Memo to the Guardian's Oliver Burkeman: sorry my kids haven't had quite enough death threats yet...
I'm endlessly fascinated by the psychopathology of the liberal-left. Consider this - entirely characteristic - response to a piece I wrote the other day on the Great Global Warming Scam.
It was a long article, taking in many diverse aspects of the Carbon Fraud: the rent-seeking by unscrupulous corporatists; the environmental damage being done by wind farms and biofuels; the flimsiness of AGW theory; Rachel Carson and Paul Ehrlich v Norman Borlaug; the nonsense of "green jobs"; the miracle of shale gas; the myth of "scarce resources." etc.
These are all fascinating topics and I would have been more than happy for any reader to have engaged with me in a factual argument on any of these issues. I think I would have won because I've done my research and the facts are on my side.
But of course, they didn't. Here instead is what one Oliver Burkeman a journalist for the left wing Guardian newspaper chose to focus on in a series of Tweets:
Dear @JamesDelingpole: in this excerpt of yr new GW-denying book http://is.gd/bGQ6ab you say you & yr kids get near-daily violent threats >
.@JamesDelingpole (I mean obviously I'm assuming you wouldn't ever exaggerate or mislead to build your case against global warming)
.@JamesDelingpole cd you link to the violent threats you say are made against your kids on Twitter almost daily? I'd like to report them.
Here's what I said in the article:
Almost every day, on Twitter or by email, I get violent messages of hate directed not just at me, but even my children.
The "even my children" bit was a reference to a particularly noisome tweet involving two uses of the "c" word, one about my kids. I'm quite sure the person who sent it was a sad, lonely, very angry individual more in need of pity than hate. But the fact remains that somebody did send that Tweet and they did direct at me, almost certainly, as a result of my stance on global warming.
Still, as far as I can recall that's the only vicious Tweet I've had against my kids. When I wrote "almost every day" it was a reference to the number of hate Tweets and hate emails I get addressed to me personally. Perhaps I could have written the sentence a little more carefully - and thus avoided the ambiguity. But I certainly wasn't trying to mislead the reader into thinking that every day my kids get death threats or anything like that. As I should have thought was palpably obvious from the rest of the article, I feel my case against the environmental movement is more than strong enough not to need embellishing with lies or half truths.
If Oliver Burkeman was just another of the foaming leftist loons who congregate on Twitter to spew random vileness I wouldn't have thought this worthy of mention. But he's not. He's a journalist - specializing in US politics, I see from his Twitter profile - on a respected newspaper, long one of the bastions of the British left-liberal establishment.
So as a fellow journalist I tried to put myself in his shoes. Had Burkeman - or George Monbiot, or any other Guardian journalist - written a 1600 word piece on green issues with which I disagreed, and he'd written a sentence like the one of mine that made him so indignant would I have taken the trouble to try to ridicule him in the form of three consecutive Twitter messages?
Well of course I wouldn't. I doubt any journalist of my political persuasion would. Why not? Because it's so utterly, nitpickingly facile, that's why. The scandal I laid out in my piece is one of the greatest in history: an effective conspiracy between big corporations, environmental NGOs like the WWF and Greenpeace, politicians, technocrats, the liberal MSM and bent, data-fudging scientists to exaggerate the threat of global warming in order to increase taxes, hamstring our economies with regulations and enrich a few selected rent-seeking business (like Solyndra and Bright Source). If the very best defense the left can come up with is that the kids of the journalist who wrote the piece haven't had quite as many threats as they should have done, then it seems to me that this is an argument that the liberal-left have lost.
I suppose I should be grateful to this Oliver Burkeman fellow for affording such a perfect example of just how intellectually and morally bankrupt the liberal-left can be.
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Comments:
Dec '10
Re: Memo to the Guardian's Oliver Burkeman: sorry my kids haven't had quite enough death threats yet...
James,
You must realize the size of the Stupidity Bubble you have burst. They are a mixture of ignorance, greed, resentment, and finally yes, pure hate.
Sorry that you must endure this. However, I am very glad that you have the guts for this fight.
Regards,
Jim
Dec '11
Re: Memo to the Guardian's Oliver Burkeman: sorry my kids haven't had quite enough death threats yet...
James, you are arguing with a church so corrupt that it only took them 20 years to develop simony.
