Paul Joseph Watson writes at Summit News Top ‘Fact Checker’ USA Today Forced to Delete Articles Over Fabricated Sources. Excerpts in italics with my bolds. H/T Tyler Durden
USA Today, which is used as a ‘fact checker’ by social media platforms, was forced to delete 23 articles from its website after an investigation found one of its reporters had fabricated sources.
Well, this is awkward.
The news outlet has an entire section of its website dedicated to ‘fact checking’ and is used by Facebook to ‘fact check’ stories published by other outlets, downranking them in algorithms in a form of soft censorship.
However, it appears as though USA Today should have devoted more resources to fact checking itself before publishing articles by its own staff.
“USA Today’s breaking news reporter Gabriela Miranda fabricated sources and misappropriated quotes for stories, the news outlet confirmed on Thursday. The outlet conducted an internal audit after receiving an “external correction request” on one of its published stories,” reports Breitbart.
The 23 articles which were removed for not meeting the paper’s “editorial standards” included pieces on the Texas abortion ban, anti-vaxxer content and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Miranda, who has now resigned from her position, “took steps to deceive investigators by producing false evidence of her news gathering, including recordings of interviews,” according to the New York Times.
“After receiving an external correction request, USA TODAY audited the reporting work of Gabriela Miranda. The audit revealed that some individuals quoted were not affiliated with the organizations claimed and appeared to be fabricated. The existence of other individuals quoted could not be independently verified. In addition, some stories included quotes that should have been credited to others.”
As we previously highlighted, USA Today was also forced to hastily delete a series of tweets which critics said were tantamount to the normalization of pedophilia after the newspaper cited “science” to assert that pedophilia was “determined in the womb.”
The newspaper was also lambasted by critics after it ‘fact checked’ as “true” claims that an official Trump 2020 t-shirt features a ‘Nazi symbol’.
In February last year, the news outlet published an op-ed which denounced Tom Bradyfor refusing to walk back his previous support for Donald Trump and for being “white.”
The newspaper also had to fire their ‘race and inclusion’ editor Hemal Jhaveri after she falsely blamed the Boulder supermarket shooting on white people.
In summary, USA Today has a severe bias problem and shouldn’t be used as a non-partisan ‘fact checker’.
John Ridgway has provided an excellent framework for skeptics to examine and respond to claims from believers in global warming/climate change. His essay at Climate Scepticism is Deconstructing Scepticism: The True FLICC. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added comments.
Overview
I have modified slightly the FLICC components to serve as a list of actions making up a skeptical approach to an alarmist claim. IOW this is a checklist for applying critical intelligence to alarmist discourse in the public arena. The Summary can be stated thusly:
♦ Follow the Data
Find and follow the data and facts to where they lead
♦ Look for full risk profile
Look for a complete assessment of risks and costs from proposed policies
♦ Interrogate causal claims
Inquire into claimed cause-effect relationships
♦ Compile contrary explanations
Construct an organized view of contradictory evidence to the theory
♦ Confront cultural bias
Challenge attempts to promote consensus story with flimsy coincidence
A Case In Point
John Ridgway illustrates how this method works in a comment:
It tells of a group of experts theorizing that 200,000 coastal properties are soon to be lost due to climate change. Indeed, it “is already happening” as far as Happisburg on the Norfolk coast is concerned. Coastal erosion is indeed a problem there.
But did the experts take into account that the data shows no acceleration of erosion over the last 2000 years? No.
Have they acknowledge the fact that erosion on the East coast is a legacy of glaciation? No.
Below is Ridgway’s text regarding this thought process, followed by a synopsis of his discussion of the five elements. Text is in italics with my bolds.
As part of the anthropogenic climate change debate, and when discussing the proposed plans for transition to Net Zero, efforts have been made to analyse the thinking that underpins the typical sceptic’s position. These analyses have universally presupposed that such scepticism stubbornly persists in the face of overwhelming evidence, as reflected in the widespread use of the term ‘denier’. Consequently, they are based upon taxonomies of flawed reasoning and methods of deception and misinformation.1
However, by taking such a prejudicial approach, the analyses have invariably failed to acknowledge the ideological, philosophical and psychological bases for sceptical thinking.The following taxonomy redresses that failing and, as a result, offers a more pertinent analysis that avoids the worst excesses of opinionated philippic. The taxonomy identifies a basic set of ideologies and attitudes that feature prominently in the typical climate change sceptic’s case. For my taxonomy I have chosen the acronym FLICC:2
Follow data but distrust judgement and speculation
i.e. value empirical evidence over theory and conjecture.
Look for the full risk profile
i.e. when considering the management of risks and uncertainties, demand that those associated with mitigating and preventative measures are also taken into account.
Interrogate causal arguments
i.e. demand that both necessity and sufficiency form the basis of a causal analysis.
Contrariness
i.e. distrust consensus as an indicator of epistemological value.
Cultural awareness
i.e. never underestimate the extent to which a society can fabricate a truth for its own purposes.
All of the above have a long and legitimate history outside the field of climate science. The suggestion that they are not being applied in good faith by climate change sceptics falls beyond the remit of taxonomical analysis and strays into the territory of propaganda and ad hominem.
The five ideologies and attitudes of climate change scepticism introduced above are now discussed in greater detail.
Following the data
Above all else, the sceptical approach is characterized by a reluctance to draw conclusions from a given body of evidence. When it comes to evidence supporting the idea of a ‘climate crisis’, such reluctance is judged by many to be pathological and indicative of motivated reasoning. Cognitive scientists use the term ‘conservative belief revision’ to refer to an undue reluctance to update beliefs in accordance with a new body of evidence. More precisely, when the individual retains the view that events have a random pattern, thereby downplaying the possibility of a causative factor, the term used is ‘slothful induction’. Either way, the presupposition is that the individual is committing a logical fallacy resulting from cognitive bias.
However, far from being a pathology of thinking, such reluctance has its legitimate foundations in Pyrrhonian philosophy and, when properly understood, it can be seen as an important thinking strategy.3 Conservative belief revision and slothful induction can indeed lead to false conclusions but, more importantly, the error most commonly encountered when making decisions under uncertainty (and the one with the greatest potential for damage) is to downplay unknown and possibly random factors and instead construct a narrative that overstates and prejudges causation. This tendency is central to the human condition and it lies at the heart of our failure to foresee the unexpected – this is the truly important cognitive bias that the sceptic seeks to avoid.
The empirical sceptic is cognisant of evidence and allows the formulation of theories but treats them with considerable caution due to the many ways in which such theories often entail unwarranted presupposition.
The drivers behind this problem are the propensity of the human mind to seek patterns, to construct narratives that hide complexities, to over-emphasise the causative role played by human agents and to under-emphasise the role played by external and possibly random factors. Ultimately, it is a problem regarding the comprehension of uncertainty — we comprehend in a manner that has served us well in evolutionary terms but has left us vulnerable to unprecedented, high consequence events.
It is often said that a true sceptic is one who is prepared to accept the prevailing theory once the evidence is ‘overwhelming’. The climate change sceptic’s reluctance to do so is taken as an indication that he or she is not a true sceptic. However, we see here that true scepticism lies in the willingness to challenge the idea that the evidence is overwhelming – it only seems overwhelming to those who fail to recognise the ‘theorizing disease’ and lack the resolve to resist it. Secondly, there cannot be a climate change sceptic alive who is not painfully aware of the humiliation handed out to those who resist the theorizing.
In practice, the theorizing and the narratives that trouble the empirical sceptic take many forms. It can be seen in:
♦ over-dependence upon mathematical models for which the tuning owes more to art than science.
♦ readiness to treat the output of such models as data resulting from experiment, rather than the hypotheses they are.
♦ lack of regard for ontological uncertainty (i.e. the unknown unknowns which, due to their very nature, the models do not address).
♦ emergence of story-telling as a primary weapon in the armoury of extreme weather event attribution.
♦ willingness to commit trillions of pounds to courses of action that are predicated upon Representative Concentration Pathways and economic models that are the ‘theorizing disease’ writ large.
♦ contributions of the myriad of activists who seek to portray the issues in a narrative form laden with social justice and other ethical considerations.
♦ imaginative but simplistic portrayals of climate change sceptics and their motives; portrayals that are drawing categorical conclusions that cannot possibly be justified given the ‘evidence’ offered. And;
♦ any narrative that turns out to be unfounded when one follows the data.
Climate change may have its basis in science and data, but this basis has long since been overtaken by a plethora of theorizing and causal narrative that sometimes appears to have taken on a life of its own. Is this what settled science is supposed to look like?
Looking for the full risk profile
Almost as fundamental as the sceptic’s resistance to theorizing and narrative is his or her appreciation that the management of anthropogenic warming (particularly the transition to Net Zero) is an undertaking beset with risk and uncertainty. This concern reflects a fundamental principle of risk management: proposed actions to tackle a risk are often in themselves problematic and so a full risk analysis is not complete until it can be confirmed that the net risk will decrease following the actions proposed.7
Firstly, the narrative of existential risk is rejected on the grounds of empirical scepticism (the evidence for an existential threat is not overwhelming, it is underwhelming).
Secondly, even if the narrative is accepted, it has not been reliably demonstrated that the proposal for Net Zero transition is free from existential or extreme risks.
