I received the following email. I respond below. "On the Exercycle reading Maddog’s Lair, again . Y’know, Mark. I do regularly read your lovely and insightful blog. You routinely there say some unkind things about your reviled boogiemen, the progressives. (What did they ever do to you that was so awful?) Whom you tend to describe as a monolithic enemy—lumping a lot of individuals and groups under one rubric. (And what’s with all the hate? You call it “wry” but mostly it comes across as bilious hate. (So I’m not being disingenuous, I freely admit I biliously hate the president* [impeached in the House of Representatives of the 116th United States Congress] and his posse. Mostly for being intentionally divisive, unkind, and incompetent—in reverse order of my irritation. Which I also freely admit )). My ultimate irrelevant point here being, you dish out the bloggy bile—in copious and redundant quantities—Oy!—but curiously you also then seem to have pretty thin skin covering that orange pustule growing on the end of your nose making you regrettably cross-eyed. As opposed to clear-eyed. (That screechy-girl thin skin is kinda... oh, I dunno... Trumpian?) I miss the old-guard, clear-eyed, republican Mark. I keep reading your writing because it’s something interesting from time to time, but it’s kinda saddening, too. That again pointlessly belaboured on my part—apologies—you can have the last word. None of it matters, anyway. I have no idea what the future will bring to this country and its people. It’s all up grabs, apparently." My response: The progressives? They are but one of the three sister cults of socialism that include socialism, fascism, and progressivism. The fault is that they all end in mass murder by making equality and equity critical dogma in the cult. See the explanation below. It is the nature of the beast. I do hate mass murders, perhaps even biliously. I have no interest in repenting this "sin." " I miss the old-guard, clear-eyed, republican Mark." Dude, I am not a Republican. I am not a conservative. I am technically an unaffiliated voter, but I am specifically a Classical Liberal which is similar to a libertarian but CLs focus on individual liberty and personal responsibility as our primary good and the sole valid focus for all government action while libertarians place economic liberty in the same status. I disagree, economic liberty is important but of lesser status to individual liberty and personal responsibility. Again, I am not a Dem, I am not a Republican. I am thin-skinned? That is the first time anyone has said that about me, ever. The most common comment here in the People's Progressive Democratic Republic of POrtlandia is that I have Rhino™ thick skin. Perhaps you could point out a paragraph or two in support. I suspect you mean I do not suffer fools gladly. Of that, I am guilty in spades. Or perhaps you mean I have tired of fools and doodles, especially the dull-witted media, slandering and lying about the President. Again, I agree with that characterization. If your complaint is Trump lies about things like the precise numbers of his economic boom, I would say, sure, as have all Presidents. Just think back to Obama. He characterized his fight against high unemployment as a successful battle right from the start. It wasn't, he constantly inflated the numbers to benefit his position. This is what Presidents do, even successful ones like Trump. I do agree Trump is a salesman with a predilection to self-aggrandizement. But I don't much care provided he gets results and he has. I doubt most Americans care about these issues for the same reason Trump gets positive results. Who cares if he brags? Only the progressive left. As for progressives, they are a singular group. On the other hand, many of the members of the progressive group also claim group affiliation in other groups like the Dem and Republican parties, SJWs, Antifa, etc. The reason I started my blog was to point out the fact that the progressive movement concluded any positive activity in the 1960s as we wrapped up the fight that started with the Republican war on slavery and ended in the 1960s with the end of segregation. Since then, the progressive movement has morphed into a cult, mostly focusing on "environment" but with some additional negative features as well. The cult is comprised of totalitarians who control the cult and true believers who operate as the pawns, foot soldiers, and cannot fodder. The best book on the phenomenon is The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements Here is an excerpt from an excellent review of the book (I will append the review to the end of this discussion): "There may be no harder form for an author to attempt than writing in aphorisms. The required combination of brevity and profundity is exceptionally hard to maintain, in fact most authors only toss off a few good ones in their entire career. The most famous exception to the rule is Friederich Nietzsche, who, whatever we may think of the destructive influence of his ideas, must be admitted to be a brilliant philosopher (see Orrin's review.) But interestingly enough, Eric Hoffer, a self educated field hand and longshoreman, is more than a match for him. There are so many quotable passages in this little book that you can seriously open to