33 Replies to “Hide The Decline: From The People Who Brought You Enron”

  1. “The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism.” -Karl Marx
    “Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, the ugly ones included.” -Karl Marx
    http://thinkexist.com/quotes/Karl_Marx/
    Can someone more scholarly than me confirm these?

  2. Love the trippy music – who are the musicians…anyone recognize the score? The voice certainly adds a cosmic dimension – destined as a intermission interlude for the Space channel. Would be a highly suitable video to play at a Rave…I can see it in my minds eye now – Rave against Gore. Peace out.

  3. Can someone more scholarly than me confirm these?
    Sure .
    “AGW is a crock of shit .”
    Stuff Jefferson Said , Volume 3 .

  4. Who cares, PiperPaul? Karl was the dumb Marx brother.
    “I rest my case! And a good thing too, it was getting heavy.” Groucho Marx.
    I must say I agree with the video. Anybody who ever gave a damn about the actual -environment- was kicked out of the Environmental Movement more than 20 years ago.

  5. Interesting, but wayyy too long. I was just about to click it off as I thought it was warmist propaganda which is good because it means it will appeal to the gaia worshippers but it won’t be watched by people like me who would much rather have a transcript of the voiceover which can be read in 15 seconds.
    Then again, maybe the pothead gaia types will watch it and be transfixed by the neat pictures for the whole 5:22. Having tried to recruit cannabis activists in common cause with firearms owners (both of us having a common cause in enjoying an activity that the state has made arbitrarily illegal) I find it very frustrating to communicate with them. OTOH, these muddled young activist types have a strong dislike of corporatism and authority and by pointing out the linkages of carbon trading with transnational banks and the very rich, it might be enough to start some doubt which will hopefully result in a massive swing away from this attempted financial swindle.
    This has made me think about how we convert people and we’re not going to do it by attacking their religion. There seems to be a recurrent need for young people to espouse environmentalist causes for a time and what we’re seeing today is similar to the German wandervogel. Such groups are prime targets for being hijacked into other causes which is what happened when Hitler used the wandervogel for his purposes. Rational argument won’t work here, but pointing out corporate links to the “green” movement will be much more effective. Most people (except for the irreperably brainwashed) don’t like the realization that they’re someone’s usefull idiot.

  6. The cyborg narator was vewey convincing – perhaps if they had shown him with a hand held gatling gun spewing tracer bullets and stepping on human denier skulls as it strode thru a post apocalyptic fried scene in LA carrying a polar bear piggyback it would have been even better. Way better.

  7. hey Kate, here’s a nice juxtaposition for you:
    July 14th 2008: “Dion’s carbon tax is not an environment policy. It is just a wealth redistribution program disguised as an environment policy,” Harper told the crowd. “The Green Shift is a green shaft and we must never let it happen to our country.”
    Dion’s proposal would slap a levy on greenhouse gas emissions and return the roughly $15 billion in revenue via tax cuts.
    http://tinyurl.com/ydvfgou
    December 4th, 2009: “We are talking about a cap-and-trade system, a continental cap-and-trade system that involves absolute emission reductions, not intensity targets,” said Prentice in response to a question from Bloc Quebecois MP Bernard Bigras. “Essentially, there would be caps established for each industry, for each source of emissions.
    “Those provinces, those industries that have moved more quickly, will be in a preferable position to achieve their objectives [and they] will be in a preferable position to sell offsets and allowances,” Prentice said. “Those who have not taken action will essentially be punished in the marketplace, because they will be required to buy allowances from others.”
    http://tinyurl.com/y9ezd74

  8. “Play this video at a Rave…”
    …..the trippy music is Angel by Massive Attack – great song!!
    The message in this video is spot on. What side of History do you want to be on??

  9. …iirc this is a ‘modified’ version of an original recent video by ‘the Corbett Report’ i’ve seen on youtube.

  11. I have been thinking something somewhat related to this and I was wondering if anyone could help me find out more information …
    Cap-n-trade schemes necessarily increase the cost of energy usage but they don’t increase revenues to energy producers, and this additional money is most likely going to be consumed by individuals or companies who manipulate the carbon market for profit; and the most likely profiteers are the large banks like Goldman Sachs. Now, I could be wrong but I suspect that most of these large banks that will profit from Cap-n-Trade likely realized early on the potential benefits of this scheme, and started heavily funding environmental organizations, climate-research and politicians to ensure that it was adopted.
    The information I am wondering if anyone knows where to look is the paper trail that would be generated in giving to these “Charities”, funding the “research”, and paying-off politicians.

  12. loki, why is it that Hitler’s invasion of Poland is commonly considered the beginning of WW2 (in virtually all TV documentaries I’ve seen) but it’s never mentioned that the Soviet Union also invaded Poland 16 days later?
    Maybe I’ve been watching the wrong documentaries.

  13. I think the You Tube clip is stupid and states the case poorly. Worse, the doom-like voice is distracting and almost comedic. And the ending with all that water flowing uphill!!! I know what it’s supposed to represent but it comes across as just plain dumb.
    The skeptic’s case against the fraudulent AGW religion is a good one but it should be portrayed in a manner better than this You Tube crap which is just a waste of time. It will convince no one of anything except how NOT to waste effort.

