Climate denial has destroyed the libertarian movement

Who’s running industry, if not those richest 10%?

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Looks like Letterman, to me.

The graphic in the image specifically said lifestyle emissions, which excludes the most important sources of CO2 emissions. (Edited to remove stupidity)

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The thing that gets me about Penn & Teller is that they clearly have formidable critical thinking skills which have served them well as a self-identified “Skeptics,” but they frequently allow their instinctive support of libertarian “free-market” ideals overwhelm their ability to objectively evaluate scientific data.

Whenever there’s even the tiniest margin for doubt in the science they always choose whatever conclusion is least likely to suggest government intervention as their default position, whether the issue is “does secondhand smoke cause adverse health effects?” or “is human activity changing the climate?” Then, when the scientific consensus is so overwhelming it makes their hemming and hawing untenable they just switch to “yeah but shouldn’t we just let the free market fix the problem though…”

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And just what is industry doing? Why, producing people’s lifestyles, both the good and the bad.

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That is true, but I was arguing against Malthusian population control, which when you actually look at it means “lets stop the impoverished foreigners from breeding”. I don’t believe that most of the people who argue this are actually ecofascists, but if we go down that route we will get ecofascism. Unintended consequences are still consequences.

Healthcare for all, education and empowering women will reduce the birthrate voluntarily. It will be a hard job to find an anti-Malthusian in the green movement who doesn’t support these.

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I’ll believe the movement is dead when the Senate is no longer controlled by it’s adherents.

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To me libertarianism has always seemed like a counter to authoritarianism. More akin to liberalism than complete anarchy. I think that there need to be smart people pulling for individual civil and property rights while other smart people pulling for the good of our collective existance. If either one of these ideologies were successfully taken to their respective perceived utopia conclusions it would land us all in a terrible dystopia. Ignoring historical data and good peer reviewed scientific work because it counters some tennent of your ideology starts to reveal it as more of a religion than a cogient phillosophy and we all know how good most religion has been to humans.

(Edited because proofreading before posting is for pussies)

In doing some research about the premise of the article I came across this very intersting perspective on climate change denial from a libertarian.

https://beinglibertarian.com/misconceptions-of-the-climate-change-debate/

Yeah, right there offering push notifications and what I’ll say are hoodie offerings well short of Heddels’ stuff.

Someone get to Brussels ca. Feb 5-6 for the Sunrise/Energy-X event with reveals of charts to replace the old conservation bits and what to make of atmos. CO2. http://bit.ly/2u3JSp Deadline to sign up extended from the 24th, but be quick (if you’re like, already telepresent in Europe or good at planning it?)

No nihilists, pugilists! @2030Battery Crashing Barcelona Feb.23ish during Mobile World Congress with plans to plasma-zap California from their @QuantumFlagship and leave @GrapheneCA , evening out the temperature too fast for fires to take. Looks like they intend to install Dr. Eggman as a puppet governor judging by the theme @HumanBrainProject …the Sonic movie will be too late!

Smarter hoodies, darker blacks from Nick Harkaway’s epigraph challenge:
@LeeCash – The sky above Dover was the color of television, tuned to a dead Chunnel. --William Gibson

George Monbiot on N [then a backwards N, sorry…] is brilliant.

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Ugh, I’m going to be thinking about this all week.

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39 bucks, it’s a steal!

Libertarian

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Being a wikipedia article, technically they’d just need to sum up what’s written elsewhere. Since there are no sources in the article, maybe nothing’s written about that in a “notable” source?

Not that I’d ever felt a need for green libertarianism, but who knows what it might be.

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From what I’ve seen in the world, nothing’s too stupid, for each possible permutation of ideologies there’s at least that one guy at a party somewhere who claims their permutation will be the thing that finally saves the world, if people only understood it. But alas, their second tier thinking will sound like gibberish to the others, they’ll laugh at him, he’ll go home still unfucked, and we’re all still doomed.

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“It’s just a manner of speaking”. As if words don’t matter.

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Penn Jillette, for whatever it’s worth, has gotten a lot more nuanced in his thinking, and not just about libertarianism. (Can’t speak to Teller.) He was infuriating for a long time in the way that every smart, confident 14-year-old boy who’s read Atlas Shrugged is: maximum human energy combined with minimum human empathy and tolerance for complexity. Then, like a lot of us who were 14-year-olds, he started growing up.

Case in point, his stance on atheism. He still doesn’t believe in god—mazel tov, neither do I—but he’s repented of his “big swinging dick” approach to it. And that happened because he let himself be affected by the experiences of decent people who aren’t the boogeyman fundies.

But the letters we got from sincere believers, really religious people, all the letters said, I disagree with you completely about your view of God but I love the show, I love the passion, I love how funny it is, and I love that you’re speaking honestly . We’d see these and cry our fucking eyes out. If you sit next to me at the end of our show at the Rio, many times a night, someone will say to me, I’m a Christian, a very strong Christian, I disagree with a lot of what you say, but I love hearing you say it and I want you to know a lot of Christians love you . My answer to that is, “Thank you,” of course. But my eternal answer is, I listen to gospel music, I listen to Bach’s “St. Matthew’s Passion.” But more important than that, I consume art very contrary to my position. “St. Matthew’s Passion” is contrary to my position. I read the Bible. I read the New York Times, which I disagree with in many, many ways, being a Libertarian.

And I’m growing. I don’t know if I’ll disagree with the Times next year. And I don’t know if “St. Matthew’s Passion” will touch me in a religious way next year. The sample I described is self-selecting. People I’ve alienated don’t come to my show. But even without those people that don’t want to see something done by anyone disagreeing with them, you can have a wonderful, thriving career that will make you cry.

At the end of the day, you could make a case that “empathic libertarianism” is either doomed to implode in a cloud of illogic, or just isn’t libertarianism. But I don’t worry about people like him nearly as much as I do the people whose sum total of thought on the subject is “fuck you, Jack, I got mine.”

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Nothing it (currently) cites uses the phrase “green libertarian[ism]”. It used to cite someone’s blog (which said “[the Green-Libertarian Movement] came into official being about 30 minutes ago (25 Jul 96), when I decided it did”) as an authoritative source. Another cited article about potentially finding a synergy, or at least compromise, between green & libertarian movements ultimately concludes that libertarians should find ways to get greens on board with libertarian principles. The 2nd sentence in the article’s lede – outlining the ostensible philosophy – was really problematic a few years ago, and someone’s since changed a couple of words where it now means something quite different, but neither version (nor anything else in the article, so far as I can tell) points to anything that says “we’re green libertarians and here’s what we’re about.”

Well I’ll grant that it’s an attractive phrase, which implies putting protections in place for the environment, natural resources, etc. and individual rights. (Though I think it also presumes/implies that green politics, or any politics that doesn’t refer to itself as “libertarianism,” is somehow not concerned with the latter.) Or as @LDoBe put it,

“Green libertarianism” would have really attracted me 10-15 years ago, after watching the US invade Iraq over false pretenses followed by the NSA domestic collection shortly thereafter (and this was all pre-Snowden).

Why any of this shouldn’t be the default position is beyond me; having to call it “green libertarianism” or “left libertarianism” places it out on the fringe – it’s some kind of exception. But, here we are, one-fifth into the 21st Century.

Heck, even Teller can’t speak for Teller.

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HEY-O!        

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