Sometimes, I really love me some Camus (obviously, considering the name and theme of this blog).
"The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion." - Albert Camus
Political activism and even what I call 'anti-activist activism' is, unfortunately, completely fruitless and hopeless. Voting is worse, of course, but in most recent elections the majority of the voting population literally did 'vote for nobody'. Somebody got elected, anyways, and it changed nothing. In our alleged, so-called 'democracy', if, a) you can even call it that, and b) it being one of the worst forms of government available to a civilized population -- Obama was elected within a handful of points from Romney, and approximately 24% of the 'eligible voting population' (about 19% of genpop) 'decided' on who would be able to impose his will on the rest of us.
However, as long as we realize that 'not voting' won't change anything, neither, and that we need to engage in other activities outside of the system to enact gradual and slow change, or better yet, to enact meaningful change in your own life in spite of the system (which is what is most important), then I think 'not voting' is good.
However, the moment you believe or convince yourself that 'not voting', or voting third party, or voting for Mickey Mouse, or voting for a Republican or Democrat of any kind, et al, in and of itself can or will actually change anything in any meaningful way -- then you've, unfortunately, entered into the realm of self-delusion.
It is said that 'if you don't vote, then you have no right to complain'. Whoever says this has it backwards -- it's only because I don't vote, that I have a right to complain. With that being said, it is what it is, and mere complaining does nothing.
It's time to stop making excuses. We have to take control of our own lives. PS - I know this is direct contrast to an older post(s) I made in my more electoral, Ron Paul activist days. My views have changed on this, since then.
Ah, yes. The ole Anthropogenic Global Warming (hereon referred to as 'AGW') 'debate', if one could honestly call it that. I apologize in advance for sullying your computer screen with another such screed, but the AGW hype-train, fueled by fear and alarmism, just keeps on keepin' on, and there are some particularly glaring, nosebleed-inducing dents in said train for me to ignore much longer.
As for instructions on how to properly handle watermelons, well, I'll get to that part, later. Don't worry, it'll all be worth it.
CO2, the Innocent Whipping Boy
First, let's look at the real meat of the numbers, here. AGW and CO2 alarmists constantly refer to the current CO2 level in the atmosphere as being at a 'potentially catastrophic' 400 ppm (parts per million). However, a lot of people touting this number either ignorantly or dishonestly don't seem too interested in communicating what this really means. They just regurgitate how it's increased from about 270 ppm since 1850 to 400 ppm, today, correlated with the rise of industrialization. That's true, but the issue is this -- 400 ppm of the atmosphere is only 0.04% of the atmosphere. 400 ppm minus the 270 ppm means an increase of 130 ppm since 1850. That's an increase of only 0.013% in the atmosphere in 164 years of increasing industrialization. 0.013% is not a significant ratio of increase relative to the whole of the atmosphere, and certainly not a significant ratio relative to other times in the history of the earth. No one can deny this, as it's based on their very own oft-touted numbers. No one. This is just the simple math.
Of course, I can see it, already. Dishonest alarmists will then want to talk about how an increase of 270 ppm to 400 ppm "is an increase of over 48%", and while, yes, mathematically that's also true -- this interpretation of the numbers is not at all helpful. The statement 'an increase of over 48%' conveys far less information than the method provided earlier, and conclusions based on less information versus more are far less valuable, particularly when you're trying to draw conclusions from them. With the previous method, you're given far more context -- you're provided information about the piece as it relates to the whole. With the 'Dishonest Alarmist Method', it's just numbers in a vacuum -- almost meaningless. Of course, unless you're engaging in unadulterated propaganda as opposed to the actual science -- then such an interpretation of the numbers is exactly what you'd want. Take note that these are the kinds of games that are very often played with statistics for a whole range of issues. With statistical interpretation, it's easy to tell lies by using the facts -- and those seeking to validate their preconceived notions will jump all over it and propagate it until they're blue in the face.
Further, it's important to emphasize that this CO2 increase of 130 ppm is, again, correlated with the rise of industrialization since 1850. It's of course difficult -- virtually absurd, even -- to claim that none of this increase is due to human CO2 contributions, but it is equally absurd to claim that none of this increase is due to some combination of natural factors, as well. The conclusion we can draw, however, is that we cannot lay 100% of the 130 ppm increase of CO2 at the feet of human activity, as we know that CO2 levels have risen long before the existence of humanity, and they will rise, at times, long after we're gone.
As for the fact of the increase, it is more than likely that the earth's ecosystem will adapt and that life, including human life, will continue to survive, if not flourish, as life always has and does amidst these kinds of CO2 levels. This extra CO2 means an abundance of plant (including algae) food, leading to more plant-life, which leads to an eventual balance where the even greater amount of plants 'eat' the excess CO2, with the natural 'breathing' of the earth stabilizing. This has panned out exactly as expected, according to NASA, with the recently rising CO2 levels leading to what they refer to as a 'greening' of the earth:
From a quarter to half of Earth’s vegetated lands has shown significant greening over the last 35 years largely due to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change on April 25.
