Reactionaries transitioned so smoothly from “it’s an environmentalist
scam” to “it’s too complicated to know either way” to “there’s nothing
we can do”, I barely even noticed!
They do this for everything. The conservative response on basically every point the left brings up goes from "that's not real" to "that's real, but you went too far trying to fight it" without ever supporting any actual change. Climate, racism, sexism, you name it.
There is an emerging body of literature on eco-fascists like this and the way that this tactic is used deliberately to say, "Look, everything is complicated or dangerous, therefore you can only trust *me*". See also the current administration waffling on intelligence and the Deep State: they can't be trusted, except when the can be (to kill an Iranian general on Iraqi territory) and the only way to know the difference is just after the fact when the acting president says so.
The motte, where if you say something weird about the right, you are
required to bring up sources. But say that people worried about the
climate don’t want geoengineering because that means they cannot create
their communist utopia, and you get upvotes.
Also love this weird delusional take:
Does the climate science community not have any economists or
political scientists who can tell them what countries will actually
accept [the introduction of large scale geoengineering]?
What im afraid off is simply the endpoint of solid borderwalls with people endlessly machinegunning climate refugees. (As this is already the option a lot of people seem to meve towards. We in .nl had 16k refugees accepted this year and they still get blamed for everything). Change is inevitable im afraid, it just looks more and more like we are picking fascism (who still are pretending not to be fascism, just 'realists looking at all the options').
"Climate Apartheid." Yeah, it's nasty stuff. And I'm definitely worried that eco-fsscism is gonna catch on. I can very easily see Republican congressmen smoothly switching from denying that climate change is happening to insisting that we deport all climate refugees.
Well, iirc there are already fascist groups patrolling the borders of Europe with guns (while claiming they are not violent of course, they just call the cops when they see a refugee (dunno how you can ID a refugee, esp as I assume civvies are not allowed to do a 'gestapo papieren bitte' check)). And this is I'm afraid going to get worse, and a lot of people are going to end up in unmarked graves.
Yeah, the US has them too. Only on the southern border of course. We can't let that scare us into giving up though, there are a lot of things worth fighting for right now.
I have expressed this worry of mine to enough people and have seen enough dismissive reactions, so I know how it goes. (In a way, it is also something you can't really do much directly about, so worrying about it is also not smart, but the same can be said about 90% of the themotte content).
an easy way to get upvotes over there is to include racial slurs in your comments. [example](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/eewd4e/the_bailey_podcast_e010_neurodiversity_case_for/fcjkzfm/?st=k52npxa0&sh=bcbaedfa)
And it is so horrible, it totally goes against the idea of one of Scotts meditations on superweapons (which he has now deleted btw, no idea why). If only we could make Scott understand that his creation has turned evil, that he summoned up something which he should have put down.
(but buttt, I hear the themotters think, that one black comedian said it was fine to call black people the n-word if they acted like n-worders. Yes, that skit is a skit he now very much regrets, because it emboldens racists).
"Why not geoengineering, hmmm?"
"Well that's a great question, why don't we google it and see if there are any good resources available-"
"No no, I've already figured it out. (((They))) are keeping it down, because massive ecological manual re-adjustment is totally the opposite of the kind of project that you would use to justify needing a communist world government. Which they want more than they want to not die. This is what charitability means."
Is this James Lindsay post-modern '(mis)reading' of academic papers where you read few sentences of the abstract and try to use your powerful mind to rationally deduce everything else the paper is about, without ever reading completely and even less understand it a word of it.
Or probably they (mis)read like Sargon of Akkad, where you go mindless rationally reading isolated sentences after sentences and when you read a hypothesis that will be refuted later in article, you still try to spin it and blame the essjaydoubleyou for both proposing a hypothesis and a solution.
Dear god, that top comment hits so much “climate skeptic” bullshit
i’m gonna puke. I especially love the bit about how climate action will
condemn billions to poverty, without mentioning, you know, the people
who climate change is going to fuck over and kill.
To be fair to them, they don't say plants, but algae, but don't realize that in places where there are already climate change algae booms there is something weird going on, as it seems that algae eaters are dying of starvation, because while there is a lot of algae to eat, these algae are now not as nutritious as before. (Sorry, no link to this, I never realized this small article I read about this once long ago would become important). This is in addition to the normal oxygen depletion btw, which also kills fish.
And also that most of the big sweeping plans to combat climate change, like the Green New Deal, specifically talk about economic justice for the people who would otherwise be harmed by the move to net zero carbon emissions.
"Sure, millions of poor people could lose their lives if we keep emitting carbon, but the shareholders could lose billions of dollars if we stop, and billions are objectively more than millions."
what’s the deal with all of their ideas starting with “So
when we have an authoritarian one-world government that can impose
literally any massive project we want on the entire global population
without resistance, we’ll just…”?
Reactionaries transitioned so smoothly from “it’s an environmentalist scam” to “it’s too complicated to know either way” to “there’s nothing we can do”, I barely even noticed!
The motte, where if you say something weird about the right, you are required to bring up sources. But say that people worried about the climate don’t want geoengineering because that means they cannot create their communist utopia, and you get upvotes.
Also love this weird delusional take:
Can’t wait for the mottely crew to cheer on (= write longwinded posts endorsing) eco-fascism once it jumps into the mainstream.
“The literature seems to support this, at least the abstracts do.”
Rationalism = base your worldview on the first few abstracts in your Google search.
Dear god, that top comment hits so much “climate skeptic” bullshit i’m gonna puke. I especially love the bit about how climate action will condemn billions to poverty, without mentioning, you know, the people who climate change is going to fuck over and kill.
Once more, with feeling: