In an article criticizing Monckton, Australian journalist Mike Carlton says some things I would not contradict. However, he also says something thing rather puzzling to my American ears.
This world government codswallop began years ago with one Lyndon H. LaRouche, a conspiracy theory lunatic so far to the right he makes George W. Bush look like Hugo Chavez
American politician Lyndon LaRouche is right of George W. Bush?
LaRouche was– and probably still is– a lunatic, but he is decidedly not on the right. Admittedly, he may also not have been on the left. He might better be described as hovering entirely off the right-left axis of earth politics.
While Wikipedia is not always an accurate resource it does provide a useful introduction to LaRouche.
Let’s look at the balance of the evidence to see whether we can figure out if he is right wing, left wing or just a wingless unhinged nut. Most quotes below are from Wikipedia’s page. To begin:
He [LaRouche] has been a perennial candidate for President of the United States, having run in eight elections since 1976, once as a U.S. Labor Party candidate and seven times as a candidate for the Democratic Party nomination.
Most recognize that the Democratic Party is not considered to be “right” of George W. Bush.
It’s not entirely clear where the U.S. Labor party [USLP] fit on the left-right axis. Wikipedia’s USLP page tells us:
LaRouche describes it in another location as “a new Whig association,” adding that an important objective of the party was to fight against “the attempted revival of the ‘preventive nuclear war’ organization, the revived Committee on the Present Danger.”[4] A state leader described the aims of the party and its organ, New Solidarity, as supporting the working class against capitalism, Nelson Rockefeller, and Leonard Woodcock, head of the United Auto Workers.
The USLP and NCLC have been variously characterized as “Marxist”,[2] “left wing”,[6] “right wing”,[7] and “far right”,[6]. Outside of the political spectrum the group has also been called a “radical and cult-like group”.[7] Milton Copulos, of the Heritage Foundation, described the USLP as “a virulently anti-Semitic outgrowth of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)” which used the Fusion Energy Foundation as a front to “win the confidence of unsuspecting businessmen.”[8] Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen wrote that the USLP began “on the political left but has since gone so far in the opposite direction that to call it politically right is to slander the entire conservative movement.”[9] Labor union journalist Victor Riesel, while writing of “anti-capitalistic movements, ranging all the way from the Communist Party U.S.A. to the Trotskyite Socialist Workers’ Party,” said in 1976, “the most extreme activists in this sprawling radicalism are the youthful U.S. Labor Party.”[10] Civil Rights activist Julian Bond called the party “a group of leftwing fascists”.[11]
LaRouche critic and biographer Dennis King says that when the USLP sponsored LaRouche’s 1976 campaign, the NCLC was still in transition from a far-left to far-right ideology[12] but by 1977-78 both organizations (which were really one and the same for all essential purposes) were advocating extreme-right positions. King described a typical post-transition USLP campaign in “Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism” (Doubleday, 1989):
Returning to LaRouche himself, the LaRouche wikipedia page tells us,
LaRouche provokes sharply contrasting views. His supporters see him as a political leader in the tradition of Roosevelt and Martin Luther King, Jr., and a brilliant thinker who has been unfairly persecuted, while critics regard him as a cult leader, conspiracy theorist, fascist, and antisemite.[3] Norman Bailey, formerly with the National Security Council, described LaRouche’s staff in 1984 as one of the best private intelligence services in the world, while the Heritage Foundation has said he leads “what may well be one of the strangest political groups in American history.”[4]
So, his supporters equate him to two well known Democrats, which suggests those supporters may be left leaning. (We’ll later see the Democratic Party has never embraced LaRouche.) Meanwhile, the right leaning Heritage Foundation simply refers to his group as strange.
Examining the historical development of LaRouche. In early years, he was distinctly on the left:
- Circa 1946-1948: “While still in the CO camp, he had begun discussing Marxism with fellow camp inmates and soon became a Marxist himself. “
- “LaRouche returned to Lynn in 1948 and began attending meetings of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). “
- Circa 1965: “… while still in the SWP, he became associated with a faction called the Revolutionary Tendency, which had been expelled from the SWP and was under the influence of the British Trotskyist leader Gerry Healy, leader of the British Socialist Labour League.[23] For six months, he worked closely with American Healyite leader Tim Wohlforth, “
- “LaRouche left Wohlforth’s group in 1965, and joined the Spartacist League, which had split from Wohlforth.” (The Spartacists described themselves as Marxists/Leninists; not a description embraced by those on the right.)
- “In 1966, the couple joined the Committee for Independent Political Action, a New Left/Old Left coalition that was running independent anti-war candidates in New York City elections, and formed a branch in Manhattan’s West Village.” (Note the words “Left”.)
Sometime around 1972, LaRouche became anti-left, though it’s really not clear he became right wing either. The anti-left part is clear. Here’s some evidence:
- In 1969 there was a violent altercation between his group and members of “The New Left” and LaRouche felt these continued until 1972.
-
Antony Lerman writes that, in 1973 and with little warning, LaRouche adopted far-right, even neo-Nazi, ideas, a process accompanied by a campaign of violence against his opponents on the left. The violence was accompanied by the development of conspiracy theories and paranoia about his personal safety, often involving alleged attempts to assassinate him.[34] LaRouche said in 1987 that, since 1973, he has believed he is under the threat of assassination from a number of sources, including the Soviet Union, the CIA, Libya, drug dealers, and bankers.[35] According to Boris Mezhuyev writing for a Russian news agency, LaRouche’s ideological shift at this time replaced Marxism with what LaRouche called the American System and the spirit of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.[36]
It’s worth noting that, though, some are describing LaRouche as far-right, Nazi’s were socialists, not capitalists and so not really “right” wing. Also, those included in the list of potential LaRouche assassins include the CIA (during periods that included Republican administrations) and bankers — a group seen as right wing.
- More evidence LaRouche was anti-left arrives in 1973, “Armed with chains, bats, and martial-art nunchaku sticks, they [ members of the NCLC] assaulted members of the Communist Party, the Socialist Workers Party, the Progressive Labor Party, and others, on the streets and during meetings. There were 60 recorded assaults in five months.”
However, it’s not at all clear this meant La Rouche embraced right wing views, because around that time he penned some interesting tomes in psychology.“In Beyond Psychoanalysis, LaRouche argued that bourgeois elements of a worker’s persona had to be stripped away to arrive at a state he called “little me”, from which it would be possible to build a new personality, centred on a socialist identity.”
This suggest his goal at the time was to make people more perfect socialists, not to eradicate socialism itself. His “anti-left” sentiments seems not to have focus on the philosophy so much as on the individuals or competing socialist groups who didn’t wish to follow his master plan.
- More evidence to suggest LaRouche was not precisely right wing comes from this:
“LaRouche said he met with representatives of the Soviet Union at the United Nations in 1974 and 1975 to discuss attacks by the Communist Party USA on the NCLC, and to propose that the former be merged into the latter.”
So, LaRouche wanted to take over, lead and rename the Communist Party rather than merely destroy it.
- In 1976, LaRouche ran for president.
LaRouche’s U.S. Labor party platform predicted financial disaster by 1980 and included a three-step proposal to restore the financial health of the nation that it said had been ruined by “the vicious incompetence of the Rockefeller-Ford regime or the foolish babbling of windbags like Hubert Humphrey”: a debt moratorium; nationalization of banks; and government investment in industry especially in the aerospace sector.
Note he reviles both Democrats and Republicans. His platform calling for nationalization of banks and government control of industry is anti-capitalist or socialist. In the US, we don not call this “right wing”. Nevertheless, at the time LaRouche’s platform was characterized as radical-right by some journalists.
Confusion was understandable since LaRouche’s group was simultaneously terrorizing known leftists.
- To make things even more confusing, organizations affiliated with LaRouche appeared to embrace racism– particularly anti-semitism– and seemed to be quite chummy with right wing racist groups like the KKK. When confronted, LaRouche is reported to have written,
Religious and racial hatred, such as anti-Semitism, or hatred against Islam, or, hatred of Christians, is, on record of known history, the most evil expression of criminality to be seen on the planet today.”[63] Descriptions of him as a neo-fascist or anti-Semite stem from “the drug lobby or the Soviet operation—which is sometimes the same thing,” according to one of his publications.
