From the Daily Skeptic
by Tilak Doshi
Considering how rigid official orthodoxy is when it comes to public health “crises,” the “climate emergency,” and the alleged moral failings of Western civilization, it’s no surprise that today’s slurs of choice are “anti-vaxxer,” .
The moniker “climate deniers” is used to silence rational debate about climate change and specious claims about “established science.” As physicist Steve Koonin puts it: “I find calls for open scientific discussion particularly distasteful [on climate change] This amounts to denial of the Holocaust, especially the fact that the Nazis murdered over 200 of my relatives in Eastern Europe.
The vulgar nickname resurfaced last week in a New York Times article. guardian Titled—cue shock, horror—“Climate Change Deniers Make Up Nearly a Quarter of U.S. Congress.”
How long can this heresy be tolerated?
British environmental activist Jim Dale called for climate denialism to be criminalized in an interview with UK News's Andrew Doyle. He said “climate deniers” were “dangerous” to society and that their skepticism about net zero emissions “contaminated the discourse”. Dyer objected to specifying what sanctions should be imposed against “illegal” views on climate change, saying it would be up to politicians such as Sir Keir Starmer to decide.
That interview took place three months ago, with Starmer now Prime Minister. He moved from his previous role as attorney general to parliament and then Britain's top political job, and his response to last week's riots was to push for swift and harsh sentences that threaten free speech.
A woman has been arrested for posting on social media about a stabbing in Southport that left three little girls dead and several others injured, Sky News reported on Thursday. Apparently, her media posts were considered “dangerous” because she publicly shared a false description of the Southport mass murderer. Although she has still not been charged, the issue of her intent does not appear to be an issue in this arrest.
The U.S. Supreme Court held that the legal threshold from protected speech to unprotected speech is crossed when the relevant words are “intended to incite or produce imminent unlawful conduct” and are “likely to incite or produce such conduct.” Both tests must be met for the words to lose protected status under the First Amendment, the so-called Brandenburg test. In Britain, the land of Magna Carta, recent court cases have shown that criminalizing online “incitement to violence” or even belief in “toxic ideological forms” does not require such a test. [sic] Possibility of threatening public safety.” The blurring of the lines between “criminal thought” and criminal conduct is a sad reflection on British jurisprudence
A day before the arrest of a woman who posted inaccurate information about the Southport killer, Attorney General for England and Wales Stephen Parkinson warned: “We do have dedicated police officers who are scouring social media for this material and then making arrests… if You may be committing a crime by forwarding, repeating or amplifying false information. Responding to a question about Elon Musk's alleged “incitement of hatred” on Being a knight does not protect you from the consequences of the law. “
Of course, blaming the riots on social media distracts from the real issue: many Britons disapprove of the government's complicity in mass immigration over the past two decades. This “thoughtcrime” fueled the unrest in the country, reflected in a host of mainstream media headlines singing the same hymn:
In an Orwellian world where carrying machetes on the streets of British cities might be easier to escape prosecution than the “far-right atrocities” of “keyboard warriors”, Mr Dyer criminalizes “misinformation” about climate change The wish may come true.
Disinformation or misinformation is whatever the state calls it. The moral crusade is a war on disinformation, with little discussion of underlying policy issues. Policy options to support a net-zero emissions, fossil fuel-free grid by 2030 are a non-partisan “given” – with little debate inside or outside parliament – just as they were when the coronavirus lockdown was imposed. It is therefore not surprising that the Starmer government reactivated the anti-disinformation unit that targeted dissidents during the coronavirus crisis into a national security online information team to monitor social media in the aftermath of the riots.
Will the secretive spy agency reborn in the Covid era start “flagging” social media posts questioning Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero Ed Miliband? Never mind that, as David Starkey said in a recent interview, a fossil fuel-free grid in the UK by 2030 – the interim target for the UK to reach full net-zero emissions by 2050 – is “like Christ’s Same as the Second Coming.”
It would be one thing to delete climate-contrary posts on social media. But will it eventually become an prosecutable offense in the UK to point out the tension between net zero emissions and energy security, or to assert that net zero policy targets constitute an impact on people’s living standards and a denial of reality? Will the UK of the future have an unelected climate change commission, Star Chamber-like, to put climate change deniers on trial at secret forums at 55 Tufton Street, a bastion of liberal and right-wing organisations?
Dr. Tilak K. Doshi is an economist, former Forbes contributor, and member of the CO2 Alliance.
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