just about any page and find a sentence that will stop you in your tracks and make you ponder its implications. It is in no way possible to address all the ideas that he broaches, so let me just try a couple. Perhaps the most important insight in the book--and it is very hard to settle on just one--is that the members of mass movements, who ostensibly seek to better the lot of all mankind, are motivated not by altruism but by selfishness. They join such movements not because they believe in any particular ideals or goals but because they do not believe in themselves : Unless a man has the talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden...We join a mass movement to escape from individual responsibility, or, in the words of an ardent young Nazi, 'to be free from freedom.' It was not sheer hypocrisy when the rank-and-file Nazis declared themselves not guilty of all the enormities they had committed. They considered themselves cheated and maligned when made to shoulder responsibility for obeying orders. Had they not joined the Nazi movement in order to be free from responsibility? ----------------- The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause." The True Believer : Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements Review I find it amusing that the progressives are constantly claiming that Trump is a leader of a mass movement. Yet, there is no evidence whatsoever of such movement either before or after his election. The people following Trump do so only because he has pursued policies that have measurably changed their lives. The moment he stops, they will leave. The core of Trump's policies is a reduction in government regulation and taxes, and a return to individual liberty and personal responsibility. Trump leads a traditional political movement that gains followers because it offers genuine positive changes in the lives of all Americans, even those who do not support him. For example, Trump's economic successes have been huge for Blacks and Hispanics and all Americans. This was not generally the case in the past when politicians, including Obama, only instituted policies that tended to benefit select groups. Progressives hate individual liberty and personal responsibility while adhering to equality and equity; this is the cornerstone of the mass movement and the core attraction to the adherents of the cult. The progressives are starkly a cult, and the movement appeals to those who look at freedom and personal responsibility as irksome burdens. This is not meant as a personal attack, but over the past many years you've reiterated that you deeply dislike your job, your coworkers and that the job is unfulfilling and annoyingly meaningless. You moved across the country and lived in a place you are not interested in, while you'd rather live in Arizona or someplace hot and sunny. You've noted your partner is focused on herself, the cats, her career, and recently her father. Her focus on you is a distant last. I may have some of this or, indeed, all of this, wrong if so, I am sorry for the error. I say this only to point out the fact that you are in a position to respond favorably to the enticements of a mass movement/cult. I suspect your attachment to the progressive cause is driven by these frustrations and lack of meaning in your life. Mass movements offer much to help reduce and cover up these raw problems. It would help if you read The True Believer, I suspect it would answer many questions. It doesn't offer many answers, however. For answers, I would look to 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos Now that I've used my patented "charm" to piss you off thoroughly let's get to the heart of the matter. Cults are always dangerous devices used by humans who hate the self. The cult offers protection, acceptance, nurture, and support for those who hate the self. Read the True Believer. Occasionally, these cults or mass movements are benign, this is rare, more often, they are malignant. The progressive cult is antihumanist. The core philosophy is death to humans. If you pay any attention at all, you can watch the cultist discuss this issue at length, look at the ravings of the Extinction Rebellion now, or the Population Bomb cultists in the past. Or you could watch some of the old dystopian progressive cult films like Silent Running, Soylent Green, or Omega Man. Most of the members of the cult are failed humans (like the rest of us) who cannot accept that they are failed and flawed (unlike the rest of us). The cult gives their meaningless lives meaning but at the cost of their souls. The SJWs and Antifa and many other progressive secular cults offer meaning through organized violence against the rational opponents of the cult. This is not actual meaning but instead the substitution of coarse violence for meaning. I fight against this meaningless violence, and these secular cults because it is the right thing to do. Secular cults have murdered hundreds of millions of people over the past century. They are the single largest killer of humans outside of natural diseases and causes. Perhaps progressivism is a cause worth fighting against? In his review of The True Believer cited above, Orrin notes: "In fairness to Hoffer, let it be noted that he applied this logic to all mass movements, including