I am having a hard time generating the will to write as of late. It didn’t use to be that way. I used to get really upset when I read some alarmist garbage or other, all pushing the same fake lines of global doom. Now there is so much progressive propaganda in the global environment, (yes it has increased dramatically) I spend most of my time being upset about other things stupid and climate alarmism is just a symptom of the much broader disease. Just look across the various localities of the world and you can see the result of leftist progressivism. Heck, you can see it on a state by state, or even city by city basis.
Craig Loehle wrote a nice article which sums up my thoughts reasonably well at WUWT. He refers to alarmism in terms of categorical thinking. Basically making the point that alarmists as a whole do not critically challenge the fact that warming is automatically a disaster. They see all change to the environment as unnatural and therefore universally bad. He notes that alarmists cannot separate climate change from negative change:
It is irrelevant how much we have changed it, we have changed the state, like spitting into the swimming pool makes everyone get out. The climate is now broken. And with a broken, human-altered climate, anything is possible, even super storms (which we can conveniently create by naming them such). It doesn’t matter if we only changed it a trivial amount, we’ve ruined the Garden of Eden with our sinful ways.
I don’t see it as categorical thinking, as described by Dr. Loehle, perhaps I’m wrong, but I do see it as feel-think. Our world has become so messed up with everything-is-equal-progressivism that feelings have replaced logic. It is no small irony that progressivism is nothing new, it holds the key features of the most repressive governments on the planet yet re-branded and resold, people think feel they are doing something new. Something less dangerous and deserving of a new brand. Handing massive power to the central government, stealing money from economic creators and handling it for redistribution, always corrupts. Political favorites are being paid off in droves with tax money by Obama’s administration, yet progressives feel it is good to pay off anti-business unions and green companies, so it isn’t a problem.
I listened to a breakdown of a group of voters commenting on a couple of speeches delivered and the host asked the individuals what they thought about different aspects of the speakers. Several of them ‘felt’ that one person was more honest, so that person got their support. The youngest man in the audience based his entire opinion on how he felt, his answer was flat stupid but he justified it by feelings on honesty of the speaker, not logic.
Besides the fact that I disagreed with him and that his reply was entirely ignorant, answering in that manner seemed fully reasonable to him. Worse, nobody in the audience seemed bothered by it.
Feelings are not logic.
We should help the poor by giving them money. If they can’t find a job, we should support them long term on welfare. While these are noble ideas which make everyone feel good, they neglect the long term result that people will often not try to do anything with themselves if they don’t have to. Through generations of these policies we have created a culture of unemployable people who will never create a thing for this world. Fifty percent unemployment in Detroit is a direct result of hard-left Obamaesque policies. Take the money from the rich, they have a lot more than me, fails to recognize that there is a negative impact on other peoples jobs for that. Guns kill people, take the guns away! It feels good, yet the fact that criminals aren’t concerned with laws, is not incorporated into the feeling.
The problem is far deeper than that though. We have an administration which has ignored the constitution, bent the rules, and done a huge variety of things outside of the legal structure of this country. There is very little we can do to stop the erosion of our constitution under this regime. The EPA is completely out of control, as is employment law interpretation. The left makes little sound because they “feel” that the laws are helpful to the people. Besides missing the hugely negative impacts of these policies on businesses and individual rights, they flatly fail to consider what the next person will do with that wildly expanded power.
Fracking is bad, because they feel it and windmills are good, for the same reason. It doesn’t matter one lick that windmill production has trashed huge areas of China’s land, nor does it matter that there have been no serious impacts from natural gas production. No consideration is given to positive effects of the much cleaner burning natural gas just as Nuclear power is a bad word no matter what the context.
All of these thoughts by the liberals are flatly wrong. Feeling is an important part of being human, but in an adult society, it cannot replace logic.
I predicted a strong economic spring despite the tax increases. Most liberals have already taken that feeling and internalized it into the category of more taxes are ok. They feel it because they see the weakly positive sounding news, in the same general time frame as the tax increases. It won’t matter that the true effect on the economy is the difference of where we are to where we would have been without the taxes. It also won’t matter that the economy slows in a year (I’m not predicting that), because the feelings already happened. They feel it is ok.
The first 6 hours of my day are spent working to send money to the government so that it can be redistributed to those who support feeling based thought, while they sit on their couches watch their government paid big-screen TV’s and collect checks. I’m allowed to make money with the last 4. How would that make you feel.. I just got off the phone with one of our suppliers at 8pm and I went to work at 6 am today. That is a normal day for me.
Until we grow up as people, stop pretending that fingers are firearms and giving a ribbon to everyone win or lose, the disease will grow progressively worse. The examples are endless, and frustrating for those of us who rely on our minds for making determinations rather than our feelings.
So it is hard for me to give a crap about climate change. I miss the data and the constant puzzles handed out by advocates pretending to be scientists, so it will be fun to go back. In the meantime, I’m a grumpy business owner who can’t afford to operate by feeling and who is being robbed by ignorant people with negative “feelings” toward businesses which feed them.
