The New Flagellants

Flagellation is the beating of the body with special implements such as whips, lashes, rods, the cat o’ nine tails, etc. Usually it was done involuntarily, but in the medieval period it became a voluntary form of penance. The Benedictine monk Peter Damian is credited with introducing self-flagellation as a form of penance in the 11th century. Later, an Italian monk named Dominic Loricatus introduced self-flagellation as a form of self-mortification, which when performed in public, also became a public demonstration of piety.

The Flagellants were a 14th century movement, that sprung up in response to the black plague. These fanatics would parade through the streets beating themselves bloody in an effort to cleanse the town of sin. It was assumed that the plague was the result of sin, so the cleaning of sin would, presumably, please God enough for him to end the plague. The movement started in northern Italy, but quickly spread to Germany. There they took on the white robes and rhythmic chanting that has come to be associated with the movement.

The Church initially tolerated the movement, but soon realized that fanatics are worse than barbarians in times of trouble, so they suppressed the movement. Secular rulers were not all that thrilled with them either, as anyone claiming to appeal directly to God is an obvious challenge to earthly authority. Compounding matters, many of the flagellant groups were influenced by messianic ideas about the coming age of bliss. As a result, the Church condemned them and the secular rulers had them burned at the stake to make the point.

While the movement is long gone, the idea is still with us. The link between piety and self-denial has probably been a part of human society since the beginning. Holy men have walled themselves off from society and earthly pleasures, as a sign of their piety, but also as a way of avoiding temptation. Prophets have given up all earthy pleasures in order to warn society of their doom. In the West, self-denial has always been closely tied to piety, while pleasure, especially carnal pleasure, is associated with sin.

This is most obvious in the climate change movement, which blends Old Testament prophecy with pagan nature worship. The true believers are sure that man’s hedonistic exploitation of the environment is making the earth angry. The result is rising global temperatures, which will lead to an apocalypse. When Al Gore said the earth had a fever, he did not mean it like an infection. Instead, the fever is due to the earth becoming increasingly angry as human activity. Earth is boiling mad, so to speak.

The first iteration of the cult focused on energy. The earth was angry because humans were using fossil fuels. On the surface, it sounded like the old environmentalism dressed up as a science. The greens always hated industry. A key part of environmentalism has always been a hostility to modernity, particularly industry, which was viewed as immoral and at odds with nature. By going after fossil fuel because of global warming, they were turning their moral opposition to modernity into a scientific claim.

Lately, the movement has shifted away from their claims about fossil fuels, which went nowhere with the public, to attacking other modern pleasures. A recent “study” claims that modern farming is making the earth angry, so we will have to stop eating tasty food and switch to a diet heavy on unpleasant stuff. That means sharp reductions in meat eating and dairy, while sharply increasing our consumption of beans, seeds and gruel. The promise of this approach is it now gives vegetarianism the veneer of science.

You’ll note that vegetarianism was never about health. Spend five minutes with a vegan and they will, of course, have told you they are a vegan, but make it clear they are better than you because they no longer enjoy their food. That age old desire to please the gods by eschewing earthly pleasures. Now that the warmists have joined in, a meal of grass and twigs is not just a personal act of piety. It is a sacrifice for the planet. The only thing missing is a good beating with a cat o’ nine tails, along with that soy burger.

Mencken famously said that Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. That’s a good way of describing all forms of environmentalism. They never come forward with a plan to save the earth that does not require misery. Of course, it’s not their misery that haunts them. Environmentalism is focused on your misery. The vegan is no longer happy being smug and self-righteous with his kale juice. He demands the state force you to drink the stuff. Their piety heavily depends on your misery.

Like everything else about this age, the Gaia worshipers are not appealing to the gods, but to our rulers. In an age where the state is worshiped, it is no wonder that it fills the role of God for the modern flagellants. The thing is, unlike the flagellants of old, the new version is not appealing to God for relief on our behalf. They are demanding the god of this age punish us for our sins. Instead of the faithful whipping themselves to a bloody pulp in the town square in order to appease God, their piety requires them to whip us.

Time to bring back burning them at the stake.

119 thoughts on “The New Flagellants

  1. Pingback: Between Barbarians and Fanatics | The Z Blog

  2. The problem is all this eco-nazi bs is actually a boon to the energy companies and big business. Anything that is a commodity is difficult to make profit from. Energy could be so cheap it’s pointless to meter it but that would be bad for profits. For instance, go to BP’s website and “sustainability” is one of the headers and the first article is about the Paris accord and lowering carbon emissions. They’re carpetbaggers masquerading as moral authorities.
    Without faith authority is nothing and faith demands sacrifice.

  3. When the bourgeoisie replaced the aristocracy, the notion of noble birth as achievement was replaced by ideology. So the scramble to escape the working-class was dressed with an aping of the clever ideas of the beautiful people. Now that the middle-class has been gutted in the West and social mobility is barely possible, the clever people have found a way to push the workers back down. Tell them they are stupid, irresponsible planet-killers and they need their jobs, cars and families taken away. Resist and we will replace you with people from overseas who are more deserving than you.

  4. They never have a plan that goes beyond “We have to close coal fired power plants!!!” They don’t consider what comes next. They never consider that solar infrastructure needs a whole lot of fossil fuels to be built and maintained. They blame any type of natural phenomenon on climate change. Hurricanes never happened last century. Floods either. Nor droughts. Nope – it is climate change. Then the screeching and gaslighting starts.

