Monday, May 18, 2015

Dueling Pejoratives: The Climate Ad Hominem War

The Left has long called dissenters "climate deniers" and "science deniers", in an attempt to connect with the earlier charges of "holocaust denier" which is an obvious moral failure.
There's no denying this label packs a political punch

""The word "denial" -- meaning refusal or withholding -- entered the English language from Old French hundreds of years ago, but it gained linguistic muscle with A.A. Brill's translation of the Austrian father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, in the early 20th century.

Denial, or Verneinung in Freud's German, came to mean refusing to acknowledge a painful or uncomfortable truth, despite overwhelming evidence.

In politics, there was "Holocaust denial," "moon-landing denial" and "evolution denial" -- all flowing from Freud, with its implications not only of untruth but of mental illness.

And now the word's in the center ring of the global warming fight: "climate denial."

"Climate change has always been a kind of a framing war," said George Marshall, founder of the Climate Outreach Information Network in Great Britain and the author of the book "Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change." "If you can get out there and you can get your language inserted into the discourse, it's your ideas that dominate."

Marshall and co-author Mark Lynas published the first reference to "climate denier" in the English-language press in a 2003 op-ed they wrote for the left-leaning magazine The New Statesman.

They wanted those words to sting.
But now the skeptics can fight back in a similar fashion, using "climate jihadi" as a reference to the eliminationist, religious cultist fervor of the warmists.
At the mercy of the climate jihadists

"To satisfy the gentry’s urgent need to feel noble and better than others, we are embarked on an ever-more extreme jihad to battle global warming, with the state, pursuant to an executive order from Gov. Jerry Brown, committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030 – and 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050 – versus the previous mandate of reaching 1990 levels by 2020. It seems clear that we are about to wage a war of increasing intensity on climate change, surely not at the expense of depriving Google executives and other oligarchs their private jets, but certainly down to the last affordable single-family house or decent factory job."

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