What Do Eco Nuts Have in Common with Legion?
In the Telegraph yesterday was the story of how a "lone-wolf" animal rights protestor managed to terrify several shipping companies into caving in to his demands on the transportation of animals used for laboratory experimentation. Never mind your opinions on the rights and wrongs of lab testing on animals: what's most shocking, surely, is how effectively the techniques of asymmetric warriors like the Viet Cong and the Taliban are now being deployed by minority protest movements.
This is especially true of environmental campaigners. Have you noticed how almost no sane person you meet these days actually believes in the man-made global warming myth, any more. What they normally say is stuff like "Climate always changes. Everyone knows that" - or "They talk about hot summers, but I remember as a kid in the 1930s...." - or "It's just another excuse for more big government, more tax, more regulation...." So why, having lost the argument about 1998 - when the global warming ceased even as carbon dioxide emissions continued to rise - do all these climate alarmists remain apparently so voluble, abundant and culturally dominant?
Simple. They use the same old trick guerilla fighters use when they're heavily outnumbered: they keep moving round the perimeter, firing their weapons from different positions, so as to give the impression of being more powerful than they really are.
You notice it with the handful of trolls (often paid activists) who lurk beneath my Telegraph blog. There can't be more than ten of them but they're so foully vituperative, so viciously personal in their ad homs, so relentless in their determination to disrupt, hurt and annoy, that it sometimes feels like I'm the one defending the Alamo - not them.
Anthony Watts has a classic example of this sock-puppetry in action: a lone activist assuming multiple identities - one of them a fancy-sounding institution - in order to make himself seem more Legion.
He got caught because one of our moderators noticed three different names all coming from the same IP address in Washington DC. All were Gmail accounts, and they were used to make attack comments like those above. I’m publishing them since “radner” already gave his email address above willingly in comments with his challenge
steve radner steveradner at gmail.com
karl williams kariwilliams19 at gmail.com
john christie johnchristie12 at gmail.com
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Comments:
Dec '10
Re: What Do Eco Nuts Have in Common with Legion?
James,
It's time for Eco-Nut Watch and Peta-Nut Watch and every other fringe manic obession Watch. We ought to try to calculate the total cost to the economy that these creeps are collectively responsible for.
It's not environmentalism that should scare people but the enviromentalists. Ted Kaczynski (The Unabomber) was no accident. This nasty ideology comes from deranged hate not empirical science.
Regards,
Jim
Mar '11
Re: What Do Eco Nuts Have in Common with Legion?
As I recall, our Dear Leader is still concerned when he sees an unusually pleasant (aka warm) spring day.
Here in Tucson, today, 'tis snowing...
Jun '11
Re: What Do Eco Nuts Have in Common with Legion?
Many thanks for sharing the sock-puppetry episode. I am in the process of emailing the exchange widely to as many people as I can.
The depth and breadth of dishonesty the eco-crazies are willing to engage in to make the case for their "settled science" is both highly amusing and deeply disturbing at the same time.
Some have argued that environmentalism is a form of religious belief. Yet most religions have strongly worded proscriptions against lying. It's sort of hard to call it a religion when active, aggressive lying is part of the Credo.
Nov '10
Re: What Do Eco Nuts Have in Common with Legion?
Mr. D,
You write "So why. . . do all these climate alarmists remain apparently so voluble, abundant and culturally dominant? Simple. They use the same old trick guerilla fighters use when they're heavily outnumbered." I must say you are overlooking an important point. Such people would have little effect if there were not a substantial market for what they're selling. Solipsism is the soul of the Left, and the notion that we, somehow, are responsible for the natural environment, that it is yet another problem under humanity's vast sway, is irresistible: it feeds progressivists' titanic moral vanity and their totalitarian appetite --for only government has the power to bend humanity in the necessary direction of environmental accountability. And it is impervious to facts or counter-arguments, since it is essentially a corrupt metaphysics; only information that supports the faith is admissible, and even facts are malleable given the justice of the cause.
Jun '10
Re: What Do Eco Nuts Have in Common with Legion?
James: Your post brought to mind Tom Sowell's book The Vision of the Anointed. These eco-nuts see nothing wrong with assuming multiple identities because, well, they have been "anointed" by virtue of their secret Gnostic-like insights into what's really happening to the climate. In other words, their superior knowledge makes each of them worth twenty or so of the troglodytes like me who actually think that the evidence should make the case, if there is a case (and so far they've not made the case--indeed, quite the opposite).
So, if they're worth 20 of us, then assuming nineteen false identities to go along with their real one is not only proper, it assumes the status of "righteousness."
When you think you're a modern-day Jeremiah, you get to issue jeremiads to the rest of us.
Edited on March 19, 2012 at 9:41pmMay '10
Re: What Do Eco Nuts Have in Common with Legion?
Poor you. Nuts are the price of admission if you want an opinion platform in the media or on the net.
Dec '10
Re: What Do Eco Nuts Have in Common with Legion?
Liberals lie. They have to delude themselves to perpetuate their "reality". They are wrong and it is sad that we have to countermand their delusions when there is real work to be done. Thanks a lot news media!