In case you missed it, our friends at americanthinker.com had a fantastic column (which won’t load now due to internal server error, but is cached by Google, so I repeat it here) by Dr. Danusha V. Goska in 2014. She was a life-long leftist and wrote that she has abandoned that philosophy. Here, she gives her top ten reasons. It parallels many if the trials and tribulations climate skeptics suffer at the hands of [climate activists]. I highly recommend it, and I recommend sending it to every activist who calls you a “climate denier”. There may be hope yet for those who value spewing hate over rational debate. – Anthony
by Dr. Danusha V. Goska
How far left was I? So far left my beloved uncle was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party in a Communist country. When I returned to his Slovak village to buy him a mass card, the priest refused to sell me one. So far left that a self-identified terrorist proposed marriage to me. So far left I was a two-time Peace Corps volunteer and I have a degree from UC Berkeley. So far left that my Teamster mother used to tell anyone who would listen that she voted for Gus Hall, Communist Party chairman, for president. I wore a button saying “Eat the Rich.” To me it wasn’t a metaphor.
I voted Republican in the last presidential election.
Below are the top ten reasons I am no longer a leftist. This is not a rigorous comparison of theories. This list is idiosyncratic, impressionistic, and intuitive. It’s an accounting of the milestones on my herky-jerky journey.
10) Huffiness.
In the late 1990s I was reading Anatomy of the Spirit, a then recent bestseller by Caroline Myss.
Myss described having lunch with a woman named Mary. A man approached Mary and asked her if she were free to do a favor for him on June 8th. No, Mary replied, I absolutely cannot do anything on June 8th because June 8th is my incest survivors’ meeting and we never let each other down! They have suffered so much already! I would never betray incest survivors!
Myss was flabbergasted. Mary could have simply said “Yes” or “No.”
Reading this anecdote, I felt that I was confronting the signature essence of my social life among leftists. We rushed to cast everyone in one of three roles: victim, victimizer, or champion of the oppressed. We lived our lives in a constant state of outraged indignation. I did not want to live that way anymore. I wanted to cultivate a disposition of gratitude. I wanted to see others, not as victims or victimizers, but as potential friends, as loved creations of God. I wanted to understand the point of view of people with whom I disagreed without immediately demonizing them as enemy oppressors.
I recently attended a training session for professors on a college campus. The presenter was a new hire in a tenure-track position. He opened his talk by telling us that he had received an invitation to share a festive meal with the president of the university. I found this to be an enviable occurrence and I did not understand why he appeared dramatically aggrieved. The invitation had been addressed to “Mr. and Mrs. X.” Professor X was a bachelor. He felt slighted. Perhaps the person who had addressed his envelope had disrespected him because he is a member of a minority group.
Rolling his eyes, Prof. X went on to say that he was wary of accepting a position on this lowly commuter campus, with its working-class student body. The disconnect between leftists’ announced value of championing the poor and the leftist practice of expressing snobbery for them stung me. Already vulnerable students would be taught by a professor who regarded association with them as a burden, a failure, and a stigma.
Barack Obama is president. Kim and Kanye and Brad and Angelina are members of multiracial households. One might think that professors finally have cause to teach their students to be proud of America for overcoming racism. Not so fast, Professor X warned. His talk was on microaggression, defined as slights that prove that America is still racist, sexist, homophobic, and ableist, that is, discriminatory against handicapped people.
Professor X projected a series of photographs onto a large screen. In one, commuters in business suits, carrying briefcases, mounted a flight of stairs. This photo was an act of microaggression. After all, Professor X reminded us, handicapped people can’t climb stairs.
I appreciate Professor X’s desire to champion the downtrodden, but identifying a photograph of commuters on stairs as an act of microaggression and evidence that America is still an oppressive hegemon struck me as someone going out of his way to live his life in a state of high dudgeon. On the other hand, Prof. X could have chosen to speak of his own working-class students with more respect.
Yes, there is a time and a place when it is absolutely necessary for a person to cultivate awareness of his own pain, or of others’ pain. Doctors instruct patients to do this — “Locate the pain exactly; calculate where the pain falls on a scale of one to ten; assess whether the pain is sharp, dull, fleeting, or constant.” But doctors do this for a reason. They want the patient to heal, and to move beyond the pain. In the left, I found a desire to be in pain constantly, so as always to have something to protest, from one’s history of incest to the inability of handicapped people to mount flights of stairs.
9) Selective Outrage
I was a graduate student. Female genital mutilation came up in class. I stated, without ornamentation, that it is wrong.
A fellow graduate student, one who was fully funded and is now a comfortably tenured professor, sneered at me. “You are so intolerant. Clitoredectomy is just another culture’s rite of passage. You Catholics have confirmation.”
When Mitt Romney was the 2012 Republican presidential candidate, he mentioned that, as Massachusetts governor, he proactively sought out female candidates for top jobs. He had, he said, “binders full of women.” He meant, of course, that he stored resumes of promising female job candidates in three-ring binders.
Op-ed pieces, Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show,” Twitter, Facebook, and Amazon posts erupted in a feeding frenzy, savaging Romney and the Republican Party for their “war on women.”
I was an active leftist for decades. I never witnessed significant leftist outrage over clitoredectomy, child marriage, honor killing, sharia-inspired rape laws, stoning, or acid attacks. Nothing. Zip. Crickets. I’m not saying that that outrage does not exist. I’m saying I never saw it.
The left’s selective outrage convinced me that much canonical, left-wing feminism is not so much support for women, as it is a protest against Western, heterosexual men. It’s an “I hate” phenomenon, rather than an “I love” phenomenon.