Note however that LaRouche didn’t anything against hating the British:
According to Lerman, LaRouche uses “the British” as a code for Jews to avoid being accused of anti-Semitism. LaRouche refers to this group as the “Zionist-British organism,” and sees them as having “evolved through moral depravity and inbreeding into a separate species outside the human race,” writes Lerman; the British, led by the Jews, are in control of terrorism and drug networks, and it is the mission of LaRouche’s NCLC to wipe them out.
All in all, it’s not clear that LaRouche’s chumminess with the KKK stemmed from shared right-wing values. The chumminess stemmed from shared anti-Semitism.
- Though LaRouche had bad things to say about both Democrats and Republicans, in 1980, he ran for President as a Democrat.
For their part, Democrats would not recognize him as a member of their party and refused to seat his duly elected delegates. Reading his platform we now see a mish-mash of right-wing, possibly left wing (he still hates banks) and many obviously wingless planks.
LaRouche’s campaign platforms have included a return to the Bretton Woods system, including a gold-based national and world monetary system, fixed exchange rates, and ending the International Monetary Fund;[71] the replacement of the central bank system, including the U.S. Federal Reserve System, with a national bank;[72] a war on drug trafficking and prosecution of banks involved in money laundering;[73] building a tunnel under the Bering Strait; the building of nuclear power plants; a crash program to build particle beam weapons and lasers, including support for elements of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI); opposition to the USSR and support for a military buildup to prepare for imminent war; the screening and quarantine of AIDS patients; and opposition to environmentalism, outcome-based education, and abortion.[74]
- Circa 1986: Larouche spearheaded California Proposition 64, which would have required testing people for AIDS and quarantine of those affected. This initiative did not pass.
More notably, two LaRouchie’s won the Illinois Democratic primaries for Lt. Governor and Secretary of state, causing consternation and dismay on the part of the Illinois Democratic party. Prior to the primary the party made the mistake of assuming their preferred candidates actually had name recognition, and would easily carry the state. (Numerous Tribune editorials mentioned the 1986 fiasco on Wednesday, when discussing their current fiasco. The previously obscure Scott Lee Cohen candidate won our Feb. 2 Democratic primary, after which naive voters discovered he was once accused of holding a knife to the neck of his prostitute girlfriend, among other things. )
- In 1988, LaRouche was convicted on of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and mail fraud and was sentenced to 15 years. In 1990, while in prison, he ran for Congress; still in prison, he ran for president in 1992. Clinton defeated him; who’d a thunk?
- LaRouche ran for president in 1996– as a Democrat.
Some Democrats were stupid enough to vote for him and he garnered a total of two delegate, one from Louisiana and one from Virginia. The Democratic National Committee chair disavowed LaRouche, and Clinton, the incumbent managed to be nominated by his party despite LaRouche’s valiant campaign.
- in 2004, LaRouche once again ran for president: As a Democrat.
Eventually, he announced his support for John Kerry, and dedicated his political forces to the defeat of George W. Bush. The Democrats did not highlight LaRouche’s endorsement of their candidate during the campaign. In 2005, LaRouche opposed privatization of social security. I’m not going to suggest this means opposing privatization of SS is a socialist position, but it’s not a far-right position!
- Although he and his supporters seem to like to run as Democrats, LaRouche doesn’t feel particularly bound to their platform.
National Journal reports that LaRouche’s solution to the crisis includes “fixed currency-exchange rates, massive spending on new nuclear reactors, and a rejection of all global-warming ideas” and that failure to follow his advice will result, according to LaRouche, in “a plunge of the planet into a mass-murderous new dark age.”
LaRouche does however, share Democrats dislike of Republican George W. Bush. When a longtime associate, Kronberg committed suicide, he evidently said some bad things about his widow:
Kronberg’s widow filed suit against LaRouche and others in August 2009, charging that they had libeled her by implying that her support for the re-election of George W. Bush drove her husband to suicide, and that she had committed perjury at LaRouche’s trial in 1988 to help secure his conviction
- Naturally, LaRouche continues to have something to say about current government policies. He supports single-payer health care; so his position is not exactly right wing. On the other hand, he has compared Obama to Hitler which can give people unfamiliar with the details of LaRouche’s notions the impression he must be right wing.
LaRouche has not yet passed to his eternal reward, and will doubtless entertain us with further actions and writings. If health permits, we may seem him throw his hat into the 2012 Democratic primary. For all we know, he will someday figure out how to run posthumously.
Americans will continue to find the man’s politics confusing. I can’t say I can fault anyone– particularly an Austrialian journalist– for not knowing whether LaRouche was “left wing” or “right wing”. While he was clearly left wing in his early years, he later propelled himself into some 4th dimension of political thought. Whatever he is, no one rational wants to be associated with him.
Update
Molly Kronberg, Ken Kronberg’s widow, wanted to provide additional information about her suit against LaRouche, and let a comment on my “contact” page. I’m posting her email in full here:
Just wanted to correct something in your original post on LaRouche. I am indeed suing LaRouche in Federal court in Alexandria, VA, but not for libeling me by saying I gave money to George W. Bush.
I did give money to George W. Bush.
I’m suing LaRouche for libeling and harassing me, including through his claim that I committed perjury when I testified as a Federal witness (subpoenaed) at his 1988 trial for mail fraud and conspiracy to defraud the IRS.
LaRouche was convicted on all counts (13 counts of mail fraud, inter alia) and sent to prison. Now he claims that I committed perjury in my testimony against him–my lawsuit identifies that as libel, and his campaign against me since the death of my husband as harassment of a Federal witness.
LaRouche also played a big role in driving my husband, Ken Kronberg, to suicide in 2007–as I have exposed on many, many occasions, in print, at conferences, etc., since Ken’s death.
Thanks,
Molly Kronberg
I’m going to need to make another pot of coffee…one cup won’t make it through all this… heavenly days! 😉
Andrew
Andrew_KY–
The Larouche stuff should be light reading. He is a lunatic. He’s the sort of political presence many would like to assume must be in league with “the other side”. In reality, politically, he is from some other universe. No matter what you are for or against, if you did some digging you could probably find LaRouche was simultaneously for or against it at different times in his life or even in different paragraphs in the same article!
To make things even weirder, it was mostly his followers (at least initially) who were holding Obama = Hitler signs and yelling at their representatives at town hall meetings last summer, which later got associated with the tea party movement in the public’s eyes :-p
He also runs a rather bizarre anti-Copenhagan site (http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/4733) and his followers made news in Australia by all getting into the audience of a news show interviewing a climate scientist following the showing of the Great Global Warming Swindle movie and heckling the fellow: http://bigcitylib.blogspot.com/2007/07/lyndon-larouche-becomes-player-in.html
Still, I’d argue its possible that the groups associated with him down under have allied themselves with the Aussie right, though I don’t really know enough about politics there to judge.
Zeke–
Don’t you wonder where LaRouche gets his money? He clearly has some, but how does he get it? Continuuing mail fraud? What?
His current followers may well be right wing.
The new “site” Desmogblog links looks like an agregator. I don’t know why they think that looks expensive. It looks like something someone could put together in an afternoon. (Speaking of which, I need to fix mine. The plugin I used to aggregate in a WP environment stopped working after one of the recent WP updates and I had to kill it. I plan to restart it … eventually… I need to see when the plugin author fixes the plugin!)
It really depends on how one defines ‘left’ and ‘right’.
For many the difference the ‘left’ seems to be in favor in vesting large amounts of power in an ‘elitist class’ while the right has a disdain for the ‘elitist class’.
A traditional view of the ‘left’ has been that power should not be vested in a small group of wealthy corporations. Hence they are opposed to ‘Corporate Elitism’. There is also a tendency to place a lot of faith in ‘Central Government’.
A traditional view on the ‘right’ is that power should not be vested in a small group of government bureaucrats. Hence they are opposed to ‘Central Government Elitism’.
LaRouche is consistent, he is against Elitism however it manifests itself. As he is extremely opposed to ‘Central Government Elitism’ he is on the far right.
You could class Hitler as a lunatic,but lots of people listened to him.
http://euro-med.dk
He’s called far right by the left because they certainly don’t want to be associated with him. Equating his anti British position with antisemitism doesn’t explain his hatred of the British crown and belief that they are major drug traffickers.
