Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Who Are You to Question Your Savior?
Daniel Cohen is a sociology professor at Berkeley who dresses exactly like he’s supposed to, as you can see. He’s also as progressive as he’s supposed to be. And he obviously views himself as a deep thinker, like he’s supposed to. Check out this Fox News story for a remarkable quote from Mr. Cohen (emphasis mine):
“It’s urgent for governments and social movements to start planning for millions of people to land in new places. Prepping Miami’s evacuation is a perfect starting point. Its residents are a multiracial, multinational, and multigenerational assemblage that spans the class spectrum. Tragically, many of them are already climate migrants—like Puerto Ricans displaced by recent hurricanes. If cities around the country were forced to plan how they’d integrate arriving Miamians into communities flush with public green investment, they’d get a head start on planning for climate migration generally. This would also trigger conversations about zoning for density, enshrining tenant rights, upgrading infrastructure, taxing the rich, building green banks, and battling racism and police violence. And yet, right now, the U.S. doesn’t have a just—or even functional—policy for immigrants and refugees. It’s still struggling to support Indigenous communities facing displacement from environmental calamities caused by colonial settlers. And the US has handled domestic movements for freedom terribly. In the last century, the emancipatory promise of the Great Migration was savagely curtailed by segregation and mass incarceration. Leading sociologists and scholars of environmental injustice called this racial violence a form of apartheid. Today, a surge in climate displacement threatens to deepen this eco-apartheid.“
Lordy. Ok, first of all, yes, I know he’s a sociology professor. Stop giggling. But still, I think his remarkable quote is a good illustration of how the left thinks. Er, believes. They are true believers convinced of an imminent apocalypse and they evangelize to the rest of us about our one hope at salvation: Our benevolent government needs to take control of all aspects of society, including “zoning for density,” “enshrining tenant rights” (note: not property owner rights), “taxing the rich” (note: meaning anybody who earns more money than sociology professors, darn them), “battling racism and police violence” (note: funny how he groups those things together), and so on.
Why do they keep pushing climate change, despite lack of evidence? Because it is the ultimate source of power for them. With climate change, they can do anything. Anything at all. If you’re trying to save the world, what limits your behavior? Nothing.
Anyone who questions our saviors is obviously evil, and should be ignored or destroyed.
I suspect that Mr. Cohen really does believe in man-made global warming. Although it doesn’t really matter. Because he understands its importance, and its centrality to his ultimate dream of complete leftist control of society.
Electric cars are terribly toxic for the environment due to their huge batteries. Windmills kill birds. Solar panels destroy previously green space. So we should argue against these things in an effort to protect the environment. But we should also argue against them to protect ourselves.
The Sky Is Falling crowd can seem amusing sometimes. So much of what they say is absurd and easily disproven. But they are not funny, and they are not harmless.
Climate change is a weapon. And you are the target.
The left’s sudden refreshing honesty on this point should not be ignored.
As Mr. Cohen so elegantly pointed out, this is a power grab. And they want it all. And if we accept their narrative, they can’t lose.
After all, who are you to question your savior?
Published in General
Since when are hurricanes “climate”??
If anything is weather, it’s a hurricane.
These people …
And if your home is destroyed by a hurricane, and you live in a place where hurricanes happen regularly, isn’t that on you? Can’t you build a domicile that is integrated into the local conditions?
This is why palm trees are bendy – the wind blows real hard sometimes where they grow. If they didn’t adapt to the local weather, they wouldn’t grow there. Duh.
And if your house does get knocked down by the weather, because you didn’t build it wisely, why do you automatically come to America??? Where is that written in the big book of justice?
This guy is an imbecile.
The second item in the liberal creed, after self-righteousness, is unaccountability. Liberals have invented whole college majors— psychology, sociology, women’s studies— to prove that nothing is anybody’s fault.
— P. J. O’Rourke, Give War a Chance, 1992
He had another one, the source of which eludes me, about sociology being “journalism without news.”
Yes, but I’m sure he has PhD printed on his checks.
Edited to add: I have a neighbor who has that on her checks; psychology instead of sociology, however.
It’s much easier to be a sanctimonious critic than to actually solve the problem. If these commies were serious, they’d never stop protesting China. That’s where the government really does control how densely packed its population is. It would seem that the top down control of citizens’ lives does not guarantee a pristine environment. They’d rather scold their fellow citizens than attack the real source of CO2 emissions.
