How dare you?

Posted by Pointman on October 28, 2019 · 10 Comments

Dr. Johnson, the first lexicographer of English, said that the last refuge of a scoundrel was patriotism. It’s both witty and true, but there’s a deeper pattern he was alluding to. In a previous article, I talked about the almost lost art of oratory which according to the Greek and Roman writers of antiquity had three elements; logos, pathos and ethos, meaning roughly logic, compassion, and appealing to the more lofty ideals of the listener’s culture.

Oratory is not only a technique of public speaking, but also a method of persuasion. What the good doctor meant was when faced with some scoundrel pushing some dubious proposition at you, the invariable pattern was they first tried logic, which promptly fell apart under the weight of some pointed criticism, then prevailing upon your sense of Christian charity, and when all that had failed, just finally saying you must know it’s the proper thing to do. eg We’re all proud Spartans of that noble lineage, so how could you not possibly want to join in with the slaughter of all those nasty Athenians?

That’s why he called it the last refuge of a scoundrel. It’s nothing particularly to do with patriotism, it’s just they’d tried everything else, and were now just reduced to cynically playing on your emotions to change your viewpoint. The broad pattern is they can’t make a solid case for whatever they’re pitching, so they resort to being manipulative. That’s the current state of play with the gerbil worming mob.

I bowed out of the climate wars nearly three years ago because after six or seven years in it, I felt that in any reasonable sense, we’d prevailed. The pseudo science had been forensically picked apart by the climate sceptic blogosphere and more importantly, the ordinary person had become thoroughly indifferent to it after a fifty year deluge of dire predictions, not a single one of which has come true.

The madness of crowds doesn’t end on a single date you can definitely put your finger on. There was never going to be a simple endpoint, a VE day or a VJ day in the climate wars, the thing would gradually dwindle away, until a point was reached where it’d disappear completely and the whole episode of the indirect genocide of the developing world and things like pensioners freezing to death in the developed world would be carefully tippexed out of history lite.

This loss of popular interest is most apparent in younger people in their twenties, a demographic that used to be the bedrock support of the craze. It’s reached the point with them where not only are the antics of the movement ignored, but the more extreme activities are now laughed at. They have lost that demographic and the real problem with that is that the people it’s composed of will within a decade or so start to be the decision makers. Sure, a certain percentage of them have been programmed for life, but not enough of them.

In response, the scoundrel ploy is being used, which in this case is emotional manipulation by resorting to child abuse. Fanatics don’t have any moral floor they can’t drop through or even consider stopping at. They’re basically concentrating on programming the children now. It’s them who’re now being scared to death by end of world horror stories. People have actually started talking up a mental health crisis about climate amongst children, which if it actually ever came about wouldn’t be much of a surprise. When a figure in authority – any adult when you’re a child – does nothing but terrify you out of your childhood idyll by a non-stop stream of scary stories, you can expect some problems downstream.

The figurehead for this new ploy is St. Greta of Thunberg, who at a cursory glance, looks like a spoilt brat of the granola-munching, well-to-do, middle classes who’ve appointed themselves to be saviours of the very planet. You know, the type of idiots who’d do something really stupid like give a baby girl a second name of Tintin. She’s basically a well-rehearsed performing seal capable of delivering a few lines complete with accompanying gestures. But at the end of the day, she’s still a child, and when things go off script, she flounders badly, as can be seen in this live press event. Notice none of her handlers rush to her aid – I presume they were hoping she’d burst into tears or something at the unfairness of asking her a question.

The reasons she’s being pimped around the world by her handlers are multiple. You can’t criticise her because A) She’s a child. B) She’s female. C) She’s reportedly got a fashionable selection of mental illnesses, all of which means you’re not supposed to say nasty things about poor little me, but it doesn’t mean you can’t be rather pointedly ignored. Here’s a pic of the Trumpie monster totally ignoring her and from the look on her face, really being pissed off she’s momentarily not the sole focus of attention. I’m inescapably reminded of that Longfellow poem about a little girl called Maud.

Her best line so far, delivered at a UN presser, seems to be a whine about us silly grownups depriving her of her childhood – “How dare you.” (Lean forward when you say it Greta, and show your bottom teeth just to show how weally weally angwy you are at all us silly billies). While the irony of what I consider an abused child saying that isn’t lost on me, it managed to encapsulate two things that’re absolutely objectionable to me.

The first, and I say this as the usual disillusioned environmentalist who became a climate sceptic, is what an inhumane thing environmentalism managed to evolve into. If you want to talk of lost childhoods Greta, what about these children, or this child, or this child, or this child working like animals digging in the dirt, before you try to move Heaven and Earth to solve a non-problem.

The second is that Greta comes from Sweden, a country hailed as having the first true feminist government which through the most noble of intentions, has become a tragic exemplar of what damage such intentions can actually wreak on the fabric of any nation. They’ve destroyed themselves by allowing themselves to be swamped by an invasion of shiftless migrants, who promptly set up no-go ghettos, roll hand grenades at any cop entering them and whose best advice to Swedish women of any age is not to go outside alone at night.

Just a weekend or two ago, a mob of migrants took over the main rail station in the country’s capital and proceeded to assault, rob and sexually molest any female of any age, while the police took an ordered hands off stance and left them to it, lest they be called racist. No wonder Swedes are fleeing the country and their neighbours like Denmark are quietly putting back in place border controls, and fuck the Schengen accord.

And we’re supposed to take advice from a pubescent child of a country that decided to play a national game of Russian roulette with an automatic?