You may have noticed a few earlier posts that referenced Frank Furedi articles. Some commenters (OK one, Tim) reminded me that he's, uh, an odd fellow with a checkered past. I know that of course, but still find some of his writings stimulating, and his arguments not easily refuted. Brian Micklethwait says something similar, but better.

Living Marxism were one of those creepy outfits that then said you should only refer to them as LM, without saying what LM used to stand for. Sort of like BAT (who were absolutely not British American Tobacco you understand, definitely not, no relation whatsoever at all blah blah blah), only political. Then when that was greeted with the derision and contempt that it deserved, they dumped even the LM crap, and called themselves the Institute of Ideas. I do not trust them further than I can spit them.

But, for their own bonkers cult reasons, they are very ambitious and worldly wise, rather like the Scientologists (Claire Fox, for instance, is one of them. Frank Furedi is another). Generally, what they say is, strangely, well worth listening to. They speak truth to power, because they are insane and want one day to be power, and do Marx knows what to us.

RCP/Living Marxism/etc. is one of the great conveyor belts of libertarianism from the libertarian ghetto here on earth to the real world, also here on earth, via the planet Zarg. Their Zargian take on the whole Class War thing is that the Class War is still raging between the nobs and the yobs, just like Marx said, but Zargians explain it differently to the usual way. Instead of Al Gore et al being described as repentant nobs on the side of the yobs, the RCP/Living Marxism/etc. people describe Al Gore et al as unrepentant nobs, foisting their latest line of bullshit on the toiling masses, the Working Stiffs of the World who Have Nothing To Lose But Their Chains. RCP/Living Marxism/LM/Institute of Ideas/Whatever will lead the Working Stiffs of the World to victory, and then put Marxist lizards in power or whatever the hell they have in mind.

All of this will now be explained with great enthusiasm by Al Gore et al, the central claim being: These People are Bonkers and we can safely ignore what they say!!!

My answer: These People are indeed Bonkers and Not To Be Trusted (i.e. warmed over and (not very) secretly unrepentant Marxists), but meanwhile, what do you say to their arguments?

Yes, what about those arguments. That's the hook for me too. And in this case the arguments being put forward are interesting and relevant. The subject of Brian's post was a documentary on BBC4 - The Great Global Warming Swindle - by documentary-maker Martin Durkin, a member of the LM crew.

If a mad, not-to-be-trusted person says something true, there is still the matter of its truth to be considered. Pointing out that the person saying the truth is mad and not-to-be-trusted does not make the truth untrue. Point of logic. Besides which, although the RCP/LM crowd are from the planet Zarg, that doesn't mean that the scientists they have rounded up are likewise Zargians. They are almost certainly, almost entirely, bona fide earth people.

The arguments in this documentary are now going to be the new orthodoxy of the global right wing, anti-regulation, anti-high-taxes, anti-road-pricing, fuck-you-Karl, fuck-you-Tarqin crowd, who will now echo-chamber these arguments with their blogs into a roar that will deafen the world, in other words these arguments will be adopted by a huge number of earth people. Al Gore et al are going to have to explain why these arguments are nonsense, or, despite the fact that they have won every battle so far, they will lose their war.

I await developments with fascination.

I didn't see the show, and didn't wade through the whole website, but it seems to be a somewhat detailed expression of the ideas of Henrik Svensmark, discussed a bit in earlier posts, which claim that solar variability affects cloud formation and planetary albedo. Brian also points to counter-arguments at RealClimate, another possibly Zargian enclave though of a different caste, who have not distinguished themselves as honest brokers.

This isn't about science, not really, it's about the exploitation of science for instrumental reasons. The bit that interests me is that the Gore-Zargians have been doing this for years, and now their methods have been adopted by opponents. See the previous post for a related discussion.