8.) It’s the thought that counts
My favorite bumper sticker in ultra-liberal Berkeley, California: “Think Globally; Screw up Locally.” In other words, “Love Humanity but Hate People.”
It was past midnight, back in the 1980s, in Kathmandu, Nepal. A group of Peace Corps volunteers were drinking moonshine at the Momo Cave. A pretty girl with long blond hair took out her guitar and sang these lyrics, which I remember by heart from that night:
“If you want your dream to be,
Build it slow and surely.
Small beginnings greater ends.
Heartfelt work grows purely.”
I just googled these lyrics, thirty years later, and discovered that they are Donovan’s San Damiano song, inspired by the life of St. Francis.
Listening to this song that night in the Momo Cave, I thought, that’s what we leftists do wrong. That’s what we’ve got to get right.
We focused so hard on our good intentions. Before our deployment overseas, Peace Corps vetted us for our idealism and “tolerance,” not for our competence or accomplishments. We all wanted to save the world. What depressingly little we did accomplish was often erased with the next drought, landslide, or insurrection.
Peace Corps did not focus on the “small beginnings” necessary to accomplish its grandiose goals. Schools rarely ran, girls and low caste children did not attend, and widespread corruption guaranteed that all students received passing grades. Those students who did learn had no jobs where they could apply their skills, and if they rose above their station, the hereditary big men would sabotage them. Thanks to cultural relativism, we were forbidden to object to rampant sexism or the caste system. “Only intolerant oppressors judge others’ cultures.”
I volunteered with the Sisters of Charity. For them, I pumped cold water from a well and washed lice out of homeless people’s clothing. The sisters did not want to save the world. Someone already had. The sisters focused on the small things, as their founder, Mother Teresa, advised, “Don’t look for big things, just do small things with great love.” Delousing homeless people’s clothing was one of my few concrete accomplishments.
Back in 1975, after Hillary Rodham had followed Bill Clinton to Arkansas, she helped create the state’s first rape crisis hotline. She had her eye on the big picture. What was Hillary like in her one-on-one encounters?
Hillary served as the attorney to a 41-year-old, one of two men accused of raping a 12-year-old girl. The girl, a virgin before the assault, was in a coma for five days afterward. She was injured so badly she was told she’d never have children. In 2014, she is 52 years old, and she has never had children, nor has she married. She reports that she was afraid of men after the rape.
A taped interview with Clinton has recently emerged; on it Clinton makes clear that she thought her client was guilty, and she chuckles when reporting that she was able to set him free. In a recent interview, the victim said that Hillary Clinton “took me through Hell” and “lied like a dog.” “I think she wants to be a role model… but I don’t think she’s a role model at all,” the woman said. “If she had have been, she would have helped me at the time, being a 12-year-old girl who was raped by two guys.”
Hillary had her eye on the all-caps resume bullet point: FOUNDS RAPE HOTLINE.
Hillary’s chuckles when reminiscing about her legal victory suggest that, in her assessment, her contribution to the ruination of the life of a rape victim is of relatively negligible import.
7) Leftists hate my people.
I’m a working-class Bohunk. A hundred years ago, leftists loved us. We worked lousy jobs, company thugs shot us when we went on strike, and leftists saw our discontent as fuel for their fire.
Karl Marx promised the workers’ paradise through an inevitable revolution of the proletariat. The proletariat is an industrial working class — think blue-collar people working in mines, mills, and factories: exactly what immigrants like my parents were doing.
Polish-Americans participated significantly in a great victory, Flint, Michigan’s 1937 sit-down strike. Italian-Americans produced Sacco and Vanzetti. Gus Hall was a son of Finnish immigrants.
In the end, though, we didn’t show up for the Marxist happily ever after. We believed in God and we were often devout Catholics. Leftists wanted us to slough off our ethnic identities and join in the international proletarian brotherhood — “Workers of the world, unite!” But we clung to ethnic distinctiveness. Future generations lost their ancestral ties, but they didn’t adopt the IWW flag; they flew the stars and stripes. “Property is theft” is a communist motto, but no one is more house-proud than a first generation Pole who has escaped landless peasantry and secured his suburban nest.
Leftists felt that we jilted them at the altar. Leftists turned on us. This isn’t just ancient history. In 2004, What’s the Matter with Kansas? spent eighteen weeks on the bestseller lists. The premise of the book: working people are too stupid to know what’s good for them, and so they vote conservative when they should be voting left. In England, the book was titled, What’s the Matter with America?
We became the left’s boogeyman: Joe Six-pack, Joe Hardhat. Though we’d been in the U.S. for a few short decades when the demonization began, leftists, in the academy, in media, and in casual speech, blamed working-class ethnics for American crimes, including racism and the “imperialist” war in Vietnam. See films like The Deer Hunter. Watch Archie Bunker on “All in the Family.” Listen to a few of the Polack jokes that elitists pelted me with whenever I introduced myself at UC Berkeley.
Leftists freely label poor whites as “redneck,” “white trash,” “trailer trash,” and “hillbilly.” At the same time that leftists toss around these racist and classist slurs, they are so sanctimonious they forbid anyone to pronounce the N word when reading Mark Twain aloud. President Bill Clinton’s advisor James Carville succinctly summed up leftist contempt for poor whites in his memorable quote, “Drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you’ll find.”
