AmericanThinker: 'PBS NewsHour paints itself into a corner on AGW' – 350:4 ratio of AGW'ers-to-skeptics

Regarding “Liberal”/socialist statists attempting to false-flag themselves as “libertarians,” I had earlier advised:

If they want to pass themselves off as “libertarians,” ask ‘em about their stance on the unalienable, civil, and constitutionally protected individual human right of every man, woman, and responsible child “to obtain, own, and carry, openly or concealed, any weapon – rifle, shotgun, handgun, machinegun, anything – any time, any place, without asking anyone’s permission.”

…at 5:42 PM on 30 August, DirkH had responded:

You don’t understand. They will claim and redefine the word as meaning social justice and the creation of the socialist man (by the usual, unspoken means). And that’s that. Case closed. Anyone pointing to the old definition will be defined as a right wing fringe extremist. Jimbo Wales’ big book will be rewritten accordingly.

Ah, but I emphatically do understand. Are you attempting to say that one of these “social justice” smarmers – seeking “the creation of the socialist man” – are ever going to voice hearty support for the exercise of their prospective victims’ unalienable right to the ownership, carriage, and operation of weapons suitable to rest the forcibly coercive imposition of socialism? Ever?
Heavens to Mises, but the first thing any of these “socialist man” slugs lunge for is victim disarmament.
Er, “gun control.” That’s what they’re calling it this week, right?

The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it’s goodbye to the Bill of Rights.

— H.L. Mencken

At 9:05 PM on 30 August, Chad Wozniak had written:

Actually, your reference to total defunding of charlatanism (such as CAGW “research”) coincides exactly with what my conservative acquaintances want, and want now, not tomorrow. They would agree that government meddling in the economy, which includes its social programs and their effects, is the chief cause of poverty and hardships. But I know of no one personally who would subscribe to the sort of religious bigotry you describe, or seek to force their opinions or beliefs on others. I know of such people, but I’ve met enough people in my 66 years on the planet to be quite sure they are the exception, as I’ve said.

As I’d said, your encounters with avowed conservatives may well be entirely at odds with my own. We do not know which of us has had experiences genuinely reflective of the statistical norm among these critters. The religious whackjobs, however, do seem to proliferate both online and in my little patch of flyover country. Possibly my diagnostic “catch” is the result of sensitivity tuned by a watchful expectancy of the pathology.

Chad Wozniak: Government’s role should be strictly to protect rights, both against itself and against those who won’t play fair (CAGW alarmists among them).

Egad. Or, as we Sicilians like to say, Oy, gevalt! The armed thugs of an institution with a long and sordid record of corruption and murderous aggression are supposed to protect individual human rights “both against itself [emphasis added] and against those who won’t play fair.”
By the way, who gets to define “fair”? The government thugs?
If these are the genuine appreciations of political philosophy among American conservatives, then there’s no argument that they’re not statists as authoritarian as their colleagues on the other side of the specious “Right/Left” spectrum.
As I’ve observed, the purpose of government is not protection except as a secondary outcome. This is supported by the many “hold harmless” statutes in state and federal codes which specifically excuse government thugs from responsibility for protecting the private citizen’s life and property.
If you hire Brink’s to transport your store’s receipts to the bank, they are responsible for the safety of your valuta from the moment they receive it to the moment they have a similarly responsible officer of the recipient bank sign for the shipment.
The police officer munching a donut in the cruiser outside your establishment’s door? A coterie of kleptomaniac Cub Scouts could pilfer every Federal Reserve note and cupronickel slug from your place of business before that flatfoot’s sugar-glazed eyes, and you have no surety that he’d even get a mild letter of reprimand in his personnel jacket for his failure to act.
What we – the sovereign citizenry – delegate to the malevolent jobholders of government is the exercise of our unalienable right to break things and kill people in retaliation against those who aggressively violate our lives, our liberties, and our property.
Note that the words are “delegate” and “exercise,” meaning it’s understood that in so doing, we do not forswear our own actions in defense and retaliation.
Also, it’s not up to those government thugs to decide whether or not anybody has or has not agreed to “play fair” because rights don’t depend upon but rather dictate the rules of play. Always and always and always, the purpose of government (if legitimate purpose can be said to exist for government) is not to make anybody “play fair” but rather that rights be enforced, whether the victim of rights violation is in any condition to manage retaliation or not.
Think of government as a sort of insurance policy, inasmuch as it works (when it works) only after the fact. It doesn’t keep you from getting whacked, but it does give everybody a little bit of confidence that the guy who’d whacked you is going to get clobbered in response. Maybe even corpsified himself.
Remember: when seconds count, the police are only minutes away.

Chad Wozniak: There is no question that there are acts of discrimination – the market won’t stop these, not in real time at any rate, especially when you consider that people all too often act in other than their own interest – and other abuses which government must step in to prevent and redress, and one can view these as denials of opportunity – freedom of opportunity being also essential to liberty;

Like hell it is. Just where in the name of Procrustes did you get this “freedom of opportunity” crap? D’you somehow conjure that it springs from the unalienable individual right to liberty of action? Does the negative right to your own freedom of thought and speech and action somehow constitute an imposition upon other people to do business with you against their will?
Gad. One problem with people who conceive themselves to be conservatives is that they still bear the cicatrices of schooling structured by “Liberal” fascists. Takes a heap of genuine learning to break past that mental scar tissue, and as a reliable rule, vanishingly few conservatives have made the effort.
Those who have, y’see, become libertarians.
Those “acts of discrimination” are expressions of other people’s freedom of choice. They choose to prefer doing business with people much like themselves because it’s easier to trust such folks. They choose not to truck or barter with folks who bear the appearance or behavioral hallmarks associated in their minds with unreliability or other adverse qualities.
People always discriminate, whether they announce it as policy or do it only in petto. It’s a simple, unavoidable characteristic of human nature, and legislating against human nature is supposed to be something only “Liberal” fascists are arrogant enough and stupid enough to attempt.
So these are the sentiments and practices of conservatives? And they’re supposed to be different from the “Liberals” in precisely…what way?

