Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Ethon gets a new Roger


Ethon was chewing over his livertarian flavored Roger, Bate, happy that he had a new chew toy which did not require a long commute, when, to his great surprise, who should show up but Martin Durkin, director of the Great Global Warming Swindle and several other confidence tricks, a real live Living Marxist. Ethon spit up. While livertarians have a somewhat plastic taste, it is hard to keep a Living Marxist down, better to microwave them, but oh my it is a rich stew, with Lydon Larouche, Roger Bate and Co. cooperating with the Revolting Communist Party types such as Martin Durkin, the Revolting Communist Party being a livertarian front group. Andy Rowell, a journalist found this out
Firstly that the Institute of Ideas (IOI) and Spiked collaborate with known climate sceptics such as Roger Bate and Julian Morris of the IPN. Their collaboration began in the late nineties when two key Living Marxism activists, Frank Furedi and Bill Durodie, started writing for the European Science and Environment Forum and Roger Bate, ESEF's founder, began writing for Living Marxism (the forerunner of Spiked and IOI).

Bate has also contributed to Spiked-Online, writing on issues such as DDT, GM[1] and depleted Uranium. The latter article by Bate is co-written with Professor Zbigniew Jaworowski,[2] who writes for 21st Century Science and Technology - the magazine of anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche, a scientist who believes that 'The Ice Age is Coming.'[3]
and an interview with George Monbiot
There are two reasons why I find it worrying. The first is that the agenda they pursue appears not to be pursued overtly. For example, when they ran the magazine Living Marxism it was very far from a Marxism journal - it was just about as far from a Marxist journal as you could possibly get. And it seemed to me that the title was a direct and deliberate attempt to distract attention from the fact that this was a far right wing libertarian publication which was using the terms of the left to make it look as if the positions it was taking were new and unusual ones. Whereas in actual fact they were very well trodden ones, but well trodden by people like the Libertarian Alliance who in theory were at the other end of the political spectrum.
*I have never heard of the Libertarian Alliance before.

George: Mad as a pile of buckets. But what Living Marxism did, I felt, was to give the impression that it was saying something new because it was dealing with the issues from a left perspective whereas it was very plainly dealing with them from a right perspective. And it was taking a line almost identical to that taken by right wing organizations - particularly some of the business come lobbyist organisations in the US, such as the Heritage Foundation, the CATO Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute - and so they were able to play very effectively on this semblance of left parties. People find it is very hard to believe that a magazine called Living Marxism would be a right wing magazine. And so they said ‘oh look - the left has come up with something new - really I think that maybe we should be following this line ourselves’. It led to a great deal of confusion really, including among some people I know.
A rich stew but hard to swallow.

13 comments:

  1. "Mad as a pile of buckets"?

    I love British idioms to bits.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Can it really be an idiom if only George Monbiot uses it?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Sounds suspiciously Australian to me. Something dreamt up by Barry Humphries (aka Dame Edna) when he was writing the Barry McKenzie comic strip for Private Eye, perhaps. Or something from Viz.

    Now, "daft as a brush", that's be British.

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  4. "But daft as a bush" is undeniably American.

    Q: When Bush says he is "clearing brush"* does that mean he is

    1) "clearing his throat"?

    2) "Clearing the cobwebs out of his (empty) head"?

    3) "Clearing the relatives from the Thanksgiving dinner table with a fart"?

    * as he is wan to do on his ranch every other month for a month and the only thing he seems to be competent at (Perhaps he learned that in Brush Clearing 101 at Yale -- or was it Harvard Business school? .... No, my mistake, that was "Advanced Brush Clearing")

    -- Hotatio Algeranon

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  5. What does Google say?

    Mad as a ...

    hatter 102,000
    hornet 14,700
    box of frogs 12,600
    wet hen 12,300
    brush 4,750
    balloon 2,630
    badger 2,220
    hare 2,020
    mongoose 942
    cut snake 684
    bag of snakes 648
    bag of spanners 472
    bag of badgers 456
    pile of buckets 1

    ReplyDelete
  6. I only know one bucket, and he's nearly 7 foot tall. Plus, since he is a re-enactor he is mad, but then so am I.

    Anyway, would you care to exploon* more about the purpose of this post? We all know that LM people are terminally confused anti-scientists detached from reality. (A sympathiser hangs out on the Badscience forum, and kept getting in to arguments over global warming. They mistook their values for scientific fact and kept trying to rubbish the IPCC et al since their conclusions disagreed with said sympathisers values. [their values are soemthing along hte line sof anything that restricts peoples freedom and development is evil, hence responding in any way to global warming is evil])


    * bonus points for those of you who think they know where I got the word from.

    ReplyDelete
  7. While you're stewing about purported libertarians like Roger, you might want to note that the David Evans seems to have decided to flog whatever publicity he can get from denialists over his bet and his supposed "belly of the beast" expose. See "I Was On the Global Warming Gravy Train" at libertarian Mises: http://www.mises.org/story/2571

    Marc Morano has pegged Evans as part of his "momentum shift" by "prominent scientists who have spoken out recently to oppose former Vice President Al Gore, the United Nations, and the media driven “consensus” on man-made global warming."
    http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=927b9303-802a-23ad-494b-dccb00b51a12&Region_id=&Issue_id=

    Morano also seems to have taken the liberty of pretending that HE was the one who posted Evan's guest post, not Brian Schmidt! http://www.pagescapes.com/news/200705/03/evans.phtml?p=1

    ReplyDelete
  8. "purported libertarians like Roger,"?

    Nothing purported about him. He is Libertarian through and through. He may give Libertarians a bad name, but it is in the nature of their ideology to give themselves a bad name.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Gentlemice, would you send a poor Rabett into the bellow of the beast? Poor Eli tweaks the milder and more litigious variety over at volokh. Would you that he puts his ears and carrots on the line?

    In other words Tom and Guthrie, is this your variety of let's you and him fight?? and is Eli you or him?

    ReplyDelete
  10. No need to attack them directly. If they happen to say something really stupid and wrong according to all known science, then by all means slag them off for it. Point out where they are wrong and ask that they rethink themselves.

    I suppose my main question was what you are on about Martin Durkin showing up on badscience, given the presence of ST, someone enamoured of the LM program and also the entity I mentioned earlier. They are barking enough to think that Deltoid is a hotbed of environmentalist alarmism, so what they think of our dear host is open to question.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Eli, not at all. You might notice that I'm already fighting this nonsense myself. It's just that I know you love Moron-o and bets, so thought you might be interested in a tasty tidbit that hadn't otherwise seem to have reached your attention.

    No presumption intended. Is there a quieter way?

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  12. Eli

    It is a completely true story. I think Private Eye blew the cover on these people (despite its scurrilous reputation, Private Eye prints what the journos write, that their mainstream employers will *not* print).

    http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Living_Marxism&oldid=124849333

    is the *old* entry in Wikipedia before 'editors' got to it.

    AFAIK everything in it is factually correct.

    ReplyDelete
  13. http://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/005199.html#005199

    has some further stuff. Read the comments:

    I went along to one of their events earlier this year. Good crowd, quite expensive, v. plush. How do they do it I wondered?

    Anyway, the point was that afterwards in the pub I tried asking them what it was they believed. Blank wall. I mean, complete blank wall.

    It has taken me years to realise and even then it still comes as a shock that when people don't answer the question it is usually because they are either lying or have something to hide.

    Posted by Patrick [] at December 13, 2003 09:23 PM

    ReplyDelete

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