Indeed, given the dominant role played by the ‘theorizing disease’ and how it lies behind our inability to envisage the unprecedented high consequence event, there is every reason to believe that the proposals for Net Zero transition should be equally subject to the precautionary principle. The fact that they are not is indicative of a double standard being applied. The argument seems to run as follows: There is no uncertainty regarding the physical risk posed by climate change, but if there were it would only add to the imperative for action. There is also no uncertainty regarding the transition risk, but if there were it could be ignored because one can only apply the precautionary principle once!
This is precisely the sort of inconsistency one encounters when uncertainties are rationalised away in order to support the favoured narrative.
The upshot of this double standard is that the activists appear to be proceeding with two very different risk management frameworks depending upon whether physical or transition risk is being considered. As a result, risks associated with renewable energy security, the environmental damage associated with proposals to reduce carbon emissions and the potentially catastrophic effects of the inevitable global economic shock are all played down or explained away.
Looking for the full risk profile is a basic of risk management practice. The fact that it is seen as a ploy used only by those wishing to oppose the management of anthropogenic climate change is both odd and worrying. It is indeed important to the sceptic, but it should be important to everyone.
Interrogating causal arguments
For many years we have been told that anthropogenic climate change will make bad things happen. These dire predictions were supposed to galvanize the world into action but that didn’t happen, no doubt partly due to the extent to which such predictions repeatedly failed to come true (as, for example, with the predictions of the disappearance of Arctic sea ice). . .This is one good reason for the empirical sceptic to distrust the narrative,8 but an even better one lies in the very concept of causation.
A major purpose of narrative is to reduce complexity so that the ‘truth’ can shine through. This is particularly the case with causal narratives. We all want executive summaries and sound bites such as ‘Y happened because of X’. But very few of us are interested in examining exactly what we mean by such statements – very few except, of course, for the empirical sceptics. In a messy world in which many factors may be at play, the more pertinent questions are:
♦ To what extent was X necessary for Y to happen? ♦ To what extent was X sufficient for Y to happen?
The vast majority of the extreme weather event attribution narrative is focused upon the first question and very little attention is paid to the second; at least not in the many press bulletins issued. Basically, we are told that the event was virtually impossible without climate change, but very little is said regarding whether climate change on its own was enough.
This problem of oversimplification is even more worrying once one starts to examine consequential damages whilst failing to take into account man-made failings such as those that exacerbate the impacts of floods and forest fires.9 The oversimplification of causal narrative is not restricted to weather-related events, of course. Climate change, we are told, is wreaking havoc with the flora and fauna and many species are dying out as a result. However, when such claims are examined more closely,10 it is invariably the case that climate change has been lumped in with a number of other factors that are destroying habitat.
When climate change sceptics point this out they are, of course, accused of cherry-picking. The truth, however, is that their insistence that the extended causal narrative of necessity and sufficiency should be respected is nothing more than the consequence of following the data and looking for the full risk profile.
Contrariness
The climate change debate is all about making decisions under uncertainty, so it is little surprise that gaining consensus is seen as centrally important. Uncertainty is reduced when the evidence is overwhelming and it is tempting to believe that the high level of consensus amongst climate scientists surely points towards there being overwhelming evidence. If one accepts this logic then the sceptic’s refusal to accept the consensus is just another manifestation of his or her denial.
Except, of course, an empirical sceptic would not accept this logic. Consensus does not result from a simple examination of concordant evidence, it is instead the fruit of the tendentious theorizing and simplifying narrative that the empirical sceptic intuitively distrusts. As explained above, there are a number of drivers that cause such theories and narratives to entail unwarranted presupposition, and it is naïve to believe that scientists are immune to such drivers.
However, the fact remains that consensus on beliefs is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for presuming that these beliefs constitute shared knowledge. It is only when a consensus on beliefs is uncoerced, uniquely heterogeneous and large, that a shared knowledge provides the best explanation of a given consensus.11 The notion that a scientific consensus can be trusted because scientists are permanently seeking to challenge accepted views is simplistic at best.
It is actually far from obvious that in climate science the conditions have been met for consensus to be a reliable indicator of shared knowledge.
Contrariness simply comes with the territory of being an empirical sceptic. The evidence of consensus is there to be seen, but the amount of theorizing and narrative required for its genesis, together with the social dimension to consensus generation, are enough for the empirical sceptic to treat the whole matter of consensus with a great deal of caution.
Cultural awareness
There has been a great deal said already regarding the culture wars surrounding issues such as the threat posed by anthropogenic climate change. Most of the concerns are directed at the sceptic, who for reasons never properly explained is deemed to be the instigator of the conflict. However, it is the sceptic who chooses to point out that the value-laden arguments offered by climate activists are best understood as part of a wider cultural movement in which rationality is subordinate to in-group versus outgroup dynamics.
Psychological, ethical and spiritual needs lie at the heart of the development of culture and so the adoption of the climate change phenomenon in service of these needs has to be seen as essentially a cultural power play. The dangers of uncritically accepting the fruits of theorizing and narrative are only the beginning of the empirical sceptic’s concerns. Beyond that is the concern that the direction the debate is taking is not even a matter of empiricism – data analysis has little to offer when so much depends upon whether the phenomenon is subsequently to be described as warming or heating. It is for this reason that much of the sceptic’s attention is directed towards the manner in which the science features in our culture rather than the science itself. Such are our psychological, ethical and spiritual needs, that we must not underestimate the extent to which ostensibly scientific output can be moulded in their service.
Conclusions
Taxonomies of thinking should not be treated too seriously. Whilst I hope that I have offered here a welcome antidote to the diatribe that often masquerades as a scholarly appraisal of climate change scepticism, it remains the case that the form that scepticism takes will be unique to the individual. I could not hope to cover all aspects of climate change scepticism in the limited space available to me, but it remains my belief that there are unifying principles that can be identified.
Central to these is the concept of the empirical sceptic and the need to understand that there are sound reasons to treat theorizing and simplifying narratives with extreme caution. The empirical sceptic resists the temptation to theorize, preferring instead to keep an open mind on the interpretation of the evidence. This is far from being self-serving denialism; it is instead a self-denying servitude to the data.
That said, I cannot believe that there would be any activist who, upon reading this account, would see a reason to modify their opinions regarding the bad faith and irrationality that lies behind scepticism. This, unfortunately, is only to be expected given that such opinions are themselves the result of theorizing and simplifying narrative.
Footnote:
While the above focuses on climate alarmism, there are many other social and political initiatives that are theory-driven, suffering from inadequate attention to analysis by empirical sceptics. One has only to note corporate and governmental programs based on Critical Race or Gender theories. In addition, COVID policies in advanced nations ignored the required full risk profiling, as well as overturning decades of epidemiological knowledge in favor of models and experimental gene therapies proposed by Big Pharma.
The attitudes and opinions of today’s so-called “elite” – those public-opinion formers who Deirdre McCloskey calls “the clerisy” – are childish. Most journalists and writers working for most premier media and entertainment companies, along with most professors and public intellectuals, think, talk, and write about society with the insight of kindergartners.
This sad truth is masked by the one feature that does distinguish the clerisy from young children: verbal virtuosity. Yet beneath the fine words, beautiful phrases, arresting metaphors, and affected allusions lies a notable immaturity of thought.
Every social and economic problem is believed to have a solution,
and that solution is almost always superficial.
Unlike children, adults understand that living life well begins with accepting the inescapability of trade-offs. Contrary to what you might have heard, you cannot “have it all.” You cannot have more of this thing unless you’re willing to have less of that other thing. And what’s true for you as an individual is true for any group of individuals. We Americans cannot have our government artificially raise the cost of producing and using carbon fuels unless we are willing to pay higher prices at the pump and, thus, have less income to spend on acquiring other goods and services. We cannot use money creation to ease the pain today of COVID lockdowns without enduring the greater pain tomorrow of inflation.
While children stomp their little feet in protest when confronted with the need to make trade-offs, the necessity of trade-offs is accepted as a matter of course by adults.
No less importantly, adults, unlike children, are not beguiled by the superficial.
Pay close attention to how the clerisy (who are mostly, although not exclusively, Progressives) propose to ‘solve’ almost any problem, real or imaginary. You’ll discover that the proposed ‘solution’ is superficial; it’s rooted in the naïve assumption that social reality beyond what is immediately observable either doesn’t exist or is unaffected by attempts to rearrange surface phenomena. In the clerisy’s view, the only reality that matters is the reality that is easily seen and seemingly easily manipulated with coercion.
The clerisy’s proposed ‘solutions,’ therefore, involve simply rearranging,
or attempting to rearrange, surface phenomena.
♦ Do some people use guns to murder other people? Yes, sadly. The clerisy’s superficial ‘solution’ to this real problem is to outlaw guns.
♦ Do some people have substantially higher net financial worths than other people? Yes. The clerisy’s juvenile ‘solution’ to this fake problem is to heavily tax the rich and transfer the proceeds to the less rich.
♦ Are some workers paid wages that are too low to support a family in modern America? Yes. The clerisy’s simplistic ‘solution’ to this fake problem – “fake” because most workers earning such low wages are not heads of households – is to have government prohibit the payment of wages below some stipulated minimum.
♦ Do some people suffer substantial property damage, or even loss of life, because of hurricanes, droughts, and other bouts of severe weather? Yes. The clerisy’s lazy ‘solution’ to this real problem focuses on changing the weather by reducing the emissions of an element, carbon, that is now (too simplistically) believed to heavily determine the weather.
