This might sound a bit odd, weird, hypocritical even, but the people who used Natural Selection as an excuse to socially engineer their nations are uppity about adaptation. The entire Climate craziness on the left is a decades-long effort to undermine their own obsession. Nature, not God. But when nature does something wholly predictable, like warming after a cooling period, rather than do the Darwin and opine on how we must adapt, they decide it’s a great excuse for communism.
Relax, they call it socialism, or Democrat socialism, which has a lot fewer legs to stand on than pure Darwinism, but it’ll get the job done. The job is a centrally planned, increasingly totalitarian government where they take your money, and eventually everything else, in the name of their having a morally and intellectually superior idea about what to spend it on.
Machiavellian narcissistic psychopaths who are so smart they can say things like Well, all the other versions (which failed) weren’t the real thing. But they were, because the same sorts of people insisted on them. Marxism can’t work for lots of reasons, but the most important one is the sort of people who want to give it another go. The social engineers, subject-matter experts, academics, secular humanists, and political grifters. People who insist Darwin was right but won’t let you alone in case he’s not.
You can and do adapt, but if you won’t do it their way, to their advantage, well, that’s what government is truly for. The UK is a fine example. It has veered down that path and recently found itself tumbling down a hill. Hiding the rapes of young women is morally superior to the risk that they might be called racists if they arrest the perpetrators. A sign that gets Americans riled up but not enough to see the parallels in the US when insane men who happen to be of color cut women’s throats or set them on fire.
Same problem.
And the same people who insist there’s no such thing as reverse racism, which is probably what the political class in London thinks, and why a young man could die handcuffed while the police were busy “seeing” the person of color who stabbed him, but not seeing that he had stabbed him. They were not permitted.
This is the headspace that justified slavery, Jim Crow, and continues to this day to permit human trafficking, and the Islamic view of women as objects and non-Muslims as slaves or worse. A rather circuitous lead to what actually got my mind started down this path.
Air conditioning. I was browsing a few paragraphs from Konstantin Kisin. “What the AirCon Debate Says About Britain’s Climate Insanity.” He’s got some nice bits about climate cult nuttery. Charts, data, facts, and exposition on why the entire exercise is insane. We’ve covered all that, so why bring it up?
Before air conditioning became widespread in the mid-twentieth century, Florida was a sparsely populated backwater. After it, the state’s population exploded — from around 2.7 million in 1950 to over 22 million today. People moved there in their tens of millions precisely because technology had made an inhospitable climate liveable. They adapted. Britain is being asked to look at this evidence and conclude that adaptation is immoral.
I originally meant to write a little climate thing, grabbing bits from Kisin about his observations on the climate in Britain and the world, the problem being global, and all that.
Around 11,700 years ago, global temperatures rose by approximately 10 degrees Celsius in the space of a few decades. Not centuries. Decades. The climate can move with extraordinary speed entirely independently of human activity. The Younger Dryas cold snap that preceded it — a sudden plunge back to near-glacial temperatures that lasted over a thousand years — ended so abruptly that it shows up as a single layer in ice cores. If that rate of temperature change were happening today, in either direction, there would not be enough TV studios in Britain to broadcast the ensuing hysteria.
But when I started writing, my mind had other ideas, which I am now forced to coalesce magically, as if they had all been in the mind in advance and born onto the page. Sure, we’re better at adapting now than we ever were, at least in some ways, but if we were to allow the Machiavellian narcissistic psychopaths, all of whom seem to think some form of communism is the ideal state of human existence (which it might be for the people in charge but no one else) the thing we all are forced to share (government) will have made it almost impossible.
Maximal freedom to innovate is how modern cultures adapt. How individuals adapt. And markets, free ones, ensure the best ideas reward the folks who had them. The more your government interferes or intervenes, on the other hand, be it through regulations or rising taxes, the less able or adept you or the system becomes. And no matter what you think about Republicans or Democrats, the latter prefer maximal government.
Even if the Earth were warming because of us, the government is the last thing you’d want trying to rally resources to address it, and you only need to look at the UK and Europe for proof. Their solutions have stopped nothing but the desire to be productive and an environment in which you could do that if you were so inclined.
Britain has a serious productivity problem. We are, as I have noted before, poorer than we were in 2007 on a GDP per capita basis. We are being overtaken by countries we once considered developing. One of the less glamorous contributors to this is that we have spent decades building an office stock that becomes largely unusable for several weeks a year.
The research on heat and cognitive performance is not ambiguous. Studies have found that performance on cognitive tasks drops by around 13% in hot conditions compared to temperature-controlled environments. …
And this is where the argument comes full circle. Adapting to climate change — building flood defences, retrofitting buildings, expanding energy infrastructure — requires money. Money requires productivity. Productivity requires a functioning economy. A functioning economy is precisely what Net Zero, as currently implemented in Britain, is actively dismantling.
Progressives don’t have the slightest idea how to manage much of anything, certainly not a functioning economy, unless you mean one that functions for them and no one else.
The political left only has one path, and when they are in charge, everyone has to be on it, even though we all know where it leads. A loss of personal liberty, autonomy, value, worth, declining property, comfort, desire to succeed, and opportunity. A place where they hide the crime, blame the victims, and make excuses for their comfort at the expense of yours.