  5. Here in the SF Bay Area, one can watch news stories on all the local channels on a daily basis bombarding viewers with the “reality” of human induced climate change and local efforts to mitigate its effects. The same goes for local news outlets/newspapers, all of which uniformly run daily stories on climate change or efforts made to alleviate its effects. Tonight’s most laughable “news” story was an item that asserts rising global temperatures will lead to more droughts causing shortages of barley and thereby cause a rise in beer prices. I kid you not, that’s the kind of bullshit they broadcast on the local news literally every day in the effort to indoctrinate the 80% of the population that never developed logical reasoning skills in the local universities/schools. The progressives are doing everything possible to convince fellow progs and anyone else they can that their claim of world wide temperature rises will certainly lead to a catastrophe of Biblical proportions.

    • an item that asserts rising global temperatures will lead to more droughts causing shortages of barley and thereby cause a rise in beer prices.

      Old hat. That story circulated in Denmark a couple of weeks back. So the headline read: “Beer prices to rise”, I swore loudly, assuming they were about to raise the beer tax. Again. Seeing it was about global warming, I just laughed.

  6. This is from the transcript of a 2010 BBC programme. Townsend is Solitaire Townsend, a green lobbyist:

    TOWNSEND: I was making a speech to nearly 200 really hard core, deep environmentalists and I played a little thought game on them. I said imagine I am the carbon fairy and I wave a magic wand. We can get rid of all the carbon in the atmosphere, take it down to two hundred fifty parts per million and I will ensure with my little magic wand that we do not go above two degrees of global warming. However, by waving my magic wand I will be interfering with the laws of physics not with people – they will be as selfish, they will be as desiring of status. The cars will get bigger, the houses will get bigger, the planes will fly all over the place but there will be no climate change. And I asked them, would you ask the fairy to wave its magic wand? And about 2 people of the 200 raised their hands.

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/programmes/analysis/transcripts/25_01_10.txt

  7. One of the insights of Nietzsche is the idea that “the priests” taught us to turn our natural hate of “the other” back onto ourselves as in Original Sin.

    Of course now the left is reverting back to the old idea of hate.

    But I think there might be value is turning hate upon ourselves. We need to curb our hate in order to live among strangers in the city. So thinking that the problem might be in ourselves, and not in others, helps people get along with others.

    • Whites have been conditioned for decades to turn our hate upon ourselves to a pathological degree.

      “And, as we will soon discuss, if you find yourself living in a culture brainwashed into self-hatred then you’re familiar with another, though related, aspect of his work. Flowerman, it must be conceded, has been largely forgotten by history. He lurks in larger shadows left by “the exiles.” But Flowerman was in some respects as crucial a member of the Frankfurt School circle as any other. Of course, he wasn’t German-born. Nor was he a member of the Frankfurt School for Social Research. Instead, he was born in Manhattan in 1912, the grandson of a jeweler who arrived by ship from Warsaw’s Jewish district in 1885. And yet he would later achieve enough influence within his own group, as both activist and psychologist, to act as Research Director for the American Jewish Committee, and, most famously of all, to direct and co-edit the Studies in Prejudice series with Max Horkheimer.” …

      “The combined result of his research and thinking in these areas was his argument that it should be desirable for people like him to obtain control over the means of mass communication. Not only, argued Flowerman, should this control be used for blanket “pro-tolerance” propaganda, but it should also actively reshape in-group standards — thus reforming peer group pressures to become antagonistic to in-group ethnocentrism. His (then) highly ambitious goal was a culture that policed itself: a politically correct culture in which Whites, via peer pressure, conformed to new values — values much more user-friendly to Jews.” …

      “What Flowerman is proposing here is essentially a revolution in values, after which a politically correct culture emerges where the demographic majority becomes self-policing and antagonistic to its own ethnic interests. In this environment — achieved via “control, saturation, crisis”— the strength of group sanctions among the White American in-group is directed towards manifestations of in-group ethnocentrism instead of outsiders. It’s nothing less than a proposal for the cultivation of White guilt and pathological altruism, and the diminishment of White ethnocentrism and cultural pride.”

      https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2018/09/23/modify-the-standards-of-the-in-group-on-jews-and-mass-communications-part-one-of-two/

  8. So much of the chaos coming out of the Left today is spiritual pathology manifesting from their Atheism. Ironically, it seems the moral structure of Christianity is still fundamentally passionately at work within their hearts and minds, only in perverted form. This explains why the old notion of seeking repentance from God for personal sins in private, now erupts in displays of public self flagellation to relieve communal “white guilt”. The public square is like a narcissistic confessional booth for them.

    The State is their new God (i.e. a reflection of their own will) which by definition is expressly blasphemous- they are overtly attempting to “play God” through social engineering to fix mankind. How hubristic does one have to be to think they can control the climate. The Right in general and also religious people acknowledge that God (or nature, if you prefer) created man in a fallen or imperfectable state (the tragic view) and accept our limitations. The Left by contrast have been wholly committed to the notion of progress and of man’s ultimate Perfectibility at their hand (scientific optimism).

    One final observation: notice the Left’s obsession with “identity” and sexual and gender confusion, and more broadly with the desire to destroy borders of all kinds (e.g. nations). My suspicion is that because they no longer are allowed to believe in the transcendent core of the individual (the soul), they are desperate to recognize the immaterial within themselves. But with no outlet to do so, they instead ruinously attack the body, etc. Another spiritual pathology of the modern era.

  9. What could be more conservative than coservation. Reduce, reuse, recycle. If people actually did the first two the third wouldn’t be needed as much. Aluminum recycling saves large amounts of electricity. Reuse of metals is just common sense. A little thought in advance of use goes a long way. Free energy from sun, tdes, wind just make common sense and should be more fully explored. I know they can’t replace fossill fuels but ffs are not infinite. Harness lightning and you would be the richest man in the world. I think we as a species can be more open minded and use common sense better. The planet aint goin anywhere anyway. We only just might make make uninhabitable fior us but I doubt it.

  10. Burning them at the stake would have symbolic value, but there is something to be said for modern efficiency in the process.

