The Ann Coulter “faggot” incident has set the right-wing blogs buzzing with commendable attempts to distance themselves from her and denounce her incessant hateful gibbering. But some have claimed that it’s unfair to pin this sort of behavior on right-wingers, that lefties do the same thing or worse.
Of course there are inflammatory statements made by the left. But you don’t hear the kind of truly vile hatefulness you constantly hear on the right, and you certainly don’t hear it as commonly, or on a routine basis from major figures who are either in office or appear in prominent roles at political functions and in the media. Patterico, however, tries to disprove this (fairly self-evident) claim by presenting a roll call of “true hate speech” from “prominent leftist figures”. You can go read the list if you want to; the quotes are mostly accurate. It’s hard not to notice a couple of things about his collection, though.
Most obviously, a considerable number of sources on it could in no way be considered “prominent leftist figures”. Several are professional comedians who are not particularly associated with politics (Chris Rock - often called conservative for his criticism of low-income blacks; Conan O’Brian; Craig Kilborn); some are totally marginal figures regardless of their politics (Charlie Brooker, a British TV reviewer; Dan Savage, an alternative-paper sex columnist; the St. Petersburg, Florida, Democratic Club [?!]); some are simply not leftist or liberal (Louis Farrakan?! - when was the last time you heard the Nation of Islam called “leftist”?).
More to the point, after scouring both sides of the Atlantic as far back as he could reach, he could only find two dozen quotations, from 21 figures (he gets Farrakhan in there 4 times for effect - it reminds of Warren Beatty’s line in “Bulworth”: “I’m sure they put something bad about Farrakhan in there for you!”). And how far back, exactly, did he have to go to find them? Well, here are the dates of the quotes he cites, in order:
- Nina Totenberg: 1995
- Julianne Malveaux: 1994 (who?)
- Richard Cohen: 1999
- Craig Kilborn: 2000
- St. Petersburg Democratic Club: 2004
- Conan O’Brien: 1998
- Chris Rock: 1998
- Spike Lee: 1999
- James Carville: 1998, if not earlier
- Alexander Cockburn: 2000
- Dan Savage: 2000
- Robert Byrd: 2001
- Jesse Jackson: 1984
- Louis Farrakhan: 1995, 1994, 2000, 1994
- Howard Dean: 2005
- Charlie Brooker: 2004
- Pete Stark: 2003
- Earl Hilliard: 2002 (not proven he wrote the flyer in question)
- Markos: 2004
- Atrios: 2006 (a direct quote of a joke from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy)
- Lou Hendra: 2006
I can’t help but notice some of them are as much as 23 years old. On average, they are almost 8 years old. Barely a third were spoken within this century (counting from 2001) - only two are within the past year. This is the “leftist” scourge Patterico trumpets. He’s proven his point: the “leftists” of America and Europe (defined to include religious reactionaries, comedians, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) do say rather undisciplined things about conservatives . . . once a year, on average.
By way of contrast, this rom just the latest Ann Coulter column alone, before her CPAC meltdown:
Liberals want mass starvation and human devastation.
They want us to starve the productive sector of fossil fuel and allow the world’s factories to grind to a halt.
There are more reputable scientists defending astrology than defending “global warming,” but liberals simply announce that the debate has been resolved in their favor and demand that we shut down all production.
When are liberals going to break the news to their friends in Darfur that they all have to starve to death to save the planet?
“Global warming” is the left’s pagan rage against mankind.
Liberals have always had a thing about eliminating humans. [Among “liberals”, here, she includes Stalin and Hitler]
Margaret Sanger wanted to eliminate poor blacks
Rachel Carson wanted to eliminate Africans
Paul Ehrlich wants to eliminate all humans
global warming is the most insane, psychotic idea liberals have ever concocted to kill off “useless eaters.”
If we have to live in a pure “natural” environment like the Indians, then our entire transcontinental nation can only support about 1 million human beings. Sorry, fellas — 299 million of you are going to have to go.
[Environmentalists] never intended for us to survive.
[According to liberals,] [t]he entire fuel-guzzling, tacky, beer-drinking, NASCAR-watching middle class with their over-large families will simply have to die.
