Last weekend I posted an essay on what I considered to be a pointless invocation of Godwins Law by my friend James Delingpole:
The battle of the pointless Nuremberg insults: Romm -vs- Delingpole
(Note: For those of you who don’t know, Delingpole was the first to pick up on Climategate and give it MSM legs in the Telegraph, for that we owe him gratitude. )
In my essay I had harsh words for people on both sides of the climate debate, pointing out where there’s more than enough instances of blame to go around. Both sides have fallen into the Godwin’s Law trap. From Wikipedia:
Godwin’s law (also known as Godwin’s Rule of Nazi Analogies or Godwin’s Law of Nazi Analogies) is an observation made by Mike Godwin in 1990 that has become an Internet adage. It states: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.” In other words, Godwin observed that, given enough time, in any online discussion—regardless of topic or scope—someone inevitably makes a comparison to Hitler or the Nazis.
When James invoked Nuremberg comparisons, he became another Godwin’s Law statistic, joining some other loud voices on the AGW advocacy side of the debate.
Normally, when you point out where they’ve fallen into such a rhetorical trap, especially with friends, they thank you for helping them to realize this. I was quite surprised to find that Mr. Delingpole has made not one, but two critical responses to my essay:
In the Telegraph: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100211704/apologise-to-michael-mann-anthony-id-rather-eat-worms/
In the Spectator: http://www.spectator.co.uk/columnists/james-delingpole/8885551/no-i-wont-say-sorry-even-to-a-friend/
After contemplation of his reaction, I wrote a thank you letter to James for the kind words that he did mention about me (to which he responded positively), and I have now condensed the problem of our differences down to what I believe is a simple misunderstanding on Mr. Delingpole’s part.
I wrote in my original essay:
My point is, no matter who says it, in whatever context, it will turn into a shouting match no matter how many qualifiers or caveats you attach to it, and we simply don’t need it, because all it does is polarize the tribal nature of the climate debate even further.
To Delingpole, take a cue from Dave Roberts at Grist: fix it and apologize. To Mann, Romm, and others, clean up your own house before taking your outrage further.
James took that as me suggesting that he should apologize to Dr. Michael Mann. No, I’d never make such a silly suggestion, because while Dr. Mann does have a right to be upset at what Mr. Delingpole wrote, as is typical of Dr. Mann, he took the issue, made it his own, inflated it, ran with it, and added his own brand of specially seasoned Team Outrage Sauce to it:
Should we be surprised at this inflation of Delingpole’s Godwin’s Law rhetorical flourish to “calling for my murder”? No, not at all, because Dr. Mann is quite good at taking small insignificant bits and turning them into issues, it’s what he does as his hockey stick critics will tell you.
But here’s where I think James missed a critical point, and that might be my fault for not making it clearer in my initial essay. I think my mistake was dashing off my original essay too quickly, which left some things open to interpretation.
I wasn’t suggesting James apologize to Dr. Mann, nooo, I was suggesting that James apologize to climate skeptics.
Why? Well, consider what goes on in the climate blogosphere on an almost daily basis. Since AGW proponents are having a hard time successfully arguing the science these days, what with the pause, climate sensitivity, IPCC modeling -vs- reality and other issues not working out like they hope, and with the public cooling their interest, AGW proponents rely more and more on rhetorical tricks to make their points. We see more and more hyperventilated media claims of every bit of odd weather being caused by global warming, only later to discover they are nothing but hype. We see desperately silly claims of “anything goes” when it comes to connecting AGW to weather, where no matter what the forecast and result, the unseen hand of AGW is to blame.
But, probably the most desperate examples being used by AGW proponents are the execrable tactics pioneered by Dr. Stephan Lewandowski of the University of Western Australia and his sidekick John Cook of Skeptical Science. Their tactic is the same as what was once employed in the communist USSR, a political abuse of psychiatry: paint your opponent as being mentally aberrant.
And, it is we individual climate skeptics who are the ones having to fight those rhetorical battles in the blogospheric trenches. We’ll now be in a defensive position over Delingpole’s article.