  11. “A recent “study” claims that modern farming is making the earth angry, so we will have to stop eating tasty food and switch to a diet heavy on unpleasant stuff. That means sharp reductions in meat eating and dairy, while sharply increasing our consumption of beans, seeds and gruel. The promise of this approach is it now gives vegetarianism the veneer of science.”

    …and bugs. Over the last several years the Cloud People have been pushing the alleged virtues of eating bugs onto us dirt people:

    https://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/environment/item/15420-un-let-them-eat-bugs

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/05/27/heres-how-to-talk-people-into-eating-more-bugs/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.e3f798b0851c

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/07/t-magazine/eating-bugs-food-restaurant.html

  12. The fact that after several decades of environmental groups crying for improvements, I do not see that anything has changed other than the issue becoming a highly charged political weapon. With the Paris Accord, we saw globalist creeps from around the world standing united on a stage for a photo-op, saying empty things about the environment, but what did they actually do? As far as I could see, nothing was done except the harnessing of billions of our tax dollars to be shuffled around the planet for globalist crooks to skim off of. If there were any improvements happening, we would be seeing new filtration systems of all sorts being developed for use at all kinds of factories, but we see none of that.

    Interestingly, recently read an article that in China the worst polluting factories are identified publicly and put on notice to figure out a way to fix it within a certain time frame. Regional or local government officials are charged with revisiting the polluting entities for follow-up, results to be made public. Ironic that Communist China is the one who is seeking remedies from the marketplace itself. There is no will here for that, the government has been bought off.

    • The improvements are already done. Here in Southern California, the quality of the environment, particularly the air, has been spectacular. Where once we made major quality improvements with basic, inexpensive changes, now we go for massive, expensive, technologically not-very-feasible regulations to make the tiniest of incremental improvements. Meanwhile, we import “dirty” electricity produced in other states, because our system has incentivized away the production of electricity at home. Those long power lines over the mountains are the source of a lot of the wildfires.

  13. Self-denial for moral or religious reasons is a rational way to act, as materialism is a spiritual dead end, and we are at our happiest when we are being productive and helping others. But you are 100% correct that the way the left goes about it is at best meaningless and at worst, terribly destructive.

  14. Though I love the irony of burning them at the stake, think of all the carbon emissions! Much better to bury them alive, so they can really get in touch with Gaia. And then the land can grow crops — circle of life, baby (though I suspect that anything grown there would taste unbearably self-righteous).

    • All diversity activists must sent to Pakistan where they will be properly multiculted.
      Popular rumor claim that mr. Putin using Chechen Muslims for his “nonviolent” protests ” . You wanted diversity for us, but whoops, you got it first…:D:D

  15. Zman, can you do a post on why there are literally only 3 billionaire American nationalists? Mercer, Thiel and Trump.

    It’s insane. There are what, 1,000 American billionaires? Even if 400 are Jewish, that’s 600 Christian mostly white men. Is there something in the shitlib mindset that allows them to become much richer than conservatives, or in order to become a billionaire you have to sell products or goods that appeal to the most amount of people without controversy?

    Either way, it’s bizarre and it’s a topic that I don’t think has been discussed enough.

  16. And honoring the flagellants of old, we we have the flagellates of the micro-world, propelled by one, or a few, or a bunch of flagella (look like teeny tiny whips). I studied these critters in books and under the microscope for my term paper when I took phycology my junior year in college (1952).

  17. Another example ZMan, not content to sing along their goodness by using the canvas bags for groceries, they want to ban plastic bags so that we all must use the damn things.

    • Around here people now pay 10 or 15 cents a bag at the grocery store for “reusable” thick plastic bags, since the old thin ones are unavailable. These new bags immediately get used for household trash or cleaning up after pets, just as the old ones did. If you are spending $75 to $100 on a grocery trip, what’s the extra buck for bags?

      There are laws that make sense and reflect the culture, and then there are “bossy” laws that simply order people around even though they are counterproductive. The plastic bag thing is a classic “bossy” law.

      • I read that it is known how to make vegetable-based ‘plastic’ bags that are virtually indistinguishable from real plastic bags except that they biodegrade much faster in the landfills. I don’t understand why we don’t just switch to vegetable-based bags. Maybe the story was an exaggeration or wishful thinking? It’s convenient having bags like that around for trash and cleaning up after the dogs, etc.

        • Home Depot’s bags must be of that sort. Put some small hardware away in one of them for a year or two, and the bag disintegrates when you touch it or move it.

          These days I buy things one or two at a time every few days at HD. Keeps the plastic bag supply up. You can put one item per bag at the self-serve checkout, too, if the bag supply at home is below what you need it to be.

    • It’s been shown that food-borne illnesses increase in areas that ban plastic grocery bags. Reusing cloth bags re-exposes your new food to last week’s/month’s meat juice drips, fruit residues, etc. People might be getting sick, but at least someone out there is trying to save the world.

  18. Is there not also an echo of the Flagellant movement in the current “white guilt” fad? This requires mortification of the sinful white flesh in order to acquire absolution and redemption.

  19. We have a nutrition class at our school that has more to do with environmentalism that actual pros and cons of various eating habits. Naturally the anti-meat crowd is in full force. When approached that industrial farming, eating an excess of carbs, and food companies exploiting the masses to sell more ding-dongs, they don’t want to hear the whole story. Cult like!

  20. Modern SJW progressive culture is nothing more than Christianity without the Christ. No grace, no forgiveness, no compassion for those who differ from you.

  21. Don’t do as I do. Do as I TELL you.

    The second greatest feature of the Church of Environ-oh-aint-we-mental-ism is bringing back Indulgences. You can buy your way to piety & superiority….