Yep - you can find fully half as many quotes, twice as insane, in one single column by Ann Coulter - and this one written and published while she was still the right’s darling - as in 23 years’ worth of selective quotation from every dubious “liberal” on two continents. And that doesn’t even touch on Ronald Reagan, Pat Buchanan, Newt Gingrich, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Grover Norquist, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney . . . . Patterico tells us it’s just the same thing. What do you think we’d get if we went back over 23 years of right-wing hate?
Update: Patterico, on his blog, points out that the Conan O’Brien attribution is wrong; it was something said by Alec Baldwin on O’Brien’s show. I can’t see that that changes anything about the basic debate.
March 5th, 2007
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General, Politics, Writing, Culture |
35 comments
NYTimes article today about yet another sociobiological argument for religious faith as an evolved trait. Ho-hum (there is a lot to sociobiology that clearly must be true, but I’m tired of them coming up with stories about how some behavioral traits could be evolutionarily advantageous if they had evolved, without any evidence that they actually could have evolved, or, more importantly, did so). But this caught my eye:
[W]hatever you call it, there seems an inherent human drive to believe in something transcendent, unfathomable and otherworldly, something beyond the reach or understanding of science. “Why do we cross our fingers during turbulence, even the most atheistic among us?” asked Atran . . . . His research interests include cognitive science and evolutionary biology, and sometimes he presents students with a wooden box that he pretends is an African relic. “If you have negative sentiments toward religion,” he tells them, “the box will destroy whatever you put inside it.” Many of his students say they doubt the existence of God, but in this demonstration they act as if they believe in something. Put your pencil into the magic box, he tells them, and the nonbelievers do so blithely. Put in your driver’s license, he says, and most do, but only after significant hesitation. And when he tells them to put in their hands, few will.
You’re shitting me.
First, who crosses their fingers during turbulence? There are atheists who do that? How does he know?
More importantly, his students are really unwilling to put their hands in an “African relic” because he says it has a curse on it? Where the hell did he find these students - at a Raiders of the Lost Ark fan convention? Admittedly, teenagers (as about half of college students still are, despite being legal adults) tend to be hyper-suggestive and somewhat superstitious, until they’ve had a chance to settle down and test their beliefs in the world a bit, but this is ridiculous. I suppose they also believe that if you say “Bloody Mary” in a mirror three times, you’ll be killed in your sleep. Oy.
That being said, I was on an East Coast campus in the early 90s when a scare went through the students of a bunch of schools in the region, to the effect that some supposed prediction of Nostradamus had declared that “all the beautiful children” would be murdered on a certain date and this clearly pointed to one or the other of the elite colleges. (Obviously, their egos had nothing to do with this.) Most of the students pretended to take it only mock-seriously, but many of them vacated the campus on the night in question.
I suppose it’s a question of just not having had to really live by their beliefs yet. It can be hard to hold out for rationality when almost everyone around you openly endorses superstition and you have only your own convictions to fall back on. But that wooden box thing is still pathetic.
March 5th, 2007
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General, Religion, Culture, Science, Education |
7 comments
So, a UK documentary filmmaker is going to release a film to British TV purporting to show that global warming is a hoax, a vicious lie that only the brave few (like him, of course) have the guts to see through. I haven’t been able to get a copy of the program, so I cannot comment on its merits, but if his comments and the description of the content in this article are a guide, don’t expect to be enlightened.
Let’s start at the top, shall we?
One major piece of evidence of CO2 causing global warming are ice core samples from Antarctica, which show that for hundreds of years, global warming has been accompanied by higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.
In ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’ Al Gore is shown claiming this proves the theory, but palaeontologist Professor Ian Clark claims in the documentary that it actually shows the opposite.
He has evidence showing that warmer spells in the Earth’s history actually came an average of 800 years before the rise in CO2 levels.
Prof Clark believes increased levels of CO2 are because the Earth is heating up and not the cause. He says most CO2 in the atmosphere comes from the oceans, which dissolve the gas.
Let’s take the first claim, that the warming spells came 800 years before the concentrations in C02. that is partially correct. The ice cores do show that, in the natural ice age/interglacial cycle, the C02 concentrations do start to appear after the rise in temperatures. What that comment leaves out, however, is that the warming periods do not start and end 800 years before the concentrations occur. The warming trends take about 5000 years, on average. So the concentrations lag the start of the wamring by about 800 years, but continue throught the rest of the 4200 years of the average warming period. In other words, the man has proven that C02 is not the only factor affecting the climate. Wow. Give that man a cigar! Not to mention the fact that it has no bearing on whether or not C02 creates a feedback loop, pushing temperatures higher, which is the actual claim related to climate change and C02. So once they get to the arguments, they start off with something that, while true, is not actually relevant to the issues at hand and does prove what the article claims it proves.