The left’s visceral hatred of poor whites overflowed like a broken sewer when John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate in 2008. It would be impossible, and disturbing, to attempt to identify the single most offensive comment that leftists lobbed at Palin. One can report that attacks on Palin were so egregious that leftists themselves publicly begged that they cease; after all, they gave the left a bad name. The Reclusive Leftist blogged in 2009 that it was a “major shock” to discover “the extent to which so many self-described liberals actually despise working people.” The Reclusive Leftist focuses on Vanity Fair journalist Henry Rollins. Rollins recommends that leftists “hate-fuck conservative women” and denounces Palin as a “small town hickoid” who can be bought off with a coupon to a meal at a chain restaurant.
Smearing us is not enough. Liberal policies sabotage us. Affirmative action benefits recipients by color, not by income. Even this limited focus fails. In his 2004 Yale University Press study, Thomas Sowell insists that affirmative action helps only wealthier African Americans. Poor blacks do not benefit. In 2009, Princeton sociologists Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Radford demonstrated that poor, white Christians are underrepresented on elite college campuses. Leftists add insult to injury. A blue-collar white kid, who feels lost and friendless on the alien terrain of a university campus, a campus he has to leave immediately after class so he can get to his fulltime job at MacDonald’s, must accept that he is a recipient of “white privilege” – if he wants to get good grades in mandatory classes on racism.
The left is still looking for its proletariat. It supports mass immigration for this reason. Harvard’s George Borjas, himself a Cuban immigrant, has been called “America’s leading immigration economist.” Borjas points out that mass immigration from Latin America has sabotaged America’s working poor.
It’s more than a little bit weird that leftists, who describe themselves as the voice of the worker, select workers as their hated other of choice, and targets of their failed social engineering.
6) I believe in God.
Read Marx and discover a mythology that is irreconcilable with any other narrative, including the Bible. Hang out in leftist internet environments, and you will discover a toxic bath of irrational hatred for the Judeo-Christian tradition. You will discover an alternate vocabulary in which Jesus is a “dead Jew on a stick” or a “zombie” and any belief is an arbitrary sham, the equivalent of a recently invented “flying spaghetti monster.” You will discover historical revisionism that posits Nazism as a Christian denomination. You will discover a rejection of the Judeo-Christian foundation of Western Civilization and American concepts of individual rights and law. You will discover a nihilist void, the kind of vacuum of meaning that nature abhors and that, all too often, history fills with the worst totalitarian nightmares, the rough beast that slouches toward Bethlehem.
5 & 4) Straw men and “In order to make an omelet you have to break a few eggs.”
It astounds me now to reflect on it, but never, in all my years of leftist activism, did I ever hear anyone articulate accurately the position of anyone to our right. In fact, I did not even know those positions when I was a leftist.
“Truth is that which serves the party.” The capital-R revolution was such a good, it could eliminate all that was bad, that manipulating facts was not even a venial sin; it was a good. If you want to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs. One of those eggs was objective truth.
Ron Kuby is a left-wing radio talk show host on New York’s WABC. He plays the straw man card hourly. If someone phones in to question affirmative action – shouldn’t such programs benefit recipients by income, rather than by skin color? – Kuby opens the fire hydrant. He is shrill. He is bombastic. He accuses the caller of being a member of the KKK. He paints graphic word pictures of the horrors of lynching and the death of Emmett Till and asks, “And yousupport that?”
Well of course THE CALLER did not support that, but it is easier to orchestrate a mob in a familiar rendition of righteous rage against a sensationalized straw man than it is to produce a reasoned argument against a reasonable opponent.
On June 16, 2014, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank published a column alleging that a peaceful Muslim was nearly verbally lynched by violent Islamophobes at a Heritage Foundation-hosted panel. What Milbank described was despicable. Unfortunately for Milbank and the Washington Post‘s credibility, someone filmed the event and posted the film on YouTube. Panel discussants, including Frank Gaffney and Brigitte Gabriel, made important points in a courteous manner. Saba Ahmed, the peaceful Muslim, is a “family friend” of a bombing plotter who expressed a specific desire to murder children. It soon became clear that Milbank was, as one blogger put it, “making stuff up.”
Milbank slanders anyone who might attempt analysis of jihad, a force that is currently cited in the murder of innocents — including Muslims — from Nigeria to the Philippines. The leftist strategy of slandering those who speak uncomfortable facts suppresses discourse and has a devastating impact on confrontations with truth in journalism and on college campuses.
2 & 3) It doesn’t work. Other approaches work better.
I went to hear David Horowitz speak in 2004. My intention was to heckle him. Horowitz said something that interrupted my flow of thought. He pointed out that Camden, Paterson, and Newark had decades of Democratic leadership.
I grew up among “Greatest Generation” Americans who had helped build these cities. One older woman told me, “As soon as I got my weekly paycheck, I rushed to Main Ave in Paterson, and my entire paycheck ended up on my back, in a new outfit.” In the 1950s and 60s, my parents and my friends’ parents fled deadly violence in Newark and Paterson.
Within a few short decades, Paterson, Camden, and Newark devolved into unlivable slums, with shooting deaths, drug deals, and garbage-strewn streets. The pain that New Jerseyans express about these failed cities is our state’s open wound.
I live in Paterson. I teach its young. My students are hogtied by ignorance. I find myself speaking to young people born in the U.S. in a truncated pidgin I would use with a train station chai wallah in Calcutta.
Many of my students lack awareness of a lot more than vocabulary. They don’t know about believing in themselves, or stick-to-itiveness. They don’t realize that the people who exercise power over them have faced and overcome obstacles. I know they don’t know these things because they tell me. One student confessed that when she realized that one of her teachers had overcome setbacks it changed her own life.
