Meh, climate change, what’s all the fuss?
Greta Thunberg is getting some attention.
So now it’s time for the right-wing adults to unload on her – Brendan O’Neill out in front as usual.
Anyone who doubts that the green movement is morphing into a millenarian cult should take a close look at Greta Thunberg. This poor young woman increasingly looks and sounds like a cult member. The monotone voice. The look of apocalyptic dread in her eyes. The explicit talk of the coming great ‘fire’ that will punish us for our eco-sins. There is something chilling and positively pre-modern about Ms Thunberg. One can imagine her in a sparse wooden church in the Plymouth Colony in the 1600s warning parishioners of the hellfire that will rain upon them if they fail to give up their witches.
Well, by the same token one can imagine Brendan O’Neill in a crowd laughing and jeering while a “witch” is drowned.
The article as a whole is quite remarkably stupid, because it’s all about the style with not a word to say about the substance. The campaign to do something about climate change is anti-progress, ignore it!
O’Neill’s conclusion:
Young people, Ms Thunberg isn’t your leader. She’s a patsy for scared and elitist adults. Don’t do as she says. Instead, refuse to panic, mock the blather about hellfire, and appreciate that mankind’s transformation of the planet has been a glorious thing that has expanded life expectancy, allowed billions to live in cities, and made it possible for even the less well-off to travel the globe. Sin against St Greta.
Yes, industrialization and technology have been glorious things (with plenty of glitches along the way – Bhopal can stand for the kind of thing I mean) for those of us who were in time to enjoy them before things got too bad…but that’s a bit like setting a house on fire to keep warm. Yes for awhile the result is what you wanted, you’re cozy and warm, but then the fire gets closer to the room you’re in. Some of the fire getting too close is already happening: Paradise, California can stand for the rest the way Bhopal did.
So O’Neill’s “forget about climate change because we have a pleasant life right now” is utterly stupid, but his sneers at Thunberg are cruel. The reporting is that she’s on the autism spectrum, so an adult writing in public about her “monotone voice” is just being a goddam bully, which is nothing new for Brendan O’Neill.
And then there’s Helen Dale, who’s always reminding us that she’s a “classical liberal.”
Can the Beeb arrange for Andrew Neil to interview this Greta Thunberg character? Because afterwards I guarantee we’ll never hear from her again. She may even have a meltdown on national telly into the bargain.
— Helen Dale (not on your team, but always fair) (@_HelenDale) April 23, 2019
Why? Because she’s campaigning for the idea that we should do something about climate change? Therefore she should be bullied into a meltdown on national television? I’m not seeing the chain of reasoning there.
The old farts are getting desperate. We’ve even had the “your mum sang in Eurovision, therefore your argument is invalid” tweets. And the unedifying sight of Toby Young accusing her of coming from a privileged background. That would be the Toby Young whose dad (a baron, no less) arranged a place at Oxford (or Cambridge, can’t remember which elitist intitution) for him when the sprogling toadmeister failed to get in off his own bat.
Fuxake, what is wrong with the world?
She says she has Asperger syndrome and seems happy (and remarkably self-possessed) to talk about it.
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/greta-thunberg-gift-asperger-syndrome-environment-strike-climate-change-radio-4-a8883056.html
If she didn’t “speak in a monotone,” no doubt she would be dismissed as “shrill.”
Not to mention excitable, hysterical, out of control, cray-cray.
Because if it’s one thing that apocalyptic preachers are known for, it’s their monotone voices, and also their evidence.
Graham, that is one thing that has annoyed me about several issues, but environment is the biggest target of that tactic. Just say “elitist” “western” “imperialist” or “racist”. No evidence is needed that it is, indeed, any of those things. And no evidence is needed that the idea is bad once one of those words gets applied; things dreamt up by those of us in the west who have become educated beyond the average level may actually be good things at least some of the time.
It is argument by ad hominem, pure and simple. Call it a duck, and then watch everyone quack at it.
Oh, yes. Genuine ad hominem, rather than “actually, it was an insult but if I call it ad hominem, I make you look like a bad debater”…
Even though I was expecting it, I was slightly taken aback by the sheer ferocity of the attacks.