There’s no just plan for immigration? Guess we need to ferry them across the Rio Grande before flying them to the destination of their choice where they will be fed, housed and face the awful prospect of free medical care and free education for their children. Yeah we’re monsters.
Stay in your lane, Dan.
That sounds about right based on my experience. Everybody’s mileage may vary, but my investment beat the market by $$$ and $$$ and $$$.
I always point climate alarmists to this article from Walter Williams
Environmentalists Are Dead Wrong, by Walter E.Williams | Creators Syndicate
My savior doesn’t mind being questioned. All He asks is that you believe in him. The climate change crowd is ready to burn at the stake any heretic who dares question the new orthodoxy . . .
I think the phrase is, “repetitive, boring and tense.” – – Ricochet Style Guide.
Come now-it’s based on sociology, which is a science akin to reading chicken entrails…..with about the same quality data to support it.
Some of the early sociologists were quite good and Robert Putnam still puts out solid work. The problem is that sociology and psychology attracts people who don’t care about empirical data.
Mine for a large State University (U of MD, circa 1976 to 1981) started at $333/semester to $400/semester. Which was a bargain for an engineering degree, however it was the $100 to $150 annual “athletic fee” (cough*pays for stupid athlete tuition*cough) and the $40 annual parking fee (which was a mile walk from the freshman/sophomore lots) that stuck in my craw.
I think that’s perfectly reasonable…
I have taken to show this chart when asked about my faith in global warming as predicted by the climate “modelers”.
As one who has 15 year of their professional career in designing and developing the space sensors that collected the accurate, calibrated, and of sufficiently granular resolution to definitively help answer the global climate question, I am miffed. Miffed that it is being ignored by the grifting climateritti . My career effort is buried in the data used by UAH.
Part of my job was to do thermal model correlation by subjecting space bound hardware to the vacuum of space (in a tank) and expose it to the extreme thermal radiation environmental of hot and cold fluxes expected for its mission. So I know a think about modeling.
I know I would be laugh out of a review if I presented my “correlated model” to the data like one can observe between the black line “modeling average”, and the real orbital measurements (the green line data).
I spent the last 15 years of my career in disgust as this table was being played out over the time, from the first calibrated climate satellite launch (1999) to the present (which goes almost flat, here it is to 2019).
I wish I could feel vindicated, yet we seem to be hell bent on reducing our per capita energy consumption back to the beginning of the 20th century along with the interruptions and blackouts that typified that period in time with a developing an electric grid. Instead we are reliving those grand times (cough* California/Texas *cough).
We should be 80% nuclear by now with the “spin up” peaking balance from natural gas, and with transportation supported by heavier hydrocarbons (you will never get an electric airplane). The energy density of the storage media dictates what will fly, and you will never convince me that battery power car (with the periodic table element in this universe), will match the all of the performance characteristics of the IC power vehicle. Perhaps with a sufficient nuclear grid you can move to a hydrogen fuel for mobile transportation, but I suspect folks will have user issues with a cryogen/high pressure fuel storage.
I could keep going, but I will relinquish my soap box.
sigh….
I think I saw a total of one football game and one basket ball game during that period (during the Lefty Driesell years). One had no extra time for that stuff when you are studying for an engineering degree, and working part time to pay for tuition, gas money, and “fees”.
Please write a post on these comments
Perhaps a post, but I refrained for many years because folks who would not like my squeaking could have made my life miserable at NASA. I already saw some of the senior scientists I was supporting “retire” or stay silent rather than fight the growing climate grifting blob (which I think is worse now).
The second reason I don’t post much is my english grammar sucks, and writing for me is a penance. Besides the Ricochettie who meet me know how I feel, and I am sure the grow tired of my rant.
I think it’s approximately $99 to $149 too high.
My late father-in-law was responsible fo the maternal and child health study by the Carolina Population Center. His recipe for a happy life based on the data from the most extensive longitudinal study of human sexuality yet conducted? Live like your grandparents. He got all kinds of hate from his radical feminist colleagues for saying this.
My daughter went to Notre Dame on an academic scholarship. I understood that the large scholarship fund was made possible because the school was a Division I school; that the student athletics bring in more money than their scholarship cost the school.
Also: Those people actively work to exclude from the field anyone who does not share their leftist biases and agendas. In fact, there are sociology departments which officially demand allegiance to leftist ideology in order to pursue a degree.