  22. The veneer of altruism in the global warming movement has always been a scam. The parasites in society want more sustenance from government, and that necessarily means higher taxes to fund more welfare transfers. But raising taxes directly can be political suicide, so a new con is needed to hide the tax. Hence the new energy taxes hidden in the greenhouse gas legislation (carbon credit my ass). At first, just a few pennies per gallon, but over time, everyone gets to pay $10 a gallon or more. The wind and solar scams accomplish the small end result in your electrical bill. Piracy by government proxy.

  23. There are so many different angles to take when discussing the global warming cult. One thing seems obvious: it took off after the Soviet Union fell — that was a traumatic event for the left. After central planning failed economically, they looked for other justifications to put them (worthless bureaucrats who did well in school and felt deserving of power) in charge.

    • Rush Limbaugh used to say the environmental movement was the last haven for socialism after the Soviet block collapsed and the lefties had nowhere else to look.

      • I think in their desperation, Lefties are now looking at an anti-white-man movement, using idiot white women against their own men so they can divide and destroy whatever healthy family culture remains.

  24. Of all the leftist positions, environmentalism is the one I’m most sympathetic to. I believe it virtually shares a common root with white nationalism, although I realize we don’t all subscribe to that philosophy in this forum, since both are concerned with sustainability, what the country will look like in 200 years, not what our paycheck will look like next month. However, I realize that currently the left monopolizes green positions and seeks to weaponize them against rightists, and I believe that global warming is mostly a hoax. Still I think that the overutilization of plastics is a damage to the environment, and also another industry eating up our fossil fuels. Remember the Sierra club was anti immigration up until the 1980s.

    • As is always the case with the Left, they have poisoned the language. Being responsible stewards of our lands is not what left-wing environmentalists have in mind.

    • Wow, the thread diversity heretic to Corn above captured everything I meant to say with 100 times the force!

  25. I think a lot of this is overbroad. The religious element of environmentalism is obvious, yet it is still plausible that doubling the carbon dioxide level of the air could have a significant impact on the climate, and that, while it certainly won’t destroy the planet, this could be quite bad for us. And I know vegetarians who do enjoy their food, and aren’t the least bit judgemental or disturbed when I order steak at a restaurant (as long there is something on the menu for them). I don’t think there is much to be gained by painting everyone who disagrees with us as crazy.

      • Be serious. If one swan in a thousand is black, then “swans are white” is a useful generalization. If one in four is black then is isn’t. Even less if three in four are black. I don’t know whether reasonable vegetarians are a majority or a minority, but if they are a minority it is a substantial minority. I say this both from personal experience (no, I am not a vegetarian myself) and as a general impression from the writings of various vegetarians that I have come across over the years. Yes, some of them are nuts, but plenty are not.

        You know, I share a lot of your goals, but you have a tendency to make all sorts of broad self-assured generalizations that just strike me as unsupportable, and I don’t think this helps you reach anyone besides those who already agree with everything you are saying.

    • “…..yet it is still plausible that doubling the carbon dioxide level of the air could have a significant impact …..”

      True; and it is also plausible that a meteor will destroy your house, so you best move into a deep cave

      By the way, please explain to we “deniers,” what was it exactly that caused the Medieval Warm Period;” and exactly what was it that caused the Little Ice Age;” and how is it possible that EVERY Ice Age was preceded by a warmer climate?
      (Oh, that’s right; warmer climates therefore, must CAUSE Ice Ages. )

      Do yourself a favor and look into the “Climate Gate,” fiasco.
      Look into how historic temperature data is “adjusted;” and ALWAYS downward to make present day temperatures, by comparison, appear warmer.

      And ask yourself this; if scientists cannot explain the historical climate (and they cannot) how can they presume to predict the future climate?

      You can find online, commentary from James Hanson – the “respected” climate scientist that literally started the entire global warming scam – from the 1970’s where he is providing dire warnings about the coming Ice Age. He had his fellow climate “scientists” were totally convinced this was a slam dunk.

      The man made global warming scam is the biggest scientific fraud in the history of the world.

      • Are you totally stupid? No, it is not even remotely plausible that a meteor will destroy my house. The odds of that happening are vanishingly small! However it is quite likely that carbon dioxide levels will double from preindustrial levels, and since carbon dioxide is in fact a greenhouse gas, it is plausible that this will have a major impact on the climate. I don’t claim to know this for sure, but it is going to take more than the boilerplate nitpicking of a random internet commenter to convince me that the majority opinion of scientists working in this field can be trivially ignored. Yes, there is definitely a religious element in the “save the planet” hysteria. That doesn’t mean the underlying claims are all false.

        • Science is supposed to be based on demonstrable facts; not on opinion, not on the consensus of scientists irrespective of their fame or popularity.
          EVERY prediction made by the AGW ( Anthropogenic Global Warming) zealots over the last 20 – 30 years has been wrong.
          EVERY SINGLE ONE.
          How many times must they be wrong before their veracity is questioned?
          By the way, CO2 constitutes 0.04% (that’s one part in 10,000) of the atmosphere. It is a trace gas in the atmosphere. The AGW thesis posits that CO2 and ONLY CO2 is the driver of climate.
          Nothing else.
          A TRACE GAS within the atmosphere, we are told, is THE driver of climate. Nothing else.

          Water vapor is by far the most abundant green house gas.

          Several very prominent AGW proponents have openly admitted that the primary motivation of the AGW movement has nothing at all to due with climate.
          They have freely said – in a rare moment of honesty – that it is all about distribution of wealth; from the advanced nations (esp., the USA) to the less advanced.
          They have STATED the above.

          Funny, is it not, that you ignore their own statements and the deceit, the sham , the fraud that they are freely admitting and promoting. Their comments have no affect on your views. Here they are, admitting the fraud, and you are OK with that.

          A real scientist, Nobel physicist Richard Feynman gave a short talk at Cornell describing the scientific method; see here
          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYPapE-3FRw

          By the way, check out James Hanson’s 1988 testimony to Congress and listen to his predictions. Manhattan should have been 20 feet below sea level about 10 years ago and the ice caps should all have melted 10 years ago.