♦ Do prices of many ‘essential’ goods and services rise significantly in the immediate aftermath of natural disasters? Yes. The clerisy’s counterproductive ‘solution’ to this fake problem, “counterproductive” and “fake” because these high prices accurately reflect and signal underlying economic realities, is to prohibit the charging and payment of these high prices.
♦ When inflationary pressures build up because of excessive monetary growth, are these pressures vented in the form of rising prices? Yes indeed. The clerisy’s infantile ‘solution’ to the very real problem of inflation is to blame it on greed while raising taxes on profits.
♦ Is the SARS-CoV-2 virus contagious and potentially dangerous to humans? Yes. The clerisy’s simple-minded ‘solution’ to this real problem is to forcibly prevent people from mingling with each other.
♦ Do many Americans still not receive K-12 schooling of minimum acceptable quality? Yes. The clerisy’s lazy ‘solution’ to this real problem is to give pay raises to teachers and spend more money on school administrators.
♦ Do some American workers lose jobs when American consumers buy more imports? Yes. The clerisy’s ‘solution’ is to obstruct consumers’ ability to buy imports.
♦ Are some people bigoted and beset with irrational dislike or fear of blacks, gays, lesbians, and bisexuals? Yes. The clerisy’s ‘solution’ to this real problem is to outlaw “hate” and to compel bigoted persons to behave as if they aren’t bigoted.
♦ Do many persons who are eligible to vote in political elections refrain from voting? Yes. The ‘solution’ favored by at least some of the clerisy to this fake problem – “fake” because in a free society each person has a right to refrain from participating in politics – is to make voting mandatory.
The above list of simplistic and superficial ‘solutions’ to problems real and imaginary
can easily be expanded.
The clerisy, mistaking words for realities, assumes that success at verbally describing realities more to their liking proves that these imagined realities can be made real by merely rearranging the relevant surface phenomena. Members of the clerisy ignore unintended consequences. And they overlook the fact that many of the social and economic realities that they abhor are the result, not of villainy or of correctible imperfections, but of complex trade-offs made by countless individuals.
Social engineering appears doable only to those persons who, seeing only a relatively few surface phenomena, are blind to the astonishing complexity that is ever-churning beneath the surface to create those surface phenomena. To such persons, social reality appears as it does to a child:simple and easily manipulated to achieve whatever are the desires that motivate the manipulators.
The clerisy’s ranks are filled overwhelmingly with simple-minded people who mistake their felicity with words and their good intentions for serious thinking. They convey to each other, and to the unsuspecting public, the appearance of being deep thinkers while seldom thinking with more sophistication and nuance than is on display daily in every classroom of kindergartners.
You’d think that politicians had learned to forego climate virtue-signaling after seeing the lawfare tactics that they will suffer. And yet, Finland bravely goes where smarter angels fear to tread. As the Helsinki Times reports New Climate Change Act into force in July. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.
The Climate Change Act lays the foundation for national work on climate change in Finland. The reformed Act sets emission reductions targets for 2030, 2040 and 2050. Now the target of a carbon-neutral Finland by 2035 has for the first time been laid down by law.
The Government submitted the bill for approval on 9 June. The President of the Republic is to approve the Act on 10 June and it will enter into force on 1 July 2022.
“The new Climate Change Act is vital for Finland. The Climate Change Act ensures that ambitious climate work will continue across government terms. The Act shows the world how we can built a carbon-neutral welfare state by 2035. It is also a strong signal for companies that in Finland clean solutions are well worth investing in,” says Minister of the Environment and Climate Change Maria Ohisalo.
Minister of the Environment and Climate Change Maria Ohisalo at a press event in Helsinki. LEHTIKUVA
The Act lays down provisions on the climate change policy plans. The scope of the Act will be extended to also cover emissions from the land use sector, i.e. land use, forestry and agriculture, and it will for the first time include the objective to strengthen carbon sinks.
“Including land use in the Climate Change Act is a significant improvement. We have a lot of opportunities to reduce emissions and strengthen carbon sinks in the land use sector – in forests, construction and agriculture,” Minister Ohisalo says.
The previous Climate Change Act entered into force in 2015, and it set an emission reduction target only for 2050. The new Climate Change Act will include emission reduction targets for 2030 and 2040 that are based on the recommendations of the Finnish Climate Change Panel, and the target for 2050 will be updated.
The emission reduction targets are -60% by 2030, -80% by 2040 and at least -90% but aiming at -95% by 2050, compared to the levels in 1990.
Finns have lost any room to maneuver, or to walk back ill-advised policies should the future be cooler rather than the warming of which they are so certain. The lawyers will be all over them to prevent any escape. To use another metaphor, they are lobsters who put themselves into the pots; there will be no getting out or going free.
The 1991 blockbuster movie revolved around meek, silent victims preyed upon by malevolent believers in their warped, twisted view of the world. A comparison can be drawn between how today’s conservative thinkers and politicians respond to advocates of the pernicious global warming/climate change ideology. Instead of challenging and pushing back against CO2 hysteria, and speaking out with a rational climate perspective, Republicans in the US, and Conservatives in Canada and elsewhere are meek and silent lambs in the face of this energy slaughter. Worse, when they do speak it is to usually to pander and try to appease offering proposals for things like carbon taxes or other non-remedies for a non-problem, essentially ceding the case to leftists.
Tom Harris of International Climate Science Coalition – Canada explains in his Financial Post article Tom Harris: The Tories should shape climate opinion, not just respond to it. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images from Friends of Science billboard campaign.
Grassroots conservatives need to ask CPC leadership candidates why, if they really support Canadian energy, they don’t contest climate alarmism
When CPC leadership candidates defend Canadian oil and gas, they either support, acquiesce to, or say nothing about the climate scare. PHOTO BY JOE RAEDLE/GETTY IMAGES
The common wisdom among candidates for leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) is that the party must have a credible plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions if it is to have a fighting chance to form the next government. As former Quebec premier Jean Charest said in the Edmonton debate on May 11, “we will not be elected as a political party if we’re not credible” about putting a price on carbon for large emitters.
The strategists’ thinking is that, given current public support for reducing emissions to “stop climate change,” the CPC has no choice but to follow along or risk electoral defeat. And public opinion polls, like one from Abacus Data last October, do typically find that a majority of Canadians, in that poll 66 per cent, “would like to see governments in Canada put more emphasis on reducing emissions.”
But the strategists are wrong. The candidates are giving up a golden opportunity to win the votes, not just of the many grassroots conservatives who oppose the climate scare,
but of Canadians at large in the next election.
A 2012 paper published in the journal Climatic Change suggests why. Three scholars — Robert J. Brulle of Drexel University, Jason Carmichael of McGill and J. Craig Jenkins of Ohio State — looked at 74 separate surveys over a nine-year period to try to figure out which factors had the greatest influence on public views on climate change. They considered five possibilities: extreme weather events, scientific information, media coverage, advocacy, and what politicians and political parties were saying on the subject. Surprisingly, they found that neither extreme weather events nor the promulgation of scientific information had a significant impact. Media coverage did, but the strongest effect came from the positions of competing politicians and political parties.
When politicians across the political spectrum supported the narrative
of man-made climate change, the public’s demand for action rose.
We see that today in Canada, with all major political parties supporting action on greenhouse gas emissions. On the other hand, when politicians questioned the narrative, as Congressional Republicans frequently did, the public’s demand for action dropped — substantially. The scholars’ analysis supported the 2009 conclusion of Harvard University’s Susan McDonald that: “When elites have consensus, the public follows suit and the issue becomes mainstreamed.
When elites disagree, polarization occurs, citizens rely on other indicators to make up their minds.”
These findings are consistent with other studies that have demonstrated the leading role politicians and political parties play in shaping public opinion on issues. It’s a little like the tail wagging the dog but public opinion supporting government climate policy seems at least partly due to the lack of coherent opposition to the policy on the part of opinion-makers — especially elected officials.
If that’s true, then instead of citing public opinion polls that support climate policies they may be skeptical of, why don’t politicians and political strategists work to change public opinion? As conservative strategist and former policy aide to Stephen Harper, Joseph Ben-Ami, put it in a 2021 study for ICSC-Canada: “The answer may come down to inexperienced politicians and their advisers not understanding their power to influence public opinion. They look at polls and conclude that they have no hope of getting elected unless they climb onto the current public opinion bandwagon.
They fail to understand that the reason the public believes what it does is largely because they (politicians) aren’t making the opposite case.”
This phenomenon is widespread in Canada, and on many topics, not just climate change. At all levels of government, politicians use language and promote policies they very likely disagree with because they think public opinion leaves them no choice. As Ben-Ami argues, the result is a “feedback loop” where politicians’ “response” to public opinion is in reality the principal driver of the public opinion to which they are supposedly responding. The more obsequious their responses, the more entrenched that public opinion becomes, which then results in even more obsequious responses from even more frightened politicians.
Climate activists don’t pull their punches. They want an end
to all of Canada’s oil and gas development as soon as possible.
And, sadly, they are being helped by many in the press, government and other institutions. But a fast phase-out would be immensely costly. Besides contributing $105 billion to Canada’s GDP in 2020, oil and gas provided $10 billion in average annual revenue to governments between 2017 and 2019. Yet, when CPC leadership candidates defend Canadian oil and gas, they either support, acquiesce to, or say nothing about the climate scare.
