From JunkScience.com LATimes cites ‘Mein Kampf’ to attack Heartland
The Los Angeles Times invokes der Führer to attack Heartland.
The Los Angeles Times editorializes:
Leaked documents from the Heartland Institute in Chicago, one of many nonprofits that spread disinformation about climate science in hopes of stalling government action to combat global warming, reveal that the organization is working on a curriculum for public schools that casts doubt on the work of climatologists worldwide. Heartland officials say one of the documents was a fake, but the curriculum plans were reportedly discussed in more than one. According to the New York Times, the curriculum would claim, among other things, that “whether humans are changing the climate is a major scientific controversy.”
That is a lie so big that, to quote from “Mein Kampf,” it would be hard for most people to believe that anyone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously”…
Here’s the story link:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinionla/la-ed-climate-20120220,0,3564279.story
Now is the time for all good men (and women) to cancel their subscriptions and fire off scathing letters to the editor about this ugly and uncalled for comparision. Most textbooks are written by private companies, and I can tell you that as a former school board member they don’t give you a lot of options since the state now issues “approved” textbook lists that you are only allowed to choose from. Local teachers and school boards can easily reject any materials they don’t want. Approving materials they do want is an uphill battle.
Here’s the feedback page:
http://www.latimes.com/about/mediagroup/la-mediagroup-contactus,0,7698150.htmlstory
h/t to Steve Milloy
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John Wright says:
February 20, 2012 at 9:52 am
Beware of lose cannons (just as meaningless as what you have just written!)
Took me a minute to figure out what you meant. 🙂
Now I feel silly. And Spellcheck assured me that the only thing I was misspelling was ‘Mein Kampf’.
Goldie says:
February 20, 2012 at 4:08 pm
On the other hand what were the editorial board thinking? Surely they should have filtered such a reference unless they somehow agree with the use of the words of one of the worlds worst genocidal maniacs. Are they covert Nazis? I thought the LAT was a left wing paper. Who knows what hidden agenda is being expressed when the Mainstream Media starts quoting Hitler?
Left and right wings are merely the opposite sides of the same coin, Marxism.
The LA Times was owned by the Tribune until the whole lot was bought out and turned into a private company:
– http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/tribune-completes-going-private-transaction-sam-zell-named-chairman–ceo-58835117.html
– http://benton.org/sites/benton.org/files/Tribune%20Fact%20Sheet.Final_.pdf
Who Owns the News
All but two on the following list are members of the Council on Foreign Relations whose stated aim is:
Isn’t arguing that any and all comparisons to nazi’s and how they accomplished the take over of an entire incredibly powerful nation nations resources just begging to allow it to happen again?
Tucci78 says:
February 20, 2012 at 5:55 pm
At 5:15 PM on 20 February johanna had written:
I too wonder about an editorial writer who is conversant enough with Mein Kampf to quote it, leaving aside the abysmal judgement involved in mentioning it at all. Life is short, and there are far too many great books that one will never have time to read. MK is not likely to be on my reading list, although I can understand why historians might have to wade through it.
Something quite similar to this sentiment had previously been voiced by other posters, and along with them johanna is dead wrong.
In order to defend civil comity, good order, and the preservation of individual human rights, it is necessary not merely for “historians” but all conscientious folk to develop and maintain knowledge of the promulgations issued by the enemies of liberty, from Machiavelli’s The Prince through Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriacha to the present-day lying viciousness of the AGW fraudsters.
One cannot with maximum effectiveness counter the noise of such malevolent bastids without the ability to understand and – when necessary – to quote their propaganda.
You can’t debunk and otherwise attack what you don’t know, and personal distaste is no bloody excuse at all.
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Tucci, I do not need to read every bit of garbage spewed out by totalitarian mass murderers, terrorists, serial killers, pedophiles, or any other unpleasant life form in order to repudiate them. People who have an academic or prurient interest are free to do so, however.
I have read extensively about WW2, and assure you that there is plenty of evidence of what Hitler and Co. did without a requirement to read his personal maunderings. Apart from Nazi apologists and other fringe groups, there is not a lot of dispute that he was responsible for about 50 million deaths.
There is no comparison with debating current scientific issues, which of course does require reading what you are disputing.
At 7:09 PM on 20 February, johanna continues to stump for the joys of willful ignorance, writing:
Hm. And how, johanna, would you like to undergo diagnosis and treatment at the hands of a medical doctor who took the same attitude toward the study of pathology?
I do like johanna‘s overt and deliberate determination to evade knowledge of the above-mentioned promulgations – which provide open and easily accessible insight into these enemies’ thought processes, motives, and action plans – in favor of leaving the unpleasant learning process in the hands of those “who have an academic or prurient interest,” at the very least relying on experts of whom johanna has also little knowledge, and in whom johanna can have absolutely no reason to repose trust.
Jeez, johanna, but could I forward to you some e-mails I’ve received from parties in Nigeria regarding opportunities for you to make mad wonderful profits in the recovery of funds from the U.S. bank accounts of West African petroleum industrialists convicted in money laundering schemes?