Christianity, not just to Communism or Nazism. In addition, he differentiated amongst such movements, believing some to be more beneficial in the long term than others : The manner in which a mass movement starts out can also have an effect on the duration and mode of termination of the active phase of the movement. When we see the Reformation, the Puritan, American and French revolutions and many nationalist uprisings terminate, after a relatively short active phase, in a social order marked by increased individual liberty, we are witnessing the realization of moods and examples which characterized the earliest days of the movements. All of them started by defying and overthrowing a long-established authority. The more clear-cut this initial act of defiance and the more vivid its memory in the minds of the people, the more likely is the eventual emergence of individual liberty. Of course, this really boils down to the fact that those movements which had freedom as their ultimate goal were more likely than others to arrive there. For this reason, the French Revolution does not actually belong in this category, but serves to prove the point. It was less about liberty and more about equality, or at least placed equal emphasis on the two; but history has shown these to be incompatible goals and that, contrary to the kind of Rousseauean ideals of the French, equality does not occur naturally, and can only be imposed by government force. Thus, the French Revolution was fated to end in the Terror, while the American Revolution was destined to end in libertarian democracy." The last paragraph is critical. The progressive movement is all about equity, and equality and like the French Revolution it will end in mass murder if allowed to gain power. Equity and equality can only be imposed by government dictate enforced by men with guns willing to use them. The end result is always the same in this case, mass murder. I believe mass murder is a cause worth fighting against. The Germans should have the Russians should have, and so should we. Joining a mass movement with mass murder in its DNA should not be an option. For many, however, it is not only an option but the "moral" option. I could go on and on about how these same people are commonly sacrificing their children on the pagan secular cult of progressivism, you know, like Greta, the young woman who has been lied to about atmospheric carbon with claims that CO2 is a pollutant. This is stunningly silly. Anyone who has taken even the most rudimentary biological science course knows that C02 is one of the three primary building blocks of life, not an atmospheric pollutant (C02, H2O, and sunlight, the big three). From the big three plants can synthesis sugar and with sugar store solar energy for later use. All plant and animal life depends upon this basic system. An example of the wildly nonsensical cultish beliefs of progressives only requires a simple look at the cult of Climate Hysteria. The basic allegation is C02 is a pollutant, and if we burn carbon sequestered in the ground millions of years ago from animal and sea life, the planet will reach a tipping point and then "burn up." First, look at the logic of this argument. The plant and animal life contained the carbon that was sequestered millions of years ago. So at one time, it was all part of the atmospheric carbon cycle. Why would returning carbon sequestered from the atmospheric carbon cycle cause the Earth to burn up today when it did not burn up in the past? The progressive has no answer to this because what they believe is the dogma of the cult, not scientific reality. Second, the data, charts, and graphs created by climate hysterics do not support their position. See the charts below. CO2 and temperature are not dependent. Also, notice that today we live in a CO2 drought of biblical proportions. One thing that the ascientific progressives are clueless about is that there is a bottom limit to atmospheric CO2 levels, meaning that if atmospheric carbon falls below a lower threshold, all life will end that limit is 150 parts per million (ppm). We are in an ice age, technically we are in a short term interglacial period during an ice age, a brief warm period during the ice age. CO2 levels have dropped as low as 180 ppm during this ice age, dangerously close to life-ending levels. During the preindustrial age, CO2 was at about 280 ppm. Since the industrial age, it rose to about 410 ppm. In the past, CO2 levels have been as high as 7,000 ppm. During the time that CO2 was 7,000 ppm, life flourished on Earth, and there were a great explosion and diversification of life. We have always known that CO2 is life, not a pollutant, but the progressives have created a cult that believes the opposite. How low is the CO2 today? We are near the lowest CO2 level since life first began on Earth, yet the progressives believe we need to reduce CO2 further. This is insanity unless one looks carefully at the dogma of the progressive cult, through the lens of its most insane left fringe like Extinction Rebellion. The goal is not to kill off human life but all life. Their hatred of the self is that significant. But let's finish the thumbnail analysis of climate hysteria, shall we? Here is a graph charting most everything you need to know about