The whole left/right axis is garbage. You have to plot on two or more axis to make any sense out of political positions. For example, one axis might be central economic authority vs distributed, with a range from Ayn Rand Capitalism to Comunist central planning. Mao and Stalin would fall about the same place on that scale but Hitler would fall somewhat toward the capitalism side (but not very far). Another axis might be social with strict social mores on one end (puritanism) and “do your own thing” on the other. When you plot it that way you see Conservatives and Liberals alot closer together. Each group wants to control some aspect of social behavior centrally, but each has a different adgenda (e.g., drugs or sex vs cigarettes or fatty foods)
I’ve always thought that the political spectrum is really a circle and if you go too far right or left you just end up coming back the other way, but in the crazy zone.
“Whatever he is, no one rational wants to be associated with him.”
Which makes me wonder also who in his right mind would want to be associated with Christopher Monckton, but he makes a regular appearance on WUWT nonetheless.
The original name of the NAZI party was the German National Socialist Workers Party, the flag was RED except for the SWASTIKA. Clearly the NAZIS and the SOVIET SOCIALISTS were cut from the same cloth, which is the reason the LEFT are now so vehement in mistakenly characterising the NAZIS as right wing. The SOVIETS and the NAZIS were allies in the early stages of WW2. The propaganda war started with the Revolution continues to this day.
I agree with BarryW, the right and left words no longer tell us anything, if they ever did.
Well maybe they tell us a little. A little about those who toss them like hand grenades or daggers.
The idea of an economic planning axis, a social mores axis, etc. is much better even though it gets messy quickly as dimensions are added. Still, it helps us visualize a solutions space – the sorts of society that seem possible.
e.g. Orwells 1984 is easy to visualize. There obedience was not enough, you were required to believe. We know that solution is possible. It can be. But very few want it.
Outside the solution space are hypothetical societies that we might prefer but don’t know how to make. The Utopian.
Lands where economic security, health care, education, are free. Where people would eagerly work for the good of all even though they could live quite well without working at all.
“Where troubles melt like lemon drops.”
Boris notes that the political spectrum is circular. True. That is why people can argue about whether LaRouche was left or right.
I would say he is neither. IMO he thinks powerful international conspiracies control all important events. And nearly all men are kept unaware of that. Man’s woes stem from that manipulation. And by golly Lyndon doesn’t like it.
Lyndon might enjoy reading Dan Brown’s novels. Something for everyone there; crazy bishops, crazy generals, crazy Senators. All up to no good.
Boris nails it.
MarkR: I presume (or hope) that is a LaRouche Poe?
I’m reminded of the old Nast cartoon
Twas Him
Re: Harrywr2 (Feb 6 12:09),
But this makes LaRouche “left”. It’s not at all clear he is against an honest to goodness central government. If I understand his fear correctly it is that private banks are allowed to remain private and not put nationalized, they will have so much power they will secretly control the world without being a formal government. So, the cure is to put the banks into the hands of government bureaucrats!
Of course, I’ll admit I may not undertstand what LaRouche’s exact argument.
Re: Neven (Feb 6 13:58),
Your comment seems like a big non-sequitor. I don’t think Monckton and LaRouche are affiliated in anyway. Is there any evidence of an affiliation?
Re: KTWO (Feb 6 14:19),
Yes. But mostly he seems to think it’s capitalists conspiring and the solution is to nationalize things. So, it’s difficult to really paint him “right wing” on economics.
Still, mostly LaRouche seems crazy.
It seems the power-seekers of today are not wedded to any particular ideology, the way some in the past may have been. Whatever provides them the traction they desire is what they use. In the end, as long as they end up in charge, it’s all negotiable.
Andrew
This from Aus (born here, lived here a very long time time):
Don’t bother with Carlton – he’s what is known here as a “shock jock”, that is he runs a talkback radio show from a loony left perspective and revels in talking at the top of his voice … all the time
And almost all Aussies would have never heard of LaRoche, nor could care
As one how has been a “yellow dog” Dem, and “leftist” since I first voted (George McGovern), I am glad that LaRouche has been labeled “Right”.
God knows I do not want him on the “Left” with me.
Of course, if the Dem’s continue to push “cap and trade” and/or carbon taxes, I may be forced to become an Indie.
The whole issue of AGW may make me hold my nose and vote for a Repub yet.
Reminds me of a two liner from V. Mayakovskiy (great poet of the early Soviet era; this is from around 1920). A loose translation:
You keep saying: the left this, the right that-
Yawn, I thought we have moved past these concepts
Lucia says: “..private banks are allowed to remain private and not put nationalized, they will have so much power they will secretly control the world without being a formal government..”
Socialists believe they can change Society for the better. The Facist/Socialists use large companies to control Society, the Communist/Socialists use communal ownership.
Larouche was of the same generation as Oswald Moseley in the UK. They believed in a more scientific socialist improvement to Society.
Of course anything that deviates from Democracy becomes Dictatorship.
Call it Socialism or Fascism.
From an interesting essay at
http://jonjayray.tripod.com/eysatt.html
Probably you need two factors, but equally, it is difficult to allow two factors without identifying what Communism and Fascism had in common, which may still make for discomfort in some quarters.
“Eysenck’s habits of thought led to what still is a very clever solution to this puzzle. He maintained that political allegiances should be conceived not on one dimension but on two — with an addition to the traditional radical-conservative dimension of tough-tender mindedness. Thus Fascists and Communists were the same in that both were high on tough-mindedness but different in that one was radical and the other was conservative. The two major parties traditional in Anglo-Saxon countries, on the other hand, were unified in being much more tender-minded than the totalitarian parties of Europe. ……
“If The Authoritarian Personality was very poor at providing an explanation for the characteristic contempt that pre-war conservatives and Fascists had for one another, Eysenck’s The Psychology of Politics made it crystal clear. Fascists were tough-minded and conservatives were tender-minded. Fascists saw conservatives as weak and ineffectual. Conservatives saw Fascists as brutal and aggressive. The opposition between the two arose because they were in fact opposites in important respects.”
“Still, mostly LaRouche seems crazy.”
This is why he must be classified as politically on right in the US.
Rednecks, morons, and nuts are on the right.
Intellectuals and the humane, compassionate types are on the left.
And don’t forget that in America fascists like Hitler and Mussolini are called right-wing despite being big time socialists.
It is very striking that skepticism about AGW is more frequent on the right, and belief in it on the left. Well conducted polls seem to show this. Its also striking that a connexion of some sort seems to be felt by both sides and appears in the extreme public rhetoric of both sides.
The most common attack on skeptics is that they are right wing neoliberals with a favorable view of Nazism and an infatuation with Republicanism and Big Corporations.
The corresponding attack on warmists is to accuse them of being part of a conspiracy to impose world government and some sort of world socialism via the UN.
Its not easy to fit this into what appears to be a debate on a simple enough hypothesis about the effects of a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere on global average temperatures! What on earth, the detached observer wonders, does this have to do with tobacco, holocaust denialism, evolution… etc.
It is easier to observe the phenomenon in the left, because it has a larger media presence. You could see it most clearly in the Guardian editorial today
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/feb/06/climate-science-truth-and-tribalism
which is full of the usual phrases of this sort of thing, including the invocation of ‘denialism’
‘For a newspaper that prides itself on leading the fight to fix the climate’
‘The blatant foul play of the deniers’
‘The well-financed interests that are set to pay a heavy price from any curbing of emissions will do anything to discredit those uncovering facts that they would rather keep buried’
There is another recent opinion piece that explicitly notices the situation, though it doesn’t account for it, and it is written from the warmist side of the debate:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2010/feb/04/climate-change-denial
It concludes
‘Believers in global warming do so because a painstakingly built up body of theory and evidence points towards a disaster of catastrophic scale. The deniers bend over backwards to disbelieve them, fearing the challenge to free market orthodoxies – and because the greens are some of the most annoying people on the planet. In a way, they’re both right’
You notice that nowhere in there is there any room for what I think of as people like me. That is, people who are simply not intellectually convinced on the merits of the argument about the relationship between CO2 rises and global temperature rises. Who cannot see, looking at the temperature record, that anything very remarkable is happening recently. But who don’t hold any of the other political points of view which are commonly cited in warmist tirades to account for their skepticism.
It is one of the strangest things about the AGW movement, that it is a central tenet of the ideology that it is simply not possible to dissent rationally from it. It is so obvious, so totally proven, that one has to find psychological or political motives for such dissent. And if one does dissent, one simply MUST, regardless of protestations or evidence, regardless of actual voting record, hold the furiously denounced right wing views which the movement associates with skepticism about what effects CO2 doubling will have. Though for ‘people like me’ all this furious shouting about evolution, tobacco, Exxon, creationism, extreme right wing foundations one has never even heard of, all that seems to be coming from a planet of the totally insane, one that we do not live on, thank goodness!
