Forbes contributor: people who dispute manmade global warming must be punished

Daniel S. writes:

Once again demonstrating the malevolence and totalitarian nature of the so-called environmentalist movement, which is little more than green Marxism, yet another global warming fanatic, Steve Zwick, writing at Forbes magazine (again we see the nexus between the establishment media and the most radical forms of leftism), has called for those who oppose the false cult of man-made global warming be forced to “pay.” According to Zwick, the so-called “denialists” (i.e. rational opponents of green Marxism) should be placed under government surveillance, have their healthy land confiscated, be forced onto “submerged islands,” have their private property destroyed, and have food withheld from them.

When I read Daniel’s e-mail about Zwick’s article, I couldn’t believe that such a thing had been published in the pro-business, libertarian-leaning Forbes. To my astonishment, it had been—another illustration of my theme of recent months that liberalism has shifted into hyper-drive. Here is what Zwick says:

We know who the active denialists are—not the people who buy the lies, mind you, but the people who create the lies. Let’s start keeping track of them now, and when the famines come, let’s make them pay. Let’s let their houses burn until the innocent are rescued. Let’s swap their safe land for submerged islands. Let’s force them to bear the cost of rising food prices.

They broke the climate. Why should the rest of us have to pay for it?

Obviously, the ideal solution is to get our collective act together and prevent this from happening, but we need a fall-back—a mechanism that puts responsibility for damages on the shoulders of the shirkers and deniers who cause it and profit from it, and we need to build that mechanism before the damages materialize.

“They broke the climate.” Human beings, who have absolutely no control over the climate of planet earth, or even the tiniest demonstrated influence over the climate of planet earth, “broke” the climate of planet earth, and must be punished for it. This is like saying that white people, who have absolutely no control over the IQ and other dispositions of blacks, are responsible for endemic black dysfunction and must be punished for it. What is the source of such madness? It is liberalism. Liberalism rejects the idea of a larger world which forms us and of which we are a part. It tells us that we are radically autonomous beings who create our own reality and our own values. But the liberal belief in man as the god of his own world doesn’t stop there. Since man creates his world in the good sense of the word, therefore he also creates his world in the bad sense of the word. Any bad things that exist, such as global warming or racial inequality of abilities, must be the result of human agency—of an evil human agency.

Further, we should remember that the warmists on whose behalf Zwick speaks are not doing anything more to save the climate than are the “denialists” whom he wants to punish. All the warmists have done is put forth wild and totally unworkable proposals, which, even if they were workable, could not make any appreciable difference in the climate. So what Zwick wants to punish the “denialists” for is not is not that they have somehow uniquely caused global warming, but that they disagree with the warmists’ dishonest and discredited theory as to the causes of global warming, and dispute the warmists’ proposals of how to stop global warming—proposals, principally Cap and Trade, which would accomplish nothing but break the world economy while enriching the friends of the politicians who passed them.

Under liberalism, the human will is supreme. Therefore the reason Zwick hates the denialists and wants to punish them, dispossess them, and crush them, is that they stand in the way of his will, of the will of all warmists. Under liberalism, those who resist the will of the liberals must be destroyed.

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April 23

An Indian living in the West writes:

That Forbes article you linked to is showing a kind of desperation among the AGW crowd that is making them write such nonsense. They have lost their minds.

LA writes:

I think the description of one’s adversaries as “desperate” is overdone. Everyone today constantly calls the other side “desperate.” Democrats, whatever the issue is, call Republicans “desperate.” Republicans, whatever the issue is, call Democrats “desperate.” I don’t buy it, especially with regard to the left.

Look at it this way: Is the left losing power, or gaining power? Consider the issues VFR has focused on in the last three months. The birth control mandate. The apotheosis of Sandra Fluke. The conviction of Dahrun Ravi. The national lynch mob against George Zimmerman. The dismissal of John Derbyshire from National Review. These events are not the marks of a left that is desperate, but of a left that is asserting itself with more power than ever, while the “conservatives” don’t stand for much of anything.

I’m not saying the left’s position is invulnerable and stable. But right now they are more energetic, willful, and tyrannical then ever. The fact that Forbes, a nominally conservative magazine, publishes an extreme leftist article calling for the punishment and financial ruin of people who take a position taken by virtually all conservatives, shows that the left is more extreme and has more power than ever before, not that the left is desperate.