You sound like just the kind of…er, qualified participant…for whom those e-mailers have been looking.
So, now that Gleick has outed himself as the lying, cheating, fraudulent, scumbag that he is … LA Times can shove their equally misguided article right into a place where the sun don’t shine.
Tucci, your personal attacks do you no credit, and are irrelevant to the issue under discussion. FYI I have never lost a cent to a financial scam or even made a bad financial deal in my life. My faults may well be legion, but gullibility is not one of them.
The thought processes of certain types of people are of no interest to me. I care about what they do, not what is going on in their disordered brains. Mein Kampf was available long before WW2 broke out, and did absolutely nothing to prevent it – on the contrary.
Next you will be prescribing reading courses in schools of the writings of the worst people in history to ‘inoculate’ children. Personally, I think it is better to stick with the good and the inspirational, but then, delving in the sewers of the human condition is not my thing.
Construing as “personal attacks” upon her my criticism of her determination to keep her eyes squeezed shut and her fingers in her ears chanting “Nurmee-nurmee-nurmee, I’m not listening!”, at 7:57 PM on 20 February, johanna claims (without support) that all arguments for maintaining situational awareness in disputes of one’s enemies’ announced intentions and strategies:
Yeah, sure. Moreover:
Uh-huh. So johanna isn’t aware of having been suckered. Might could very well be that’s because johanna is hewing faithfully to her own expressed policy of maintaining a state of ignorance.
Confidence men just love marks who are absolutely sure that “gullibility is not one of” their own character flaws. Self-honestly, on t’other hand, recognizes that there are always going to be situations in which one can and will get gulled, and thus facilitates mitigatory perspicacity.
Further elucidating her vulnerabilities, johanna writes:
Yep. Ditto for the expressed doctrines leading up to Stalin’s Holodomor in the years immediately preceding Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration extending diplomatic recognition to the government of the U.S.S.R.
The ideas behind that species of authoritarianism – as was the case with Mein Kampf and the publications of other opinion leaders in the National Socialist German Workers’ Party during the 1920s and ’30s – were ignored for reasons chiefly of political expedience, aided by the encouragement of popular sentiments to the effect that “He/They can’t really mean something so absolutely horrible, can he/they?”
Well, yeah. Of course they did. Proved it, too, with corpses stacked in the tens of millions to prove their sincerity.
Being myself the kind of fella who understands that ideas have consequences (pace Mrs. O’Connor, who lived through those decades), and that “what they do” has a whole helluva lot to do with “[t]he thought processes of certain types of people,” I reject completely johanna‘s determination to evade study of those “thought proceses”.
Like any other physician, I don’t want to cause cancers. But I sure as hell want ot learn as much as I can about what conditions and activities predispose to the development of malignant diseases. That’s because such knowledge not only helps to reduce exposure to causative factors but also to get at the earliest possible diagnoses of such diseases.
This is why johanna really doesn’t want to seek the care of a medical doctor who approaches the study of pathology in the same way that johanna herself is determined to obliterate thought about (much less knowledge of):
…in her determination:
Jeez, so much emphasis upon sweetness. Shall we discuss diabetes mellitus now?
Your preoccupation with sickness and pathological behaviour has led you down some dark paths, Tucci. But I suggest you put the bottle away and hit the sack now, that being my most charitable explanation for your OTT and off topic personal attacks.
Abandoning completely her pretense of reasoned argument (if we could ever call what she’s been writing “reasoned”) and descending completely and unequivocally into “personal attacks” upon this your humble deponent, at 10:04 PM on 20 February, we’ve got johanna writing (in toto)
And thus does johanna yelpingly screw the proverbial pooch.
It is observed that criticism of what a communicant posts in the way of argument for a point or policy or action can in no way be construed as “personal attacks” upon that disputant, and only someone who (arguably neurotically) so thoroughly identifies with his/her articulations in a public forum would possibly take such critique as directly “personal.”
Saying that someone’s position is so invalid as to be qualitatively idiotic is not the same as saying that someone – like johanna – his him/herself an idiot.
On t’other hand, implying that a respondent has been boozing it up and only uttering what he has posted out of alcoholic inebriation is both an evasion of the responsibility to stick to the topic (originally raised by johanna, please note; see her post above) but also falls most assuredly into the category of “personal attacks” in and of itself.
Having reminded the readers here that I’m a physician (and therefore have a professional “preoccupation with sickness and pathological behaviour”), I’ve drawn an analogy between medical pathology and the praxeological malignancies of thought and action manifest in the histories of political authoritarianism.
Now, were the analogy not robust (as I think it to be), one would suppose that johanna would be working contrariwise along that line of argument, right?
Ah, but no. Instead johanna has to submerge herself in the sewer of “personal attacks” upon an online contestant about whom she supposes much and knows vanishingly little.
Sheesh. It’s like debating one of my grandkids.
Lady Life Grows says: “Cancel our subscriptions??? Since when are WUWT readers such idiots as to get their news from the L.A. “Grimes” (as L. Ron Hubbard called them in “Battlefield Earth) or similar newsrags? We don’t have subscriptions to cancel!”
