The Megathread
Moving my rabbit hole threads from Twitter to here
I seem to have tried Twitter’s patience. And Twitter has tried mine. It’s a deeply confused and conflicted company, unable to stick to its story, and unsure about whether it is ashamed or proud of what it has done and what it is has become. I’m not. So I am moving the content of what was my pinned Tweet — a directory to number of threads on important topics — to this platform. This is a starting point…
My research and writing has a number of main themes:-
The growing democratic deficit and hollowing out of democratic politics and the tendency to supranational institutions — aka ‘globalisation’, in which domestic political parties converge, offer the public less choice, and take their instructions from above.
The global ecosystem of ersatz ‘civil society’ organisations or fake charities that dominate formal and informal political discussion, at all levels local to global, to displace independent views from the public sphere.
The dodgy private interests behind the green movement, the fact being that it simply would not exist without the generosity of about a dozen or so fake “philanthropic” foundations, which provide green campaigns with nearly all of their resources.
The hyperreality of the climate ‘crisis’, and how green ideology, not science, drives the false understanding of a world in ecological collapse, the end of civilisation and all that Greta stuff. In other words, how we can know that climate change is bullshit, even if it’s real.
The parallels between environmentalism and other characteristic tendencies in mainstream politics, which help to explain environmentalism’s ascendency, such as Western foreign policy — i.e. warmongering. Also, interrelated things such as technocracy, hyperregulation, preoccupation with risk and all things Blair.
The fact of green ideology not being understood as an ideology — an ‘-ism’, like any other, communism, capitalism, fascism, Maoism. And how ‘science’ is not a sufficient fig leaf for such a shameful thing, and so how institutional science has to twist, turn lie and cheat to sustain its new political function.
I will add the threads as articles here on Substack, and link to them below.
Energy prices and energy policy failures
Three historical Twitter threads from early 2022 explaining why energy prices were beginning to spiral out of control.
A short thread on the UK’s energy price cap, which had precisely zero effect on household energy bills, which simply multiplied, thanks to MPs continued and determined failure to represent the public’s interests.
Rishi wonders “oh God, what have I done?” But it is too late.
If only we had fracked when we could…
A former chair of an energy industry lobbying association wades into the debate about rising bills. But where was she and her organisation when the problems were being created, and why can’t they be straight about it?
Stop Blaming Russia for the UK’s bad energy policies!
For years, politicians have promised that “green investment” would create a new era of economic dynamism. It was always a lie.
The 2019 Conservative Party election manifesto DID NOT explain to the public what they were committing to.
Net Zero Endgames — War
I’m not going to be blackmailed by bankrupt Tory bullshit into supporting a war in Europe.
Idiot green tories have switch from taking cash from Russia and China to talking up war with them.
Green ideology and Eco-hyperreality
How the Met Office gets itself into an ideological muddle.
Eco-spooks were asleep at the wheel.
Weirdo organisations, in cahoots with the BBC and its offshoots, with £millions from Western governments and dodgy green billionaires are trying to lump people who object to wind farms with jihadi terrorists.
If you are interested in understanding the "thinking" that motivates the ISD's current research, I began examining it about a decade ago here...
Some on the other side of the debate claimed that I had not properly understood the claim I was responding to, and had improperly characterised it. A more able expert in this field corrected them some years later...
The same writer has a more recent criticism of one of the approaches used in the ISD's paper -- a taxonomy of climate scepticism -- here... NB: It's not an entry-level discussion.
I attempt to dismantle the attempt to exclude climate sceptics from debate -- or rather, the attempt to legitimise their exclusion from debate -- here.
I explain some of the methodological abuses behind the mischaracterisation -- smearing, aka -- of climate sceptics here.
Again, more able researchers -- scientists in fact, one now working in social science -- added much more depth to that perspective here...
There are *many* more discussions I could point to, that I and others have produced in relation to the framings that the ISD uses in its false analysis, going on for a decade or longer. But academics in the climate field do not do debate. And their work suffers for it.
Rather than engage in debate, on differences of understanding and on how differences emerge, "academics" have allowed the smear machine to roll on. We can know that they have read the criticisms -- they link to it. But they have nothing to say. They cannot defend their work.
The problem is that to them, any criticism of their work is simply a 'conspiracy theory'. Groupthink defends itself. But it defends itself self-consciously. That is to say that the researchers involved in it believe that they can 'immunise' themselves from criticism.
But back to the Megathread…
The UK Treasury fund a load of old ideological BS.
Some more objections to “academic” psychology.
{Work in progress…}
B.