Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Philosophy

Tolerate Assaults on the Truths You Hold Dear

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Today, the online magazine spiked launched Free Speech Now!, a brand new campaign for ‘unfettered’ freedom of speech, with no ifs and no buts.

The editor of spiked, Brendan O’Neill, says:

‘”Every man should think what he likes and say what he thinks.” It is 350 years since Spinoza wrote those profound words. And yet every man (and woman) is still not at liberty to think what he or she likes, far less say it. It is for this reason that, today, spiked is kicking off a transatlantic online magazine and real-world campaign called Free Speech Now! – to put the case for unfettered freedom of thought and speech.’

‘Freedom of speech is in a bad way’, says O’Neill. ‘Ours is an age in which a pastor, in Sweden, can be sent to jail for preaching to his own flock in his own church that homosexuality is a sin. In which British football fans can be arrested for referring to themselves as Yids. In which those who too stingingly criticise the Islamic ritual slaughter of animals can be convicted of committing a hate crime.’

‘This new illiberalism commits the double offence of shutting up those who have something to say and shutting down the critical faculties of everyone else, discouraging debate in favour of promoting only those ideas that small groups of people have predetermined to be good, right, scientifically or politically correct, and safe for the little people to consume.’

The Free Speech Now! campaign is necessary challenge to this new illiberalism. Combining an online hub, providing free-speech lovers with the sharpest, most insightful articles, interviews and podcasts around, with plans for a series of live events in the US and Europe, Free Speech Now! will mount a vital defence of this most important of liberties.

O’Neill says:

‘We need a renewed commitment to the freedoms of thought and speech, and one which is consistent – which defends these freedoms not only for writers and the right-on, but also for so-called deniers, for the politically weird, for those who are offensive or outrageous. For it is only by having unfettered freedom of speech that we can guarantee an open and lively public sphere in which bad claims or ideas might be intellectually beaten, and the truth, arrived at.’

View Free Speech Now! here: http://www.spiked-online.com/

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Media Release

March Against Democracy

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JULIA Gillard promised, if she was elected, that there would be no carbon tax. Tony Abbot promised, if he was elected, that he would scrap the carbon tax. But the learned ignorant promote mass action to get their way, all the while claiming tolerance, and respect for democracy. march rally

Many of the posters on display at the ‘March in March’ rallies today, in which tens of thousand gathered in Australia cities to boo capitalists and lament the lack of action on climate change, clearly showed the prejudices of the increasingly vocal, Australian inner city pseudo-intellectual.

As Carl Jung wrote in about 1957, “People go on blithely organizing and believing in the sovereign remedy of mass action, without the least consciousness of the fact that the most powerful organizations can be maintained only by the greatest ruthlessness of their leaders and the cheapest slogans.”

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Link to original photograph of poster with ‘step aside or be deposed’ from the Sydney Morning Herald http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/tens-of-thousands-gather-for-march-in-march-protest-20140316-34v1x.html

Nick Cater’s book, entitled ‘The Lucky Culture: The Rise of an Australian Ruling Class’, gives great insight into the totems and prejudices of these self-labelled ‘progressives’.

Same Information: Different Opinion. Part 2, The Tragic versus Utopian Vision of Climate Science

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WE know that General Circulation Models underpin the theory of anthropomorphic global warming, rely on supercomputers, are expense to run and mostly output nonsense [1].

Earlier this year I sat in a seminar as a UK climate scientist acknowledged all the limitations of General Circulation Models, but then went on to claim that they had to be the future of weather forecasting because they were grand and incorporated all that was grand about science and that one day they would be better at predicting the weather and the climate.Steven Pinker

The Professor suggested that statistical models, including artificial neural networks, were just pattern analysis. He stated that even if statistical models could forecast rainfall in Australia, for example, better than the best General Circulation Models, these statistical models were so limited and so ordinary that this is not where science should be investing.