Grassroots conservatives need to ask the candidates why, if they really support Canadian energy, they don’t contest climate alarmism, which is by far the greatest threat to that energy.
Tom Harris is executive director of International Climate Science Coalition – Canada.
Footnote:
The billboards are from a campaign to inform the public by Friends of Science, not to be confused with the predatory Fiends Friends of the Earth in the UK.
Chapter One of Trucking For Freedom is titled; “How We Got Here”. The objective of this episode is to adequately introduce the political and social climate leading up to the truckers’ convoy through the lens of C19 mandates, news footage, government officials, and views from Canadian citizens. A philosophic analysis of freedoms, rights, and responsibilities is also portrayed along with reenactments and dramatizations to convey the story. The chapter ends on a cliffhanger…leaving the viewer on a precipice as interest in the Freedom Convoy surges.
Ron Stein provides a briefing from California on the energy debacle imposed by clueless political leaders on ordinary Americans. Excerpts in italics with my bolds H/T CFACT
Please enjoy and share this educational energy literacy briefing, a 5-minute video by Costa Mesa Brief at a California Chevron gas station. The video talks about the outrageous gas prices and tells us what is behind the increases, where it is heading and what, if anything, we can do about it. I think you will find his no-nonsense approach and perspective unique, sobering and very informative.
The video explains the impact on fuel prices from California government-imposed reductions in the supply chain of crude oil has increased imported crude oil from foreign countries from 5% in 1992 to more than 60% today of total consumption. Biden’s pledge stating, “we are going to get rid of fossil fuels,” is impacting fuel prices.
At today’s price of crude oil well above $100 per barrel, the imported crude oil costs California more than $150 million dollars a day, yes, everyday, being paid to oil-rich foreign countries, depriving Californians of jobs and business opportunities, and forcing drivers to pay premium prices for fuel.
Californians are consuming more than 50 million gallons of fuel daily for its 35 million vehicles, which is slightly more than one gallon per day per vehicle.
Californians continue to pay more than $1.00 more per gallon of fuel than the rest of the country primarily for the State, Federal and Local taxes, and the Government environmental compliance programs such as the Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS), Cap and Trade, Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), and the Underground Storage Tax. Those costs ‘dumped” onto the posted price at the pump are not transparent to the public.
The demand for fuels to move the heavy-weight and long-range needs of more than 50,000 jets for the military, commercial, private and the President’s Air Force One, and the more than 50,000 merchant ships that move products throughout the world are also manufactured from the supply of crude oil.
Life Without Oil is NOT AS SIMPLE AS YOU MAY THINK as renewable energy is only intermittent electricity from breezes and sunshine as NEITHER wind turbines nor solar panels can manufacture anything for society. Climate change may impact humanity, but being mandated to live without the more than 6,000 products and the various fuels manufactured from crude oil will necessitate lifestyles being mandated back to the horse and buggy days of the 1800’s.
When the public continues to demand increasing needs for the transportation fuels and the products made from crude oil, limiting its supply by governments and the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) movement to manufacture those items is a guarantee for today’s shortages and inflation.
Life without crude oil could be the greatest threat to civilization’s eight billion residents, resulting in billions of fatalities from diseases, malnutrition, and weather-related deaths.
There are many places where people are worried about erratic and destructive behavior by those inflamed with fear of global warming/climate change. In the past they have been known to vandalize pipelines delivering natural gas or oil critical for energy needs. These days climatists are more and more frantic, and for example, given to slashing tires on SUVs, thinking them to be “Axles of Evil.”
Fortunately, we have news from Paris that there may be a way for these fevered persons to vent their fears, thereby feeling better, and leaving the rest of us alone. I refer to the reported action by one of these poor souls attacking the image of Mona Lisa in the Louvre with a cream pie in order to save the planet from climate change. Of course the painting is behind bulletproof glass, so it was not damaged. But the release of passion was cathartic, followed by the climatist being taken away for admission to the Paris Home for the Bewildered.
The good news is that from now on there could be at local carnivals or at county fairs booths like those above where other such inflamed activists could act out their passion against images of Mona Lisa, and thus, perhaps regain reason and common sense. Let us all hope for the best for these tortured souls.
There is a lot of mumbo jumbo psych talk circulating around the dead bodies in Uvalde, a town I knew pretty well because I consulted frequently with their hospital administrator.
I want to remind readers of the problem of personality disorders (PD) and distinguish PD from mental illness.
PD is pattern of anti-social or dysfunctional behavior that is not caused by mental illness but by bad manners and bad social adaptation. There are 3 groups of personality disorders. In the Emergency Medicine part of my life,
I taught residents that PDs are the weird, the wild, and the withdrawn.
The killers and criminals are usually in the wild group, who are the most anti-social and disruptive.
Characterized by suspiciousness and a deep mistrust of people, paranoid personalities often think of others as manipulative, cunning or dishonest. This kind of a person may appear guarded, secretive, and excessively critical. More..
· Schizoid personality disorder
People with schizoid personalities are emotionally distant and tend to prefer to be alone. They are generally immersed in their own thoughts and have little interest in bonding and intimacy with others. More..
· Schizotypal personality disorder
This disorder is characterized by odd and unusual “magical” beliefs. These individuals may have an eccentric way of behaving or dressing. They also tend to display outlandish beliefs such as believing that they can see the future or travel to other dimensions.
People with this condition often have difficulty connecting with others and establishing long term relationships. Overtime, they may develop a fear of social gatherings. More..
Class B (The Wild)
Dramatic, emotional or erratic disorders (wild)
· Antisocial/psychopath personality disorder
Individuals with this disorder are known to be manipulative, irresponsible, and have a history of legal difficulties. They show little respect for the rights of others and feel no remorse for their actions. They also leave a trail of unfulfilled promises and broken hearts.
Antisocial personalities are also at high risk for drug abuse (e.g., alcoholism; meth) since many are rush seekers. While they seldom suffer from depression or anxiety, they often use drugs to relieve boredom and irritability. More.. (Dunn note–this PD is male dominant)
· Borderline personality disorder
Borderline personalities are impulsive and have extreme views of people as either all good or bad.
These people are unstable in relationships and have a strong fear of abandonment. They may form an intense personal attachment with someone they barely know and end it without no apparent reason. They might also engage in a pull and push behavior that usually ends with their partner leaving permanently.
Self-mutilation, suicidal gestures or attention-seeking destructive behaviors are not uncommon. Borderline personalities are three times more likely to be female. More..
· Histrionic personality disorder
People with this condition engage in persistent attention-seeking behaviors that include innapropriate sexual behavior and exaggerated emotions. They can be oversensitive about themselves and constantly seek reasurrance or approval from others.
Excessive need to be the center of attention, low tolerance for frustration, blaming others for failures are also characteristics of the histrionic personality. More..
· Narcissistic personality disorder
Narcissistic personalities have a blown up perception of themselves and an excessive desire for attention and admiration. Individuals with this disorder have a false sense of entitlement and little respect for other people’s feelings. They are oversensitive to criticism and often blame others for their failures.
Prone to outbursts of anger and irritability, the narcissistic personality tends to be manipulative in interspersonal relationships. But deep beneath the surface lies a vulnerable self-esteem, susceptible to depression and feelings of inferiority. More..
Class C (The Withdrawn)
Anxious or fearful disorders
· Avoidant personality disorder
This disorder is described by chronic social withdrawal, feelings of inferiority, over-sensitivity and social withdrawal.
People with avoidant personality disorder are constantly fearful of rejection and ridicule. They form relationships only with people that they trust. The pain of rejection is so strong that these individuals prefer to isolate rather than risk disappointment.More..
· Dependent personality disorder
Individuals with this condition have an abnormal desire to be nurtured that leads to submissive and clinging behavior. Dependent personalities have difficulty making their own decisions and seek others to take over most important areas in their lives.
They will often go to great length to obtain nurturance from others, have separation anxiety when alone and desperately seek another partner when a close relationship ends.More..
Not to be confused with OCD. People with OCPD are perceived as strict and demanding by others. They have a persistent preoccupation with perfectionism, orderliness, and efficiency, at the expense of interpersonal relationships. They also show an excessive devotion to work, productivity and exhibit rigidness and stubbornness.
People with OCPD usually have a negative view of life and often become withdrawn and depressed.
I was a corrections physician for almost 30 years as a contribution to our hometown and local law enforcement/incarceration services. I know a little about criminals. Here are three essays, two short, one long, on the issue of criminality and mental disorders.
Consider my warning: PDs are not a mental illness, they are a culturally dysfunctional behavior problem. PD individuals are not psychotic or out of touch with reality — they just have a bad set of behavior and social controls. They got messed up on the way to adulthood and functional good behavior.
My Comment:
Dr. Dunn puts analytic rigor to confirm a suspicion many of us have, that these violent acts by individuals demonstrate the breakdown of socialization in our societies. Current political initiatives aim to denigrate and defund law enforcement, and to not prosecute criminal behavior. Educators are proudly replacing family values with ego-centric pleasure gratification. How can this be anything but a concerted effort to infect free societies with more and more mal-adjusted, disordered personalities? And social media adds fuel to the fire.
The wokeness destruction of our institutions must be reversed, and families must function to raise children to care about and respect others. Otherwise, when the social bonds are completely dissolved, the jack boots will come in.