          No, I am not stupid.
          When predictions are made, and they are 100% perfectly wrong – repeatedly, over a nearly 30 year period -a thinking person will question the veracity and/or honesty of those making such predictions.

          Apparently you do not.

          You know, the consensus of many scientists for a thousand years was that the earth was flat and that earth was at the center of our planetary system.
          It was the scientific consensus (as well as being obvious to any sentient human being) so it had to be correct.

          • Actually, you ARE stupid! You opened your previous response with a stupid argument about a meteor hitting my house, and you didn’t have the brains to notice that it didn’t make sense. You argue like a 9/11 truther, triumphantly reciting talking points you got from a website somewhere and then expecting me to refute them all to your satisfaction. You are even dumb enough to haul out the old flat earth chestnut to justify disregarding the scientific consensus. (Here is a clue — the ancient Greeks had already figured out that the Earth was a sphere, and medieval Europeans, including Columbus, were quite well aware of this. And we didn’t really have scientists in any modern sense until maybe the 16th century, so I don’t see how they could have been wrong about it for “a thousand years”).

            I spent a lot of time studying physics in graduate school (never got my PhD, but I got a good job out of it), and I know first hand that scientists are serious people. They can certainly make mistakes, but not the kind of kindergarten mistakes you are accusing them of. I don’t care what website you got the information from — no serious scientist ever predicted that by 2018 the icecaps would have melted and Manhattan would be be under 20 feet of water! If you had any understanding you would have realized how outlandish the idea was and you wouldn’t have repeated it, but you don’t, so you did.

            I’m not arguing this with you — I’m just venting my frustration over the way the issue has been overrun by politicized nitwits. I certainly do have my own reservations. Modeling is really, really hard, and it’s entirely possible that some scientists have unwittingly allowed their results be contaminated by their politics. My own best guess is that climate change will turn out to be real, and that it won’t be a good thing, but that it will be manageable, and will be eclipsed in importance by other issues, such as the migration crisis (in particular the Exodus from Africa). But I don’t know for sure. It remains, not certain, but PLAUSIBLE that some of the worst case scenarios might turn out to be true. Given the consequences, to simply dismiss the majority scientific consensus is stupendously irresponsible.

  26. It’s interesting to notice how personality traits are heritable. My mother is a sadomasochistic religionist with a tendency to confront, berate, and in her youth whip or beat people. My brother is just like her but with his new religion of environmental veganism (minus the violence…though he’d love to see humans slaughtered the way “we do animals”). Their demeanor is exactly the same when they discuss their different religions. They’re both empty and naturally dour.

    • Studies on the heritability of religiosity, never include ideological fervor, but they should. I think we’ll find it is like all other human traits. It’s also why you cannot talk a fanatic down. The best you can do is channel their fanaticism into soemthing useful. We used to send these people off as missionaries.

  27. Back when I was living in deep space with my proggie in laws, before I got thrown out the airlock – the prevailing orthodoxy in the family was that if Mohammed wouldn’t go to the dump – then the dump would come to Mohammed. I had piles of garbage forming round the house that my father in law had carefully sorted for me. The idea was that he would save the planet by playing in the garbage and I could spend my weekends in line at the bottle depot and the recycling centres with the greasy hippies and elderly flower children that ran them.

    One day I just lost my chit. I gathered them all up in garbage bags and threw them out! In the kitchen the tard had set up a big slop bucket for banana peels, orange rinds and apple cores that could go out to the composter. It was full, and fruit flies were hatching in it. I threw that out too. My last trip to the recycle centre had the big composter in the back of the truck. I told the garbage scientists there that I was getting an even bigger one and they dutifully acknowledged my membership among the ranks of the enlightened.

    That started World War 3. The old bastid told me that we recycled in this family and I’d better straighten up and fly right or else. I told him that he did nothing of the sort, all he did was make a mess for me to clean up. To emphasize the point I finished off my pop and threw the can in the garbage. He told me I needed to find another place to live, and I opened the door for him and pointed out it was my house.

    When they eventually DID move out into their own home … the old boy started up his own home based garbage dump again … and his idiot wife fell over a pile of newspapers in the garage and shut him down. But then, of course, the dump was in HIS backyard so it only made sense.

    No, Z, those types are more interested in flogging you than themselves. Consider Fat Al Gore – between his yacht and mansion he leaves a carbon footprint the size of a small town. It’s always the same with them.

    • Back in the early ’70s, when I was just a lad, I stayed at a friends house way downtown. NYC had recently ( well a few years earlier) had a drought; everyone was encouraged to save water. You know, shower with a friend, wink wink. But this kid’s parents, being a little crazier than most, decided that the best way to save water was to never flush the toilet. The first time I went in there, it looked like half a dozen people had already taken a dump.
      There have always been crazy people, there always will be. Let’s stop catering to them.

      • Haha. I remember back in the early ‘90s one of the major networks aired a special on energy and water conservation. One of the tips was “selective flushing”.

      • The lovely wife watches water use like a hawk. It is true that at home the water is drawn from the Colorado River and then is sent to the ocean. I pointed out that up in the high desert, the water we use is pulled straight up from the aquifer, and returns to it when it goes down the drain or onto the plants. Yet the difference doesn’t register, because it is not about the water, it is about subscribing to the religion.

  28. “The greens always hated industry.” This.

    Ask one about nuclear power. You’ll get some non-science nonsense about pollution and danger. then they’ll proudly tell you it isn’t cost-effective (after their regulations made it so).

    • The thing with nuclear power is that when the plants fail, it’s catastrophic. With no safe way to handle the toxic materials that have a shelf life of tens of thousands of years, it seems the only reason they’re favored is for the lucrative byproducts for nuclear weapons.

