Given the shameful pedophilia labels that were recently applied to climate skeptics by the Merchants of Hate Robyn Williams and Stephan Lewandowsky on Australia’s ABC radio, I thought this essay from the Chillicothe Gazette (Ohio) said something that needed to be said, so I’m repeating an excerpt here.
Jim Thompson writes:
As a global warming skeptic who never will be in a car pool van or AFV unless forced to do so by the government, it hit me that I now know what it was like to be a black citizen in the South during the height of Jim Crow laws.
You know, when because of your skin color, you were thought to be stupid, ignorant, lazy and dirty. You sat in the back of the bus, were not allowed to use any “whites only” facilities and were sent to segregated schools.
Today, if you do not bow to the global warming/climate change/carbon footprint gods, you are deemed stupid, ignorant, lazy and unenlightened. You don’t deserve to park next to the door, you should feel lucky we even let you in the parking garage. Additionally, there are certain lanes on the expressways in which you are not allowed to travel.
…
All is not lost, however. For by experiencing the discrimination of not swallowing the nonsense, I have been able, in some small way, to experience what it must have been like to have been an African-American in the United States in the first half of the 20th century. The ridicule, catcalls, unfair labeling and so forth that one experiences when they are on the wrong side of a mob’s beliefs are interesting. The only difference is the African-Americans were stuck with their skin color. All I would have to do is abandon all the science I was ever taught to be, once again, accepted.
Full essay here
h/t to Tom Nelson
Princessartemis writes : “…. What an atrocious article. Maybe he’ll get a hangnail next and come to a sudden understanding of what it’s like to be disabled in America.
Anthony, I have been quietly following WUWT for years. It has demonstrated itself to be better than this in the past:”
Boy do I agree with this. Anthony, I’m a great fan but your tone deafness here is deeply depressing. Even disturbing. I’m a global warming skeptic surrounded by liberal democrat, full on believers. My family, my friends, many acquaintences. Yes, it sure is frustrating at times. Even maddening. But the notion that I now understand what it was like to be a black man in the bad old days in the South is beyond silly. You’ve made yourself look foolish by publishing this nonsense.
Another term that is much used and much abused is “diversity.” If diversity is so great, as is taught these days, we should thankful (especially while feasting turkey leftovers) for all the AGW proponents, AGW skeptics, bureaucrats, lawyers, lobbyists, congress, con men, burglars, counterfeiters, murderers, and even people like me. (Mostly swedish-american, still waiting for his check from Big Oil.)
Oh – the car-pool lanes were to try to get as many commuters down the road in fewer vehicles, at least all the ones I know of were for congestion control, not for saving the planet.
Just be skeptical about what ever you want, the psychological manipulation will eventually be engineered later to prove you are wrong. It’s called warfare in some countries.
Anthony, Just to add, I’ve been reading WUWT for several years now. I’ve come to rely on it, and be heartened by it. I read your blog and understand that all is not lost. Sanity will prevail. I’m sorry for my harsh words above, but must stand by them nonetheless. I hope you’ll reconsider and acknowledge what in my view is a mistake that does the skeptical cause no favors.
perlcat99 says:
November 25, 2012 at 11:01 am
…Not news that unethical people are unethical. More amusing is the revelation that the first letters of one of their propaganda outlets, MS-NBC, stands for “Manure Spreader”-NBC.
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What is really interesting is MS-NBC tie-in with Obama’s Jobs Czar, General Electric’s CEO Jeffrey Immelt. Immelt is (an expert at creating foreign jobs notes Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH)
pokerguy,
This is an article from a source that Anthony linked to for discussion. Have you completely missed the calls for scientific skeptics to be labeled mentally ill? Or for the rounding up of skeptics, for merely having a different scientific point of view? You don’t seem to understand where that kind of thinking will lead.
Segregation of blacks generally did not include calls for them to be locked up in psychiatric institutions. To me, the current attacks against skeptics is worse in some ways. History is repeating, and if you don’t understand that it is because you have not read enough history.
davidmhoffer says:
November 25, 2012 at 10:56 am
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The best comment on the thread … by a long way.
For all of the other critics of this posting by Anthony, you may be right to the extent that the anti-denier attitude is not nearly as pervasive or as intense as the racist attitudes of segregation in either the US or South Africa, but those attitudes had a beginning. That beginning was in the dehumanising of a group based on an irrelevant characteristic (skin colour). This is the same beginning and must be stopped before it goes anywhere. This article shows where we could end up if good people do nothing.