Well, maybe it gets better:
Scientists in the programme also raise another discrepancy with the official line, showing that most of the recent global warming occurred before 1940, when global temperatures then fell for four decades.
It was only in the late 1970s that the current trend of rising temperatures began.
This, claim the sceptics, is a flaw in the CO2 theory, because the post-war economic boom produced more CO2 and should, according to the consensus, have meant a rise in global temperatures.
Ahh, no, no sorry it doesn’t. First, temperatures in the 20th century rose sharply between about 1900 and 1940. there was a cooling period between the 40 and 1970, but temperature has increased since then. In other words, the claim is correct but it is not a “discrepancy with the official line” It is the official line. As for the claim that the post war boom period should have seen the largest temperature rise, a couple of things. First, please keep in mind that C02 is not the only thing to affect the climate. I shouldn’t have to keep pointing this out, but, based on this article, apparently I do. What is not mentioned is that, even at the time, science was beginning to think that aerosols could have a cooling effect on the climate:
Of the other strand, aerosol cooling, Rasool and Schneider, Science, July 1971, p 138, “Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and Aerosols: Effects of Large Increases on Global Climate” is the best exemplar. This contains the quote that quadrupling aerosols could decrease the mean surface temperature (of Earth) by as much as 3.5 degrees K. If sustained over a period of several years, such a temperature decrease could be sufficient to trigger an ice age!. But even this paper qualifies its predictions (whether or not aerosols would so increase was unknown) and speculates that nuclear power may have largely replaced fossil fuels as a means of energy production (thereby, presumably, removing the aerosol problem).
… The cooling trend from the 40’s to the 70’s now looks more like a slight interruption of an upward trend (e.g. here). It turns out that the northern hemisphere cooling was larger than the southern (consistent with the nowadays accepted interpreation that the cooling was largely caused by sulphate aerosols); at first, only NH records were available.
Any claim about C02 and the post-war period has to take that into account. This article does not, which implies that the documentary does not. (And don’t think we can get rid of global warming by pumping sulfate aerosols into the atmosphere. Thus were some of the things that were causing acid rain.)
Let’s move on — it has to get better:
Gary Calder, a former editor of New Scientist, is featured in the programme, and has just released a book claiming that clouds are the real reason behind climate change.
‘The Chilling Stars’ was written with Danish scientist Henrik Svensmark who published a scientific paper, claiming cosmic rays cause clouds to form, reducing the global temperature. The theory is shown in the programme.
Mr Calder said: “Henrik Svensmark saw that cloudiness varies according to how many atomic particles are coming in from exploded stars - when there are more cosmic rays, there are more clouds.
Sigh. Shoulda known. I have already dealt with this:
He claimed that the scientist had “hit the jackpot” in their search for evidence that cosmic rays produce clouds when, in fact, the experiment had produced no actual clouds. Nor, for that matter, does the op-ed explain why these “building blocks” are guaranteed to produce actual clouds. It is an interesting first step, but it is not the proof that the author of this op-ed claims it is.
Now, anyone who would make a documentary with these claims (the quotes and information in the article come from the documentary) without providing the rebuttals that I have here isn’t a documentary. It is either the work of full fledged idiot or a piece of propaganda. Interestingly enough, the last time the filmmaker made a documentary, the channel that carried it had to apologize for the distortions in it. And who did he distort? Wow, look at that: he distorted the words of environmentalists:
TC ruled that the programme makers “ distorted by selective editing” the views of Tony Juniper and other interviewees; and ” misled” participants over the “content and purpose of the programmes when they agreed to take part.”
What a surprise. A man who knowingly changed the meaning of the words of environmentalist comes out with a documentary “proving” that global warming is a lie. What an incredible coincidence that is. Once again, it seems that global warming skeptics are left with nothing but selective evidence, distortions, and dishonest omissions to rest their case upon. Not sure if I can blame, them really; it’s not as if they have any actual science on their side.
March 5th, 2007
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General, Climate Change |
23 comments