This professor perhaps sees grandeur, where I see waste and hubris. [Read more…] about Same Information: Different Opinion. Part 2, The Tragic versus Utopian Vision of Climate Science

Same Information: Different Opinion. Part 1, Attitudes to Natural Variation

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MIKE Haseler was once a candidate for the Scottish Green party.  He has worked in the wind industry, has knowledge of precision temperature controllers and is a blogger.   He is also interested in how:

“The two sides in the climate debate look at pretty much the same information and come to very different conclusions. Having met both sides, and tried to understand their motivation and outlook, I am thoroughly convinced that both approach the subject in what they think is the right way and both are horrified at the antics of the other.” Mike Haseler

But Mike has gone further than just pondering (or asking the respective camps to complete a Myers Briggs profile), he has started compiling his own table of key differences between the two sides based on categories such as employment sector, definitions of ‘quality’, experience in decision making, ‘main focus’, and more.

You can examine Mike’s categories here…

http://scottishsceptic.wordpress.com/2013/10/03/sceptics-vs-academics/

There are several issues that Mike raises that I find particularly interesting.  But let’s start with just one:

  1. The idea that the sceptics and non-sceptics have a different point of view when it comes to natural variation.

[Read more…] about Same Information: Different Opinion. Part 1, Attitudes to Natural Variation

Why Aren’t There More Female Libertarians?

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“The thing about freedom is that its heights are limitless, and its lows are bottomless. Libertarians, I presume, look at that void and never consider that they will do anything but rise. And communalists, as the Research Institute dubbed the other end of the spectrum, probably look and are horrified by the many eventualities that could sink them. This is Thomas Hobbes’s state of nature: The strong snap up all the firewood and nuts and berries and whatnot, and the weak die starving and shivering in the cold.”[1]

This extract, from an article in New Republic entitled Why aren’t there more female libertarians, goes on to suggest that young white males can afford to embrace Libertarianism in a way that those more likely to fail in our society cannot.Virginia Postrel

There is a fundamental flaw though, in the argument as presented. The author, Nora Caplan-Bricker, assumes that there are not enough bits of “firewood and nuts and berries and whatnot,” to go around. The author presumably subscribes to the Malthusian catastrophe, etcetera.

In contrast, libertarians fundamentally believe that there is enough to go around, or at least that they will be able to gather enough to meet their basic needs.

Indeed, I’m yet to meet a libertarian concerned that humanity is about to run out of water, or energy.

Libertarians are not even concerned by overpopulation or anthropogenic global warming. Rather, libertarian believe in progress, and to quote Virginia Postrel they believe that today we have greater, wealth, health opportunity and choice than at any time in history.

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1. http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115410/why-arent-there-more-female-libertarians

2. http://www.amazon.com/The-FUTURE-AND-ITS-ENEMIES/dp/0684862697

And the picture is of Virginia Postrel.

Against Collective Integration: Carl Jung

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In his review of the book ‘The Undiscovered Self’ by the psychiatrist and philosopher Carl JungCarl Jung, Maxwell Cynn suggests that:

“Dr. Jung noted that whenever individuals are pressed into a group an averaging effect occurs and part of the individual Self is sacrificed in order to fit-in to the norm of the group. We stop thinking in terms of Self and the group becomes our personae. The larger the group the more the individual suffers. He pointed to the Iron Curtain as a physical manifestation and symbol of a psychic schism within mankind.

He also warned that the freedom-loving West was not immune to the psychic infection of the communist Eastern Block, but rather more susceptible because of our free and open-minded societies. The fall of the Iron Curtain in modern times did not symbolize an end to the schism Jung described, but more ominously the acceptance in the West of collective ideals.

Jung’s words ring soundly today in our modern electronic society of larger groups, stronger connections, greater integration, and socio-political correctness. Our nationalism has turned to internationalism and our group has become global. Individualism is under greater assault today than at any point in history–Jung’s words live on in an almost prophetic sense. The Self continues to drown in a sea of collectivism.”

Ive been reading ‘The Undiscovered Self’ on my iPhone via Questia.com.