My students do know — because they have been taught this — that America is run by all-powerful racists who will never let them win. My students know — because they have been drilled in this — that the only way they can get ahead is to locate and cultivate those few white liberals who will pity them and scatter crumbs on their supplicant, bowed heads and into their outstretched palms. My students have learned to focus on the worst thing that ever happened to them, assume that it happened because America is unjust, and to recite that story, dirge-like, to whomever is in charge, from the welfare board to college professors, and to await receipt of largesse.
As Shelby Steele so brilliantly points out in his book White Guilt, the star of the sob story my students tell in exchange for favors is very much not the black aid recipient. The star of this story, still, just as before the Civil Rights Movement that was meant to change who got to take the lead in American productions, was the white man. The generous white liberal still gets top billing.
In Dominque La Pierre’s 1985 novel City of Joy, a young American doctor, Max Loeb, confesses that serving the poor in a slum has changed his mind forever about what might actually improve their lot. “In a slum an exploiter is better than a Santa Claus… An exploiter forces you to react, whereas a Santa Claus demobilizes you.”
That one stray comment from David Horowitz, a man I regarded as the enemy, sparked the slow but steady realization that my ideals, the ideals I had lived by all my life, were poisoning my students and Paterson, my city.
After I realized that our approaches don’t work, I started reading about other approaches. I had another Aha! moment while listening to a two minute twenty-three second YouTube video of Milton Friedman responding to Phil Donahue’s castigation of greed. The only rational response to Friedman is “My God, he’s right.”
1) Hate.
If hate were the only reason, I’d stop being a leftist for this reason alone.
Almost twenty years ago, when I could not conceive of ever being anything but a leftist, I joined a left-wing online discussion forum.
Before that I’d had twenty years of face-to-face participation in leftist politics: marching, organizing, socializing.
In this online forum, suddenly my only contact with others was the words those others typed onto a screen. That limited and focused means of contact revealed something.
If you took all the words typed into the forum every day and arranged them according to what part of speech they were, you’d quickly notice that nouns expressing the emotions of anger, aggression, and disgust, and verbs speaking of destruction, punishing, and wreaking vengeance, outnumbered any other class of words.
One topic thread was entitled “What do you view as disgusting about modern America?” The thread was begun in 2002. Almost eight thousand posts later, the thread was still going strong in June, 2014.
Those posting messages in this left-wing forumpublicly announced that they did what they did every day, from voting to attending a rally to planning a life, because they wanted to destroy something, and because they hated someone, rather than because they wanted to build something, or because they loved someone. You went to an anti-war rally because you hated Bush, not because you loved peace. Thus, when Obama bombed, you didn’t hold any anti-war rally, because you didn’t hate Obama.
I experienced powerful cognitive dissonance when I recognized the hate. The rightest of my right-wing acquaintances — I had no right-wing friends — expressed nothing like this. My right-wing acquaintances talked about loving: God, their family, their community. I’m not saying that the right-wingers I knew were better people; I don’t know that they were. I’m speaking here, merely, about language.
In 1995 I developed a crippling illness. I couldn’t work, lost my life savings, and traveled through three states, from surgery to surgery.
A left-wing friend, Pete, sent me emails raging against Republicans like George Bush, whom he referred to as “Bushitler.” The Republicans were to blame because they opposed socialized medicine. In fact it’s not at all certain that socialized medicine would have helped; the condition I had is not common and there was no guaranteed treatment.
I visited online discussion forums for others with the same affliction. One of my fellow sufferers, who identified himself as a successful corporate executive in New Jersey, publicly announced that the symptoms were so hideous, and his helpless slide into poverty was so much not what his wife had bargained for when she married him, that he planned to take his own life. He stopped posting after that announcement, though I responded to his post and requested a reply. It is possible that he committed suicide, exactly as he said he would — car exhaust in the garage. I suddenly realized that my “eat the rich” lapel button was a sin premised on a lie.
In any case, at the time I was diagnosed, Bush wasn’t president; Clinton was. And, as I pointed out to Pete, his unceasing and vehement expressions of hatred against Republicans did nothing for me.
I had a friend, a nun, Mary Montgomery, one of the Sisters of Providence, who took me out to lunch every six months or so, and gave me twenty-dollar Target gift cards on Christmas. Her gestures to support someone, rather than expressions of hate against someone — even though these gestures were miniscule and did nothing to restore me to health — meant a great deal to me.
Recently, I was trying to explain this aspect of why I stopped being a leftist to a left-wing friend, Julie. She replied, “No, I’m not an unpleasant person. I try to be nice to everybody.”
“Julie,” I said, “You are an active member of the Occupy Movement. You could spend your days teaching children to read, or visiting the elderly in nursing homes, or organizing cleanup crews in a garbage-strewn slum. You don’t. You spend your time protestingand trying to destroy something — capitalism.”
“Yes, but I’m very nice about it,” she insisted. “I always protest with a smile.”
Pete is now a Facebook friend and his feed overflows with the anger that I’m sure he assesses as righteous. He protests against homophobic Christians, American imperialists, and Monsanto. I don’t know if Pete ever donates to an organization he believes in, or a person suffering from a disease, or if he ever says comforting things to afflicted intimates. I know he hates.
I do have right-wing friends now and they do get angry and they do express that anger. But when I encounter unhinged, stratospheric vituperation, when I encounter detailed revenge fantasies in scatological and sadistic language, I know I’ve stumbled upon a left-wing website.
Given that the left prides itself on being the liberator of women, homosexuals, and on being “sex positive,” one of the weirder and most obvious aspects of left-wing hate is how often, and how virulently, it is expressed in terms that are misogynist, homophobic, and in the distinctive anti-sex voice of a sexually frustrated high-school misfit. Haters are aware enough of how uncool it would be to use a slur like “fag,” so they sprinkle their discourse with terms indicating anal rape like “butt hurt.” Leftists taunt right-wingers as “tea baggers.” The implication is that the target of their slur is either a woman or a gay man being orally penetrated by a man, and is, therefore, inferior, and despicable.