My issue with James Delingpole simply had to do with handing our opponents another tool to beat us up rhetorically with. When they want to use a broad brush to paint all climate skeptics as nutters, the last thing you want to do is indulge their fantasy by invoking Godwin’s Law, giving them rhetorical ammo that they’ll re-purpose and fire back at us. One thing I’ve learned is that climate extremists have no shame, they’ll take any issue and throw it back at us with wildly inflated claims, just look at Dr. Mann’s tweet above to see this in action.
In his letter to me James wrote that:
As a scientist you are inevitably going to think this is all about the science. it isn’t – and as I documented very carefully in Watermelons – it never was.
No, I’ve never thought that. While James and I fight the battle using different tools at our disposal, we both know that that battle lines of global warming/climate change are constantly blurred between science and politics. Some days they are entirely interchangeable as Al Gore, James Hansen, Joe Romm, Kevin Trenberth, Michael Mann, and Bill McKibben routinely demonstrate to us.
I simply think we shouldn’t hand our opponents new weapons (such as Godwin’s Law eruptions) that they will inevitably use against us; it just isn’t a good strategy. For those in the blogospheric trenches who will now be forced to defend Mr. Delingpole against hyperinflated claims of “calling for my murder” like Dr. Mann has made, I think Delingpole should offer a simple mea culpa to them for the extra difficulties they will now face in the battle.
James also wrote this in his letter to me:
We’re free and open in expressing our differences. Compare and contrast the way, for example, after Gleickgate the greens/alarmists throughout the blogosphere and the MSM pretty much closed ranks and got behind Gleick regardless of the gravity of his crime. Our side would just never do that. If any one of us was involved in serious malfeasance like identity theft, we’d be quick to condemn it.
Indeed we would, we police our own, which is why I’m pointing out this Godwin’s Law instance to James.
James does make some very good (and entertaining) rhetorical points though about the eco-oriented left , and you can read about them in his book: Watermelons: The Green Movement’s True Colors
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
AOL was started in 1985, btw.
Mark
Both of you should drop it and row your own boats. Nothing could benefit the buggers more than two of our biggest players infighting. I mean it , drop it – they love it.
Here’s a research paper on Authoritarianism http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/
Dr. Watts, I respectfully disagree with you on Delingpole’s essay. I did not interpret it as invoking anything about the Nazis except for the mention of the Nuremberg tribunal, which was established by the Allies. Sorry, but I think you are off base on this one.
REPLY: No Dr. here, simply Mr. But thanks for thinking of me that way.- Anthony
It is, obviously, a lack of communication.
Mixed signals/hurried typing/bad wording.
Entertaining to be sure, glad it wasn’t me 🙂
I am not saying Delingpole is an idiot.
Delingpole pretends that what he says was a metaphor. Well, it was. But a metaphor that acted as paralipsis
http://wordsmith.org/words/paralipsis.html
Here is a snippet of conversation that speaks to the different mindset of
“those who know the truth”. This is from an MSN science article….this first line is from Physicist_retired…
“If Rex doesn’t understand how that works, he really isn’t qualified to be commenting on this topic at all, Jock.”
6
Vote for this comment.
!
#3.3 – Fri Apr 12, 2013 1:53 PM PDT
Comment author avatarstoneyplanet
I’ve seen Rex in here before. I wish he would stick to the sports stories. He’s an idiot and a bit of a racist.
1
Vote for this comment.
!
#3.4 – Fri Apr 12, 2013 11:44 PM PDT
Comment author avatargoldminor
Rex has the right of free speech, or maybe Physicist doesn’t believe in free speech. This is not a science journal,. This is a run of the mill spin the news website. Anyone can say whatever on this thread , as long as it is in the realm of decency. Your socialist agenda shines clearly.
Vote for this comment.
!
#3.5 – Sat Apr 13, 2013 8:44 PM PDT
If they had the opportunity, these people would pass censorship laws to silence those that they do not agree with, or whose opinions might be deemed dangerous to their ideology.
Glad to see I’m not the only one with the view that Monckton and Delingpole are both loose cannons in the AGW debate. I fear this is not the last time we shall see such a problem…
I found my way into this realm when I bought and read Dr Bob Carter’s book “Climate: the Counter Consensis”. I found his chapters on the science to be erudite and convincing. They sounded like the material I was exposed to as a geology undergraduate ie. honest science. Later chapters put me off and I didn’t pick up the book and finish it for nearly a year. This was because he had very harsh and (I thought) over the top things to say about conservationists. I knew these were well deserved in reference to charlatans like Gore ( ie the funding and salary crowd) but his rant included ALL conservationsts. It read like bad ‘Mannerisms'(are there any good ones?)