Chad Wozniak: But government should also be kept as small as is possible to perform these functions; if this is not done, it inevitably becomes abusive. This is generally agreed upon by all of the basically tolerant, if firmly believing, conservative people that I know.

Of course, the libertarian has reference to the premise that the right size for government is one that can be dragged into the bathroom and drowned in the tub.

Chad Wozniak: I’m in process of writing a trilogy – a set of three novels – in which poverty is eliminated through education with an emphasis on economics, education is free to prepare for all professional, managerial and technical (i.e., trades) occupations alike, everybody does one or the other, goes to work at a well-paying job from the git-go and has a pension account which grows to enable early retirement without a cent of public monies expended. Pensioners do the low-paying service work, which involves no sacrifice because they already have pensions equal to their last pay when working – makes services cheap without impoverishing the service providers. No income taxes, minimal regulation, a stronger Bill of Rights than our own. And incidentally, it’s set on a fictional plant where there is 10 times as much CO2 in the atmosphere on an otherwise very Earth-like world, with resultant abundant growth of crops, forests, etc. AND NO RUNAWAY WARMING.
I’d like to think that such a world would be possible here on Earth if only people would behave themselves – and not dispose themselves to fantasies like CAGW that can do so much harm. And CAGW alarmists certainly are NOT behaving themselves – they’re representative of a broad stratum of people who act on larcenous, perverse, self-destructive or simply destructive motives.

As you explore this premise, I strongly suggest you examine the Freehold series of novels published by Michael Z. Williamson since 2004.
Every writer should be aware of prior art.

At 11:23 PM on 30 August, Chad Wozniak writes:

I know of the Williamson books. Mine are nothing at all like them; this part of the context in mine is subordinate, really only incidental, to the story lines in them. Also, you appear to misinterpret many of the things I say about conservatives – and I’d be rather inclined to agree with Mark Besse, above, concerning your attitude in general (minus the epithet).

Oh, you’ve made it clear that your planned works are nothing like Williamson’s Freehold (2004) et seq. I’d recommended that series – emphasis on the first novel – because the author approaches the hypothetical establishment of a polity with much more thoughtful reflection upon the relationship between society and government (particularly when it comes to political economics) than have you in your summary:

Chad Wozniak: I’m in process of writing a trilogy – a set of three novels – in which poverty is eliminated through education with an emphasis on economics, education is free to prepare for all professional, managerial and technical (i.e., trades) occupations alike, everybody does one or the other, goes to work at a well-paying job from the git-go and has a pension account which grows to enable early retirement without a cent of public monies expended. Pensioners do the low-paying service work, which involves no sacrifice because they already have pensions equal to their last pay when working – makes services cheap without impoverishing the service providers. No income taxes, minimal regulation, a stronger Bill of Rights than our own.

What you’re doing, y’see, is empowering government thugs to make all the critical economic decisions which government thugs are historically really goddam incompetent to do, as has been repeatedly demonstrated and as had been thoroughly examined in Ludwig von Mises’ seminal work, Socialism: An Economic and Social Analysis (1922).
Specifically, you’re screwing the pooch with regard to the calculation problem. This is particularly remarkable inasmuch as you claim to be a conservative rather than a socialist while at the same time envisioning a planetary polity operating (if it might be able to operate at all) in the strangling grip of thuggish government dirigisme devoid of any real market mechanisms to guide the allocation of human effort and material resources.
This is no “emphasis on economics,” but rather the abolition of economics in favor of hammering “top-down” ordination. Who decides what what kind of “education is free” and suited “to prepare [each particular victim] for all professional, managerial and technical (i.e., trades) occupations alike,” anyway? Who are supposed to be so omniscient, so omnipotent, so infallible, so omnibenevolent?
Not to say anything about whence cometh the generous pensions for your “Pensioners” who “do the low-paying service work, which involves no sacrifice because they already have pensions equal to their last pay when working.”
Ever heard the old expression “Ex nihil, nihil fit”?
So you’re gonna have a central bank (or some other source of Federal Reserve-style fiat currency) to just conjure that spending power out of thin air? And how do you guarantee that your “Pensioners” are physically and mentally fit for that “low-paying service work” when so many of us old folks creak with osteoarthritis, sag under the effects of endocrine and other metabolic derangements, and instantiate Dr. Alzheimer’s diagnostic expertise in terms of mentation?
Have you given any thought to child labor yet? That’s a resource much leveraged in conservative polities like Castro’s Cuba and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
If your trilogy is skiffy (“sci-fi”), I suppose you can posit a race of super-benevolent hyper-intelligent purple space squid or something, but the critics are gonna jump all over you for a Deus ex Cosmos, I guarantee it.
Ah, but I “appear to misinterpret many of the things [you] say about conservatives.”
Or not.
Most likely not.