Misogynist speech has a long tradition on the left. In 1964, Stokely Carmichael said that the only position for women in the Civil Rights Movement was “prone.” Carmichael’s misogyny is all the more outrageous given the very real role of women like Rosa Parks, Viola Liuzzo, and Fannie Lou Hamer.
In 2012 atheist bloggers Jennifer McCreight and Natalie Reed exposed the degree to which misogyny dominates the New Atheist movement. McCreight quoted a prominent atheist’s reply to a woman critic. “I will make you a rape victim if you don’t fuck off… I think we should give the guy who raped you a medal. I hope you fucking drown in rape semen, you ugly, mean-spirited cow… Is that kind of like the way that rapists dick went in your pussy? Or did he use your asshole… I’m going to rape you with my fist.”
A high-profile example of leftist invective was delivered by MSNBC’s Martin Bashir in late 2013. Bashir said, on air and in a rehearsed performance, not as part of a moment’s loss of control, something so vile about Sarah Palin that I won’t repeat it here. Extreme as it is, Bashir’s comment is fairly representative of a good percentage of what I read on left-wing websites.
I could say as much about a truly frightening phenomenon, left-wing anti-Semitism, but I’ll leave the topic to others better qualified. I can say that when I first encountered it, at a PLO fundraising party in Marin County, I felt as if I had time-traveled to pre-war Berlin.
I needed to leave the left, I realized, when I decided that I wanted to spend time with people building, cultivating, and establishing, something that they loved.
Another related piece worth reading is by Dr. Tim Ball – A Climate Story That Must Be Told
Great post with this one, and timely for me. I have someone whom I want to share this story with
Is that the nice Martin Bashir who has gone back to working for the so-called BBC as religious affairs correspondent? He’ll fit in well with all the other nasry lefties that the so-called BBC employs.
She saw the light but it took a long time.
It’s a long journey, one measured more in light-years than inches.
It’s quite obvious why she is no longer part of the left, she has an open, objective mind capable of critical thought… something not found in the gene pool of the left.
Like other highly specialised creatures that fill very small niches the ‘Lefie’ is a product of abundance, the type of abundance that the left cannot produce.
And I pay into a legal protection insurance , which costs some 10-20 € annually-averaged, never needed – when I say ‘I have a legal protection insurance’ the conversation is finished.
I have a form of violence protection service. Works the same way.
Politics doesn’t control climate science just as it doesn’t control physics, astronomy or mathematics.
This is a diversion from the fact that the terminal sceptics haven’t produced any evidence that will stand scrutiny.
Perhaps you need to take a closer look at reality. It seems your window is cloudy and you’re getting the wrong picture of what is inside.
@WTF
Tragically, neither have climate alarmists.
WTF March 5, 2017 at 1:53 pm
“This is a diversion from the fact that the terminal [CO2-Climate Change] sceptics haven’t produced any evidence that will stand scrutiny.”
Right, because the real world’s Empirical Data itself has disproven the hypotheses involved with CO2-Climate Change’s “Science”: that is, none of its critical CO2-dependent Predictions have eventuated. So it’s quite a long way for CO2-Climate Change’s “Science” to go to get anywhere near the success rate it needs to be considered viable – and thus funded any longer by the Tax Payers – when compared to Science’s real world of Empirical Data.
“This is a diversion from the fact that the terminal sceptics haven’t produced any evidence that will stand scrutiny.”
It’s not a skeptic’s job to provide evidence, that is the job of whoever is promoting a scientific theory. The skeptic’s job is to poke holes in scientific theories. Skeptics have to be convinced there are no more holes in a theory before accepting that theory as fact.
1) It’s not up to us to provide the evidence. We aren’t the ones making the claim. It’s sufficient to disprove your “evidence”, which we have done.
2) It’s not true that we have provided no evidence. Just because you close your eyes, stick your fingers in your ears, and shout nyaa, nyaa, nyaa, reality doesn’t change.
I had a very similar experience to Ms Goska. A good friend of mine was an extreme climate sceptic, but one day, after reviewing masses of data and information, he realised he was mistaken. And now he is no longer a Conservative, he has rejected far right politics and makes decisions based on evidence.
He no longer hates anyone who does not think like him and believes that communities are essential to the wellbeing of the individual. His family tell me he has changed from a depressed and angry man, to someone who inspires and spreads light everywhere he goes.
These tales are just so wonderful! !
Joking aside I rather like her writing. But read all of it, there is much to upset Conservatives as well as lefties.
Here is her view of Clinton hating Trump worshiping fanatics.
“If the Trump supporters posting misogynist hate-Hillary memes and inflammatory conspiracy theories have a moment of awareness, I want to be there when it happens”.
Oh dear, ‘no such thing as society’ again. This is what she said and you chose to misinterpret (and misquote usually) those five words. Please tell us what you object to in the following.
M Thatcher, Woman’s Own, 23.9.87
I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand “I have a problem, it is the Government’s job to cope with it!” or “I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!” “I am homeless, the Government must house me!” and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour and life is a reciprocal business and people have got the entitlements too much in mind without the obligations, because there is no such thing as an entitlement unless someone has first met an obligation and it is, I think, one of the tragedies in which many of the benefits we give, which were meant to reassure people that if they were sick or ill there was a safety net and there was help, that many of the benefits which were meant to help people who were unfortunate ” It is all right. We joined together and we have these insurance schemes to look after it” . That was the objective, but somehow there are some people who have been manipulating the system and so some of those help and benefits that were meant to say to people:”All right, if you cannot get a job, you shall have a basic standard of living!” but when people come and say:”But what is the point of working? I can get as much on the dole!” You say: “Look” It is not from the dole. It is your neighbour who is supplying it and if you can earn your own living then really you have a duty to do it and you will feel very much better!