You reasonably conclude that the global warmists (or what do we call them now, the climate changeists?) are desperate because their claims have been shattered, not just by conservatives, but by climate scientists. Your conclusion is based on the assumption that we live in a world led by reason. That assumption is incorrect. We live in a world controlled by the left, and in such a world the demonstrated falsity of a statement is no objection to it.

Similarly, Alan Dershowitz said that the prosecutors in the George Zimmerman case had acted “stupidly” by making claims in the Affidavit of Probable Cause that were unsustainable. Dershowitz, like you, assumes that we still live in a rational world, where a demonstrably false statement by a prosecutor hurts his case and damages his credibility. But we don’t live in such a world. We live in a leftist world, a world where, for example, major media news organization have continued with impunity to use a several-year-old photograph of Trayvon Martin that makes him look much younger, more innocent, and less formidable than he actually looked the night he died. When the media keep publishing with impunity a photograph even though it’s false and everyone knows its false, are they demonstrating their “desperateness,” or are they demonstrating their ever-increasing power? I say it’s the latter.

Nile McCoy writes:

In the case of the whether the left is desperate or gaining ground, I look back to the issues of the 1990s in the United States body politic. The left was unafraid to heavily push gun control was huge, partial birth abortion, but they were afraid to push their environmental extremism agenda. Now they run away both locally and nationally from gun control, they don’t try to defend partial abortion in specific (the issue is now obfuscated by trying to redefine personhood), and their environmental extremism agenda was simply in its infancy compared to where it is today.

The issues that are being pushed now: trying to punish climate change deniers; race, gender, and sexual orientation “extra” equality; and others that would take too long to list or go delve (the criminal mindset of the modern Democrat party), could very well be a few years from becoming bad politics for the Democrats. They still want to implement gun control on a massive national, perhaps international, level, but the left will never make it an issue for its opponents to rally against at the ballot box.

James P. writes:

I don’t read Forbes, but I find it interesting that Forbes has become such a bastion of Leftism as indicated recently; a Forbes author led the charge against Derbyshire, and now another Forbes author is pushing AGW.

Ken Hechtman writes:

“Desperate” is a strong word. But you can certainly hear a tone of frustration coming from environmentalists today that wasn’t there when global warming first surfaced as an issue in the late 1980s.

If global warming really is a fraud, that information is VERY closely held within the movement. The typical “warmist” you’ll see on TV or read in the papers believes what he’s saying. He believes the problem is real and that after 25 years we should be well on the way to solving it. He’s mad as hell that after 25 years, he has to engage the same arguments by the same fossil-fuel industry shills about whether the problem even exists.

LA replies:

I’m surprised that Mr. Hechtman would make an argument so easy to shoot down. An ideological movement such as AGW is like an army, with generals, officers, and foot soldiers. The soldiers aren’t privy to the information possessed by the generals. A fraud being conducted by the leaders of the AWG movement is not going to be recognized and understood by the rank and file; they’re just repeating the arguments they’ve heard from the leaders. So the fact that the rank and file don’t know about the fraudulent nature of many of the key AWG statements, far from indicating that the charge of fraud is false, is exactly what one would expect in the case of such a fraud.

Ken Hechtman replies to LA:

Yes and anyone who runs away from the helicopters is VC and anyone who stands his ground is well-disciplined VC. You credit the left with a level of discipline it hasn’t had in at least 60 years. The Communist Party was a military hierarchy. The New Left is an unruly mob. It’s not capable of keeping a secret that big for that long.

Let me put it this way: There are campaigns on the left that I know for a fact are completely or partially frauds because I’ve been told so by people on the inside. If you ask around about the Greenpeace seal hunt campaign, or Leonard Peltier or the International Solidarity Movement, you won’t find it that hard to get the truth. There are campaigns I so strongly suspect are frauds that when they’re exposed it’ll surprise me as little as an exposé on professional wrestling. But if global warming turns out to be a fraud I’ll be as surprised as if I found out that all of World War II was shot on a Hollywood sound stage

LA replies:

Perhaps my analogy was not well chosen. The point of the analogy was not to suggest military-style discipline or secrecy in the AGW movement, but simply a difference of expertise and knowledge. The leaders, the people who are generating the AWG data, ideas, and arguments, know what they are doing, and are aware of their own deceits. The regular warmists believe what the leaders tell them, just as the general public does—or, rather, used to, until the lies and falsehoods began to be revealed.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 22, 2012 09:14 PM | Send