An international team of 32 authors from 24 institutions in eight countries led the effort, which involved using satellite data from NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer instruments to help determine the leaf area index, or amount of leaf cover, over the planet’s vegetated regions. The greening represents an increase in leaves on plants and trees equivalent in area to two times the continental United States.
...
Results showed that carbon dioxide fertilization explains 70 percent of the greening effect, said co-author Ranga Myneni, a professor in the Department of Earth and Environment at Boston University. “The second most important driver is nitrogen, at 9 percent. So we see what an outsized role CO2 plays in this process.”
Further, and this point is particularly important with respect to the natural 'breathing' of the earth,
The extent of the greening over the past 35 years “has the ability to fundamentally change the cycling of water and carbon in the climate system,” said lead author Zaichun Zhu, a researcher from Peking University, China, who did the first half of this study with Myneni as a visiting scholar at Boston University.
Greener areas show a 'leaf area' gain aka 'greening', whereas redder indicates loss.
To further capitalize on this point, much higher CO2 concentration levels of 2200 ppm preceded the rise of the Devonian Period about 400 million years ago, and vast forests covered large portions of the earth. Trees began competing with eachother over the 550% higher CO2 concentrations, to the point of eventually dying on top of eachother until they were 100 meters or more in depth. Want to know where all of our coal deposits we've been finding have come from? You guessed it -- those vast forests of dead trees consumed all of that 'catastrophic' CO2 that we're burning today. And even with a CO2 concentration of 2200 ppm, temperatures were only 6 degrees celsius higher than they are today.
In the end, it is all very silly to say that an increased CO2 level of 0.013% is 'catastrophic' -- especially considering our ecosystemic adaptability and the history of CO2 levels and the life that flourished under it.
Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc
Yes, temperatures have risen. Yes, CO2 has risen. No one denies this. However, linking temperature increase to CO2 increase solely because of the amount humanity is adding in to it since industrialization is a pure post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy. There are many more factors at play with respect to temperatures and climate, and only acknowledging temperature changes for the last 150 years since industrialization, even just in relation to the past couple hundred thousand years of human existence (let alone hundreds of millions of years of climate history), is a pretty piss-poor sample size. Whether we're looking at the climate over the past year, past 150 years, past 20,000 years, past 400,000 years, or past 400 million years, not only does the climate change, but it's always changing, across virtually all timescales. There are cycles, within cycles, within cycles, within cycles. Even a cursory glance at temperature data derived from ice cores (below), shows how silly and nonsensical the whole idea of AGW is, as one can clearly see that the vast majority of human history has seen climate to be multiple degrees warmer than it is, today. To the extent there's been any climate change, we've actually been cooling for the past 1,000 years or so.
Ice cores clearly show that the vast majority of human history has been warmer than it is, today. To the extent there's been any climate change, we've been cooling for the past 1,000 years.
In addition to this, evidence shows that temperature fluctuation for Earth is very cyclical, switching between very warm periods and very cool periods every 100,000 years or so. We're actually currently in an interglacial period called the Holocene, and these interglacial periods are very tightly correlated with insolation (incoming solar radiation), leading to this being a major factor in earth's climate cycle. Clearly such a tight correlation over hundreds of thousands of years is far from coincidence, so either the earth is having a significant affect on the cyclical climate of the sun, or the sun is having a significant affect on the cyclical climate of the earth. Needless to say, it shouldn't be difficult to realize that one of these two possibilities is prima facie absurd.
Data clearly shows extremely tight correlation between earth's climate (temps), CO2 concentration, and insolation (incoming solar radiation)
Further -- and this is very important to note -- CO2 increases come after the temperature increases (on average about 800 years after), not before -- further putting into question the claim that 'CO2 increases are what cause higher temperatures'. They may contribute, but it doesn't seem that they're the cause. This doesn't necessarily prove that CO2 doesn't cause temperatures to rise, or that they aren't a factor in causing them to rise, otherwise we'd be engaging in the same correlation fallacy AGW proponents do, but it does show that this data is not valid evidence to their argument.
Speaking of planetary ecosystems, climates, temperature, greenhouse gases and life, let's bring our attention, for a moment, to Venus. Fear mongering alarmists, especially in the pop-science celebrities sphere, love to talk about and use Venus comparisons a lot. Man, they love to use them. But Venus has no vegetation. It doesn't have vast oceans of H20 and other complex ecosystems with fauna and flora and dirt that cyclically absorb and breathe out CO2, as we noted earlier. On Venus, it just gets trapped under an atmospheric blanket, under the brutal power of the sun and doesn't go anywhere. The Earth is not even remotely comparable to Venus, and there's no good reason to believe we will become Venus.