Edited on February 5, 2012 at 1:22pmFeb '12
Re: Memo to the Guardian's Oliver Burkeman: sorry my kids haven't had quite enough death threats yet...
James,
As a non-writer/journalist, let me just say a sincere "Thank you", for without you and others like you who are more interested in fact than favour, nothing would ever be truly known.
Sincerely,
Natalie
Oct '10
Re: Memo to the Guardian's Oliver Burkeman: sorry my kids haven't had quite enough death threats yet...
The left is much more pragmatic than the right in this respect. Nitpicking information to death is one way of killing it. Global warming is especially sensitive to the nihilistic left, as it represents (in their minds) the best chance they've had in decades of advancing their nihilistic agenda on a global scale.
Not that they ever had a chance of succeeding, of course. If leftists had won the global warming debate, the world would simply have started investing in nuclear power, it certainly wouldn't have started tearing down capitalism, or anything like that.
Edited on February 5, 2012 at 2:53pmMar '11
Re: Memo to the Guardian's Oliver Burkeman: sorry my kids haven't had quite enough death threats yet...
Hate Tweets?
Oct '11
Re: Memo to the Guardian's Oliver Burkeman: sorry my kids haven't had quite enough death threats yet...
James Delingpole:
Here's what I said in the article:
We know where this journalist priorities lies, not with the multi-trillion worth of status, but with a petty attempt's of character assassination based on nitpicking.
My English is highly deficient, but isn't ''even'' signaling a lesser frequency bordering unusual ?
Feb '11
Re: Memo to the Guardian's Oliver Burkeman: sorry my kids haven't had quite enough death threats yet...
Thank you for taking the time to do the research, put it out there, and for having the thick skin to endure to insults and threats that are then directed to you. Mark Steyn has a good line he uses in some articles ..."Some societies are just too stupid to survive...." He may be onto something.
Mar '11
Re: Memo to the Guardian's Oliver Burkeman: sorry my kids haven't had quite enough death threats yet...
The Guardian is only respected by the left-liberal establishment, because they are one and the same - much like the NY Times in the US. I personally have no respect for 'em at all, in much the same way that I feel about BBC News.
The tactic of nit-picking is very familiar in the US, also, and it's almost impossible to say anything that can't be given that treatment - ask Mr Romney.
Sadly, it does seem to work, at least in the aforementioned left-liberal establishment and for voters who aren't paying attention.
Jul '11
Re: Memo to the Guardian's Oliver Burkeman: sorry my kids haven't had quite enough death threats yet...
Your sentence is clear. The liberal when faced with reality will choose instead to construct another side reality in which they feel the have the upper hand. You, my AGW denying knight, are the scent gland of a skunk to their higher power.
Nov '10
Re: Memo to the Guardian's Oliver Burkeman: sorry my kids haven't had quite enough death threats yet...
James, what you are up against is a religion whose heaven is here on earth and that earth is significantly less populated than it is today. They are misanthropes of the highest order and the current generation's Malthusians.
Jun '10
Re: Memo to the Guardian's Oliver Burkeman: sorry my kids haven't had quite enough death threats yet...
James: Well, with AGW now in consensus stage (don't look at that large group of demented scientists over in the corner asking questions about AGW), what would one expect a member of media to do? Surely not actually check out the actual "facts" about AGW or the contentions you made in your article (once consensus is reached that's obviously unproductive). So, being a seeker for truth, your enterprising journalist gets into the important stuff: how many of the tweets actually threaten your children as opposed to how many limit their threats solely to you. The public has a right to know.
Edited on February 5, 2012 at 6:28pmRe: Memo to the Guardian's Oliver Burkeman: sorry my kids haven't had quite enough death threats yet...
@Joseph "The left is much more pragmatic than the right in this respect. Nitpicking information to death is one way of killing it."
I think you're absolutely right here. It's why I wrote this piece: not in the manner of "ohmygosh please pity me someone was rude about my kids" but because I think it's really important that we keep abreast of the rhetorical techniques used by the left, the better to defeat them.
I'm not necessarily suggesting we emulate the more devious leftist techniques. But we must definitely learn the best ripostes, otherwise they'll run rings around us.
For me, the best defense of all is to show the trick being used and expose it to ridicule. A bit like I've done in this blog post.