These days, marxist theory is camouflaged as “Critical Theory”, AKA Critical Race Theory, Critical Gender Theory, etc. But the thrust remains the same: every social identity and relationship is redefined as a power struggle between oppressor and oppressed. Thus everything is politicized and civil society is reduced to a jungle where might makes right. Those who seize cultural control of social and economic institutions imperil each individual’s inalienable right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.
Last month Peter Robinson conducted an Uncommon Knowledge interview with Jordan Peterson on the topic The Importance of Being Ethical. The video link is below, followed by my transcription with light editing to produce from the captions a text for reading. Excerpts in italics with my bolds. (PR is Peter Robinson, JP is Jordan Peterson)
PR: If you’re the prime minister of Canada the man is a villain, but if you’re a conservative particularly a young conservative it’s very likely you think of him as a hero. Jordan Peterson on Uncommon Knowledge.
In 2016 the Trudeau government enacted legislation making it illegal to discriminate on the ground of “gender expression”.Jordan Peterson, a clinical psychologist at the University of Toronto objected. In particular he flatly refused to use politically correct gender pronouns, said so in videos and went viral in 2017. He began a series of podcasts called the psychological significance of biblical stories that has been viewed by millions. In 2018 he published a book 12 rules for life an antidote to chaos that became an international bestseller. Last year he published another bestseller beyond order: 12 more rules for life, and then he resigned from the University of Toronto to devote himself to lectures and podcasts. Jordan Peterson welcome. The audience should know by the way that we’re filming today as part of the classical liberalism seminar at Stanford.
PR: All right, question one: The February protest by Canadian truckers. They’re protesting covid restrictions; some of them block border crossings; some of them snarl the capital city of ottawa.
Here’s your quotation made in a message you taped for the protesters. “ I’d like to commend all of you for your diligence and work on accomplishing what you have under trying conditions, and also for keeping your heads in a way that’s been a model for the entire world.”
Now the clip of PM Trudeau speaking in parliament: “It has to stop. The people of Ottawa don’t deserve to be harassed in their own neighborhoods. They don’t deserve to be confronted with the inherent violence of a swastika flying on a street corner, or a confederate flag, or the insults and jeers just because they’re wearing a mask. That’s not who Canada, who Canadians are.”
So here’s the first question: How can discourse in a great democracy have become so polarized that Jordan Peterson and the Prime Minister look at exactly the same set of events and come to opposite conclusions about them.?
JP: Well he’s lying, and I’m not. So that’s a big part of the issue. I don’t believe that he ever says a word that’s true. From what I’ve been able to observe, it’s all stage acting. He’s crafted a persona. He has a particular instrumental goal in mind, and everything is subordinated to serve that.
What’s the motivation? It’s the same motivation that’s generally typical of people who are narcissistic, which is to be accredited with moral virtue in the absence of the work necessary to actually attain it.
Apart from playing a role, from you know the swastika thing is really just untrue about Canadians. Really, we’re going to be worried about Nazis in Canada? First of all that just isn’t a thing in Canada; There isn’t a Nazi tradition, and i don’t know anyone in Canada who’s ever met anyone who’s met someone who was Canadian and who was a Nazi. So that’s just a non-starter
When that sort of thing gets dragged into the conversation right off the bat you know, “Canadians shouldn’t be subjected to the inherent violence of a swastika, ” first of all it’s not even obvious what that swastika was doing there. There’s reasonable evidence to suggest that the person who was waving it was either a plant,or someone who was making the comment about what was characteristic of the government. Now no one knows because the story around that event is messy, and it’s not like there were credible journalists who were going in there to investigate thoroughly. But to use that, and the confederate flag issue is exactly the same thing.
The story in Canada is that our Prime Minister implemented the emergencies act and so the question was why. So I went on twitter when this was trending and read at least 5000 twitter comments to try to get a sense of people who were supporting Trudeau in applying the emergencies act. I wanted to understand what do they believe is happening. As far as I can tell, and maybe I’m wrong, the story was that something like make america great again conservative republicans, the you know pretty far right., were attempting to destabilize Canadian democracy.
And so my question was, well what makes you think they care first of all about Canada and its democracy? And second, why in the world would they possibly do that? You need a motive for a crime like that. At the same time, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation which is subsidized by the liberals to the tune of 1.2 billion dollars a year, the CBC was insisting that most of the money that the truckers raised was foreign financed. If it wasn’t the bloody Russians, then it was the American Conservatives. And so that all turned out to be a complete lie.
And so the line was, it’s republican right-wingers trying to destabilize Canadian democracy, except no one has an answer for what’s in it for them.
And then three days later, the emergency act was lifted. i thought, okay now what are they going to make of that? What could possibly be the rationale for that? And the rationale was that it just showed how effective he was. We had this coup ready to go that was financed by Americans apparently, and our prime minister acted so forthrightly that we only needed to be under the strictures of the emergency act for three days.
I don’t even know what sort of world exists in which those things are happening, and then why do Canadians buy this to the degree they do.
And I think they’re faced with a hard choice. Because in my country for 150 years you could trust the basic institutions. You could trust the government, it didn’t matter what political party was running it; you could trust the political parties right from the socialists over to the conservatives. The socialists were mostly union types and they were trying to give the working class a voice and honestly so. You could trust the the media, even the CBC was a reliable source of news. You know, none of that’s true now. And so Canadians are asked to make a hard choice in the truckers convoy situation. Either all your institutions are almost irretrievably corrupt, or the truckers were financed by like right-wing republican-americans. Well both of those are preposterous, so you might as well take the one that’s least disruptive to your entire sense of security. And I think that’s what Canadians mostly did.
PR: Coming back to Canadian universities Jordan Peterson was quoted in the National Post this past march: “I had envisioned teaching and researching at the University of Toronto full-time until they had to haul my skeleton out of my office.” Instead you retired. Why?
JP: Well it was impossible to go back. For a long time I couldn’t think clearly about what I should do on the professional front because I was ill. Later when I started to recover and looked at the situation, first of all there was just no going back because I’m too well known and too provocative I suppose. I’ve never really thought of myself as that, but it seems to have turned out that way. I couldn’t just return to the classroom.
And then there were other problems too. There’s no bloody way I’m writing a diversity, inclusivity and equity statement for a grant.
I can’t imagine the circumstances under which i would do that. And that’s become absolutely crucial now in Canada. Also increasingly in the US to get any sort of research grant you you have to write a diversity statement, and it has to be the right kind of statement. I read that the national sciences and engineering research councils frequently asked questions about how to prepare a diversity statement. And you couldn’t write a more reprehensible document from the ideological perspective if you set out with the intent purpose of writing a despicable document.
So there’s no way I could get funding for my research and then what bloody chance would my students have of being hired in an academic environment today? You know perfectly well those who sat on faculty hiring committees your basic decision right off the bat is: Okay who do we eliminate because you have way too many candidates? And so you’re searching for reasons to get rid of people. I’m don’t say this as a criticism, it’s just a reality. If there’s any whiff of scandal of any sort, well we have 10 other people we could look. Why would we bother with the trouble? So I just couldn’t see my students having any future.
Then I also thought: Well I can go lecture wherever I want, to whoever i want with virtually any size audience, with no restrictions whatsoever. Why go back to teaching a small class at university? I did like doing that, but all I could see were disadvantages. Plus it was impossible. Exactly what am I supposed to do when I meet a graduate student or a young professor hired on diversity grounds manifest instant skepticism? What a slap in the face!
The diversity ideology is no friend to peace and tolerance; it is absolutely and completely the enemy of competence and justice.
PR: What happened? How did wokeness take over universities? University faculty poll after poll of party affiliation in this country, I’m sure it’s the same in Canada, shows the university faculty been to the left for a long time. But this wokeness is something new. What’s the transmission mechanism; what happened and how did it happen in a small number of years?
JP: That’s a tough question. I’ve tried to put my finger on the essential elements of what you might describe as political correctness or wokeness and done that in a variety of ways. For example this is one student of mine undertook a quite promising line of research. The first thing we wanted to find out was: Is there really such a thing as political correctness or wokeness? Because it’s vague, can you identify it? And by that I mean psychometrically. Because for 40 years one of the things that psychologists have been wrestling with is construct validation. That’s the technical problem: How do you know when you put a concept forward whether it bears any relationship to some underlying reality? For example, is there such a thing as emotional intelligence? Is there such a thing as self-esteem? Or political correctness?
The proper answer is we don’t know, but there are ways of finding out. You need to find out if the construct assesses something that’s unique and does that in a manner separate from other similar constructs in a in a revealing and important way. There’s a whole theory of of methodology that should inform your efforts to answer such questions. So for example if you’re a clinician you might want to differentiate between depression and anxiety. Keeping the concepts separate is important so they have functional utility, but also accounting for the overlap because they’re both negative emotions. It’s part of epistemological mapping
So we asked a large number of people a very large number of political questions trying to oversample questions that had been put forward in the media and in the public sphere as indicative of politically correct beliefs. Then we did the appropriate statistical analysis to see if the questions hung together. They hang together if question a is politically correct, let’s say you answer it positively. And question b is politically correct and you answer it positively. If there’s a large correlation between those two questions then you think well they’re assessing something underlying that’s holding them together.