climate during the Holocene. The citations to the author of each graph are on the graph itself, color-coded. There is only one proxy temperature analysis of Earth's temperature for the past 11,000 years, which was done by Marcott et al. in 2013. Notice how the Earth's temperature rose after the end of the cold phase of the ice age circa 12,000 years ago (pre-Boreal), to what has been called the Holocene Climate Optimum. This optimum lasted from 10,000 years ago to 5,000 years ago when the Earth's temperature began rapidly declining. At the end of the chart, you will notice a small rise in temperature, which is the modern warming period. This is not calculated the same way as the rest of the chart and is not statistically correct to add it as such, but it does represent the warming we've seen so I won't quibble with the attachment of this data. The basic premise of the climate hysterics is that atmospheric increases in CO2 drive Earth's temperature upwards and is likely to cause a catastrophe. This is not supported by the data. Short duration correlations, no matter how strongly correlated, are not valid evidence of causation. While the Earth's temp declined from 5,000-6,000 years ago, CO2 increased, this is more than 5,000 years of evidence that the climate hysterics beliefs are invalid. Remember, the climate hysterics are basing their entire climate alarmist claims on one single 20 year period (1978-1998), not thousands of years of data. We will get to that in a minute. UPDATE ON THE HOLOCENE AND HOW IT UNDERMINES CLIMATE FEAR MONGERING The graph explanation of the terminal spike in this piece about the Marcott data is important, I've copied it below. "Red curve, global average temperature reconstruction from Marcott et al., 2013, figure 1. The averaging method does not correct for proxy drop out which produces an artificially enhanced terminal spike, while the Monte Carlo smoothing eliminates most variability information. b. Black curve, global average temperature reconstruction from Marcott et al., 2013, using proxy published dates, and differencing average. Temperature anomaly was rescaled to match biological, glaciological, and marine sedimentary evidence, indicating the Holocene Climate Optimum was about 1.2°C warmer than LIA. c. Purple curve, Earth’s axis obliquity is shown to display a similar trend to Holocene temperatures. Source: Marcott et al., 2013." Notice the one thing that does closely correlate to temperature during this period is Earth's Obliquity(˚). This is, of course, discounted by the climate hysterics. Here is another graph that shows some of the data more clearly. Citation on the graph. Notice that temperature has had four significant dropouts during the Holocene. The 8,200-year event was the deepest, but it was a very short abrupt spike down then up again. This is what rapid climate change looks like. Also, note that for every action (drop), there is a reaction (rise), and the drop and the rise are commonly quite similar. Sometimes the rise is far greater than the drop; the 8,200-year event shows this well. The Little Ice Age is the longest cold dropout during the Holocene; the short red tag at the end is our current warming trend. We have yet to achieve a return to even the Holocene average temperature. Yet the progressives are out of their minds with claims of climate catastrophe. But their claims are not fact-based, nor is the climate hysteric deception. The game is to shift power to progressive politicians and take away the rights of citizens permanently. I fight against the totalitarians of the progressive left because they are totalitarians. If allowed, they would destroy the nation and kill tens or hundreds of millions of people as heretics. You can dispute this at your leisure, but please do so with facts and analysis, not hopium and hot air. We should discuss the modern data since 1900, but that data has been all but destroyed by NOAH, NASA, and other climate hysterics data fraud/tampering. Watch the video below to understand the problem; The Superbowl Of Data Tampering We can look at data, but it is almost impossible today to get real data from the Departments of Data Fraud and Obfuscation. Since 1998 there has been no change in Earth's temperature: I am unwilling to use the current misinformation that is available since it makes the current temperature data excessively warm while cooling the past data. This makes the 1900 to 2000 temperature information valueless. Notice how the past is cooled, and the present is warmed. This is absurd. But it does make the data behave the way the climate hysterics need it to behave to support their hysterical position. This is bad, but the following graph shows exactly what the climate hysterics are doing. "And in the ultimate science fraud, NOAA precisely tampers with data to conform with their CO2 warming theory." NOAA IS Very Consistent With Their Data Tampering
