The people who agree that the world is run by a cabal of pedos mostly don’t believe in anthrogenic climate change. Yesterday was the autumnal equinox and I still needed my AC. It’s fucking hot out. Also, the last time there was this much CO2 in the atmosphere there weren’t any ice caps. Is the point here to make sure nobody has a consistent worldview? Or are people who worry about what happens to new people usually not the type that worries about global thermal trends, and vice versa?

[ @slartibartfastibast ]

Bhikshu explained the reasoning they’re using pretty well, from what I can see.

To expand on that, for the educated right within the technical class, the environmental movement’s opposition to nuclear power is amazingly damning, and IMO this filters down to a lot of the rest of the right even if they don’t talk about it much and aren’t consciously aware of it.

On the one hand, it’s said that to avert the consequences of this looming disaster, people will have to live in tiny boxes, give up on cars, eat insect powder (even though chicken feed ratios aren’t much worse), tightly ration resources, stop having children, and apparently for some reason, ban straws.

On the other hand, for the right technical class, it’s obvious that society already knows how to produce low-carbon power stations that produce a reliable, steady output of the scale necessary to operate modern society.

So from the right-wing perspective, the environmentalists are willing to make everyone do all those other things because they claim the situation is so bad, but not only will they not build a single atomic power plant (from their perspective, well worth the risk if the forecast is that bad!), they actively try to shut the existing ones down! Even though that makes the emissions numbers worse!

Since within the right-wing frame, that’s totally illogical, they go searching for whatever the real motivation for this plan to live like monks in a Communist monastery might be, and then they run face first into Von Wokenstein’s Monster.



Left-wing and SJ policy isn’t decided by one person, but by competing interest groups that, unlike making a software release, don’t go back and see if it compiles into one single coherent worldview.

But on the receiving end, this shambling, stitched-together assemblage of contradictory policy and opinion is largely experienced as one vector. For instance, if a democratic party controlled legislature passes a straw ban and also shortly thereafter they pass a gun ban, these are both experienced as the result of the same force by red tribe voters, even if the interest groups that instigated it don’t interact with each other at all. (They do, but it holds even if they don’t.)

If you try to analyze the motives of Von Wokenstein’s Monster as a single coherent entity, then you can come up with some pretty crazy stuff. For instance, Wokenstein’s Monster will tell you that you need to have fewer children because children in the first world create too many carbon emissions, then tell you that you need to import people from the third world (where per-capita emissions are lower) to the first world (where per-capita emissions are higher) as a form of poverty alleviation, while simultaneously telling you that emissions must crash before 2032 or humanity is doomed. Trying to resolve this into a single coherent viewpoint could take you to some dark places, but in practice most of the people making these statements at the same time actually just aren’t thinking it through.

Unfortunately, overlapping policies from different interest groups can have unintended real effects that single policies or coherent policy regimes do not, and therefore the various [N]-stein’s Monsters of differing ideologies are of material interest.