Not a comparison I would have chosen.
I agree with posters above who say that religious persecution is much more apt.
TomE says:
November 25, 2012 at 11:24 am
As more time passes and the CAGW position weakens, we will see more of the “denier” attacks and as their funding becomes threatened even desperate moves. Since this article involved concerns about racism, what more despicable attacks do we now see than charges of “racism” whenever the competence of a black politician is questioned…
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Or a black employee. I am REALLY REALLY sick and tired of the “Race Card” being played just to cover-up incompetence. I was around in the 1950’s and 60’s when REAL racism was alive. I was subject to discrimination from grade school on and so it makes me very angry to see racism being fanned into life again by the MSM and politicians hoping to use it for gaining power.
It does blacks no good to allow the race card to be played for political advantage and it should be condemned when it is used that way.
It’s funny how sensitive that people are about race, when the most vicious attacks ever were about what you did for a living, or does the starvation of the Kulaks (~42 million dead) in Russia during the Stalin era not count. Americans are way too sensitive about color, and readily forget that most genocide has nothing to do with color. For someone to get a small ah-ha moment is not to be disparaged. Real transparency leads to real communication. I’m glad he said what he felt, he should continue to learn and talk about it.
Maybe another spate of Ted Kazinsky type bombings would bring the whole thing into focus. Ted was already starting the eco-war. The thought police are just a declaration away in some countries – see how quickly it went in Egypt.
This site is as far as I can see, about communication. Let’s stop with the thought police.
Anthony I support your posting of this article and the open dialog that ensued. Shame on those who advocate for restrictive thought on discrimination.
Following up on greg copeland (smokes and skeptical) Crustacean (detests having to use an alias):
For these and other reasons, two years ago I gave up tolerating all the aggravation and went private. My field is town planning and building design. Very much on the receiving end of the CAGW/CC creed. I am findable, but so far have not needed to advertise my services. I get regular referrals, and more work than I can handle – in a market that presently moribund.
The aggravation is still there apparently, but I tend not to turn up at the venues and events where it is likely to be expressed to me personally.
Clients have told me they contacted me because they had been “warned” that I was a skeptic 🙂
Perhaps the writer could have used a better analogy, however the subject is now being switched from the way people like myself have been treated, for being skeptical about Global Warming, to the dead past of the Jim Crow Era.
I don’t care a rodent’s posterior about the Jim Crow Era. It’s over.
If people are going to get all hypersensitive, please do it about little children being blown up because they don’t believe in Global Warming. I found that video appalling, yet never have heard the slightest hint of an apology for it, from any Alarmists.
Have you? Can you link me to a YouTube of Bill McKibben stating that a video blowing up children might have been an itty bitty bit overboard? Or, instead, do we have public figures like Hansen equating the coal trains which keep our elderly warm during winter with genocide’s “death trains?”
I have been putting up with this bullying abuse for seven years now, and am hugely glad Anthony and others have had the guts to stand up to it and point it out and call Alarmist behavior what it is.
How stupid these Alarmists are! You show them perfectly proper and elegant evidence that it was warmer when the Vikings grew barley in Greenland, and they do what? They call you a pedophile? They state you belong locked up in a mental hospital? They attempt to get you fired?
You have to stand up to this nonsense. Unfortunately, judging from some of the comments to this post, there are people who agree the Alarmist’s bullying is wrong, but lack the spine to stand up to it. Instead they cower. They may think they are being reasonable, but their blithering, yammering intellectualism is only a justification for their cowering.
(Now watch. They will venture forth like brave mice to rebuke me, but will they ever rebuke an Alarmist they actually know, in their real life? Do they even dare post using their real name?
While understanding the intent of the article it is a poor analogy as skin color is not a personal decision. The same criticism can be laid at the door of the ‘gay’ community claiming that discrimination against them is the same as that against ‘African Americans’ before the ‘civil rights’ movement. The end to segregation is all too fresh in the psyche of African Americans even slavery means far more to them than it does to citizens other countries.
However, Jeremy says: November 25, 2012 at 10:55 am has it right to compare it to the rise of National Socialism in Germany. After all we are being called ‘deniers’ and that is the same time period. Luminaries in the AGW camp like George Soros will understand that too as Jews looked just like everyone else and if they acted like everyone else and supported the political activities of the majority, they could and did avoid concentration camps and the holocaust.