The data tampering is designed to create graphs that follow the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere. This is criminal fraud not just data tampering. It is a felony to defraud the US government and these "scientists" who are taking grant money from the federal government, some are even on the government payroll, are manufacturing data which is false. During the 1970s, I became interested in climate because there was a "New Ice Age" scare and I loved the outdoors, sea kayaking, skiing, waterskiing, and hiking. I took many courses in climate, and meteorology and I have to say that if I had treated the data the way NASA and NOAH treated the data today, I would have failed the course, and been expelled from school. Most of the problem is coming from the climate modeling hysterics and not from the actual scientists who are doing primary climate science data gathering and research. Modeling is not science and should not be confused with science. Science is a process, long term modeling is mostly divination and necromancy. Yes, we model weather a few days to a week out because we've found that such models have some relationship to reality and can provide us with reasonably accurate information on the next few days of weather. Often this is a huge safety feature, think tornados and hurricanes and other dangerous or deadly storms. But get more than about a week out and the weather predictions become little more than vague notional assumption. More than a month or two out and the predictions are either aggregated past averages which are a bit useful or divination and necromancy. We've allowed modern prophets, necromancers, and pyromancers to invade the climate sciences turning them into nothing more than an End of Days cult. This is what the progressives do, everything they touch becomes a power cult, in order to shift power from the people to themselves. Once they have power, they will do everything they can to aggreigate any remaining power to themselves. You vote yourself into progressivism, fascism, and socialism, but you either have to wait for the collapse or fight your way back out the other end. With socialism, more than one hundred million people died in the fight. Let's not do that here. I fight on the front end against totalitarian progressivism to avoid this outcome. I assumed in those years of yore when you were a Republican that you were on board with this fight, I was wrong. Maddog Orrin's review of the True Believer: The True Believer : Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (1951) Author Info: Eric Hoffer 1902-1983 In 1951, when Believer first appeared, eager eyes had long been peeled for the emergence of a proletarian philosopher. A genuine one emerged at last--with a philosophical cast very different from what a proletarian was supposed to think. The literary shock could hardly have been greater. For Hoffer's hero is 'the autonomous man,' the content man at peace with himself, engaged in the present. In Hoffer's book, this hero, nourished by free societies, is set off against 'the true believer,' who begins as a frustrated man driven by guilt, failure and self-disgust to bury his own identity in a cause oriented to some future goal. -Editor's Preface to the Time-Life Books edition of The True Believer There may be no harder form for an author to attempt than writing in aphorisms. The required combination of brevity and profundity is exceptionally hard to maintain, in fact most authors only toss off a few good ones in their entire career. The most famous exception to the rule is Friederich Nietzsche, who, whatever we may think of the destructive influence of his ideas, must be admitted to be a brilliant philosopher (see Orrin's review.) But interestingly enough, Eric Hoffer, a self educated field hand and longshoreman, is more than a match for him. There are so many quotable passages in this little book that you can seriously open to just about any page and find a sentence that will stop you in your tracks and make you ponder its implications. It is in no way possible to address all the ideas that he broaches, so let me just try a couple. Perhaps the most important insight in the book--and it is very hard to settle on just one--is that the members of mass movements, who ostensibly seek to better the lot of all mankind, are motivated not by altruism but by selfishness. They join such movements not because they believe in any particular ideals or goals but because they do not believe in themselves : Unless a man has the talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden...We join a mass movement to escape from individual responsibility, or, in the words of an ardent young Nazi, 'to be free from freedom.' It was not sheer hypocrisy when the rank-and-file Nazis declared themselves not guilty of all the enormities they had committed. They considered themselves cheated and maligned when made to shoulder responsibility for obeying orders. Had they not joined the Nazi movement in order to be free from responsibility? ----------------- The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause. ----------------- A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business. With these startling thoughts, Eric Hoffer, one of the very proletarians for whom activist intellectuals always claim to be fighting, stood conventional wisdom on its collective head and threw down a challenge which has never been adequately answered. Traditionally folks have been willing to forgive coercive utopians for the catastrophic harm they have done to society because it was felt : "their hearts were in the right place," that however misguided their actions proved to be, they should be forgiven because