In this way we identified a set of beliefs that were observable or easily identifiable as politically correct. So yes, it exists.
The next question is: Where does it come from? We haven’t done empirical analysis of that, but I think if you’re reasonably familiar with the history of ideas you can see two streams, two broad streams of thought.
One is a postmodern stream that basically emerged out of literary criticism.
It’s predicated on what is actually a fundamental and a valid critique; which is that it’s very, very difficult to lay out a description of the world without that description being informed by some value structure. That’s at the core of what’s useful about the postmodern critique. I actually happen to believe that you look at the world through a structure of value. Well then, what is the structure of value and also what do you mean by a structure value?
And that’s where the post-modernists went wrong,
and where I think our whole society went wrong.
Because the radical left types who were simultaneously postmodern turned to marxism to answer that question. They said, well we organize our perceptions as a consequence of the will to power. And I think that is an appalling doctrine. It’s technically incorrect for all sorts of reasons that we could get into. Partly the issue is: if power is my ability to compel you to do things against your own interest or in your own desire, maybe I can organize my social interactions on the basis of that willingness to express power. That’s a very unstable means of social organization.
So the notion is that it’s power that structures our relations,
but where’s your evidence for that?
There’s no evidence for that, it’s wrong; but that’s what we assumed and that’s what universities teach by and large. It makes no sense to me that this thing that has raged through these great magnificent institutions, these universities that our grandparents and great grandparents sacrificed to give money to, these magnificent citadels of learning. It makes no sense to me to suppose that english departments suddenly took over well unless they’re on to something. As I said before, I don’t think you can look at the world except through a structure of value. So why has literary criticism become so relevant and so powerful?
I believe that we see the world through a narrative framework. If that’s true, you need a mechanism to prioritize your attention because attention is a finite resource and it’s costly. So you have to prioritize it and there’s no difference between prioritizing your attention and imposing a value structure those are the same thing. The mechanisms that we use to prioritize our attention are stories, which means that the people who criticize our stories actually have way more power than you think. Because they’re actually criticizing the mechanism through which we look at the world.
So the post-modernist would say, you even look at the scientific world
through a value-laden lens. I think they’re right, yes you do,
but they’re wrong that the lens is one of power.
Now with a word like power, you can expand the borders of the word to encompass virtually any phenomena you want. And so that’s why I define power as my willingness to use compulsion on you or other people. Because power can be authority, power can be competence, but I don’t mean any of that. I mean power in the sense you don’t get to do what you want, you do what I tell you to do. This is power as coercion exactly. And I do think the marxist types view the willingness to use coercion as the driving force of human history. That’s really saying something, because that means it’s the fundamental motivation.
That’s a very caustic criticism, and it’s easy to put people back on their heels about that, as we are seeing with capitalists.
I’ve been stunned to see the CEOs of major corporations just roll over in front of these DEI activists. I wonder, what the hell’s wrong with you people? You’re not even making use of your privilege and you are not very powerful if you’re the CEO of a major corporation and you can’t even withstand some interns who have DEI ideology, which is not doing you a lot of good. So why would you produce a fifth column within your organization that’s completely opposed to the entire manner in which you do business and to the capitalist enterprise as such?
One answer would be, well we don’t think much about ideas. Well maybe you should. Or maybe you are cynical about it and say, well it’s just a gloss to keep the capitalist enterprise going while appearing to to meet the new demands of the new ethical reality. Which I think is also a bad argument.
But more importantly it’s that people are guilty and the the radicals who accuse us all historically and as individuals of being motivated
by nothing but the desire for power
strike a chord especially in people who are conscientious.
Because if you’re a conscientious person and someone comes to you, or a little mob of 30 people says, you can be a little more careful in what you say and do on the racist front and the sexist front etc. You’re likely to think, well I’m not perfect. I probably could be a little more careful. And no doubt people have been oppressed in the past and it’s also true that in some sense I’m the undeserving beneficiary of historical atrocity and so maybe I should look to myself.
That’s weaponization of guilt and it’s very effective and it’s not surprising. But it’s not helpful because there’s a resentment that drives this, a corrosive resentment that’s able to weaponize guilt and it’s very difficult for people to withstand it.
PR: Earlier you talked about values and how we see the world through values so here’s a question. If there’s no objective standard of reason outside and above ourselves, if everything is just matter how we think, how can we do science? What do you think of this from C.S. Lewis: If I swallow the scientific cosmology as a whole, meaning all that exists is only what we can perceive through our senses, then not only can I not fit in religion, I cannot even fit in science. If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry in the long run on the meaningless flux of the atoms, how the thoughts of minds have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees?
JP: Well that’s a complicated problem. First of all I don’t think science is possible outside of an encompassing judeo-christian ethic. For example, I don’t think you can be a scientist without believing as an axiom of faith that truth will set you free. In fact we don’t know the conditions under which science is possible and we tend to overestimate its epistemological potency. I mean you can stretch it back to the Greeks if you’re inclined, but in a formal sense it’s only been around for about five centuries, and it’s only thrived for a very short period of time. And it’s perfectly reasonable to assume that there were particular preconditions that made its rise and ascendancy possible. It is an historical phenomenon, yes it happened at a specific moment in time and for particular reasons.
One of the bunch of conditions is for example, there’s an intense insistence in the Christian tradition that the mind of god in some sense is knowable, and yes including the structure of the cosmos. And you have to believe that’s the case before you’re going to embark on a scientific endeavor. You have to believe that there’s some relationship between logos or logic. But logos is a much broader concept than logic, that’s for sure. You have to believe that there’s some relationship between that and the structure of the cosmos.
You have to believe that the pursuit of truth is in itself an ethical good,
because why would you bother otherwise.
You have to believe that there is such a thing as an ethical good and those are not scientific questions. Which is why i think the arguments of people like Hitchens and Dawkins are weak. People like that have a metaphysic which they don’t know and they assume that metaphysic is self-evidence. Well sorry guys, it’s actually not self-evident. And they assume that it can be derived from the observations of empirical reality and the answer to that is no. There’s going to be axioms of your perceptual system that aren’t derivable from the contents of your perceptual system.
And you might think, well that’s not very scientific and i would say you can take it up with Roger Penrose about say the role of consciousness and and the structure of consciousness. And it’s by no means obvious that the materialist reductionists have the correct theory about the nature of consciousness. And not surprisingly we don’t understand the relationship between consciousness and being at all.
You know these are hard hard questions. One hard question for consciousness researchers is: Why is there consciousness? Why aren’t we just unconscious mechanisms acting deterministically? I don’t think that is the hardest question.
The really hard question is: What’s the relationship between consciousness and being itself?
Because I can’t understand what it means for something to be in the absence of some awareness of that being. There’s an awareness component implicit in the in the idea of being itself. Consciousness is integrally tied up with being in some mysterious manner and so I also don’t believe that the the most sophisticated scientists are by necessity reductionist materialists. It’s occam’s razor clear if you can reduce and account deterministically no problem. But don’t be thinking that accounts for everything because I don’t think there’s any evidence that it does.
PR: From science to to politics to quotations. Jordan Peterson this is a tweet of just last month: Does anything other than the axiomatic acceptance of the divine value of the individual make slavery a self-evident rule, right? That’s a good one. I’m going to put you in an august company. Here’s G.K. Chesterton: The declaration of independence bases all rights on the fact that god created all men equal. There is no basis for democracy except in the divine origin of man so these are very similar thoughts.
JP: I’ve been talking to my audience about what is the right to free speech and and how that might be conceptualized. Because you can think about it as a right among other rights, so it’s just one on a list of rights. And you can also think of rights as being granted to you in some sense by the social contract.
That is a different theory than the notion that rights originate in some underlying religious insistence of the divine value of the individual.
There’s a bunch of problems with the rights among other rights argument i don’t think free speech is a right among other rights. Speech has to be free because if it’s not free it’s not thought. So imagine if everything’s not going all right, you have problems, and you have to think about hard things. If you have a problem the thinking is going to be troublesome because you’re going to think things that upset yourself and upset other people. It’s part of the necessity, part of what will necessarily happen if you’re thinking.
PR: You said something that just stopped me so completely cold that I missed some of what followed. To repeat: There is no difference between speech and thought; if you have free thought you must have free speech. That’s the argument.
JP: Yes. Well I’ll unpack that first and then return to the other. First of all, mostly you think in words now. People also think in images but I’m not going to go into that, we’ll just leave that aside. But mostly we think in words and so we use a mechanism that’s sociologically constructed– the world of speech to organize our own psyches. We do that with speech and basically when you think there’s two components to it that are internal. In a sense when you think you have a problem, you ask yourself a question and then answers appear in the theater of your imagination. They are generally verbal so that’d be like the revelatory element of thought. And that’s very much prayer in some fundamental sense.
It’s very mysterious the fact that you can pose yourself a question and then you can generate answers. So why did you have the question if you can generate the answers, if the answers are just there. Where do the answers come from? Well you can give a materialist account to some very limited degree, but phenomenologically it’s still the case that you pose a question to yourself in speech and you receive an answer in speech. Now it can also be an image but forget about that for this discussion.
The next question is what do you do once you receive the answer? The answer is, well, if you can think then you use internal speech to dissect the answer. This is what you do, for example, you encourage your students to do if they’re writing an essay. You know they lay out a proposition and then you hope they can take the proposition apart. Essentially in this way they’re transforming themselves into avatars, speaking avatars of two different viewpoints. So you have the speaker for the proposition and then you have the critic. Maybe you lay out the dialogue between them and that constitutes the body of the essay.