      • When has a western plant ever failed? Few years ago an old Japanese with terribly designed back-up generators was hit by an earthquake and tsunami – and the failure never made it out of the plant.

        There are plenty of ways to deal with the toxic materials, The French just re-use them in breeder reactors.

        • Western nuclear accidents:
          2017 Airborne radioactivity increase in Europe in autumn 2017
          2001 Instituto Oncologico Nacional radiotherapy accident
          1996 San Juan de Dios radiotherapy accident
          1990 Clinic of Zaragoza radiotherapy accident
          1987 Goiânia accident
          1986 Chernobyl disaster and Effects of the Chernobyl disaster
          1979 Church Rock uranium mill spill
          1979 Three Mile Island accident
          1969 Lucens reactor
          1962 Thor missile launch failures during nuclear weapons testing at Johnston Atoll under Operation Fishbowl
          1961 SL-1 nuclear meltdown
          1961 K-19 nuclear accident
          1959 SRE partial nuclear meltdown at Santa Susana Field Laboratory
          1957 Kyshtym disaster
          1957 Windscale fire

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_nuclear_disasters_and_radioactive_incidents

          For all we know, our end might have been initiated with the Fukushima nuclear meltdown in March 2011. I recently heard some depressing update about Fukushima and couldn’t help but think of the part of Revelation in the bible where it’s written about the waters of the sea becoming yellow and roiled and everything in it dying. We do not know yet how the Fukushima leakage into the ocean will end and what effects it is having and will have. The most recent couple of notes about Fukushima in Wikipedia include:

          * On 10 September 2015, floodwaters driven by Typhoon Etau prompted mass evacuations in Japan and overwhelmed the drainage pumps at the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant. A TEPCO spokesperson said that hundreds of metric tons of radioactive water had entered the ocean as a result.[188] Plastic bags filled with contaminated soil and grass were also swept away by the flood waters.[189]

          * In June 2016, it was revealed that TEPCO officials had been instructed on 14 March 2011 not to describe the reactor damage using the word “meltdown”. Officials at that time were aware that 25–55% of the fuel had been damaged, and the threshold for which the term “meltdown” became appropriate (5%) had been greatly exceeded. TEPCO President Naomi Hirose told the media: “I would say it was a cover-up… It’s extremely regrettable.”[212]

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster

          End times.

          • I said “western”. Chernobyl didn’t even have a containment dome but the crazy Ruskies were running “hold my beer” experiments there. They literally launched the core through the roof and into the plant parking lot.

            Coal plants release far more radioactivity than Three Mile Island ever did.

      • Good point Ursula, it is not the likelihood of failure that is the issue, but the unknowable potentially catastrophic results. I’ll take my known chances on fossil fuels anyday.

        • Me also, Dutch (can’t say MeToo anymore!), I’m happy with fossil fuels and any other viable energy source that *fails well.*

  29. Somehow the leaders of these nuts don’t do the real sacrificing.
    I thought someone would have quoted Chesterton by now, when man stops believing in God he doesn’t believe in nothing, he believes in anything, (paraphrased)

    • I’ve long called Environmentalism/Climate Change a religion for people who don’t have one. It has all the aspects of a faith:

      – we’re all sinners (against the planet)

      – we must strive to be better people by doing penance (banning straws, plastic bags, paper bags, laundry and dishwasher soap that actually works, decent flushing toilets, cheap light bulbs, reasonable shower heads, washing machines and dishwashers that don’t take 3 hours, workable gas cans, simple cars with powerful engines, etc.). Without pain there can be no redemption.

      – good people (are required to) perform the weekly sacrament of washing and sorting the recycling (even when it goes into the same landfill and is a pointless waste of time and resources, remember that your time has no value)

      – heresy against official dogma is a sin and must be publicly punished for the good of the faith. Denial should be illegal and deniers ostracized.

      – we can buy indulgences for our sins with carbon credits and solar/wind power (even though it’s inefficient and unworkable for a modern society, it shows we care)

      – cheap, plentiful energy is akin to guiltless, sinful debauchery and must be eliminated

      Al Gore studied divinity (before he became a mediocre law student) so he recognized these parallels early on and saw that the masses were ready for a new faith.

  30. Creating the EPA was a huge mistake. It was an invitation to fanatics to climb aboard the government’s Environmental Express. And all on the taxpayer dime.

    • It’s a great example of the ratchet effect in democracy. Inevitably, democracy caters to the crazy faction. “Well, let’s give them something so they will shut up” gets repeated every election cycle, meaning the center moves toward crazy land after every election.

      Environmentalism, like all radicalism, lacks a limiting principle. There is no conception of “good enough” so they are always finding some way to be even more pure and pious.

  31. This post is very perceptive and clarifying in a way one doesn’t see elsewhere — as is usual for the Zblog. Even so, I thought you were taking it in a different direction. For example, the idea of self-punishment as a form of penance could be plausibly connected to liberal notions of White guilt, or even their current obsession with viewing mixed-race couples. There might even be a connection to modern forms of bodily mutilation like piercing and tattooing.

    A feature of the medieval and contemporary forms of flagellation might be that the mode of self-punishment has no real efficacy or even connection to the “plague” it seeks to redress.

    A related point, which you made clear, is that the flagellant implicitly perceives himself (increasingly herself) as morally superior to everyone else. One of the most interesting features of the contemporary scene is that behaviors from earlier times that were baffling are now recognizable in the mental breakdown we’re seeing on the Left. It suggests that these are “natural” behaviors that arise in human populations when they are subjected to certain kinds of stress.