they meant well. Think of how charitably we look upon youthful membership in the Communist Party by many artists and intellectuals of the 1930's. Sure the Party was funded by Moscow and served Soviet ends and, of course, we realize now that Communism was not quite as beneficial to the workers of the world as it was supposed to be, but surely we can all agree that their motivations were noble, that they were thinking only of the downtrodden, right? Wrong. Hoffer exploded that myth and forced us to consider that they were driven by feelings of personal inadequacy and the desire to tear others down. In fairness to Hoffer, let it be noted that he applied this logic to all mass movements, including Christianity, not just to Communism or Nazism. In addition, he differentiated amongst such movements, believing some to be more beneficial in the long term than others : The manner in which a mass movement starts out can also have an effect on the duration and mode of termination of the active phase of the movement. When we see the Reformation, the Puritan, American and French revolutions and many nationalist uprisings terminate, after a relatively short active phase, in a social order marked by increased individual liberty, we are witnessing the realization of moods and examples which characterized the earliest days of the movements. All of them started by defying and overthrowing a long-established authority. The more clear-cut this initial act of defiance and the more vivid its memory in the minds of the people, the more likely is the eventual emergence of individual liberty. Of course, this really boils down to the fact that those movements which had freedom as their ultimate goal were more likely than others to arrive there. For this reason, the French Revolution does not actually belong in this category, but serves to prove the point. It was less about liberty and more about equality, or at least placed equal emphasis on the two; but history has shown these to be incompatible goals and that, contrary to the kind of Rousseauean ideals of the French, equality does not occur naturally, and can only be imposed by government force. Thus, the French Revolution was fated to end in the Terror, while the American Revolution was destined to end in libertarian democracy. For Hoffer though, as I would assume for the rest of us these days, the free, or autonomous, man is real hero of society. Though activists of all ideological stripes tend to dismiss them as complacent and unmotivated, even characterless : Free men are aware of the imperfection inherent in human affairs, and they are willing to fight and die for that which is not perfect. They know that basic human problems can have no final solutions, that our freedom, justice, equality, etc. are far from absolute, and that the good life is compounded of half measures, compromises, lesser evils, and gropings toward the perfect. The rejection of approximations and the insistence on absolutes are the manifestation of a nihilism that loathes freedom, tolerance, and equity. Hoffer's free man has none of the romantic trappings of the radical, perhaps appeals less to a certain kind of imagination. But as experience has shown, at great cost in human life, the adherents of mass movements, cloaked though they are in the language of selflessness, are, as Hoffer says, all too eager to trade the burden of freedom for the comfort of equality, however brutally attained and maintained. Despite some historical inaccuracies, occasionally sketchy reasoning, and a too thorough dismissal of the value of faith, Hoffer's great contribution throughout the book lies in his recognition that these are not fundamentally economic matters, that mass movements, despite their protestations to the contrary, are not truly concerned with altruistically securing a better standard of living for everyone, but rather are driven by a selfish desire to secure an equal standard for all, regardless of the cost. Though this insight has taken hold in the intervening fifty years, as academic Marxism, with its emphasis on economics, has been put to flight, Hoffer seems now to be largely forgotten. This seems to be partly a function of his own personality--worldly success made him uncomfortable, so he did not capitalize on his temporary fame as others might have. But it is undoubtedly also a function of the challenge his ideas pose to the academic Left. Though his intellectual honesty is admirable, when he said during the years of student unrest in the 1960's that : The intellectuals and the young, booted and spurred, feel themselves born to ride us. and Never have the young taken themselves so seriously, and the calamity is that they are listened to and deferred to by so many adults. he essentially committed professional suicide. Of course, he never considered himself a professional philosopher, returning always to life as a longshoreman. This book is required reading for anyone trying to make sense of the 20th Century, and, unfortunately, will likely remain pertinent in the 21st. It is concise, lively, and thought provoking, a book you will return to again and again. (Reviewed:21-Oct-00) Grade: (A) The True Believer : Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements Review
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