And, like Tom C, Derek takes a poorly-understood metaphysical claim to tie up all the baddies in history into one camp. ‘The basic principle is that humans need to be in constant conflict, or working against some sort of impending tragedy in order to be productive’, he says. And then this:

“Investigation and exposure into the real perpetrators and real intent of this ruse is may literally be critical to the course of all mankind. As you know all mankind is at risk of suffering major quality of life changes as required by the Gods of Green. We must fight! Tirelessly and to the bitter end!”

Derek is either joking, or is Glen Beck.

May is clearly a shameless manipulator, or thinks we all are stupid, because he is basically repeating the dialect word for word. He is clearly committed to its principles, and knowing how despised these ideas are in philosophical circles, apparently thinks his viewers are too dumb to recognize them as such. Though perhaps the best proof that he is full of shit is his invocation of Evolutionary theory. Sure he floats a thoughtful anecdote and works in evolution to make it seem profound. Nonetheless Evolution is perhaps the single most contradictory scientific theory to Anthropogenic Global Warming, in that the assumptions of the two cannot be rectified in any way. Evolution requires change. Changes in conditions, and the subsequent adaptation to them by organisms is a core principle of evolution. In no way shape or form can these principles by successfully merged with a theory that assumes millions of years of constant temperatures, a fixed atmosphere, and no extinction of species. Or that any such change will yield dire consequences for living beings.

My personal education and experience has been exclusively in the sciences and language. As such these cleverly worded junk-science and junk-philosophy cons are immediately recognizable to me. But the average, reader/viewer/watcher will be easily moved by such fancy language and feigned profoundness. And what that tells me clearly is that AGW is a lie, it is an intentional lie, and the underlying intent is to fool us and use us. And that is why I hate the whole idea of it. I’m long past the “is it true or not” arguments and well on my way to “what is the end game”. As good skeptics you all need to do the same. Arguing on blogs with knuckleheads who believe this kind of pap is a worthless distraction. Investigation and exposure into the real perpetrators and real intent of this ruse is may literally be critical to the course of all mankind. As you know all mankind is at risk of suffering major quality of life changes as required by the Gods of Green. We must fight! Tirelessly and to the bitter end!

“A means can be justified only by its end. But the end in turn needs to be justified. From the Marxian point of view, which expresses the historic interests of the proletariat, the end is justified if it leads to increasing the power of man over nature and to the abolition of the power of man over man.” – Leon Trotsky

Why did the left turn against progress? Did it tear itself apart, because the desires of the middle-class people who adopted left-wing ideology to cultivate an image of themselves as “caring” clashed with the (largely materialistic) desires of working-class people themselves? “The Gods That Failed” by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson made this argument.

The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie. Marx and Engels. The Communist Manifesto. Ch 1. Bourgeois and Proletarians.

I find that I am getting into a classic British “Class Action” here.

I was a grammar school boy, smart, but of the lower classes. I left the UK to escape the classism that still, apparently, does exist. The astonishing thing is, though, that it is the bourgeois that are the snobby-wobbies, forming their own elite based upon comfortable bureaucratic service in organisations that just suck up money, and are answerable to no one. Yet these same elites will justify themselves with talk of fighting elites and spreading wealth, at the same time as they concentrate power and wealth amongst themselves.

OK, having just read what I wrote, then I should not be surprised; this is natural human behaviour. Machiavelli I wish were beside my side at this moment.

Thomas Malthus, student of Smith, developed Smith’s ideas and applied them to his understanding of poverty and population. It’s hardly a secret. Here’s a link to help you out:

http://www.google.com/search?q=Malthus+“adam+smith”

the Malthusianism of May’s arguments has its origins in Adam Smith.

Ezplain Please!!!

We are flattered that you see ‘enlightenment values’ in our posts here. But we haven’t been pursuing an individualist, or otherwise anti-collectivist criticism of environmentalism. We’re not convinced that they are particularly useful categories in this case.

There does seem to be a tendency amongst some critics of environmentalism to see history as divided between the collectivist/individualist camps, with all the ‘evil’ produced by the former. This somehow turns Kant, Stalinists, Nazis, and Environmentalists as all part of the same continuity, and therefore somehow equivalents.

But as we attempted to show, things aren’t so straightforward. May uses many of the ideas produced by the Rand Corporation; the Malthusianism of May’s arguments has its origins in Adam Smith.

It looks like you’re more interested in imposing these categories over a view of history and the present than you are interested in understanding why or how they became expedient or were legitimised at different times and in different circumstances. In other words, it seems that dogma drives your argument. It is as though collectivism itself, acts on people, and ideas throughout history can be understood, as it were ‘in a vacuum’. This is precisely what we criticise May for: he sees people as automata that respond obediently to ‘ideologies’ as though they were parts of a machine – just as the people at the RAND Corporation such as Nash seemed to. This kind of idea, imposed on people, is a tyranny whether it is used for the purposes of individualism, or collectivism, or to ‘save the planet’.

It may well be possible to criticise Kant for some of his philosophical arguments. But you don’t. You merely say that he is ‘the most evil villain in history’. Others of a similar persuasion have said similar things here about other thinkers, such as Marx, such as ‘environmentalism is a rehashing of Marxism’, and that it too is ‘demonstrably false’. Again, it may well be possible to criticise Marx, but is it so easy to show that his work is ‘demonstrably false’? Every word? Every theory? Every argument? Again, there, it seemed that the test of a theory’s validity was whether it was an argument which tended to produce an argument for individualism or collectivism – as though these two stood themselves for ‘true’ and ‘false’, and as though it didn’t matter how Marx or Kant reach their conclusions. So much for metaphysics. And so much for rationalism. It seems that, for Randists at least, ‘axiomatic concepts’ exist prior to experience. Rand ought to be disappointed.

So why is Kant ‘the most evil villain in history’?