{"id":51314,"date":"2019-09-27T01:00:12","date_gmt":"2019-09-27T05:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=51314"},"modified":"2022-03-30T13:45:06","modified_gmt":"2022-03-30T17:45:06","slug":"qotd-environmental-cultists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2019\/09\/27\/qotd-environmental-cultists\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Environmental cultists"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p><a href=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"float:left; padding: 0px 10px 0px 0px\" src=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"400\" height=\"400\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-48672\" srcset=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png 400w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-150x150.png 150w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-50x50.png 50w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\" \/><\/a>There are a million examples, but since climate hysteria is briefly back in the news let&#8217;s go with that. That Greta Thunberg freak might not know it \u2014 she is, after all, a product of modern &#8220;education&#8221; \u2014 but anyone old enough to remember the early 2000s has heard her spiel before. Al Gore kept telling us that the world would end by 2012 or something; he made a movie about it and everything. Hell, several generations of Americans have heard this nonsense before, going all the way back to the original Earth Day in 1970.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, back then it was global <em>cooling<\/em> that was going to kill us all, and do you see what I mean about True Believers? The very same people who were convinced that we were all gonna die in a new Ice Age in 1970 were certain we&#8217;d die of melted polar ice caps in 2006, just as they&#8217;re now positive we&#8217;re going to get killed by &#8230; whatever it is Thunberg is hectoring the UN about. Normal folks&#8217; skulls would&#8217;ve exploded from cognitive dissonance, but the eco-freaks don&#8217;t suffer from cognitive dissonance. Because, for them, it never rises to the level of <em>cognition<\/em> in the first place. If &#8220;pulling a U-turn on your deepest convictions&#8221; is what it takes to stay in the group, well, start peeling rubber. The cult&#8217;s leadership will come up with a retcon in due time.<\/p>\n<p>Two interesting effects flow from this. The first is the growing disconnect between the cult&#8217;s leadership and the True Believers. A cult with a big enough membership roster stops being a cult and becomes a movement. Movements beget organizations, which by universal law attract grifters, with predictable-as-sunrise consequences. E.g. Christianity. Back in the mid-first century, Christians were sure that Christ would return in their lifetimes \u2014 after all, <a href=\"https:\/\/biblehub.com\/matthew\/24-34.htm\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">He said so Himself<\/a>. His comeback tour kept getting postponed, though, and these days <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Pope_Francis\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">you can be the leader of a major Christian denomination<\/a> without ever bothering with that &#8220;Jesus&#8221; guy, much less any of the stuff He said.<\/p>\n<p>This is why &#8220;global cooling&#8221; became &#8220;global warming,&#8221; which is now &#8220;global climate change.&#8221; We cognitively-normal folks assume that the eco-freaks keep changing the name to avoid cognitive dissonance. After all, the climate &#8220;changes&#8221; every day \u2014 we call it &#8220;weather,&#8221; but if you&#8217;re looking for evidence that your crackpot eco-doom theories are correct, well, just look at how much the temperature varies from noon to midnight!! But see above: Cognitive dissonance is actually a boon to the eco-freaks, because in cult psychology, disconfirmations prove that you were right all along. The eco-freaks would still trot goofy Greta Thunberg out there no matter what it&#8217;s called, and she, poor deluded little sod, would keep on doing her thing, because she&#8217;s in the cult. So: <em>They<\/em>, the eco-freaks, didn&#8217;t come up with &#8220;climate change;&#8221; the grifters in charge of Climate Shakedown Inc. did.<\/p>\n<p>Severian, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rottenchestnuts.com\/what-happens-if-the-ufo-actually-comes\/\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;What Happens if the UFO Actually Comes?&#8221;, <em>Rotten Chestnuts<\/em><\/a>, 2019-09-25.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There are a million examples, but since climate hysteria is briefly back in the news let&#8217;s go with that. That Greta Thunberg freak might not know it \u2014 she is, after all, a product of modern &#8220;education&#8221; \u2014 but anyone old enough to remember the early 2000s has heard her spiel before. Al Gore kept [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[65,41,11],"tags":[245,1364,240,456,139,1462],"class_list":["post-51314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-quotations","category-religion","tag-climatechange","tag-cognitivedissonance","tag-globalwarming","tag-hysteria","tag-psychology","tag-severian"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-dlE","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51314","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51314"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51314\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51318,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51314\/revisions\/51318"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}