A most hilarious exodus

With horribly serious implications

“Scientists suffering insults and mass-spam are abandoning Twitter for alternative social networks as hostile climate-change denialism surges on the platform following Elon Musk's takeover.”

This is definitely a lead for the ages, courtesy of the AFP. It is also the funniest thing I’ve read in quite a while. Not because it’s meant to be funny. Because it’s not. Not because it’s a blatant example of non-journalism. Because it is.

It is funny because it is likely to achieve the exact opposite of what its author intended it to achieve in yet another confirmation of the fact that evil always contains the seeds of its own destruction.

The AFP article relates the dramatic story of “scientists”, “researchers”, “a climate and water specialist”, “a physicist and lead scientist at the non-profit environmental data analysis group Berkeley Earth”, a “prominent climatologist”, a “professor of atmospheric sciences”, and “a prominent climate scientist”.

You can easily see where I’m going with this list. The selection quoted by the AFP is truly stunning, exuding tonnes of scientific knowledge. Unfortunately for the the author, some readers, such as myself, are quite well aware that the “denialists” those above complain about often have no less impressive professional qualifications. As are the complainers themselves.

This fact, however, gets omitted in such pathetic laments of the return of free speech on Twitter as does the really inconvenient fact that those same people who are complaining about being abused in Twitter have a absolute-zero problem with abusing others, as aptly and succinctly detailed by Cowboy State Daily’s Kevin Killough.

Not only this — one of these self-described experts openly admitted to The Guardian, as quoted by Killough, that he was in direct contact with a Twitter executive with the specific purpose of silencing what I could only call inconvenient voices. And it was apparently totally fine to do that.

This is where the situation stops being hilarious. This is where it becomes utterly serious and very dangerous. Because it reveals that not only is there a drive to normalise censorship in proportions not seen since the 1930s in certain parts of Europe but this drive is being spearheaded by infantile adults with no notion of morality or ethics.

I remember when some 15 years ago I joined a parenting platform here in Bulgaria. I say parenting platform but there were a lot of other topics being discussed there and I actively participated.

The first time I got verbally attacked on that platform I got deeply offended and sulked for hours. It took me a while but I learned to take it and I also learned to dish it out back, I’m not ashamed to say. That place was a great school.

It taught me that just because you’re 30 or 40 or more it doesn’t mean you’re an adult. It’s a sad observation but the social media world appears to be bursting with people with severe developmental problems in the rational thinking and emotional intelligence departments — people who are, to all intents and purposes, playground bullies, only they experience themselves as truth-tellers.

For them, mocking someone’s professional credentials is perfectly acceptable and even desirable. Accusing people of being paid propagandists for the oil and gas industry is perfectly acceptable, perhaps even a necessity.

For those same people however, having their own professional credentials or possible financial motivations put into the spotlight — not even mocked, you understand, simply questioned — is inconceivable.

Their reaction: a tantrum fit for a particularly energetic three-year-old whose parents have yet to get the hang of decent, self-preserving parenting (maybe after a good week’s sleep as happens with most of us).

The problem is that some of these people partake in important decision-making of the kind that concerns us all, regardless of what we think of the energy transition or whether or not we are driving catastrophic climate change. We are in the hands of people with a mental age of between three and five and a half. If that’s not a scary thought I don’t know what is.

There are those who are a bit older mentally, however. Old enough to become cunning. Now, some of those delicate flowers of climate science are saying there is an organised effort — sponsored by the oil industry, of course — to attack those same flowers and everything they stand for, which is human-caused catastrophic climate change. Because we absolutely needed more ways to doubt the information we absorb on social media.

I’m sure the oil industry is taking steps to protect its bread and butter and I’m sure not all of these steps are morally unassailable. The thing is that thanks to the delicate flowers, everyone who dares question the catastrophic climate change narrative immediately gets labelled an oil industry shill or propagandist.

The third thing I’m sure about is that most of those doing the questioning are simply people who see the gaps in logic, the data cherry-picking, and the inconsistencies in the climate change narrative — people like you and me, although I don’t know, maybe some of you are oil industry propagandists. Raise your hands if you are.

Meanwhile, scientists with a strong advocacy bend are given a free reign of fact manipulation by the media. And why not? The media need eye-catching, attention-grabbing stories and the advocates, I mean the scientists, are all too happy to provide them.

Here’s just one recent example from that beacon of factual, impartial reporting, CNN, courtesy of the Union of Concerned Scientists:

“The study by the Union of Concerned Scientists, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, found that 37% of the area burned by wildfires in the West since 1986 — nearly 19.8 million acres out of 53 million — can be blamed on the planet-cooking pollution from 88 of the world’s major fossil fuel producers and cement manufacturers […].”

How does planet-cooking pollution sound? Alarming, of course. Extremely alarming. So alarming it’s becomes easy to forget that CO2 is not a pollutant. It plainly does not fit the definition of a pollutant. But if scientists say it’s a pollutant, who are the rest of us to argue?

Because of the infantilisation of science, people with science degrees feel absolutely no compunction about manipulating the meaning of words to suit the cause they advocate for, because apparently advocacy is the new purpose of science.

If someone dares question the manipulation they get mocked and accused of shilling for the oil industry with — and this is the important part — no hint of an actual response to the questions posed by those pesky “deniers”.

Incidentally, the above study seems to either have anticipated the wildfires in Canada or to have coincided almost supernaturally with them since it was published as the wildfires raged. That must have been some quick research.

All this sounds like a joke but it’s not. Because the whole transition frenzy is accelerating if a frenzy can even accelerate but whatever. The pendulum, already pushed far in the direction of “We’re all going to die unless we do something right now this minute”, is being pushed harder still in the same direction.

That means that when it starts coming back, it will come back hard, fast, and maybe bloody. Not because people are stupid and they don’t know hat’s good for them so they need to be told what’s good for them.

It’s because people may be generally stupid — yes, we are — but they, we know perfectly well what’s good for us when essential needs are concerned. But they are being told what’s good for them by people whose advisors include scientists who can’t take a Twitter burn without blocking those administering the burn. That’s a whole new level of immaturity.

What happens when the immature are in charge? Nothing good, that’s what. You think I’m exaggerating? People died last year in Sri Lanka’s protests. Consider the fact that Sri Lankans have not had a chance to get accustomed to the kind of lifestyle that the average European has enjoyed for decades and yet they got up and rioted, and people died.

What happens when something threatens that lifestyle we have been following recently courtesy of the French. Yet the messaging that a lot more radical lifestyle changes are in order because of “planet-cooking pollution” continues relentlessly.

This messaging often comes from people who seem to believe allegedly scientific arguments carry more weight if the one putting them forward throws a tantrum over questions about the validity of those arguments. From people who seem to believe science is static and cannot be questioned.

These people call themselves scientists and embrace total censorship of all differing opinions, including the opinions of fellow scientists. It’s the law of the playground in action: I’m always right and everyone else is always wrong because I said so.