AGW is Political Religion, Not Science
So around and around we go, with AGW alarmists and other useful idiots claiming they are 'doing science', running around exclaiming how much they supposedly 'fucking love science', but they clearly haven't a clue what science actually is and what it means to 'do science'. 'Doing science' involves utilizing the scientific method, which is testing to try to disprove a hypothesis (not trying to prove it, as many of these organizations and individuals are actually trying to do) by utilizing control groups vs experimental groups in controlled environments. This point is important, here -- controlled environments. I'd hardly call the earth's climate a 'controlled environment' and I'd hardly call using a sample size of a mere 150 years in the tens of thousands of years of relatively recent human existence, amidst the millions of years of earth's climate, a proper sample size to compare this against.
This brings us to another point of interest in this debate -- climate 'models'. These 'models' are procedurally generated speculations produced by computer programs and designed by flawed individuals with extremely limited information. They incorporate relatively few factors (there are vast numbers of factors in earth's climate and ecosystem, many of which we don't even know) into these algorithms while trying to produce results akin to historic trends up to the current climate reality 'and beyond'. Of course, as the real-world climate changes, the algorithms governing the models (which regularly produce future predictions inconsistent with reality) are 'adjusted' to reflect new and updated data in order to shoehorn them into fitting both the actual climate along with predicting trends that uphold the AGW narrative. Climate models are not particularly rigorous, they don't utilize the scientific method, and the process surrounding them is eerily similar to how religion is rationalized, ad-hoc, based on preconceived notions and dogma. Yet, instead of being called out as such, these ad-hoc climate 'models' and their future trend predictions are regularly cited by the usual suspects to fuel the fire of alarmism and fearmongering. This is all completely backwards and not how actual science and the scientific method works.
Then there are the pet projects and special interests involved. The IPCC is a political authority that, while it doesn't engage in direct funding itself, has many subsidiaries that do, and if your outfit doesn't provide evidence that justifies its own existence and support the special interests involved, your funding gets cut. The existence of the IPCC in the first place absolutely relies on AGW dogma -- without it, they would disappear. As such, this naturally creates distorted incentives that amount more to supporting political favor than to supporting actual science that constantly challenges itself to discover truth as opposed to re-affirming certain political narratives.
One such narrative we still, unfortunately, hear propagated to this day, from the 44th President of the United States on down to any rando reddit commenter, is the notion of the scientific consensus re-affirming AGW. The '97% of scientists agree' claim is a debunked myth, but it circulates, regardless.
Yet the assertion that 97% of scientists believe that climate change is a man-made, urgent problem is a fiction. The so-called consensus comes from a handful of surveys and abstract-counting exercises that have been contradicted by more reliable research.
One frequently cited source for the consensus is a 2004 opinion essay published in Science magazine by Naomi Oreskes, a science historian now at Harvard. She claimed to have examined abstracts of 928 articles published in scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and found that 75% supported the view that human activities are responsible for most of the observed warming over the previous 50 years while none directly dissented.
Ms. Oreskes's definition of consensus covered "man-made" but left out "dangerous"—and scores of articles by prominent scientists such as Richard Lindzen, John Christy, Sherwood Idso and Patrick Michaels, who question the consensus, were excluded. The methodology is also flawed. A study published earlier this year in Nature noted that abstracts of academic papers often contain claims that aren't substantiated in the papers.
Another widely cited source for the consensus view is a 2009 article in "Eos, Transactions American Geophysical Union" by Maggie Kendall Zimmerman, a student at the University of Illinois, and her master's thesis adviser Peter Doran. It reported the results of a two-question online survey of selected scientists. Mr. Doran and Ms. Zimmerman claimed "97 percent of climate scientists agree" that global temperatures have risen and that humans are a significant contributing factor.
The survey's questions don't reveal much of interest. Most scientists who are skeptical of catastrophic global warming nevertheless would answer "yes" to both questions. The survey was silent on whether the human impact is large enough to constitute a problem. Nor did it include solar scientists, space scientists, cosmologists, physicists, meteorologists or astronomers, who are the scientists most likely to be aware of natural causes of climate change.
The "97 percent" figure in the Zimmerman/Doran survey represents the views of only 79 respondents who listed climate science as an area of expertise and said they published more than half of their recent peer-reviewed papers on climate change. Seventy-nine scientists—of the 3,146 who responded to the survey—does not a consensus make.