Then I read Christopher Booker’s “The Real Global Warming Disaster” with a similar experience.
THEN I acquired James Delingpole’s “Killing The Earth To Save IT” It was hard to get on with appreciating all the very good points he was making because of the dense cloud of invective. I thought it is going to be hard for me to speak out in the face of the hatred that this kind of activity will inevitably generate.
So I agree with Anthony. It is not necessary to made odious comparisons and generalizations. Take individuals to task for their errors and sins with vigour but stay on fact. It may not be easy and it may be less colourful. I hard to censor myself twice just writing this. I guess I really am a pedantic old fart.
By the way. Those books led this old dinosaur to WUWT which I visit twice a day. Wouldn’t miss it.
[snip – policy violation – mod]
I must respectfully disagree with you Anthony.
The way to ensure another round of Nazi atrocities and holocaust eventually is to forget the last one, and to not identify it when it is in stages of infancy. Godwin’s Law is a politically correct form of a free pass or immunity from criticism for those proto-Nazis and neo-Communists that are infecting Science and all of society itself. It is a malignant tumor of cancerous cells. I soon expect a similar Wikipedia Law that will also truncate comparisons to Communists and medical diseases as well.
I wouldn’t worry about handing them another tool because Political Correctness is one of the main tools the enemy already uses, and invoking Godwin’s Law to stifle accurate comparisons to their forerunners is itself “handing them a weapon” to beat us up with. Heads they win, tails we lose. That is the nature of the “game” the enemy has us playing. You are only looking at one side of that coin. We are not in a battle of scientific opinion, we never were. It is about slavery, feudalism and servitude, and Political Correctness is the blue pill in this Matrix.
P.S. naturally this is your site and you can restrict it however you want, and seeing how Nazi related words already trigger the content filter it looks as if you already are restricting the conversation somewhat. That’s fine I guess. But I still respectfully disagree, and I do understand because you are a much nicer person than I am. However, I am prepared to happily accept being painted not-so-nice by freedom’s enemies. The price of liberty truly is eternal vigilance.
In addition to the comments of others in response to your comment, there were many online services around in the late 80s and early 90s, as well as extensive BBS networks, such as Fidonet (my 2-line BBS was a member for a couple years).
I also worked for a small online service called The Source, based out of McLean, VA. At our height we had about 60k subscribers. I was a tech support dude. They were gobbled up and dissolved by Compuserve in 1989. From there I went to Telenet, which shortly thereafter became Sprintnet. One of the online services which used our dial-up lines was called PC-Link (also Apple-Link), actually those were the names of the software used to connect to Quantum Computer Services servers. I worked closely with the Quantum folks as a representative of Sprintnet to help develop dial-up scripts and testing protocols. Shortly thereafter they launched America On Line (AOL), and grew so quickly that our rotaries were overwhelmed in a short space of time. We went from about 50k dial up lines in 1989 to over half a million in the early 90s.
So, yeah, “online” meant quite a bit, without a public internet.
I’ve occasionally got into this argument over Delingpole (and Monckton) in the past. My answer has always been that I feel no requirement to defend Delingpole as a member of my ‘team’. Sceptics are not a tribe or a coherent organisation – they’re a collection of individuals, few of who have anything to do with any of the others. They don’t speak for me, and I can’t speak for them. And I’m always polite, and ought to be judged on my *own* behaviour.
Having said that, I’d also say there’s room in the debate for several different approaches. Delingpole is essentially an entertainer, who makes a living by presenting in a humorous style that deliberately breaks taboos and ‘political correctness’. There are many people who are attracted and impressed by sophisticated debate, but there are even more people who admire someone who speaks directly, expresses their feelings, and says all those things that “you’re not allowed to say”. It attracts support, raises passions and enthusiasm. (It’s usually funny, too.) The British have a tendency to follow the rules, so when the authorities say “you’ll put up with all these windfarms because it’s Green, and only an evil person would disagree with Green” they will go along with it, with no more than a little dark muttering under their breath. People like Delingpole say to them they can argue back – say such things out loud. It’s liberating – if a little scary.