If you doubt, according to the movement, you are either insane, irrational, confused, deliberately denying what you know to be true, or perhaps are deceiving yourself. If you say you don’t hold the other views which people like you must hold, well, you are probably lying. Or maybe you are a bad parent instead!
We really need to think hard about how on earth such attitudes came to characterize a debate about what effects the doubling of CO2 would have. Its as strange as it is disturbing.
I think an interesting plot of the spectrum of political/economic ideas can be made in the form of an equilateral triangle scaled in percentages–the kind of plot frequently used to plot tri-partite mixtures. The plot would be based on the method that a political order would use to motivate the workers. The vertices of the triangle would represent pure incentive (i.e., the “carrot” as motivator), pure coercion (the “stick” as motivator) and pure programming (the “classroom” as motivator). The sides of the triangle represent various mixtures of the parts represented by two vertices that the side connects and complete absence of component represented by the opposite vertex. Thus, capitalism would fall near the “carrot” vertex, while a strictly egalitarian system would fall somewhere along the opposite side, ranging from pure programming (Plato’s Republic) to pure coercion (a slave economy). Most real systems likely fall somewhere on the interior, while aspiring to reach one or the other of the vertices.
When Karl Popper was blackballed, and couldn’t get an academic position in the US, mostly due to the influence of the prolific correspondent Neurath, he attributed his pariah status to his being “too far to the Right.” To paraphrase, roughly. Interesting that he still considered himself a socialist.
And the final thing is
(I am going to run into Slow Down Michel pretty soon!)
is what has happened to the environmental movement. I can recall when it was about lowering pollution, preserving valuable landscapes from destructive development, protecting wildlife, and favoring healthy farming methods which wouldn’t destroy the soil.
It now seems to have metamorphosed into a movement which favors the large scale industrial development of the wildest places in Europe with wind power plants which produce no usable electricity, and converting huge proportions of our grain produce into gasoline. This is a green agenda?
This is wrecking the environment and raising world food prices; its a recipe for the loss of quality of life where we live, and for producing mass hunger where we don’t, and if you think mass production of ethanol out of chemically farmed grain is somehow green farming, you are simply mad!
Lucia I know you had this argument with Monckton re His temp graph for the last 10 years temps. I still think he was roughly correct and I think that perhaps his statement that the C02 effect is probably 10 times less than models predict is also correct. He his after all a renowned mathematician…. The latest jump in UHA and RSS is 100% correct I .. but you will probably find its due to a dying El Nino which has occurred xillions of times before. I am guessing that you will see a dramatic drop in temps again and the graphs will again level out. Also remember Christys paper on negative feedback which in mine eyes negates the whole thing anyway. Yes I have become a denier and proud of it Hahaha
Two Worlds: The Warmist and Skeptic go to Starbucks.
W: Starbucks is so common. But anything to save the world.
S: I know that’s a burden. Maybe you shouldn’t.
W: But it is so urgent and you sure won’t do it. AGW is proved and certain. Its effect on the Earth will be horrible. We must do X, Y, and Z to avoid that. And fast, no delays, no debates.
S: AGW is possible, not certain. Its effect on the Earth may not be as bad as even trying X, Y, and Z. Or bad at all. I detest X, Y, and Z and will take my chances.
W: If only it was that simple. I would be willing to let you take your chances. But your chances can not separated from mine or the chances of all others. The problem is global so some sort of world regulatory body must direct all efforts.
S: I hate central planning and spit on your world regulatory body. More government? No thanks!
W: How did you escape from Alabama after knocking up your sister?.
S: Did you like Copenhagen?
ctually i am prepared to be just a skeptic very slight lukewarming which is obliterated by negative feedbacks. Otherwise the earth would have cooked/frozen us a long time ago hahaha
Ron: Your triangle is somewhat analogous to the solution space I mentioned at KTWO (Feb 6 14:19). And it is easier to visualize.
It can also be extended into a pyramid to add dimensions. – I forget the geometric name ?tetrahedron?
Anyway, what is the “programming”? Reasoning? Education? Indoctrination? Social pressures? Mediation?
If you think of politics as being a circular spectrum with centrists front and center, demos slightly off to the left and republicans slightly off to the right, then rotate it 90 degrees – either way – one edge will be political centrists while the other is political weirdest. As the “wings” get more extreme, they become less and less distinguishable.
More importantly, this spectrum is a plane segment, and above and below it are political positions that don’t correlate to “wings, right or left” at all. As you retreat further you will begin to note distortions in the political space that fail to satisfy normal Euclidian political geometries. These spaces are the political non-Euclidian spaces. Here you find flat-earthers, holocaust deniers, small cults waiting for comets and spaceships, libertarians and greenies, dominionists and anarchists.
One of the problems with AGW that I have is that the support for it comes because the ‘solutions’ are only centralized, elitist control of resources and production. Consider if the solutions were only libertarian, capitalistic and decentralized. Does anyone think that those who espouse a liberal agenda would believe in AGW? It would be denounced as a right wing plot.
The concept of a circle is appropriate if you’re only considering a one dimensional spectrum. Far left you get Mao, Lenin and Stalin. Far right you get Hitler, Mussolini, Peron. All totalitarian thugs. Not a dimes worth of difference.
Michael
The answer to your puzzle is that AGW is a cult, not a scientific hypothesis.
I suggest you study some social psychology.
AGW does not make sense (ie is not consistent with the real world) because it is nonsense.
KTWO,
The usual metaphor for motivation is the carrot versus the stick. However, I am sure that most egalitarians see this as a false choice and feel that with proper upbringing the subjects will labor their utmost for the common good. Thus, the Soviet Union attempted to raise a generation of “the new Soviet Man”. By programming I mean any and all of the methods you mention, and perhaps others, such as changing the language–Orwell’s “Newspeak”. With modern genetics, genetic programming will be possible, e.g., Huxley’s “Brave New World”. The objection to programming should be that such a society would regard the individual as a means to an end, rather than an end in himself.
KTWO,
With regard to the tetrahedron and additional dimensions, yes that would be possible. I just could not think of any other motivations so distinctly different that they could not be subsumed under the three dimensions that I mentioned.
Ron: Totally agree with your last. Genetics and brain scans as well as various devices for external monitoring are becoming so powerful that I cannot see how any privacy can be preserved.
And if governments can read minds they will. Orwell could only crudely sense that such tools would come. But he understood deception and propaganda and saw those as more useful for the nearer future.
Huxley knew more about science and was willing to risk on being totally wrong about what it would produce. The last book of his that I read was “After Many A Summer…..” about 30 years ago. It began with a rather mad and wonderful description of Southern California in 1940 as seen by a naive English writer. That part was a hoot. The science… eh.
To me Soviet Man seemed not only an aim. He was an absolutely needed product if the socialist stage was to become communism.
And he must appear if Marxism was correct and communism was destiny. During the socialist stage the old, who could remember and perhaps cling to ideas or superstitions from their youth, would depart. Soviet Man would remain.
Gad, its been fifty years since I studied that. If i am even close it is a miracle.
michel (Comment#32448) The Warmers suffer from “Groupthink”:
To make groupthink testable, Irving Janis devised eight symptoms indicative of groupthink (1977).
Illusions of invulnerability creating excessive optimism and encouraging risk taking.
Rationalizing warnings that might challenge the group’s assumptions.
Unquestioned belief in the morality of the group, causing members to ignore the consequences of their actions.
Stereotyping those who are opposed to the group as weak, evil, biased, spiteful, disfigured, impotent, or stupid.
Direct pressure to conform placed on any member who questions the group, couched in terms of “disloyalty”.
Self censorship of ideas that deviate from the apparent group consensus.
Illusions of unanimity among group members, silence is viewed as agreement.
Mind guards — self-appointed members who shield the group from dissenting information.
Groupthink, resulting from the symptoms listed above, results in defective decision making. That is, consensus-driven decisions are the result of the following practices of groupthinking[5]
Incomplete survey of alternatives
Incomplete survey of objectives
Failure to examine risks of preferred choice
Failure to reevaluate previously rejected alternatives
Poor information search
Selection bias in collecting information
Failure to work out contingency plans.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink
this topic was discussed a lot already. i am not sure that further discussion makes a lot of sense.
