Armed and Dangerous » Blog Archive » Naming and shaming the AGW fraudsters
The best reason not to relent, to name and shame the fraudsters and shatter their reputations and humilate them — ideally, to the point where there’s a rash of prominent suicides as a result — is this:
If we don’t destroy them, they’ll surely ramp up yet another colossal, politicized eco-fraud to plague us all.
Conspiracy #1: Most of the environmental movement is composed of innocent Gaianists, but not all of it. Thereâs a hard core thatâs sort of a zombie remnant of Soviet psyops. Their goals are political: trash capitalism, resurrect socialism from the dustbin of history. Theyâre actually more like what I have elsewhere called a prospiracy, having lost their proper conspiratorial armature when KGB Department V folded up in 1992. There arenât a lot of them, but theyâre very, very good at co-opting others and they drive the Gaianists like sheep. I donât think thereâs significant overlap with the scientists here; the zombies are concentrated in universities, all right, but mostly in the humanities and grievance-studies departments.
Conspiracy #2: The hockey team itself. Read the emails. Small, tight-knit, cooperating through covert channels, very focused on destroying its enemies, using false fronts like realclimate.org. Thereâs your classic conspiracy profile.
My model of whatâs been going on is basically this: The hockey team starts an error cascade that sweeps up a lot of scientists. The AGW meme awakens chiliastic emotional responses in a lot of Gaianists. The zombies and the green-shirts grab onto that quasi-religious wave as a political strategem (the difference is that the zombies actively want to trash capitalism, while the green-shirts just want to hobble and milk it). Pro-AGW scientists get more funding from the green-shirts within governments, which reinforces the error cascade â itâs easier not to question when your grant money would be at risk for doing so. After a few times around this cycle, the hockey team notices itâs riding a tiger and starts on the criminal-conspiracy stuff so it will never have to risk getting off.
Posted by Vanderleun at February 3, 2010 11:44 AM