You have to be bloody sophisticated to manage that because it means that you have to divide yourself in some sense into two avatars that are oppositional. And then you have to allow yourself to be the battle space between them that. People have to be trained to do that. It’s what universities are supposed to do.
But it’s really hard; so instead of that, people generally talk to other people.
And that’s how they they organize themselves, by talking to other people.
So the additional reason you have the right to free speech, isn’t that you can just say whatever you want to gain a hedonistic advantage, which is one way of thinking about it. You have a right to say whatever you want like you have a right to do what you want, you know subject to certain limitations. It’s like it’s a hedonstic freedom. No, that’s not why you have a right free speech.
You have a right to free speech because the entirety of society depends
on this ability to adapt to the changing horizon of the future
on the free thought of the individuals who compose it.
It’s like a free market in some sense, a free market argument in relationship to thought. We have to compute this transforming horizon, and we do that well by consciously engaging with possibilities. Doing that is mediated through speech. So societies that are going to function over any reasonable amount of time have to leave their citizens alone to grapple stupidly with complexity. So that out of that stupid, fraught grappling that’s offensive and difficult and upsetting, we can grope towards the truth collectively. This before taking the steps to implement those truths, before they’ve been tested. So that’s the free speech argument.
The divinity argument is while you are that locus of consciousness,
that’s what you are most fundamentally.
The reason that’s associated with divinity is a very very complicated question and part of the reason I outlined this in my biblical series on genesis. This divinity of the individuals rooted in the narrative conception is part and parcel of the judeo-christian tradition. You have god at the beginning of time in whose image men and women are made acting as the agent that transforms the chaos of potential into the habitable reality that is good. And he uses the word the divine word logos to do that, which implies that the word that’s truthful is the word that extracts habitable order out of chaos.
What characterizes human beings is that capability.
To those who don’t believe that, I say try acting another way, try basing your personal relationships on any other conception and see what happens. You know people are so desperate to be treated in that manner that it’s their primary motivation. You want other people to treat you as if you have something to say that you’re worth attending to. You have the opportunity to express yourself, no matter how badly you do it. And if they’re willing to grant you their attention and time to help you straighten that out, there isn’t anything you want more than that. If you try to structure your social relationships on any other basis then that respect for their intrinsic value, it’s going to fail.
PR: We’ve talked about faculty and students. A couple of statistics: According to Gallup the proportion of Americans who claim no religious affiliation, among Americans–over 76 years old is just seven percent. 93 percent of the oldsters claim a religious affiliation. The youngest group that Gallup tested is Americans between 26 and 41–almost a third claim no religious affiliation.
Item two and I’m reasonably certain this is the same in Canada at least in eastern Canada, but certainly in the United States, poll after poll shows that young people are far more open to socialism, or to farther not just left of center but farther left political aims. They’re the ones who most fervently support this. By the way This is an inversion from the Reagan years in the 80s when the kids were more conservative than the older. That’s not the case now, add in my personal observation that during covid, during the lockdowns, personally almost more shocking than any other aspect was the supineness, the passivity of the kids. This despite it was established very very early that if you’re young you’re at no serious risk of this virus. You’ll get sick, perhaps it’ll be a flu, but you’re more likely to die in a car accident up to the age of 20 something than you are to die of covid. That was established right away and yet universities shut down and they made kids go on zoom to take exams or take their classes. I could detect no pushback. No kid was trying to diss the man; in general they were saying, Yes Master.
It’s like they were Igors to Dr Frankenstein. This is all really bad news.
After listening to you talk with such a sophistication for a while now, here’s the crude point, the crude suspicion I take away:
If you don’t have some notion of the transcendent; if you don’t have some notion of the divine, then you’ll believe any damn thing.
JP: I think that’s right and that’s what the kids are doing. Dostoevsky commented on that: if there’s no god everything is permitted you know. And he did a lovely job of analyzing that inCrime and Punishment and the Brothers Karamazov. I do think it’s true that if you believe nothing, you’ll fall for anything.People like to ask me if i believe in god, and i always think well, who are you to be asking that question? First of all you have some notion of what you mean by believe that you think is just accurate because you know what believe means. And so you have a prior theory about belief and now you’re asking me if my belief in god fits into your a prior theory.
How about we start by questioning your a priori theory of belief?
Because I don’t even know what you mean by believe, and neither do you especially when we’re asking a question that profound. You know, do you believe in god involves three mysteries there, and all three of those are subject to question.
I think people act out what they believe. So when people ask me if I believe in god, generally I say that I act or try to act as if god exists. And they’re not very happy about that because they want me to abide by the rules, the implicit rules of their question. Which is, do you believe in the religious view as a pseudo-scientific description of the structure of reality? I don’t know how to answer that question because it’s so badly formulated i can’t get a handle on it.
Do you believe that there’s something divine? Well let’s try to define divine here, we can do that for for a moment. Most of us have some sense that literary stories differ in their depth. I don’t think that’s an unwarranted proposition: some stories are shallow and some stories are deep; some stories are ephemeral and some move you deeply, whatever that means. It’s a metaphor but we understand what it means. Imagine there are layers of literary depth and one way of conceptualizing the layers is that the deeper an idea is the more other ideas depend upon it.So you have ideas that are fundamental because if you shake that idea, you shake all the ideas that depend on them.
And then I would say the realm of the divine is the realm of the most fundamental ideas.
That must be so because the alternative is to say well all ideas are equal in value. Okay well, try acting then and you can’t, because you can’t act unless you prioritize your beliefs. And if you prioritize them you arrange them into a hierarchy, and in that arrangement you accept the notion of depth. And so when we use language of the divine we’re talking about the deepest ideas.
And so I believe the notion that each individual is characterized by a consciousness that transforms the horizon of the future into the present.
That’s a divine idea–it’s so deep and our functional cultures are necessarily predicated on that idea. It’s not just a western idea since you can not have a functional culture that in some sense doesn’t instantiate that idea. Because you interfere with the mechanism of adaptation itself, by not allowing it free expression.
Suppose you are like my prime minister and you say, “Well I really admire the Chinese Communist Party, because when it comes to environmental issues they get things done.” So many things are wrong with that statement, it’s hard to know where to begin. It is the posture of an inexcusably narcissistic idiot. But we can start with the idea that, if you know what you’re doing and you have power, maybe you can be more efficient in your exercise of in your control over movement towards that goal. Fair enough but what about when you don’t know what you’re doing. Where then do you turn because it means your ideology failed you and you have no mechanism for operating when you don’t know what you’re doing.
The regime is based on believing we always know what we’re doing
because we’re totalitarian and we have a complete theory of everything.
And don’t say anything to the contrary or else.
In free societies, when we don’t know what we’re doing, we let people talk. And out of that babble, out of that noise, (American culture is particularly remarkable in this regard) you have this immense diversity of opinions. Most of them are completely useless and some are absolutely redemptive. As a Canadian observing your culture we see you guys veer off in weird directions fairly frequently and things look pretty unstable. And then there’s some glimmer of hope somewhere that bursts forward in in a whole new mode of adaptation and away you go again. And that just happens over and over and over as a consequence of real diversity.
It’s definitely a consequence of freedom of association and freedom of speech
because it enables all that expression of possibilities.
PR: Sure that’s optimistic and I always like to end a show on an up note. But first let me put a pin in the optimism balloon. You mentioned Trudeau and Trudeau’s admiration for the Chinese communist Party. Ray Dalio billionaire on china points out empires rise when they’re productive, financially sound, earning more than they spend and increasing assets faster than their liabilities. Objectively compare China in the US on these measures and the fundamentals clearly favor China” Jordan Peterson writing about communism in your introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of the Gulag Archipelago:
“No political experiment has been tried so widely with so many disparate people in so many different countries and failed so absolutely and catastrophically.”
The question is: How much proof do we need and why do we still avert our eyes from the truth? Why why do we still feel tempted. Dostoyevsky in the legend of the grand inquisitor has the grand inquisitor speaking to Christ and he says to Christ: You’re all wrong. Receiving their bread from us the people will clearly see that we take the bread from them to give it back to them. And they will be only too glad to have it so long as we will deliver them from their greatest anxiety and torture: that of having to decide freely for themselves. Never was there anything more unbearable to the human race than personal freedom.”
What do you think: Canada had a good run, the United States had a good run but sustaining free societies across the decades and across the generations is just too hard for human nature to bear.
JP: No you should not agree with that for two reasons. The first is that man does not live by bread alone so that’s the first rejoinder. And the second is regarding difficulty: the only thing more difficult than contending forthrightly with existence is failing to do so. I’m not suggesting for a moment that this isn’t difficult. What the western religious tradition has done, what religious traditions in general do to some degree, is to try to provide people with support from what’s divine in their incalculably difficult efforts to deal with the unknown. If you orient yourself ethically in the most fundamental sense, then in some sense you have the force of god on your side and then maybe you can prevail despite the difficulty.
