Posted on 03/30/2012 6:13:37 PM PDT by aruanan
Climate-change scepticism must be 'treated', says enviro-sociologist
Dubious on warmo peril? You're the kind who'd own slaves
Scepticism regarding the need for immediate and massive action against carbon emissions is a sickness of societies and individuals which needs to be "treated", according to an Oregon-based professor of "sociology and environmental studies". Professor Kari Norgaard compares the struggle against climate scepticism to that against racism and slavery in the US South.
Prof Norgaard holds a B.S. in biology and a master's and PhD in sociology.
"Over the past ten years I have published and taught in the areas of environmental sociology, gender and environment, race and environment, climate change, sociology of culture, social movements and sociology of emotions," she says.
(Excerpt) Read more at theregister.co.uk ...
Why does it always take the Brit press to report on American extreme criminals and lunatic fringe fruitcakes?
Thanks for posting this aruanan. I put this stuff out on fb all the time. I know this woman is at the crazy end of the GW spectrum but I know from previous experience that many lefties would have quiet sympathy with her statements.
Mel
My bad (I complain about the photos of Debbie Whatshername-schultz), but I couldn’t resist!
Don’t they have orthodontia across the Pond?
Some have said, “The case against abortion in the first trimester must rest entirely on metaphysics and philosophy.” I think the case for or against abortion at any time must rest entirely on metaphysics and philosophy. It appears that for many who wish to have nothing to do with metaphysics and philosophy “empirical reasons” are what they get when they pass the point at which they are no longer aware of (or have successfully forgotten) their philosophical and metaphysical reasons for selecting them.I first saw this difference clearly explained in The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis. As a result, environmentalists and utopian statists have never snookered me. I was a skeptic in high school and I'm still a skeptic.
The “empirical reason” appears to rest on cold fact, but the reason for using it rests on something entirely different. Any time one moves from the descriptive of “This is” to the prescriptive of “Do this”, one moves through the moral world of “This ought or ought not to be.” This is the world of motives and beliefs. It’s the world in which people actually live. It cannot be described in the same way that physics describes solar flares. This is central to the absurdity of “experimental” psychology’s attempts to explain human behavior by dissecting rat brains and measuring dog spit. There is that in human behavior which is man’s distinguishing characteristic which transcends the physical processes of reproduction, nourishment, and death.
--Letter to the Editor, National Review, Sept. 16, 1985
Given the complexity of life, the narrow range of understanding possessed by any particular group is guaranteed to fall short at some point. Given the concentration of power exercised under a centralized system, the failures are guaranteed to have widespread and crippling effects. By contrast, the multiplicity of successes and failures over a wide range of scale that appears so chaotic in a state of liberty has the benefit of limiting the damage and of spreading throughout society successes which can be emulated and modified to fit local conditions.Well, it was probably this part that really did it, given that that prof was probably already in negotiations to become the public health director of Cincinnati or Columbus:
Among some, the attitude seems to be “We know so much now, but people don’t care or won’t listen or aren’t changing fast enough. What can we do to change things now?" The yearning appears to be for some universal remedy. This may be “nice”, but is hardly practicable, let alone even conceivable. It would require an understanding of life and society beyond the capability of any individual or group. Universalist approaches in the realm of economics and government have proved uniformly disastrous.
"But, somebody ought to pay me to do it because I'm right!"
Some health professionals seem to believe that the government should sponsor their efforts to counter the self-interested efforts of others (nutrition and diet quacks for example) because they are right and the others are wrong, because they are altruistic and the others are not. It may be true that they are factually correct and genuinely altruistic, and that what they wish to do will have a beneficial effect on many people, but it doesn’t follow necessarily that the government should fund them.
This is a manifestation of a widespread phenomenon brought about by the advent of the secularized state. Instead of viewing the state as a limited means to a limited end, the tendency has been to imbue it, a temporal entity, with the attributes of a transcendent final judgment in which all injustices and inequalities are finally rectified. In this way, the secular state has been categorically, though not personally, deified and expected to act accordingly (something of a diffuse divine right of kings).
This is seen in those who believe the necessary response to a social ill is the passage of a law, especially a federal law, and the enactment of a program, especially one that they can devise and administrate (and that not necessarily for cynical reasons). Those who feel they are on the side of right, certain they aren’t acting against society’s interest, often appeal to the State to aid them in their struggle against evil. Since the spirit of the secular state is money and power, they ask to be endowed accordingly. It’s pathetically naive and dangerous.
Power accumulates power. Government grows until it meets a limit, either a systemic one (Constitutional limits), or a fiscal one (limits imposed by the amount of money it is able to generate or extort from its own citizens or those outside), or a social one (limits provided by massive societal non-compliance or armed insurrection or by other countries’ response to aggression or perceived weakness). Even then it still has great power to drain resources and people from productive enterprise and turn them to its own ends. In this way it is functioning as a parasite living off the body politic.
Beautiful graphic! I’m saving this one.
Considering the past 450,000 years, we’re living in the end times of the good times. Smoke em if you’ve got em. Hey, maybe each one of those previous plunges into cold oblivion represents a previous time in which nutcases got their way, the intervening deep freeze the length of time needed to weed them out of the gene pool to a sufficient degree for science and sensibility to recrudesce. Hey, I think it makes better sense than their view of AGW.
"WI-I-I-I-I-LBUR!"
In other words, UBER-LEFTIE STUDIES!
Global Warming on Free Republic
It liberal code for "Whites bad, males bad, womyn good, pussified liberal lap-dog males provisionally acceptable" You probably didn't understand because you speak English rather than Moron.
I don't think I'd want a combustible engine. Seems like you'd be replacing them a lot.
Nice point aruanan!
Somewhere in the background of all that is that they are the ones who get to make the decision. Without the guidance of God, though, their decisions are arbitrary and without the humility that comes from ultimately having to answer for their actions they cannot be trusted.
Mel
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