    • My thought is that people are naturally competitive, and the self-flagellants have nothing else to be proud of or good at, so they beat themselves up more and better than everyone else. The Lovely Wife couldn’t get over the election a couple of years ago, so I suggested she take up things that have nothing to do with politics. She has taken up cooking, sewing, and gardening, and enjoys socially showing off her skills. For my part, I can repair, build, or grow anything, and she enjoys showing me off as well. She still harbors a grudge against The Donald (I tell her and her family that he is simply a locus for all that bugs them about everything), but she is a much happier person now. This self-flagellation and competitive veganism is a symptom of people having nothing to be proud of or to aspire to. Like putting an animal in an environment with zero constructive stimulation of any sort, the behaviors get all weird.

      • Indeed, the hamster cage must have a wheel. Your precautionary note is a good reminder to anyone advocating a policy of guaranteed universal basic income. Or as Dean Wormer put it, “Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son.”

    • I used to work with a guy who was tattooed neck to ankles. He often wore a shirt with “SUBMIT YOUR FLESH”. He was “troubled” and didn’t play well with others.

  32. The hypocrisy of most of these people is that they live in cities and are surrounded by warmth and cooling supplied by power plants, ride their bimes on asphalt paved streets maintained by burly men boiling tar with noxious gases, and having a high tech rescue net around them 24/7.

    A couple lives off the grid near my hunting and fishing property. One of them introduced herself recently. I think she was just happy to talk to another human out there, and seemed relieved to know there was someplace with water, electricity and a septic tank she could run to if things ever get real bad.

    If more of these hypocrites were forced to really live the way their beliefs demand, I’d bet that they’d be a lot less judgemental about the way the rest of us live.

    • There’s off the grid done right and then there’s the hippy fantasy. One keeps all of the features of modernity with a few alterations and the other resembles nouveau Amish.

  33. Z, today’s Guardian has an article about eating insects, entitled “Would you munch on a bug to save the planet from global warming?”. I saw the headline before reading your post, and it prompted thoughts along the same lines as yours, namely that greens want us to do penance (eat bugs instead of meat, ride bicycles instead of cars, spend freezing winters rather than heating our houses,…) in order to restore the planet’s health.

    Most of this stuff has zero impact on the environment. It’s literally an act of contrition. The moral dimension is all-important.

  34. Good overview. Liberal madness is inherited in some person genes and always existed. That is why we had witch hunt and all other horrors in history.
    Now the great question. What we must to with our natural born open minded bleeding heart do gooders, who push our civilization from one apocalypse to another.

  35. I suppose I represent the anti-flagellants. If you’re talking about the 14th century type, they got it all wrong. Jesus didn’t whip himself, he whipped the money-changers. Jn 2:15. If you’re talking about the soy-infused aberrations that Zman castigates so well, they are nothing but disgruntled killjoys. As Aristotle taught and Aquinas baptized, virtue lies in moderation. Flagellants of either stripe (pun intended) are paradigmatic examples of extremism. My kindred and I will stick to the middle course.

  36. As a kid I used to watch Saturday morning cartoons on ABC back in the early 70’s. Even then ABC ran a bunch of short cartoons with a political agenda. One of which clearly remember was showing that meat eating was bad because it used oil and grains that could be used to feed starving masses in the 3rd world.

    And yes these so-called environmentalists hate your guts. They want to strip you of your meat, your home with HVAC and that Toyota pick up in the drive way.

    They are not so much anti-industry as anti-white. This is why they are silent on India and China being the super polluters and responsible for the sea of garbage in the Pacific. They are silent on over-population in the 3rd world which is one of the chief driving factors in environmental devastation and destruction of the the quality of life.

    Environmentalism may have started out as a legit concern. But it was quickly co-opted by hippies in the 60’s and 70’s who became the future Western hating Marxists that now run the various movements.

    Now it’s become a cover to wage war on America, the West and by extension blue collar and middle-class whites. Because their policies would be most hurt tby their policies the most.

    • This is why it’s so important to fire up my Chevy truck to buy a few ribeye steaks at the butcher (imagine the horror, a whole store devoted to meat) then head home to fire up the BBQ. Of course, I’ll enjoy my steak in my A/C cooled, 72F house (admittedly only a modest 1400 sq. feet for one person). All as a giant F**k You to the ecotards and vegans who dare to threaten my liberty to consume as much energy as I damn well can based on free-market pricing (though with regulation and taxation that’s a bit of a misnomer). So, hell yeah, you want my meat or my Chevy or my guns? Molon labe.

      • I should invite you to our annual ‘Earth Day Tire Fire’ where we celebrate human achievements by having a huge bon-fire with tires we collected over the year. Started with waste oil naturally

    • Precisely the “Greens” understand that industrialization is how the White man is better than non-White they don’t care about the Planet or the animals they just want to put ol’Whitey back into the cave so that Africans don’t have to feel so bad about them selves for not having invented the wheel even.

    • Think about Bambi. That movie ruined hunting for generations of children. It forever made the person putting meat on the table the bad guy. For some reason I never saw it. Probably because I was the youngest child and they were tired of taking kids to it but to this day people will let out a sigh when they talk about seeing Bambi .

      And an interesting aside is it was translated from the German by Whittaker Chambers when he was still a communist

  37. It’s curious, after one round of gas-lighting by the media regarding the 2016 election’s “99.99%” reliable outcome, how damaged media and “expert” credibility was and remains (people just don’t watch anymore; “Shark Week” kicks CNN’s ass routinely). I’m wondering how many times environmentalists and climatologists have to get their predictions drastically wrong, year after year, before they lose the ability to scare and control people. They’ve been so wrong so many times. Die “Grüne” in Germany were predicting another massive shortfall in grape harvest (like the previous year) and now the Moselle’s hills runneth over with fruited Riesling and they’re just ignoring it; normal people notice, though. The only reason the Greens cleaned house in the recent election (in Bavaria, especially) was because some journalist fell out of a tree and died when he was covering the deforestation effort in Hamburg (which galvanized the party, like the harpies were hoping #metoo would do). I guess saints/martyrs, are even better than flagellants ( see Matthew Shepherd, MLK, etc.)