In 2010, William R. Love Anderegg, then a student at Stanford University, used Google Scholar to identify the views of the most prolific writers on climate change. His findings were published in Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences. Mr. Love Anderegg found that 97% to 98% of the 200 most prolific writers on climate change believe "anthropogenic greenhouse gases have been responsible for 'most' of the 'unequivocal' warming." There was no mention of how dangerous this climate change might be; and, of course, 200 researchers out of the thousands who have contributed to the climate science debate is not evidence of consensus.
In 2013, John Cook, an Australia-based blogger, and some of his friends reviewed abstracts of peer-reviewed papers published from 1991 to 2011. Mr. Cook reported that 97% of those who stated a position explicitly or implicitly suggest that human activity is responsible for some warming. His findings were published in Environmental Research Letters.
Mr. Cook's work was quickly debunked. In Science and Education in August 2013, for example, David R. Legates (a professor of geography at the University of Delaware and former director of its Center for Climatic Research) and three coauthors reviewed the same papers as did Mr. Cook and found "only 41 papers—0.3 percent of all 11,944 abstracts or 1.0 percent of the 4,014 expressing an opinion, and not 97.1 percent—had been found to endorse" the claim that human activity is causing most of the current warming. Elsewhere, climate scientists including Craig Idso, Nicola Scafetta, Nir J. Shaviv and Nils-Axel Morner, whose research questions the alleged consensus, protested that Mr. Cook ignored or misrepresented their work.
Rigorous international surveys conducted by German scientists Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch—most recently published in Environmental Science & Policy in 2010—have found that most climate scientists disagree with the consensus on key issues such as the reliability of climate data and computer models. They do not believe that climate processes such as cloud formation and precipitation are sufficiently understood to predict future climate change.
Surveys of meteorologists repeatedly find a majority oppose the alleged consensus. Only 39.5% of 1,854 American Meteorological Society members who responded to a survey in 2012 said man-made global warming is dangerous.
Finally, the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—which claims to speak for more than 2,500 scientists—is probably the most frequently cited source for the consensus. Its latest report claims that "human interference with the climate system is occurring, and climate change poses risks for human and natural systems." Yet relatively few have either written on or reviewed research having to do with the key question: How much of the temperature increase and other climate changes observed in the 20th century was caused by man-made greenhouse-gas emissions? The IPCC lists only 41 authors and editors of the relevant chapter of the Fifth Assessment Report addressing "anthropogenic and natural radiative forcing."
Of the various petitions on global warming circulated for signatures by scientists, the one by the Petition Project, a group of physicists and physical chemists based in La Jolla, Calif., has by far the most signatures—more than 31,000 (more than 9,000 with a Ph.D.). It was most recently published in 2009, and most signers were added or reaffirmed since 2007. The petition states that "there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of . . . carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate."
The fearmongering and alarmism continues in the face of all of the conflicting scientific evidence. Global climate change is happening, yes -- it's been cyclically happening for millions of years, and there is far too much evidence that suggests, contrary to AGW dogma, that humans have virtually to absolutely nothing to do with it. Ultimately, Anthropogenic Global Warming is an excuse towards an ideological agenda -- to regulate, tax and redistribute as much as possible, and to curtail capitalism and individual liberty, in favor of centralization and collectivism.
A Gallagherian Conclusion
For this reason, I've long referred to AGW activists and environmentalists as 'watermelons' -- 'green' on the outside, but ultimately deeply 'red' on the inside. These are utilitarian ideologues, and utilitarians are well-known for their affinity towards what's known as The Noble Lie, if that's what it takes to advance their narrative and political agenda. The ends justify the means, and eviscerating the truth and individual liberty is a small price to pay towards achieving what is, in their perception, the aim of some 'greater good'.
To be clear, I am not implicating all AGW scientists -- though there are certainly some distorted incentives and politics taking place, that much is clear. The political and ideological activism I am concerned about poisoning this issue are in the mainstream media, bureaucrats and representatives within the State, special interests, influencers on social media, and amongst the rank-and-file. It's in this domain where they are spinning or even outright fabricating claims, some of which pro-AGW authorities don't even claim, themselves, to push an ideological agenda and send it viral.
"If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself." -- Joseph Goebbels
The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly and with unflagging attention. It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over. Here, as so often in this world, persistence is the first and most important requirement for success." -- Adolf Hitler
Anthropogenic Global Warming is, simply put, just another of the latest in a long line of compounding Noble Lies employed in the service of an ideology which cannot stand on its merits, alone, and it should be publicly recognized as such. So let's finally peel the green skin off of this watermelon, for good, expose the mushy, rotten, red flesh that's beneath, and smash it to bits once and for all.
And with that, I leave you with your moment of zen...
This post was originally published under my old pseudonym, 'Sentient Void', at the Ron Paul Forums Blog, on 10/15/2015. It has been edited and updated with more sources and other information and for 'A Sisyphean Revolt'.