I love it when socialists have to lie in order to make a point.
It’s proof that even they know that their delusions can’t be supported.
What Dr. Goska described isn’t the “left” per se, but rather totalitarianism. Totalitarianism can be of the left, it can be of the right, it can be of the middle or it can be divinely inspired. One of the things that distinguishes it is unreasonableness and intolerance. Whenever someone tells you that 97% agree with something and you don’t, you are experiencing totalitarianism. As I said before, this is more a struggle between sanity and insanity, than it is with classical liberalism or classical conservatism. Reasonable people of different persuasions can debate without invective, name-calling, insults or other rude behavior. It is evident on this site all the time. When reasonable people of different persuasions debate, often a better solution or remedy is achieved than when one is imposed by force through what is effectively a form of totalitarianism.
@Phil,
very well illustrated. Thank you.
Phil, a good summary. The only real difference between left and right is the color of the tie. That way they can differentiate.
The last time the USA was great. Was when they stole from other countries, assainating 30 democratically elected leaders in those countries to put in their own selected leaders.
And still they do it, look at Obama’s Arab Spring and the loss of life along the way.
Oooh, did I say that out loud. Amazing what a Christian country will do. Wasn’t it GW Bush that said they were doing God’s work?
PS
The correct term for a non believer is Bright.
ozone, it really is sad when you on the left start to believe the lies you tell each other.
MarkW
I would suggest that you try reading instead of trying to be a prophet of wisdom.
You ignorance is unbelievable.
MarkW
PS, I am not of the left. Just because you type words, it does not make them either accurate of factual. You classify and ridicule people for sport.
What does make you. A jerk.
No, Phil, that’s not good enough.
Your protest is similar to all those communist apologists during the cold war who repeated the refrain “but Russia / China isn’t real communism”.
The left that Dr Goska may not be the left that you or other well-meaning armchair progressives envision, but it is the one that exists in today’s social and political landscape. It’s the one that has achieved total dictatorial control of all American universities. It’s the one of which the media have become the blindly obeisant mouthpiece. It’s the one that has led to the reactive vote for Trump.
War is coming because of this.
So much hate cannot lead anywhere else.
Thanks Ptolemy2,,
If the armchair left would speak out against the totalitarianism and intolerance of the left element one might be sympathetic, but clearly many are enablers and cheering the Hollywood crowd, the radical demonstrators, the MSM, and the elected officials like Pelosi and Schumer for their horrible anti Trump rhetoric.
Need I bring up the unethical treatment of any Scientist who questions climate change or extreme global warming.
Thanks for the good article and anyone on the left who disagrees should do some thoughtful sole searching rather than just dismiss it.
War is here. It’s being fought on Fæcebook, Twitter, and the Internet, generally, as well as here on WUWT. The enemy’s numbers are small, but they compensate by greater activity. I recently attended a live presentation on AGW. At one point, a poll was taken of how many believe that humans cause dangerous warming. The pro vote was no more than 10%. The internet thread announcing the event showed roughly equal numbers of pro and con posts. Pop that bubble!
@Phil Salmon:
I must protest. You use the words: “dictatorial control,” “blindly obeisant mouthpiece,” “so much hate.” That is exactly what I am referring to, when I used the term “totalitarianism.” I don’t think we are in disagreement. I further must protest your assumption that I was a Cold War “apologist” or “armchair progressive.” Far from it. I have my own experiences dealing with totalitarian leftists. We need more people to go through the awakening that Dr. Goska went through. We are more likely to achieve that by welcoming any who are willing to engage in reasonable debate. It is remarkable what happens when the totalitarian binders are removed.
“It’s the one that has achieved total dictatorial control of all American universities. ”
It’s blanket statements like this that turn logical, rational people OFF to your entire post. I live in America where there are two private owned, Christian universities and several states ones run by conservatives. So I KNOW that sentence is vividly false.
Total. Dictatorial. Control. All. Hyperbole (rhetoric) is easily identified and discounted.
Those Universities are having a lot of difficulty with regulators. For instance in bathroom signage, hiring, and insurance coverage. One College is being told to report on what is being done to mitigate the “25% rape” rate on campus, which they don’t have..
“What Dr. Goska described isn’t the “left” per se, but rather totalitarianism. Totalitarianism can be of the left, it can be of the right, it can be of the middle or it can be divinely inspired.”
I would call it “Man inspired”. Lots of people presume to speak for God. A loving God wouldn’t instruct his followers to murder innocent people just because they were not following some ritual.
I stand corrected. I meant “presumed to be divinely inspired.”
Name a single right wing totalitarian.
Trump
LOL! I love it! He is living rent free in all those liberal heads.
Trump is no totalitarian.
Only the dystopian fantasies of the left are capable of painting him as one.
PS, Trump is only right wing when compared to you communists.
Very well thought out and written article. I used to work with a guy who was ultra right wing, and that’s saying something in an office environment that was almost all conservative people. I agreed with the vast majority of what he said, but he was angered so easily by liberal viewpoints it made me do some self reflecting about my own tolerance. It was entertaining to see him go on his rants, his teeth clenching, veins in his neck popping out as he spoke, but when I tried to get him to admit he wasn’t very tolerant he said he thought he was a very tolerant person. That made me wonder if I was kidding myself about who I was and how tolerant I was.