    • I believe you are correct that Shark Week beats CNN, which is even sadder for CNN since Shark Week has really sucked for the last 10-15 years. Used to be about sharks now its about stupid stunts somewhat tangentially related to sharks. And now live tweeting by morons during the show out on my TV screen? Sad.

  38. The environmental movements of the 1960s and 70s generally opposed population growth (one even had Zero Population Growth for a name). It seems elementary that the greater the human population, the greater the human burden on the planet, particularly when every Chinaman wants a car. Yet the present-day envrronmental movements are conspicuously silent on this point, probably because population growth is occurring mostly in Arabic and African countries–calls to curb that population growth would be considered racist.

    • It’s like banning plastic straws and cocktail swords. The overwhelming majority of ocean plastic comes from Asia and India. I love to point this out to the local do-gooders and have them argue with me that it’s not true because to acknowledge it would diminish their virtuous efforts to save the planet. They’re mainly concerned with virtue-signaling their peers regardless of the pointlessness of it all. They’re focused on haranguing you and me, not the Chinese who would laugh and tell them to fuck off.

      • I was called racist for pointing out that 8-0-90% of ocans’ plastics come from Asia.Facts can be racist nowadays.

        • The word ‘racist’ now has a Tourrette’s-like quality that causes it to reflexively burst out from Lefty when his brain stem feeds him a negative emotion from having encountered something objectionable.

    • Immigration is another major factor that does damage to the environment, for pretty obvious reasons. When someone with a subsistence level life in a favela or shantytown comes to America, their carbon footprint goes through the roof. If you go back in time you can find the Sierra Club actually talking about immigration’s negative effects on the environment. Billionaire David Gelbaum greased the skids with the Sierra club and shut them up with a big pile of “green philanthropy.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Gelbaum

      • I remember that fight between the Sierra Club and a bunch of outsider Lefties who hijacked the the SC to shut them up on the illegal immigration debate in CA at the time.

        You know it’s really something, most of the super rich support open borders and the resultant ecological destruction of North America. These f**kers are really some sick SOB’s who need to neutered to protect the West.

        • Re: the Sierra Club, the guy who was responsible was named Horowitz. He offered them $100 million to never mention population pressure or immigration ever again. They took the money and purged the dissidents.

          • There was a decade or so of internal struggle between a faction of the Sierra Club that was pro-immigration, and those that actually cared about the environment. The donation of Wall Street financier Mr. Gelbaum, $100 million, the largest the Sierra Club had ever received, certainly had a role to play in deciding the issue:

            “Gelbaum told Times reporter Kenneth Weiss that his instructions to then-Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope were that “if they ever came out anti-immigration, they would never get a dollar from me.””

            Source:
            https://www.noozhawk.com/article/021712_joe_guzzardi_sierra_club

      • Immigration certainly screwed up my environment. I used to live on the west coast of Florida just south of Tampa. As a long-distance cyclist I would pedal south through a town called Ruskin, populated by 3rd generation crackers and known for its strawberry and tomato farms. Every year the transient migrant Mexican pickers would come, pick, and then move on. One year (probably because they managed to pool enough of their collective EBT benefits) they came and never left. The local business signs quickly all turned to Spanish. And to make the place feel more like home they imported a local custom of smashing beer and liquor bottles out of their car windows onto the pavement. As a cyclist it became impossible to pedal through Ruskin as I would flat literally every time, even with brand new kevlar-belted tires. It became so distracting I barely noticed the piles of trash and old car tires that seemed to spring up seemingly overnight. Why visit Mexico when it’s already come to you?

    • If Chad and Becky have 4 kids they’re wrecking the environment. But Jose and Maria pop out 4 little niños? Such a vibrant neighborhood!

    • The Sierra Club, whose membership consists mostly of leftist moral exhibitionists, has been missing in action on U.S. overpopulation — almost entirely a product of immigration. The organization folded when one of its big donors, (((David Gelbaum))), threatened that “if they ever came out anti-immigration, they would never get a dollar from me.”

      This batch of hypocrites has supported open borders ever since.

  39. I’ve always seen the “annoy you” aspect of environmentalism as an important part of the ritual. One of their goals is to always make you do something you don’t want to do. They’ve replaced lighting candles in church with the weekly sacrament of recycling. Even though all our recyclables (now that the Chinese won’t take any more) actually go into the same landfill with the rest of the trash, we’re still required to separate and wash it “to keep us in the habit” in case they ever find another place to send it to. The elites can have multiple huge homes, boats, etc. but after they fly to the latest enviro-conference on their private jet they still lecture us on how we’ve been living too well and we’re going to have to make do with less, for the good of the planet. The morons who run Sarasota Florida (where I’m from) actually bought solar-powered trash cans, at $1.000’s each, for their public parks so as to publicly demonstrate their piety.

      • I believe it is a compactor so the park trash guys don’t have to empty it as often. It should pay for itself in about 100 years, assuming it never breaks and the batteries and charging circuits don’t need replacing, despite the extreme heat and humidity of west central Florida. The same park has a “lightning detector” that sets off a siren if lightning is seen. If only lightning made some kind of sound or gave off some type of visual cue when present.

  40. They are appealing to our rulers, the state, but also to each other. It is the easiest virtue signaling position available, but more importantly, for the majority of white people who have no wish to dress up as or sleep with the opposite sex, it is the only option.

    In a world of identity politics and grievance mongering where being a so-called minority counts for more than anything, worshiping the great god of Gaia is the only route that stupid white people have. You will notice that there ain’t much diversity at all in the Gaia worshiper camp.

    • HMMM! You may want to reword that. I have never wished to dress up as the opposite sex; sleeping with them however…

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