However, there are two very important points that have been missed which should not be glossed over:
(1) Not an Opinion. The ‘deniers’ are saying that human activities were not responsible for all the warming that has taken place in the last hundred years. This is not a political point of view it is based on empirical science. If forecasts from several people posting here, Russian scientists and even NASA are to be believed we can expect cold or even quite severe cold in the next decade. This will not be something the politicians can hide as it is not an opinion when the cold comes and there are severe famines due to crop failures and the windfarms cannot provide power to heat homes. I think this is why there is a real rush to put in place laws and Global Governance before Gaia shows how hard life can be.
(2) What DO we believe in? We should all state outright that we believe the climate changes – in fact we believe it doesn’t need assistance from human activities to change, it has been changing all on its own in the same way for millennia. We also actually believe that the Earth has become warmer – there has been global warming – since the end of the Little Ice Age; but that it was warmer before then in the Medieval Warm Period. It is the ‘warmists’ and their political masters who are the climate change deniers, as they claim to not believe in natural climate change and the preceding naturally occurring warm and cold periods: they blame any change in climate on human activity so that they can tax it. We therefore believe that much of the false panic about climate catastrophe is intended to justify raising taxes and assumption of power and control over the population.
We must show what we DO believe as well as what we do not believe. Put the ‘denier’ label on the warmists where it belongs.
Off on a few levels. First of which is that there have not to date been any climate murders that I know of. Second. I can choose not to speak about global warming to people. One can’t choose to not be black or Jewish. Stupid analogy that weakens your legitimate arguments on science. Lord Monckton would tear this analogy up.
Rob Honeycutt says:
November 25, 2012 at 12:00 pm
….Have any of your relatives been lynched? Have you had people shoot at your house while your family were eating dinner?….
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You have your head in the sand if you can not see the danger headed straight at us. (Anthony please take care)
My neighbor had his house shot-up and I have had incidences happen which I reported to the FBI.
So yes it is happening and it is ESCALATING! Just look at the FBI report I posted above.
Here are more
FBI accuses 3 environmentalists of bomb plot… Also “Last year, homemade bombs believed to be planted by followers of ELF failed to detonate at two government buildings in Auburn and at a house under construction. Ryan Daniel Lewis, 22, of Newcastle (Placer County), was arrested and pleaded guilty to two counts of attempted arson and one count of arson.”
If the MSM whips up enough hate against ‘deniers’ do you doubt these eco-terrorists will not come after the ‘leaders’ and anyone else they identify? If they are willing to go after innocent people for buying products from a company they hate what do you think will happen when they turn on ‘deniers’? What will happen if and when the CAGW green movement goes belly-up and the power elite find another cash cow to milk abandoning solar power and windmills? The Deniers will become the scapegoats and if you had any brains you can see the set-up is already taking place.
arthur4563 says (November 25, 2012 at 11:45 am): “I believe that one of the reasons that warmists are so certain in their beliefs is that they mistakenly believe that all skeptics deny that any warming has occurred over the past 100 years or, if it has, mankind has had zero influence.”
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Logically, what you said makes zero sense. Simplified, you statement is: “X believes zzzzz because X believes that Y denies zzzzz”. No sense at all, sorry.
Second, “say something” and “believe something” are 2 different things. Sometimes people say that they believe what they do not believe at all. I guess the concept of lying for political and ideological reasons is familiar to you.
Truthseeker says:
November 25, 2012 at 2:23 pm
davidmhoffer says:
November 25, 2012 at 10:56 am
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The best comment on the thread … by a long way.
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I will second that and raise it to a request that Anthony post that comment at the top of the page where it deserves to be.
OOPS, My Bad, I liked davidmhoffer’s comment but it is Crispin in Waterloo’s comment @ur momisugly
November 25, 2012 at 11:50 am That is the best explanation of the situation and should be placed under the article.
I listened to the ABC article and it was utterly disgusting. The kind of conniving skulduggery that you would expect in a private conspiracy in a pub. Prof L. is so obviously more likely a candidate for psychological examination than any of the deniers he wants to denigrate, it is as ironic as it is alarming. I admit to being at a loss as to why there should be such hate. What is the source of it? Is it the kind of psychological issue that Prof L is talking about (in reverse)…what irony?