I’m an atheist and centre right. Got no time for that hate #### from other people and as those left leaning liberals continue to play identity, hate and cultural politics, the general population will continue to swing in behind those who stand for Christian-Judeo values.
I have had encounters with acquaintances & some family who fall in the “far left” category. It is remarkable how many of the points in the post applied directly to them. They are addicted to hate & hating. They are very difficult to be around. And if any conversation can be steered to victimizing & hate, it will be turned there. I simply stop talking. Not worth the brain damage to convince them otherwise. Very sad to go through life like that. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.
“They are addicted to hate & hating.”
No lie. More precisely, they are literally addicted to adrenaline. (I’ve seen skeptics that seem a bit that way, but far fewer.) Progressives will steer the argument away from logic and towards maximum, spittle-spewing dissent, using strawmen, ad homs, appeals to authority, and so on, ad nauseam. The same substance addiction that drives rageaholics and wife-beaters is behind a range of issues and CAGW.
I’m sure we can name a dozen pushers. The important thing is not evidence or logic, it’s the fix, the evocation of anxiety or aggravation. Ultimately, the pushers need no data, no evidence, not even words. The need only show a picture of some famous skeptic to get the audience to react, perhaps with Orwellian cries of “HATE! HATE! HATE…!”
“I have had encounters with acquaintances & some family who fall in the “far left” category. It is remarkable how many of the points in the post applied directly to them. They are addicted to hate & hating.”
Sadly, I find this, too. Some of my lefty friends just get so emotional about some subjects that you cannot have a rational conversation with them about it. So we dont discuss poltics. 🙂
The left, by nature of their inborn jealousy, demands the world is ruled by minorities.
exit
And just a cursory scan of Western societies will confirm that. Brexit and Trump victories, with the incredibly vitriolic backlash of threats to overturn two entirely democratic decisions, is evidence alone.
The left demand vengeance, they demand power, they demand victory, and will, in their eyes, achieve it by fair means or foul. In those two cases, they are determined to achieve success by foul means, irrespective of the cost to them, society or national sovereignty, simply because they are determined to be right.
Few leftist will accept democracy because the rights of the few multiply into the rights of the many. In other words, everyone has a defining feature that divides them, somehow, into a sub-category; colour, race, gender, sub-gender, ability, disability, marital status, mental condition, physical condition, illness, genetic inheritance…..the list goes on.
Their objective has been to identify those sub-categories, convince us all that somehow or other we are all victims of oppression, then unite those minority pressure groups to support one another.
Their source of success is in the guilt, and/or victimisation, no matter how inconsequential, we all retain for our own survival, despite our own inadequacies. They create the guilt complex then encourage us all to seek out our own victim complex, and then engage in marches, demonstrations and subversion based on negative emotions.
Brexit expressed a positive desire to do something. Few of us in the UK are quite sure how Brexit will be positive, but I take heart in that it is better to make a decision than not to make one. Remainers decided not to make a decision.
The Trump victory was in the same way, a decision to change what everyone in the Western world has been demanding for generations; a change to a lazy, corrupt, inept Western governmental system that simply follows the piper. And make no mistake, those in the vanguard of that clarion call were the people at the far left of society. But when changes came, and it didn’t suit them, they are the ones taking to the streets.
I live on the outskirts of London, England. I note that the objections to diesel cars and their emissions are largely from city dwellers, and I expect action will be taken on that subject (our budget is to be announced on Wednesday and it’s expected that the demonisation of diesel cars will begin then).
However, I also note that much of the suburban and rural community, who value clean air far more than the London elite, survive on the benefits of diesel transport that is some 25% more efficient than petrol. Much of America is similarly inclined.
So once again, nationwide social and political decisions are being enacted on behalf of the minority, over the majority.
I rest my case m’lud.
And I have no idea where the word “exit” came from following the first paragraph……..please ignore, fat digits probably.
‘Tis a Brexit whisker?
Danusha is a proud name –
https://youtu.be/02QUmKVsyFY
“…usha” is just the Russian diminutive/affectionate suffix of some name starting with “Dan..”
Dr Goska has exposed the truth that today’s left is virulently fasc1st.
War is coming because of this.
this is crap propaganda. Don’t be a leftist, don’t be a right-winger either, and don’t swing from one side of delusion to the other and then paint your new enemies with the same propaganda bs as you once did your new friends. People are just naive.
It is pure horse droppings. Kind of illuminates where Anthony’s head is at … not good.
The language you choose validates everything that Dr Goska said.
That’s the funny thing about everything that the left is doing in reaction to Trump. It is reinforcing all the reasons that Trump was elected. The left have lost the ability to understand that people mean votes, regardless of the label you give them. The next election is going to return a Trump second term with a humiliating landslide.
War is coming because of this.
This post isn’t about America, right or left of center, it’s a tale about extreme fringe … but those of a certain bubble seem to have a misconception of this story as representing more than it does. While interesting, there’s nothing, in a broad sense, “fantastic” about it. I don’t view getting uber-excited about this as particularly a good thing … more like propaganda for those deeply engrossed in tribalism.
“it’s a tale about extreme fringe …”
Unfortunately it’s a pretty broad fringe, even broader in certain European states such as Germany and Sweden, unfortunately!
If you haven’t seen it, you really do need to get out more.
@ur momisugly catweazle666
I get out plenty. You sound persecuted in search of something to blame. For you to mention Sweden is all I need to know about the tight cocoon in which you reside. I’d suggest you are the one needing a little fresh air.
