Well, yes (via Instapundit):
AGW: when a scientific theory becomes a religion…
…then those with an opposing view become apostates.
Yes! Punish the unclean heretics!
Believe me, I've been all over this aspect of global warming activists.
Hell, I wrote a friggin' song in their honor.
But this faith/apostate clash makes sense when you consider a survey of Dartmouth students showed liberal students to be way more intolerant of different political views than conservative students:
Yup. The side that is currently breeding violence against speech they disagree with happens to be intolerant of opposing views. They've practically built an entire movement on preaching "tolerance," while those of us who didn't fall for it recognized it as Orwell's "newspeak."
Yeah, they can go scrape those COEXIST bumper stickers off their cars right now.
Long-time readers will recall that I've often said that it is a crime against language to have "liberal minded" considered the equivalent of "open minded." I've never claimed conservatives are more open minded, but deny that liberals are necessarily open minded just because they loudly insist they uniquely are capable of rationally weighing evidence.
Perhaps I should change my mind on that because of the data, eh?
But not that even general trends speak to what any individual on the left, right, or middle believes in this regard. There are of course clearly open- and closed-minded people across the spectrum.
So even with some data, I won't say that liberals are more likely to be totalitarians than conservatives:
The lie we were told as kids was this: The end of American liberty would come at the hands of the political right. ...
But the lie is obvious now, isn't it?
Because it is not conservatives who coerced today's young people or made them afraid of ideas that challenge them. Conservatives did not shame people into silence, or send thugs out on college campuses to beat down those who wanted to speak.
The left did all that.
I will say that it has long been nonsense that the left is the protector of freedom.
Just look at those "anti-fascist" violent thugs who look oddly fascist-like.
Just look at those who preen at being the founders of "free speech" eagerly suppressing or (just as bad) failing to defend free speech when it is within their power to preserve freedom of speech.
Part of that similarity is that communists are international socialists are actually very similar to Nazis (who called themselves "national socialists"). So going from one to the other is a simple word change, as you might notice Stalin did for the USSR when he proclaimed Russia would forge the path of "socialism in one country." That's way different than national socialism, eh?
So I think it is clear that left-wing tyrants at least need a "good" cause to justify suppressing dissenters and cleansing them from society. Right-wing tyrants generally are content to leave the people alone as long as they accept their place and provide the goodies to the palace. The left needs a reason that saves the world to justify hating those who stand in their way and crushing them, while sleeping just fine at night.
Global warming is the mother of all causes in this regard. It is an all-purpose Apocalyptic crisis--complete with a fiery Hell on Earth and the flood!--that justifies anything.
Seriously, people, Yahweh sent but ten plagues to torment pharaoh. Global warming's toll is orders of magnitude greater to compel us to let our carbon go!
I like to flatter myself that my disagreement with global warming claims rests on the failure of the science to prove that mankind's influence is the driver of climate change (the climate always changed even without mankind's influence and continues to change vectors even in an age--since 1950--of human influence); the failure to admit that climate change can't be good to a certain point or prove climate change can't at least be adapted to if it does get severe; or that their left-wing state-driven (or even supranational power) ideas that always seem to enrich themselves and reduce freedom and well-being for the rest of us is the answer if humans are responsible for changes that will be too dangerous to adapt to.
But so far, the way global warming activists react to any questions of the science (and there is real science going on out there) as a challenge to their faith, I'm inclined not to think they are doing anything but knocking on my door some Sunday morning and asking me in increasingly insistent tones if I'd like to discuss my faith.
Act like a fanatic and I'll view you as a fanatic who is possibly dangerous.
Now go and emit no more.
(Sorry, I meant to stop this post after the song. But I value individual freedom--even for those who disagree with me--and see the foundations of totalitarianism in the increasingly strident voices who would order the world as they see fit and regiment the people to save us all from a Hellish future that only exists in their minds. Their extremism and growing hysteria is alarming. The guards of the gulags and concentration camps believed they were good people, too, don't forget. So the post got longer and the title changed from mere mockery.)
