Thursday, March 24, 2011

That went well

Catallaxy, a "centre right" blog which for years has firmly placed itself firmly in the climate change skeptic camp, recently had a post simply showing in large size a poster reading "Axe the tax - Dump the Frump" from the first (small scale) anti carbon tax protest at Werribee.

The blog then had at least one post notifying people of yesterday's larger scale organised protests.

After yesterday's protest in Canberra, quite of few of your rabidly climate change skeptic and vehemently anti-Gillard commenters (basically, apart from a handful, they don't come in any other variety there) decided that the "look" of the protest was not so good for Tony Abbott. (Who, as I have mentioned before, is now receiving criticism from Catallaxy commenters for not doing a good job. Yet the advice he has been offered by some there is to stop trying to straddle the fence and come out more vehemently against climate change as deserving any response.)

Tony Abbott has now said he "regretted" some of the posters yesterday.

It is odd that Catallaxy commenters think that the posters yesterday were bad PR for the right of politics. One might assume then that they must also understand then the bad language and wild hyperbole of their threads is a very bad advertisement for the "centre right".

As I noted yesterday, Julia Bishop complained some in Labor calling Coalition members "climate change deniers" by quoting scientists who don't think there is a problem with climate change.

As I have said ever since Abbott took over the leadership from Turnbull, climate change "scepticism" in the Coalition - which is apparently evenly split on the topic in Parliament - is a poison to its intellectual standing.

And Catallaxy is a joke.

Attention Jason: as should be clear from the low numbers of readers I've had for years, I've always blogged for my own satisfaction, and if others read it, that's fine. You can link to it at Catallaxy if you want, but it does not matter to me whether you do or not.

Update: this counts as a "meltdown"? At fairly regular intervals, I used to tell off many of the regulars at Catallaxy, in much more vehement terms than this, as a result of the absurdly personal (and wildly inaccurate) criticisms hurled towards me for my views on (virtually) any topic. So I am criticising it from here now. Big deal.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

"I used to tell off many of the regulars at Catallaxy, in much more vehement terms than this, as a result of the absurdly personal (and wildly inaccurate) criticisms hurled towards me for my views on (virtually) any topic. So I am criticising it from here now. Big deal."

You re such an idiot.

John said...

Steve,

I trust you appreciate that many at Catallaxy consider themselves to be the disenfranchised elite. They consider themselves to be the superior humans, the better breed. Their goal is not to inform and engage in constructive dialogue but to ridicule and demonise anyone who strays from the ideological line.

Don't waste your time with them, it is bad for the soul. That or be flippant about it, have some fun it, treat it as an interesting observation on human behavior. Just don't take it seriously, they aren't worth the effort.

This is how desperate they become. Circa 2 years ago I had an argument with Sinclair and CL where they were asserting that waterboarding did not constitute torture. The other day they cited their hero Bolt who was citing their heroine Coulter who was claiming that a little radiation is a good thing. Never mind that the studies on hormesis are very inconclusive about the matter or that even a sophomoric understanding of cell biology would indicate that the elevation of the cellular stress response may look like a good thing but in relation to particulate radiative sources in tissue the studies become meaningless.

They are wannabe elites. They cannot reconcile themselves to just being peasants. Don't make their frustration your problem.

Anne said...

What John said. I don't live in Australia, so a lot of Catalepsy's concerns don't concern me and it is a shame to see you wasting time with them. And even if I were lucky enough to live in Australia, I still think they'd be off my radar if it weren't for you.