I recently referred to some greenies as “evil” and was immediately admonished by my wife. I am now thinking that this was exactly the correct definition. Why are we afflicted by THIS evil?
Apartheid begins somewhere very small and it grows.
I was at the University of Cape Town in South Africa in 1967 when the Government policy of apartheid was at its height. The policy of the denigration of a very large sector of the population was promulgated in the press and on the radio (there was no television in South Africa then). The propaganda was relentless. To my horror I found that I was beginning to accept the false premises of this iniquitous system after only a few months. And why not? I was one of those favoured by the System.
The quandary in which I found myself, either to accept my privileged position within the System or to reject it and to suffer the consequences was solved by a comparatively minor incident.
A man working up a ladder on the house opposite to where a friend and I were studying, fell when the ladder broke. He fell and injured his back. We called an ambulance. When it arrived one of the crew members informed us that they could not assist as they were a “white” ambulance and could not take a coloured person. The threats of violence by my friend and I ensured that the injured man was conveyed to Groote Schuure Hospital where he was successfully treated.
This incident drove home to me, most forcefully, what discrimination, segregation or differentiation on the grounds of colour, belief or shoe-size (included to demonstrate how trivial the previous two categories are) really mean. I rebelled against apartheid and ended up being refused access to South Africa in my final year at the U of Cape Town (I was a Zambian resident).
Discrimination on any grounds remains anathema to me these many years later. There are no degrees of ‘discrimination’. If it exists it is evil.
The insidious ‘denormalisation’ of smokers is the thin end of the wedge in persuading people to accept degrees of discrimination. The allocation of parking spaces to ‘acceptable’ vehicles is another inch of the wedge driven home.
The analogy the author of this article makes in no way equates colour discrimination with car-park discrimination. What he does is high-light the fact that DISCRIMINATION lives!
The evil of treating someone differently because of some arbitrarily chosen fact has not only become acceptable but has become Law and that can never be tolerated.
I dread the coming of the Carbon Inquisition. I am doomed.
This kind of marginalization of a group of people based on what beliefs they espouse is not unique to climate change skeptics and neither is the treatment they are receiving. Being a conservative, white, Christian and a climate skeptic, I draw fire from several different angles. It’s all designed to dehumanize the “other.” If you can dehumanize your opponent, you delegitimize everything they say and can readily dismiss it without having to think about it overmuch. The danger is that when you can dehumanize the other, you also open them to treatment as a subhuman entity whether this is by accident or design, and when that happens, we see the results in the Jim Crow South, Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany and other places where people have been and are subject to degraded treatment – the many countries of the Middle East are also a good object lesson.
The thing that worries me is that rhetoric has been ramping up over the past decade, and I’m afraid that it’s only a matter of time before words are followed by actions. Then this comparison, while it seems overblown and offensive to some now, may not be such an academic matter.
Ian W;
Jews looked just like everyone else and if they acted like everyone else and supported the political activities of the majority, they could and did avoid concentration camps and the holocaust.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
This is a blatant lie and an egregious anti-Semitic statement. If by intent then it is one of the most racist remarks ever made in this forum. If by ignorance, then allow me to set the record straight:
There were Jews active in the Nazi party, and fully believed that because they were Germans and Nazis first and foremost, that they were only Jews as an accident of heritage, that they would be safe in the new regime. When the Nazis came to power, those Jews were slaughtered like any other Jew. The Nazis researched in detail birth records to identify every last bit of Jewish DNA they could find. In some cases, they sent to the death camps entire families who weren’t even aware that they had a single great grandfather who was a Jew.
The notion that they acted in some way that brought their fate upon them is as ignorant as suggesting they could have escaped their fate simply by changing their DNA.
You owe millions of people who died in the holocaust an apology.
You can treat me like a second class citizen, but don’t expect me to behave like one!
Down with the tyranny of CAGW and the Green hate and spite that goes with it…
Caleb says:
November 25, 2012 at 3:31 pm
“… I don’t care a rodent’s posterior about the Jim Crow Era. It’s over…”
You should. It’s an era where bigotry not only thrived, but was given the full force of law. It’s one thing for people to have dissenting opinions, quite another to have a group able to enforce their ideas via incarceration, fines, even execution. Jim Crow is important to keep in mind for all those people who maintain “it couldn’t happen here”.