.
nobody wants the lunatics on their side, so people search for reasons to shift them to the other one. the most extreme case of this, is the completely absurd claim that the NAZIS were not right wing. (people tend to forget tat nationalism and xenophobic behaviour are important parts of extreme right positions)
.
there is an interesting example of this in another part of German history. the “socialistic attorney collective”, which defended red army faction terrorists ( a extreme leftish group in the 70s) in court, was made up mostly of 3 (back then very leftish) attorneys, who in later life behaved very differently:
Horst Mahler, Otto Schily und Hans-Christian Ströbele.
Stroebel today is still on the left, and a member of the green party. Schily joined the socialist democrats party and was a pretty hard line minister for interior under chancellor Schröder.
Horst Mahler (perhaps the most radical of them during the RAF times) on the other hand, changed sides and shifted to the extreme right.
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so without having looked at the literature on this subject (which i assume to be extensive), i would assume the following:
.
with age, politicians might change positions, even in a extreme form. lack of success, and a position that is mostly based on radicalism, might favour extreme changes.
ps : and you can keep LaRouche on the right! 🙂
I dunno about the lefts and rights of the issue, but Mike Carltons piece on Monckton was an indictment on Mike Carlton himself.
Nothing of substance in the article. Just an attempt to associate Monckton with a looney and a comment about his eyes.
Carlton should be ashamed of himself.
I’ll bet a million quatloos he wont debate Monckton, gutless people usually just snipe from behind safety.
“nobody wants the lunatics on their side, so people search for reasons to shift them to the other one.”
Really? I don’t see denialists trying to shift Monckton to the warmists’ side.
http://www.politicalcompass.org/index This might be relevant to the discussion
Baa Humbug (Comment#32470) February 7th, 2010 at 3:16 am
You can’t debate people like Monckton. He will do just what the creationists do, make incorrect claims that sound plausible to most of the audience since they will be couched in terms that are beyond their understanding. Crichton and go already gave a good demonstration of the method in the ‘debate’ with Gavin.
sod (Comment#32469)
I’ll accept the nationalism may be a defining difference between right and left but even then you had Stalin utilizing nationalism during WWII and I’m sure I could find a multiplicity of examples if I looked. Xenophobia is just as rampant in leftist cultures they just cloak it in other terms (Jews as enemies of the state for example in the USSR).
In either case the methods and results are about the same. Who were the bigger butchers Mao and Stalin or Hitler?
bugs–
Gavin shot himself in the foot during the debate. He had an opportunity to present science. He insulted the audience who’d traveled to the debate to hear the science by suggesting that if they wanted to know the science, they could read his blog (presumably after the debate.) He then proceeded to waste the time they had granted him by attending devoting it to discussing conspiracy theories, attacking motives, and making unsupported assertions about the other side cherry picking etc. While his claims may have even been correct, he didn’t take the extra step of pointing out what made a choice a cherry pick, or why something was a red herring.
If the audience had one iota of intelligence or understood the rudiment of logical argument, then a ham sandwich could have beat Gavin in that debate. Gavin’s performance was very weak. He’s a smart guy, and I suspect if someone objective pointed these things out to him, he could do better next time. But for some reason, people want to lay the blame on something other than Gavin’s objectively pitiful performance which sprung from his conscious choice to discuss conspiracy theories when the audience wanted to hear the scientific argument for why AGW was a crisis!
KTWO,
I have given some additional thought to your suggestion regarding an added dimension to the triangular motivation plot, and I think that I have identified a good use for the tetrahedron plot. I had lumped a lot of various things under “programming”, but there may be some interest in considering a spectrum of the ways that egalitarians might undertake to “remake man”. One possible spectrum would be reprogramming by pure nurture, i.e., “reeducation”, versus reprogramming by pure nature, i.e., the fantasy of genetically engineering the “new Man”. Thus, an ant colony-like regime might be plotted at the vertex representing reprogramming by pure nature, while the totalitarian schemes of the far left would likely fall near the vertex representing reprogramming by pure nurture. Such a spectral representation might help to solve the Hitler problem, i.e., he attempted to realize his egalitarian aspirations by employing what he may have regarded as eugenics to bring about his ideal population. Stalin, although seemingly committed to totalitarian reeducation, may have been also hedging his bets with a eugenics approach with his starvation of the Kulaks and use of the Gulag. Pol Pot was another similar case, although I suppose you might regard death as the ultimate “reeducation”.
lucia (Comment#32488),
Hi lucia. I think Gavin also lost because he treated the audience the way that Micheal Tobis tends to treat anyone who is not a climate scientist: he talked down to them like they were a bunch of idiots, incapable of understanding an oral argument about a technical subject. Had I been in the audience, this would really have ticked me off, and I suspect lots of people were in fact ticked off.
.
“He’s wrong in what he says, but you folks just aren’t up to understanding why he is wrong, so I can’t address his argument” is never going to win a debate.
Lucia. Look for the obvious cause first. Gavin can’t make the argument based on scince cos the science doesn’t support him. The warming does not exist if measurement errors are excluded, it is not unprecedented, does not match CO2 levels, cannot be modelled accurately. AGW is simply wrong.
Monckton
Lucia, I realise that you do not agree with Monckton on a number of things. However, the Carlton rant is just that. The usual ad hominem attacks with not one piece of factual contradiction.
I know Monckton and I can assure you that his grasp of maths and the “science” is excellent.
He is or was a heriditary peer or was until the Socialist government in the UK effectively removed most of the heriditary peers as part of their general vandalisation of our constitution. He always explains that he acquired the peerage through “accident of birth” but it’s his and he is entitlked to use it.
I doubt that Carlton would actually be willing to debate Monckton face to face for the same reason that Gore won’t. They’d loose.
Cheers
Paul
The warming does not exist if measurement errors are excluded
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http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/
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yes, and pigs can fly!
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your claims are nonsense.
He is or was a heriditary peer or was until the Socialist government in the UK effectively removed most of the heriditary peers as part of their general vandalisation of our constitution. He always explains that he acquired the peerage through “accident of birth†but it’s his and he is entitlked to use it.
Monckton has made the claim, that he is a member of the house of lords. he is not.
Ad hom or not, but is this true?
“Truth is, he’s not even much of a viscount, as viscounts go. Nelson got his viscountcy for Trafalgar; Montgomery for Alamein and the war in Europe; Bill Slim for beating the Japanese in Burma. Monckton has his coronet because his lawyer grandfather sorted out the abdication of Edward VIII and his messy marriage to Wallis Simpson.”
Neven:
Monckton’s wrong, but he’s no more a lunatic than you are (note careful choice of words).
If you want to find whacked-out insanity, look at what some of the warmists write about on Romm’s blog.
Some of those people you hang out with in virtual space are completely nuts.
Like Mockton or not. Doesn’t matter any more. Carlton’s is a socialist/left-wing/eco sancophant rant. Doesn’t matter any more.
Both fellows and their various arguments are becoming less and less relevant by the day.
Fact is, the bottom has fallen out of the “man-made global warming” grand narrative, and the great unwashed are no longer buying. And lest we forget, they are the ones electing the politicians in the next elections.
AGW/ACC is dead as a door nail as a political driver in the OECD countries, China and India. Whether the temps rise above or fall below the models’ projections.
sod (Comment#32499)
February 7th, 2010 at 10:36 am
The warming does not exist if measurement errors are excluded.
Didn’t you know that the satellite record has been adjusted upward to match the corrupted surface record.
Fact is, the bottom has fallen out of the “man-made global warming†grand narrative, and the great unwashed are no longer buying. And lest we forget, they are the ones electing the politicians in the next elections.
AGW/ACC is dead as a door nail as a political driver in the OECD countries, China and India. Whether the temps rise above or fall below the models’ projections.
.
and
The warming does not exist if measurement errors are excluded.
Didn’t you know that the satellite record has been adjusted upward to match the corrupted surface record.
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both show some immense lack of knowledge. such uneducated nonsense is pretty far beyond the majority of things, that you will find on the AGW blogs i frequent.