Whenever the LA Times subscription peddlers used to call, I’d tell them I had a subscription to Pravda and had no need for the Times. I was fibbing, of course. I dropped the Times when our last parakeet died.
Goldie says: “Does anyone normal even read “Mein Kampf”, let alone publicise the fact by quoting from it? Shows a strange fascination with psychotic egomonaniacs to my way of thinking – oh wait, now I see the link!”
I tried to read MK in college and found it nearly unreadable in German. Regrettably, it’s very difficult to obtain accurate copies online. Germany has banned it, resulting in online availability mostly in the sanitized English verson only. Hitler didn’t allow it to be published in English (or any other language) in its full, original form for obvious reasons: it all too clearly spelled out what he intended to do.
“To read Mein Kampf in German is the beginning of wisdom in international affairs” –Sir Robert Ensor, 1938.
Your puerile judgmentalism is interfering with your ability to say anything meaningful here. The pity is that too many European politicians had the same attitude and failed to read MK before 1930, when something could have been done about Hitler.
Your puerile judgmentalism is interfering with your ability to say anything meaningful here. The pity is that too many European politicians had the same attitude and failed to read MK before 1930, when something could have been done about Hitler.
(Comment directed at Goldie)
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jorge, as I said above, speaking as another ‘puerile judgementalist ‘in your estimation, Mein Kampf is history – it was published about 90 years ago. It is certainly true that there might have been value in people outside Germany reading it in the 1920s and 30s, but if they did, it made not a jot of difference. Reading it now is about as meaningful as reading the babblings of the Swedish mass murderer. If you want to understand how WW2 came about, the answer is not there. It is in the broader political and economic history of Europe – Hitler was just the catalyst. Very likely, if he had never been born, WW2 would have happened anyway.
While some people may obtain vicarious thrills from reading the outbursts of the deranged, I do not. It is sometimes worth trawling through their narcissistic and invariably sludgy prose if they represent a current or future threat. Aside from that, why on earth would you bother? Nothing of historical import is revealed. There is too much important, useful or just plain pleasurable stuff to read instead, unless you have a particular interest in the mindset of the depraved for its own sake.
Johanna, watch out for trolls – they can’t help it and life is too short.
Afizzycyst: care to explain your ridiculous statement and also agree that the LAT is out of order?
A physicist says:
February 20, 2012 at 9:01 am
Obviously, you should stick to physics, because you know absolutely NOTHING about law or legal ethics.
Neither lawyers or judges are allowed to knowingly suborn perjury on the part of their clients in any state of the United States. It is both a criminal and a disbarable offense. Likewise, it is an ethical principle of EVERY code of legal professional responsibility in the United States that lawyers are to be zealous advocates “within the bounds of law.” The term “within the bounds of law” has realistic meaning in today’s jurisprudence (but I doubt it has enough meaning within the scientific community). Although some lawyers have stretched the envelope of that fundamental principle, they have not stretched it like some climate scientists and their lackeys (yourself included) have stretched the truth these days when it comes to CO2 and climate.
You are the LAST person who should be attacking lawyers and judges.
I also concur with Richard Drake’s analysis about the “Big Lie.” It is exactly what big liars do to opponents of their lies. And runaway, uncontrollable, catastrophic AGW has quickly achieved the status of big lie exposed and decisively refuted.
Perhaps that is what disturbs the LA Times. They can’t hide in their bubble anymore.
We’ll see if everything goes quiet “on the Western Front”–and whether the LA Times prints a retraction, explanation, and apology.
I doubt we’ll see anything more than a classified ad for Gleick’s used leather chair.
Not surprising when you consider that the Director of the IPCC is a Commander of the Order of King Leopold II, the mega-murderer of the Congo.
johanna says:
February 21, 2012 at 1:29 am
“If you want to understand how WW2 came about, the answer is not there. It is in the broader political and economic history of Europe – Hitler was just the catalyst. Very likely, if he had never been born, WW2 would have happened anyway.”
No, far, far from it. Consider that after Hitler’s rise to power, he defied the French, occupying the Saarland and breaking the Versailles treaty, later the German speaking parts of Czechia, and Austria – in all these cases, the locals consented (not the Czech government, of course, but the people in the annexed areas). Western powers appeased him, showing understanding. He could have rested on his laurels – he actually did, slacking off at the Obersalzberg.
WW2 only started a while after this initial expansion and was a completely different operation.
From the LA Times, “Leaked documents from the Heartland Institute in Chicago…”
Hey, do you know who else other than the LA Times mentioned Chicago at one time or another? Hitler.
We can all play that game :). So can Hitler.
Of course, a major population reduction to save Nature may be the unspoken green elephant implied by the call to depend on renewable energy only. This could make Hitler seem to be a multiple order of magnitude piker.
Anthony, as a postscript to this conversation I contacted the Simon Wiesentahl Institute in LA, assuming they would be concerned that this book had been quoted in such an offhand way regardless of the context.
Apparently not, they received no other correspondence on this matter and concluded that it’s use “was not intended to cause offence”.
It seems that at the age of 52, I still have a lot to learn about the ways of the world.