That doesn’t mean we should *all* do it. And it would help if they knocked it off with the nazi analogies – it’s cheap and lacks imagination. (I don’t think he should be apologising to the sceptics either, but to the Jews and other victims.) But on other topics the angry rhetoric serves a purpose, addresses a particular (very large) segment of the population, and is in any case a sort of comedic act, part of a journalist-entertainer’s way of making a living. Delingpole’s perfectly capable of defending himself, he doesn’t need any of us to defend him, and nor should we.
Free speech means the freedom to say things we don’t like. Sometimes people need to say things people don’t like specifically to maintain that freedom – to hold the door open, so to speak.
Perhaps, in a way, not being allowed to say it is actually a worse thing than saying it.
Actually, the best example of invoking Godwin’s Law is the “Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming” meme itself–and in typical fashion, advocates of CAGW frequently call anybody who doesn’t march in lock step with them the “N” word or some variant thereof.
Add to that prattle the mindless, irrational invoking of the Precautionary Principle and you’ve got a dynamic duo–(fictional) CAGW justifying (ignoramus) PP. (It almost sounds like physiological dysfunction, but I won’t go there.)
And to top it all off, they’re hiding all this garbage under the banner of “science”. It doesn’t get worse than this unless you add how much they’re getting paid and the impact their charade is having on the defenseless poor of the world. Then it becomes criminal–as in crimes against humanity.
Of course, Mann only chafes at hypothetical death threats and not actual deaths. For him the theoretical always trumps reality.
Sometimes it is entirely appropriate to compare something to Nazism.
Godwin’s “Law” does not discuss whether it is wrong to ever mention the Nazis, it just states that in any internet discussion is appears to be the observation that if the discussion lasts long enough then the Nazis will be mentioned.
I think that Delingpole’s point was to draw attention to the idea that the warmists are effectively proposing to commit a crime against humanity with their CO2 policies since many have predicted that those policies will lead to increased starvation. What better way to do that than to frame the characters into those of the famous Nuremberg trial?
I hope that it is now clear that Anthony did not ask James to apologize to Mann.
And that the main concern of Anthony was that the skeptic side discipline ourselves to avoid the distraction of Godwin’s law.
Both men exhibit the truth of the Proverbs, “Faithful are the wounds of a friend” and “Iron sharpens iron.”
And I have on doubt that these super heroes will remain true friends.
Deadman at 1:48pm – your included link is dead.
“AGW advocacy”… and that is all it is.
I am one of Delingpoles biggest fans. but he c0cked up. It takes a big man to admit it, and Dellers is a big man.
This fight is only worth the candle if we win fair and square, with dignity, and, yes, even respect
The examples of the AGW “metaphors” you provided in your original screed directly called for violence against skeptics. Delingpole properly applied the use of metaphores and even went out of his way to illustrate how he was using them. By implying equivenlence when there is none, you may well be doing even more harm to your side. You should have left it alone for the readers to judge Mr. Delingpole’s article.
Sorry Anthony but I’m going with James Delingpole on this one, you can’t apologize to a watermelon they don’t have ears. Having said that I dearly love you both for standing up to crooks of so called climate science. Now please kiss and make up, we have bigger issues to deal with than Mann’s sensitivity.
It just strikes me that this is rather a pointless ‘argument’ amongst ‘friends’ caused and due mainly due to personal ‘interpretation’ and semantics. FWIW I think Anthony got on his high horse a little bit (with his anti-inflammatory essay! but it perhaps had the opposite effect!) and Delingpole has just responded in a similar fashion. Listen guys, there is no need for it !!
as has been alluded to by others – there are many ways to skin a cat – and all achieve the same result. Disagreements are always gonna happen in any debate, even amongst those on the same side – the main point to remember is that you are both on the same side!!
Peace !
Nullius in Verba says:
April 14, 2013 at 3:55 pm
totally agree!
Having established a successful beachhead in the occupied MSM, the two generals are having some disagreement on strategy against the warm-macht.
I think that Delingpole skated up to the line, but he did not cross it. One man’s opinion.