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i would expect such rubbish to be corrected immediately, by some sceptics who want to protect their side…
‘Baghdad sod’? 😉
Andrew
sod, I do’t see these two quotes as some immense lack of knowledge. Rather they are low probability hypotheses. Though I will say Copenhagen and the recent remarks from India, do indicate that some schisms in the political world on AGW have occurred. Though it is possible that the temperature records have been thoroughly saturated by UHI, and other problems, that there has been little warming for 30 years, the odds of this being true must be about 10^-5, or less.
“Some of those people you hang out with in virtual space are completely nuts.”
Yes, those guys are pretty much out there as well. Luckily they don’t get nearly as much media attention as Monckton. In fact, Monckton should be getting as much media attention as they do. :-B
Anyway, Monckton isn’t just wrong, he’s doing an awful lot of damage if AGW turns out not to be a hoax.
Re: MarkR (Feb 7 10:13),
Warming does exist. Gavin could have presented evidence supporting the premise of the debate– which was an argument over whether global warming is a crisis. Gavin chose to not present evidence for the actual premise of the debate, insulted his audience by not focusing on the issue they came to listen to and presented a conspiracy theory.
Re: Paul Maynard (Feb 7 10:13),
Monckton is does seem guilty of resume puffing. Carlton addresses that and only that. This may be because Carlton isn’t capable of addressing any technical argument (though some of Moncktons are, indeed weak or very distorted.) Carlton also tries to puff up his indictment of Monckton by imply some sort of connection with the uber-nut LaRouche. There is no such connection.
If your point is that Carlton isn’t the brightest bead on the rosary, fairest flower in the land or that he didn’t address Monckton’s actual arguments: I agree with you. That said, I think he does show Monckton is guilty of resume padding.
Sod,
“Monckton has made the claim, that he is a member of the house of lords. he is not.”
Naughty naughty, setting up a strawman you can knock over!!
Where is your linkie supporting that Monckton made the claim??
What did he actually say??
” I’m a member of the House of Lords, though, being merely hereditary, I don’t have a seat there). ”
http://nzclimatescience.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=178&Itemid=1
Not being familiar with the intricacies of the HOL his statement may be wrong. He does admit he doesn’t SIT with the Lords. If you don’t have a seat, as he admits, you don’t have the authority. Then again, just anyone doesn’t even have a chance to SIT with the Lords and Monckton DOES!!
Maybe you can do some research that will clarify this muddled position before slandering the man?? Ahh, but no. He is a sceptic so must be smeared!!
Neven,
“Anyway, Monckton isn’t just wrong, he’s doing an awful lot of damage if AGW turns out not to be a hoax.”
And he could be hailed as a true warrior if AGW turns out to be a hoax. Kinda like Hansen, Mann and others who have perverted the science expected to be hailed as saviours of Gaia or something!!
Sod,
“…yes, and pigs can fly!…”
Why, they certainly can!! Haven’t you ever seen a pig on an aircraft??
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
It is a fact that Satellite Temp record has been adjusted to fit the surface record, and the surface record has been adjusted (older Temps downwards, and recent Temps upwards) by an amount which is => the alleged AGW.
Lucia,
” But for some reason, people want to lay the blame on something other than Gavin’s objectively pitiful performance which sprung from his conscious choice to discuss conspiracy theories when the audience wanted to hear the scientific argument for why AGW was a crisis!”
I suspect it is their absolute position that the science is settled and it is irrefutable. To actually argue the science would be to admit the POSSIBILITY that it is not absolutely, irrefutably settled.
Is it possible that the science they have, understand, and could present, simply isn’t as persuasive as they wish it to be and they are afraid to engage in reasonable debate for fear of damaging their position further??
Either way they lose.
Politics is more complicated that right/left. See
http://www.baen.com/chapters/axes.htm
for example.
Ron 32490: Yes a model or graphic can be invaluable in these matters. I was reminded when someone remarked that the left – right axis was inadequate.
Our political labels are old and carry too much baggage. If people agreed on their definitions a party could write its platform in ten words.
The accepted and usual approach to securing power in the West is by building a coalition.
At least in theory the party platform tells us what party members support. But does anyone ever support every clause? I doubt it, each bloc compromises on minor principles to secure allies.
In fact it is hard to believe that our politicians in either party hold any belief that is not for sale.
Were the NAZI socialists? Well, they said so when it suited their purposes. That factoid has no value in guiding us.
Two interesting books: Kangaroo and The Plumed Serpent. Both by D.H. Lawrence are about marginal politics with a dollop of mysticism for flavoring. Both were written before Hitler came to prominence but while Mussolini was overhauling Italy. Lawrence sensed something was afoot.
No one wants to be associated with the lunatics. Yet that does not place them with the other side.
The astronomers saw the planets were not stars, they “wandered”, there seemed to be no explanation. Regard LaRouche as a wanderer.
It is futile to toss him over the wall, or may I say across the aisle, into the enemies camp. They will toss him back.
“And he [Monckton] could be hailed as a true warrior if AGW turns out to be a hoax. Kinda like Hansen, Mann and others who have perverted the science expected to be hailed as saviours of Gaia or something!!”
If AGW turns out to be problematic after all, the planet’s ecosystems and human society are in trouble, especially considering the other existing strains in them (ocean acidification, top soil erosion, overfishing, financial bubbles, resource depletion, etc).
If AGW turns out to be a hoax or not problematic or whatever, we will have probably paid more taxes. If used in the right way, this will more or less also result in the deployment of a new energy infrastructure that is badly needed anyhow. I personally don’t believe AGW is needed to push legislation that deprives Americans of their civil rights and freedom in general. The Patriot and Homeland Security Acts have already taken care of this.
Bottom line for me is this: I rather run the risk of having to pay more tax and clean up my act by making lifestyle adjustments (a process I’ve almost reached the end of, for several other good reasons besides AGW) than run the risk that AGW and the freak weather it might cause make life impossible for a few billion people with all the consequences of that.
So I think Monckton better be right, because he has a lot of responsibility right now, and this responsibility increases with every poll showing that more and more of the masses think AGW is a scam. The same goes for the responsibility of people like Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre (though the latter might be acting in good faith, his work is used to drive an agenda and he is not doing much to distance himself from that tactic).
Sometimes I feel as if the denialists think they have the right to do as they please to bend policy their way (most of the time that means nowhere). But all actions have consequences and the concerted effort to get AGW labeled as another conspiracy or nothing to worry about, could have serious consequences. And perhaps a side effect of the ClimateGate PR success is that people like Monckton, Plimer, Watts, Morano, d’Aleo etc etc etc will have to start to bear the responsibility that comes with the political (not the scientific) legitimization of their view? I think this should be clear from now on and I think this should be pointed out to people that hold denialist positions (or should I say held?).
†I’m a member of the House of Lords, though, being merely hereditary, I don’t have a seat there).
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here is a member lists of the house of lords:
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http://www.parliament.uk/mpslordsandoffices/mps_and_lords/alphabetical_list_of_members.cfm
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i must have missed the Lord Monckton entry in that pretty long list. please correct me, if i am wrong.
.
Maybe you can do some research that will clarify this muddled position before slandering the man?? Ahh, but no. He is a sceptic so must be smeared!!
.
i did some research. i find my position confirmed. so who was smeared?
Sod–
Wikepedia says this:
Do you have a date for Monkton’s quote? The way the wiki statement read, seems if he said it before last October, his claim may have been accurate at the time. (Or maybe the rules about who is seated in the house changed earlier and the 2009 date only tells us of a recent change to the number of members. I don’t follow UK parliamentary changes.)
I think he does puff up his resume, but there is an outside chance that particular claim about membership in the house of lords was true when he made it.
Re: Neven (Feb 7 14:14),
I don’t think SteveMc has called AGW a conspiracy.
Anyway, saying the consequence of being wrong are grave is not the same as providing evidence anyone is wrong. People advance this argument against both “sides”. The consequence of over-reacting to AGW and taking draconian measures (which a fraction of people do advise) is grave also. That fact doesn’t affect the strength of evidence one iota. Either does the fact that under-reacting to AGW and taking more measures lead to grave consequences.
People may, of course, argue how grave the consequences are in either direction if the estimates of climate scientists are right. At that point, we generally exit the realm of climate science and enter the realm of ecology, social science, economics, political science and if –discussing our ability to devise mitigation methods — engineering.
I think he does puff up his resume, but there is an outside chance that particular claim about membership in the house of lords was true when he made it.
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quite a waste of time, but i did a bit of research.