I try to ask these questions seriously you know and I would also say that I’ve been driven to my religious beliefs such as it is by necessity not by desire. What do you want to have on your side when you’re contending with the unknowable future and it’s vagaries? How about truth? How about beauty? How about Justice? You want allies, those powerful allies that the university is supposed to be teaching young people
You need some allies for the pursuit of truth when the scientists are having their say. On the economic front, how about the free trade between autonomous individuals, the free trade of goods of value between autonomous individuals. That’s not such a bad thing to have on your side these eternal verities. They share something good in common as all good things. For all intents and purposes that’s god. You might say well i don’t believe in that. How is possible you don’t believe there’s any such thing as good, and don’t believe there’s any such thing as ultimate good. I’m not trying to make some ontological claim about an old man living in the sky, although i think that’s a lot more sophisticated concept than people generally realize.
My point is you do have a belief system whether you know it or not, a system of ethics whether you know it or not. There’s either something at the bottom that unifies it or it’s not unified. In which case means you’re aimless and hopeless and depressed and anxious and confused because those are the only other options. And maybe you don’t know what that unifying belief is, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not there. It just means you don’t know what it is.
I can give you a couple of examples very very briefly. I already mentioned the story in genesis that associates god with the force process that generates habitable order out of chaos and attributes that nature in some sense to human beings. The next part in the story of adam and eve,god is what people walk with unself-consciously in the garden. So adam doesn’t because he’s now ashamed and he doesn’t walk with god anymore. So what is god? Well that’s what you walk with when you’re unself-conscious, so that’s an interesting idea. And then you have the god that manifests himself in the story of noah. That’s the intuition that hard times are coming and that you better get your house in order. If you have any sense, the nature of the intuition is a spirit that animates you. Well obviously because there you are acting and you’re acting out a pattern. it’s a spirit that animates you. And then there’s the story of the tower of babel, what’s god there? Well god is that which you replace at your peril because everything will come tumbling down. That’s the tower of babel. It’s like definitely if we put the wrong thing at the top, like Stalin for example then look out. We’ve done that a bunch of times in the 20th century.
I think you know Milton conceptualized Lucifer as something like the spirit of unbridled intellectual arrogance. Something like Lucifer is the light bringer and he is engaged in a conflict with god attempting to replace the divine and that’s pretty explicit in the story. That’s a poetic intuition of the of the battle between the secular intelligencia and the religious structure that’s milton’s pro-droma. He sees happening the intellect has become so arrogant that it will attempt to replace the divine and rule over hell. Well that’s the soviet union man; that’s Mao’s China— we know we’ve got our theory, it’s total, we’ve solved the problem and nothing’s going to change
Fair enough if you want to rule over hell and you think these societies are successful. Pretty odd definition of success as far as I’m concerned. If you want to be successful like china, you know that’s why it’s true that man does not live by bread alone. You know that a wealthy slave, that’s no life.
PR: I’m going to stumble along toward o setting up my last question. I’m thinking back to the 1970s. Canada is part of this, but i know the American story better, and in the 1970s everything goes wrong. Economic stagnation, loss of morale in this country because we lose in Vietnam. Watergate scandal. We’re on the defensive as the soviets advance in Africa, Latin America. And then in the 1980’s, we go from 1979 with the national humiliation of the Iranian hostage crisis and this Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and then 1989 one decade, just 10 years later, the Berlin wall comes down.
So the question here is: the loss of freedom of speech, the corruption of the universities, the rise of
china which is in all kinds of ways a more formidable opponent than the soviet union was. In all kinds of ways one could argue that we’re in a worse position now than we were in the 70s. Are you speaking to those few who have eyes to see and ears to hear? Do you believe that we are capable to prompt another kind of restoration? Or is Jordan Peterson the fascinating eloquent compelling champion of a lost cause?
JP: When I spent a lot of time at the various universities, I was associated with studying motivation for atrocity. Because i was very curious about that as a psychologist; not as a sociologist or an economist or a political scientist. If you’re an Auschwitz guard, what’s motivating you as an individual? I wanted to understand it well enough so I could understand how I could do that. Some say, well that sort of behavior is so far beyond the pale that it’s completely incomprehensible. It’s just a manifestation of say, intense psychopathy, and a normal person can’t even imagine it.
I think the evidence doesn’t really suggest that. Because it is not obvious that all the people involved in the Nazi movement for example were criminally pathological, that they were incomprehensible deviations from the norm. It’d be lovely to think that and it would make the world a lot simpler. But the evidence mostly suggests that you can get ordinary people to do that sort of thing, and maybe even to enjoy it. So that’s pretty bloody terrifying and so i tried to understand, and think i did to some degree. Without getting deep into it here, we can say a fair bit of it is a consequence of envy. It’s the spirit of Cain if you had to sum it up in a phrase.
But that isn’t the issue; rather the issue is how do you stop it from happening again? Because that’s what we’re supposed to be concentrating on. In the aftermath of the second world war, we said, “Never Forget.” That should mean something like, How about we don’t do this again? So my question was: how do we best go about ensuring we don’t walk down that road again? My conclusion was that it was fundamentally an issue of individual psychology, most fundamentally more than economics, more than sociology.
For all of that, the cure is individual people have to act
as ethically as they are powerful or else.
And so I’ve been trying to convince people to do that. I suppose not to convince them precisely, but to put forward an argument about why that’s necessary and why it’s on them. You have to understand this problem because if you don’t get it right, it isn’t gonna work. How you start is with what you have under control in your own life. Where else are you going to start but to look to yourself. Put your house in order, not to be worried about some other person walking the satanic path. That’s what activists do all the time. They’re protesting it’s you, it’s the corporations, like it’s someone else. No, it’s you and I think also fundamental to the judeo-christian doctrine is that it’s you. it’s on you.
Redemption’s an individual matter and so my hope is that if enough people take themselves with enough seriousness, then we won’t end up in hell.
Because we certainly could, it’s a high probability. But I also don’t think that you can be motivated enough to put your house in order to the degree that’s necessary merely by being attracted, let’s say to the potential utopia that might emerge as a consequence of that. So that’d be a vision of heaven, let’s say you need also to also be terrified of hell. Just because you haven’t been there doesn’t mean there’s no such thing. You have to be pretty bloody naive to think there’s no such thing, how much evidence do you need? It comes about at least in partial consequence of the sins of men.
PR: What about incoming freshman next year at University of Toronto or Stanford University, 18 year old kids coming into all this, we’ve been through three years of covid. I won’t rehearse it all in one sentence. What would you say to them as they begin university at the age of 18 or 19? What’s the restorative, redemptive sentence? What should they do?
JP: What should they do is: Don’t be thinking your ambition is corrupt. Because that’s part of the message now: we human beings are a cancer on the planet. We’re headed for an environmental apocalypse. The entire historical structure is nothing but atrocity. etc etc. Anyone with any ethical
aim whatsoever is just going to pull back; you don’t want to manifest any ambition, support the patriarchal structure, exploit the environment. You’re supposed to crush yourself down, you shouldn’t even have any children.
There’s no excuse for that there’s zero excuse for that I saw a professor at an event something like this who came out and trumpeted this bloody environmentally friendly house he built. Fair enough, it was a pretty interesting house. But not everybody had the four million dollars that that it took him to build it. I’m not criticizing his money, good for him he built a house, okay. But then to trumpet that as a moral virtue well you’re pushing it there. Then he came out to all the kids and he said my wife and i decided that we’re only going to have one child. I think that’s one of the most ethical things we could have possibly done and I would strongly encourage you to do the same.
I thought, you son of a . . . , you get up in front of these young people, a lot of these kids children of first generation immigrants from china, and he showed all these images of these terrible factories in China, these endless rows of sterile mechanism that were subordinating all the chinese people to this terrible capitalist machine. And I thought you don’t understand half the audience is looking at those factories and thinking that’s a hell of a lot better than struggling through the mud under Mao buddy.
I don’t know where he thought he was but to come out in front of all those kids and basically tell them that the whole human enterprise is so goddamn corrupt that the best thing they could possibly do is limit their multiplication, and to think of himself as a scholar and an educator. I did say something, by the way it was rather uncomfortable and he stomped off the stage. But that’s no message for young people: that’s no there’s no excuse for that.
You think we’re going to destroy the planet, so we have to do this:
we have to demoralize the youth to be ethical
I’m passionate about this because you have no idea how many people that’s killing. I see people everywhere all over the world they’re so demoralized especially young people especially young people with a conscience, because they’ve been told since they were little that there’s nothing to them but corruption and power. How the hell do you expect them to react? You know they will say. OK, I shouldn’t do anything.
So I go around and say to people: Look there’s not only more to you than you know there’s more to you than you can imagine. You have an ethical responsibility to act in that light. You might claim not to believe that, but i would say your whole culture is predicated on that belief. Insofar as you are an active member of that culture and a believer in its structure, then you believe it. You might not be very good at believing it, you might be full of conflict and doubt, and you might not be able to articulate it. But it’s still right at the bedrock of your culture: this notion of what the divine sovereign individual is. Your culture is predicated on that idea the logos is inherent in each person.
I’ve never seen a credible argument made to show that it’s anything other than that. You can say, well rights are attributed to you by the state. Sorry that’s a weak argument, because the state’s dependent on your actions. In effect you are believing that the state is the entity, and that individuals are just subordinate in some fundamental sense to the state. No, the state is dependent on the individual to exactly the same degree. So we’re the active agent of the state in some sense we are the seeing eye of the state, the speaking mouth of the state, because the state’s dead without the individuals that compose it.
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