Would you care to show that the people she is talking about are in fact just an extreme fringe.
In my experience they are pretty mainstream for leftists.
For example, you have demonstrated by your reaction how much hatred you have for those who disagree with you.
Agree 100%. Putting this whole discussion about climate in a left/right “thing” is even worst. It’s science, not politics. The problem is that the world turned this into a politics question and that’s just dumb. If climate, one day, return to be mainly a science matter and politics will be conditioned by it (not the opposite as today), maybe I will not need to be classified as a “denier” anymore. When people tend to think that alarmist is a “left” thing, it’s the same error as thinking that being a “denier” is a “right” thing. Both are stupid ideas. I am a scientist (english is not my mother language), I consider myself a very moderate leftist and I align myself with Ideas from Lindzen, Curry and similar ones. By the same reason, I do not want to be mistaken with the ideas (or lack of them), from Donald Trump. Probably Trump will do most arm to “Climate Realism” that most alarmists ever did…
A bit of clarification for any English-not-first-language readers:
Anthony did NOT cite this article as proof that AGW is largely a leftist endeavor (the evidence is overwhelming that it is, imo, but that is beside the point, here). The article is cited as a PARALLEL only.
Note: the following two assertions,
1) AGW is largely a leftist endeavor;
and
2) some science realists are self-described leftists;
are NOT mutually exclusive.
In my experience, those who claim to adhere to neither side only care about one thing. Lining their own pockets. They support whatever government program they believe will pass the most free stuff to themselves.
They will support any politician, left, right or center that promises them the most free stuff.
MarkW
You need more experience
The most hated thing for a leftist is themselves. The thing they just cannot comprehend is that some of us have actually worked out our place in the Universe, something they have not been able to do.
I chuckled several times as I read Dr. Goska’s background. She and I had a very similar upbringing. My father ran for office alongside Bernie Sanders in the 1970s. He had communist party meetings in our living room etc. I feel fortunate that I did not go into the peace corps or academia because I might still be aligned with that kind of thinking. I, almost accidentally, ended up managing a small business and learned very quickly how government taxation and regulation was crushing and harmful rather than being a boon to mankind.
Several years ago I read a wonderful book by Professor Gosca, “Save Send Delete”. As I read this commentary many of her comments/life mirrored that of the “fictional” character in the book. If you enjoyed this essay, read the book.
https://www.amazon.com/Save-Send-Delete-Danusha-Goska-ebook/dp/B007Y5BFEY/ref=sr_1_1_twi_kin_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1488755553&sr=1-1&keywords=save+send+delete
Dr. Goska sums up nice why I had learned to hate the political left so thoroughly by the time I left graduate school in 1980. And for those who are trying to sell the potion that she describes only the most disagreeable 10% of leftists, don’t kid yourselves.
…nicely…
you got the wrong message from all this then, which is, “don’t hate” period.
Ha ha. That yogi may not be so broken!
“Hate is a poison we take, hoping someone else will die.”
“Thanks to cultural relativism, we were forbidden to object to rampant sexism or the caste system. “Only intolerant oppressors judge others’ cultures.””
This is an extraordinary admission.
Many people are willing to say that the recent mass immigration in Europe has not been very fun to live through. Some are even going so far as to say, “Well perhaps multi-culturalism has failed.”
But the term “cultural relativism” is the most honest name for the desire to make all cultures equal, and pretend that all outcomes are good. To favor one culture and one outcome over another is to be a rac1st or a nationalist, or both.
In my experience, this is not an attitude that is relinquished easily. Is there a difference between whether there are little wooden churches or whether there are mos8ues on every third block? I think there are a lot of people who are still not willing to commit to an answer. And if so, could not tell you why, because the academic/globalist virtue of cultural relativism has still so flattened their thinking.
Remember, nationalism in the Renaissance sense just means having your own history, literature, folk sayings, celebrations, and law codes in your own written language. Before that, writing was done in a dead prestige language (Latin), likely by foreigners.
Zeke March 5, 2017 at 3:38 pm
But the term “cultural relativism” is the most honest name for the desire to make all cultures equal, and pretend that all outcomes are good.
Amen. But the basic problem is that the term “equal” doesn’t make any sense without “unequal” also being a possibility. The two terms “are parasitic upon each other.” In other words, Cultural Relativism is misusing a term in order to try to dictate reality. I used to wonder what all those Poly-Sci Majors were doing in their classes.
Leftists use “equal” to mean “same”.
Thanks for posting this, I know it’s not the standard WUWT fare. Many of the author’s points I’ve noticed as well.
For a PhD she sure is slow on the uptake. Education is what you get, wisdom is what you retain.
A PhD is not a measure of how bright you are, or even intelligence (not the same thing). I know a lot of PhD’s who are as dumb as a sack of rocks about most of life beyond their specialty.
someone mentions the pope as being Christian??
he is not christian he is a leftwing sack of turds
Well, that added a lot to the debate, then…
Where I come from, we call this “hate speech”. In case you missed the message of this article — it is a good thing for people to have different perspectives. It is not a good thing to fail to listen to multiple perspectives. In other words, don’t condemn the Pope for his viewpoint. Listen to it as one of many, diverse viewpoints.
The current pope is a Manchurian candidate
Worse.
The current Pope is an Argentinian Communist – a particularly egregious variety, the Artgentinian one.
Stop, just stop attacking the Pope. Disagree with positions, if you are so inclined, but stop attacking the person.
The two are not mutually exclusive.
The posted column is wonderful.
Another similar story that is great to read is “Commies,” by Ronald Radosh.