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the best link on the topic is to deltoid. (yes, this is pure chance..)
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http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2007/09/moncktons_fantasy_world.php
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Tim does not only provide the original claim letter from 2006:
.
http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Moncktons_letter_to_Snowe_Rockefeller_on_1218.html
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but also the document, that Monckton was not elected in 2007
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http://www.parliament.uk/documents/upload/HoLNotice070307.pdf
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(the election, in which he did not get a single vote.)
while it is still possible, that he was a member in Dezember 2006, but no longer in march 2007, the chance is really tiny.
(from the election document, i assume that members are elected for life time. the free seats were caused by death.)
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another funny note from the wiki page on the House of lords act 1999:
.
The House of Lords Act 1999 provides firstly that “No-one shall be a member of the House of Lords by virtue of a hereditary peerage.”[1
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(so it isn t a confusion of terms, like “member”, either…)
Lucia: “I don’t think SteveMc has called AGW a conspiracy.”
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Like I said, in my categorisation of denialists/skeptics/lukewarmers McIntyre might be acting in good faith, but his work (or should I say personal vendetta?) is used by others to drive an agenda and he is not doing much to distance himself from that tactic. He is also tied to the Heartland Institute, which doesn’t have a great record when it comes to ‘in good faith’. McIntyre might not engage in calling AGW a conspiracy, but the impression I always get when reading at CA, is that McIntyre makes the assist and then a multitude of commenters score the goal. By the commenters ye shall know the blogger.
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IMO McIntyre has to come out and state exactly what his opinions on various aspects of Global Warming are (is it warming? are humans causing it? how much?), perhaps repeatedly.
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“Anyway, saying the consequence of being wrong are grave is not the same as providing evidence anyone is wrong. People advance this argument against both “sidesâ€.”
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Sure, but my point is that the consequence of the successful denialists being wrong (Morano, Watts, Monckton, Plimer etc) would probably be much worse than consequence of the frustrated alarmists being wrong (Hansen, Schmidt, Gore etc).
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“The consequence of over-reacting to AGW and taking draconian measures (which a fraction of people do advise) is grave also. That fact doesn’t affect the strength of evidence one iota. ”
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Exactly! So why do people who do not like the idea of the wrong and/or draconian measures being taken, attack the science (or the scientists as it turns out recently this is much more effective in swaying public opinion) instead of attacking the wrong and/or draconian measures? And let’s be honest, a significant part of the contrarian community doesn’t want any measures to be taken at all because it hurts either ideology or business interests.
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I for one am a warmist, that is I’m worried AGW might become a problem quicker than anticipated (especially in conjunction with other problems), but that doesn’t mean I’m all for propaganda stuff like CCS or bio-ethanol. There’s an enormous amount of greenwash out there. I’d rather see go more energy into combating wrong policy than in a PR war on science and scientists.
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ps Is there a way to use HTML line breaks?
If you are going to argue by asking rhetorical questions, why do some people who like draconian measures retreat from invitations to defend the science and instead explain horror stories of what might happen if the most extreme events imaginable happen were probable, the we should take draconian measures? Why don’t they want to discuss whether or not those extreme events are remotely likely?
We can then lightly edit one of your sentences to say
let’s be honest, a significant part of thehurts aids either ideology or business interests.
contrariancommunitydoesn’t want anywantsmeasures to be taken at all because itThe edited sentence is just as true as the original version.
Lucia,
“But this makes LaRouche “leftâ€. It’s not at all clear he is against an honest to goodness central government. If I understand his fear correctly it is that private banks are allowed to remain private and not put nationalized, they will have so much power they will secretly control the world without being a formal government. So, the cure is to put the banks into the hands of government bureaucrats!”
As I tend towards libertarianism…
This is the paradox that all libertarians face. If I desire the least outside interference in the conduct of my life then I need a government that will control those that might attempt to control my life. Unfortunately, if the purpose of the government is to control others that might control my life, then it will end up controlling me as well.
Hence, all purist libertarians find themselves mired in insanity as there is no logical way to construct a functioning framework.
I must resort to pragmatism and conclude that the existence of the state is necessary, even though it is undesirable. Some would label me ‘right wing’.
But I’m not particularly pleased when my ‘Right Wing’ friends failure to enforce Monopolies laws when there are clear and egregious violations. I think Microsoft and a number of other large corporations should be broken up. Failing that they need to be regulated. They are so large they are ‘governments unto themselves’. Which makes me ‘left wing’.
However, when the City Garbage police are auditing my garbage for ‘recycling violations’ I feel a genuine desire to start an armed revolution…which probably makes me a hard core right winger.
Oh well..time to take my medications now 🙂
Maybe we have an ongoing reading comprehension problem:
“Monckton was born on 14 February 1952, the eldest son of the late Major-General 2nd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, CB, OBE, MC, MA, DL and Marianna Letitia (nee Bower), former High Sheriff of Kent and a Dame of Malta. He was educated at Harrow School, Churchill College, Cambridge, where he received a BA (Honours) in classics in 1973, and an MA in 1974, and University College, Cardiff, where he obtained a diploma in Journalism Studies. In 1990, he married Juliet Mary Anne Malherbe Jensen.
Monckton is a liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Broderers, an Officer of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, a Knight of Honour and Devotion of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, and a member of the Roman Catholic Mass Media Commission. He is also a qualified Day Skipper with the Royal Yachting Association, and has been a Trustee of the Hales Trophy for the Blue Riband of the Atlantic since 1986.[2]
Although an hereditary peer, Monckton is not a member of the House of Lords.[3] He was an unsuccessful candidate for a Conservative seat in the House of Lords in a March 2007 by-election caused by the death of Lord Mowbray and Stourton. Of the 43 candidates, 31 – including Monckton – received no votes in the election.[4] He was highly critical of the way that the Lords had been reformed, describing the by-election procedure, with 43 candidates and 47 electors, as “a bizarre constitutional abortion.”[5]”
And
“In 1999, the Labour government brought forward the House of Lords Act expelling several hundred hereditary peers from the House. The Act provided a temporary measure that only 92 individuals may continue to sit in the Upper House by virtue of hereditary peerages. Two hereditary peers remain in the House of Lords because they hold hereditary offices connected with Parliament: the Earl Marshal and the Lord Great Chamberlain. Of the remaining 90 hereditary peers in the House of Lords, 15 are elected by the whole House. Seventy-five hereditary peers are chosen by fellow hereditary peers in the House of Lords, grouped by party. The number of peers to be chosen by a party reflects the proportion of hereditary peers that belongs to that party (see current composition below). When an elected hereditary peer dies, a by-election is held, with a variant of the Alternative Vote system being used. If the recently deceased hereditary peer was elected by the whole House, then so is his or her replacement; a hereditary peer elected by a specific party is replaced by a vote of elected hereditary peers belonging to that party (whether elected as part of that party group or by the whole house).”
Any politician that a writer for major media does not like is generally cast as “right wing” because they simply must be. Left wing politicians are always wonderful so this crazy loon must be a right wing extremist.
An Australian perspective:
Perhaps La Rouche is best regarded as a contrarian. If you elect a conservative, he’ll find some silly left-wing cause. If you support a left-liberal, he’ll rush to the side of the lunar right.
As for our Mike Carlton: it was Philip Larkin, I think, who said nothing was funnier than an upstaged revolutionary. Carlton once confessed that he was a failed leftist. He recounted that he and his wife were in bed discussing this. Mike said they had run out of revolutionary steam. She agreed with him. Then they turned over and went to sleep. Gripping, eh what? Pachauri’s bodice-ripper is nothing on this …
Larouche is not an economist or Democratic Leader or anything but a convicted criminal and cult leader who was sent to prison in the 1980s for hijacking over 30 million dollars from people who thought that he was a legitimate person. In this regards, Larouche is more of a Bernie Madoff with his cult’s promissory note schemes and credit card fraud. Like Madoff, hardly anyone who lost a total of nearly 34 million dollars in this madmans delusions and fraud will ever see a dime.
Larouche has been a socialist, communist, Christian, left/right winger, pro Russian, anti Russian and anything else you can imagine to sucker people to his delusions.For over 40 years he has been running a cult of endless economic collapse, New Dark Ages and Nuclear war to recruit enough naive colege kids to drop out of school and support him. His cult dances around many labor laws as he has them called “volunteers” and has them running like hamsters 18 hours a day, 6 1/2 to 7 days a week with one crisis after another for about 20 to 40 dollars a week.
This cult circus has been going on for over 40 years by Larouche who has to recruit new blood to replace the worn out and broken down cult members who are discarded or those who have figured out how this farce works. Several hundred people have left the cult and in the last dying days of the elderly Larouche, he needs a few naive people to keep him and his wife living that millionaire lifestyle.
You can read about how this charade is run on sites like:
http://laroucheplanet.info/
http://justiceforjeremiah.com
http://lyndonlarouchewatch.org/
http://www.factnet.org/ under discussions where there are over 9K posts from former members about this lunacy.
This is a bum who had the anti semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion placed in his propaganda.
If you want to see what the real Larouche has to say about Obama, check out what he told his cult privately last year .
http://lyndonlarouchewatch.org/larouche-obama-menu.htm
” I mean: Obama is a racist. I mean, with an African father–he wasn’t much of an African father, but was an African father of Kenya. He was part of a British operation, which took over Kenya, through MI5’s operation. But this guy was away from Kenya, and he married a Margaret Mead type, a woman who had a number of successive husbands, like Margaret Mead did. Went out to the poor, brown people, in Asia, and had sex with them! It was called “Coming in Samoa.” [groans, laughter] And she wore through a number of successive husbands, and by them, had various children. And therefore, you’ll find Obama’s ancestry, if you chase his family tree, everybody’s climbing and swinging from the branches there–from all over the world! All parts of the world! This guy is the universal man. Every monkey in every tree, from every part of the world, has participated in the sexual act of producing him. And he works for organized crime–which is a branch of British intelligence. ”
If you give your name and phone number to the cult, they will be calling you endlessly to save humanity which seems to be only done by emptying your bank account with them. If you are in college, then the way to save humanity is for you to drop out of college, toil endlessly at their card table shrines or boiler rooms raising money for him. You basicaly work for free as most people in cults.
Whatever is the current script is all just a mirage as it can change on a dime when Larouche needs you to raise money from another list of people. Last year, Obama was the devil incarnate,. Then , Obama is being advised by Larouche. Now Obama is Hitler. Read up on how this cult operates so you do not get hoodwinked by them.
These cultists call themselves Democrats? Read what the cults LPAC National Leader had to say about a Black Democratic Senator years ago to see what sort of crazy town you are about to enter.
http://wlym.com/PDF-SpReps/SPRP24.pdf
Just google Debbie Freeman with Parren Mitchell and see that the Senator had to pull a gun on the cult gang sent to his house.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/cult/larouche/larou4.htm
“His outfit smacks of fascism to me,” Rep. Parren J. Mitchell (D-Md.) said in a statement introduced in the libel case. Mitchell said in an interview that LaRouche supporters tried to break up his political gatherings in Baltimore and distributed literature calling him a drug dealer and a “house nigger.” Mitchell said he received several anonymous telephone calls, including one death threat.
“I knew it was them because I recognized some of their voices,” Mitchell said. He said the harassment ended soon after he pulled a gun on a group of LaRouche supporters gathered outside his Baltimore home. ”
The bottom line is that you can’t view Larouche and the cult as being of any persuasion because he will masquerade in whatever can bring in recruits and cash to keep his delusionsn going.
Keep in mind that his cult has wasted over 330 Million dollars , thousands of members and 40 years in keeping his tremedous ego inflated and well fed.
If you look at him as the leader of a cult of personality, then it will all make sense when you understand how cults work.
Larouche is not an economist but a convicted criminal and cult leader who was sent to prison in the 1980s for hijacking over 30 million dollars from people who thought that he was a legitimate person. In this regards, Larouche is more of a Bernie Madoff with his cult’s promissory note schemes and credit card fraud. Like Madoff, hardly anyone who lost a total of nearly 34 million dollars in this madmans delusions and fraud will ever see a dime.
Larouche has been a socialist, communist, Christian, left/right winger, pro Russian, anti Russian and anything else you can imagine to sucker people to his delusions.For over 40 years he has been running a cult of endless economic collapse, New Dark Ages and Nuclear war to recruit enough naive colege kids to drop out of school and support him. His cult dances around many labor laws as he has them called “volunteers” and has them running like hamsters 18 hours a day, 6 1/2 to 7 days a week with one crisis after another for about 20 to 40 dollars a week.
This cult circus has been going on for over 40 years by Larouche who has to recruit new blood to replace the worn out and broken down cult members who are discarded or those who have figured out how this farce works. Several hundred people have left the cult and in the last dying days of the elderly Larouche, he needs a few naive people to keep him and his wife living that millionaire lifestyle.
You can read about how this charade is run on sites like:
http://laroucheplanet.info/
http://justiceforjeremiah.com
http://lyndonlarouchewatch.org/
http://www.factnet.org/ under discussions where there are over 9K posts from former members about this lunacy.
This is a bum who had the anti semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion placed in his propaganda.
If you want to see what the real Larouche has to say about Obama, check out what he told his cult privately last year .
http://lyndonlarouchewatch.org/larouche-obama-menu.htm
” I mean: Obama is a racist. I mean, with an African father–he wasn’t much of an African father, but was an African father of Kenya. He was part of a British operation, which took over Kenya, through MI5’s operation. But this guy was away from Kenya, and he married a Margaret Mead type, a woman who had a number of successive husbands, like Margaret Mead did. Went out to the poor, brown people, in Asia, and had sex with them! It was called “Coming in Samoa.” [groans, laughter] And she wore through a number of successive husbands, and by them, had various children. And therefore, you’ll find Obama’s ancestry, if you chase his family tree, everybody’s climbing and swinging from the branches there–from all over the world! All parts of the world! This guy is the universal man. Every monkey in every tree, from every part of the world, has participated in the sexual act of producing him. And he works for organized crime–which is a branch of British intelligence. ”
If you give your name and phone number to the cult, they will be calling you endlessly to save humanity which seems to be only done by emptying your bank account with them. If you are in college, then the way to save humanity is for you to drop out of college, toil endlessly at their card table shrines or boiler rooms raising money for him. You basicaly work for free as most people in cults.
Whatever is the current script is all just a mirage as it can change on a dime when Larouche needs you to raise money from another list of people. Last year, Obama was the devil incarnate,. Then , Obama is being advised by Larouche. Now Obama is Hitler. Read up on how this cult operates so you do not get hoodwinked by them.
These cultists call themselves Democrats? Read what the cults LPAC National Leader had to say about a Black Democratic Senator years ago to see what sort of crazy town you are about to enter.
http://wlym.com/PDF-SpReps/SPRP24.pdf
Just google Debbie Freeman with Parren Mitchell and see that the Senator had to pull a gun on the cult gang sent to his house.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/cult/larouche/larou4.htm
“His outfit smacks of fascism to me,” Rep. Parren J. Mitchell (D-Md.) said in a statement introduced in the libel case. Mitchell said in an interview that LaRouche supporters tried to break up his political gatherings in Baltimore and distributed literature calling him a drug dealer and a “house nigger.” Mitchell said he received several anonymous telephone calls, including one death threat.
“I knew it was them because I recognized some of their voices,” Mitchell said. He said the harassment ended soon after he pulled a gun on a group of LaRouche supporters gathered outside his Baltimore home. ”
The bottom line is that you can’t view Larouche and the cult as being of any persuasion because he will masquerade in whatever can bring in recruits and cash to keep his delusionsn going.
Keep in mind that his cult has wasted over 330 Million dollars , thousands of members and 40 years in keeping his tremedous ego inflated and well fed.
If you look at him as the leader of a cult of personality, then it will all make sense when you understand how cults work.
The fundamental division in political philosophy is between collectivists and individualists. Classic liberals and libertarians want social and economic freedom, i.e. capitalism, with the minimum government to ensure those freedoms.
Collectivists are ‘we’ people. They want to improve and perfect
society from a utopian perspective. Conservatives, current liberals, socialists, communists, Nazis just vary in degree of coercion, justification for coercion, and whether some degree of freedom is allowed for business or individuals.
It really isn’t more complicated than that!
The most generous description of Mike Carlton would be “Left wing turd”
Lyndon LaRouche is simply a bat. A Baseball bat. He can be used by either the left or the right to club someone over the head who has no other argument in defense of his own principals. Lyn Marcus is correct – he is all those things, and yet none of them. But one thing is for certain. he is a wingnut.