  14. BCer
    humans are egocentric by nature, and you are demonstrating this very fact by using your assessment, of this video, as a metric, it’s not meant for those of us who are already convinced, it’s for SOME on the other side. And I personally can’t relate to them, can you???

  15. Cantor Fitzgerald had the original carbon trading market. Although I haven’t been there for awhile you may find info on their interweb page

  18. Wow — here is an interesting comment from the UK site that Kate linked to under “Breaking” — anyone ever heard this before re global warming CO2 and second law of thermodynamics?
    “What is going to be most interesting is the paper by Gerlich & Tscheuschner which, as far as I can tell, is currently in the review phase. If you put complete trust in peer review and this paper gets throught then all hell will break loose since it purports to prove through purely theoretical considerations that global warming by CO2 is not compatible with the second law of thermodynamics. We shall see.”

  19. I was impressed by the video because it is a call for those on the Left to come in from the cold.
    I’ve watched for years as the Left built this huge idol to the idea of Global Warming and castigated anyone who didn’t see the beauty of their idol and worship it.
    Nobody wants to have to say they were so wrong as the CRU leak has shown those on the Left to be.
    Rather, the message of this video gives them an out.
    The message here isn’t so much that many on the Left were so wrong, it’s that they were conned.
    The message of the video tells them their heart was in the right place, but the whole Global Warming issue was a big con job and it’s OK to come out against Global Warming.
    It saves them their dignity and self worth, showing them they can come over to our side of the issue against a common enemy of a totalitarian cabal who has attempted to con the world in the name of environmental concern.

  20. Loki: “These muddled young activist types have a strong dislike of corporatism and authority. By pointing out the linkages of carbon trading with transnational banks and the very rich, it might be enough to start some doubt which will hopefully result in a massive swing away from this attempted financial swindle.”
    Albeit it would be too much to hope for a massive swing, I agree. $87b has been spent annually on those who are willing to agree with the AGW theory and then find evidence for it. What are the odds that such funding won’t find people who’ll “find” evidence? Furthermore, it’s not at all clear that “big business” – as opposed to the taxpayers – is actually opposed to massive “green” expenditure, inasmuch as many big businesses are actually the most well-positioned to benefit from such an unprecedentedly huge money transfer. The bottom line is that when potentially trillions of dollars are set to be doled out, at taxpayer expense, based entirely – as we now realize – on support for a certain scientific “theory,” that’s big business. If big money is corrupt, then that amount of money pretty much guarantees corruption – as opposed to, say, natural justice.
    A report on last night’s National, nominally on the matter of the Hadley emails, was really just a thinly-veiled pre-emptive propaganda shot suggesting that Big Money – big oil – is behind the criticism of the Hadley emails. The report opened with a shot of the Himalayan mountains, and these words: “There’s no debate for those who live at the pointy end of global warming. This is the Nepalese cabinet, meeting at Mr. Everest where they see glaciers melting at an alarming rate.” Next, footage of some men signing documents *underwater*: “And what about sea level rises? The cabinet of the Maldives went to great depths to demonstrate their very existence is threatened. They blame human activity for worsening their lot; ‘Climategate’ isn’t an issue.”
    Aerial shot of a Saudi city: “But (Climategate) IS (an issue) elsewhere. The climate negotiator for oil-rich Saudi Arabia now says it will have a huge impact on the Copenhagen talks. Perhaps the dodgy emails were just the excuse some countries were waiting for.” The University of London’s Philip Stott: “The leaked emails are simply giving an extra line of evidence to those countries which want for political reasons to delay any agreements over what to do about global warming.” Reporter: “And there are more than a few of those.” Stott: “And there are more than we imagine.”
    CBC reporter: “Vancouver’s Jim Hogan wrote a book tracing the funding of some climate sceptic movements, and maintains the oil, gas and coal industries drive much of it.” Hogan: “They’ve also been the ones behind what we call a confusion campaign that’s been going on, attacking climate skeptics across the United States and in Canada and in Europe over the past two decades.”
    Think about that last bit of CBC-promoted, utterly specious crap. Did oil, gas, and coal industries write those emails? Did the oil, gas, and coal industries, or “Big Business”, alter/corrupt/delete data, or try to get legitimate scientists blacklisted for expressing their own considered scientific opinions in legitimate journals? Is retired mathematician Steve McIntyre, or bloggers like Kate, or the untold thousands of programmers who’ve been poring over the corrupt data and finding evidence of bald scientific malfeasance, secretly in the employ of Big Business?
    If money and funding really steers the public debate, let’s at least pause to consider what the $87b a year that’s seeking out those who “find” certain evidence can do to the public definition of “evidence.”

  21. Linda;
    A description of the Gerlich & Tscheuschner for the layman is found at the American Thinker.
    http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/11/politics_and_greenhouse_gasses.html
    “The point discussed here was to answer the question, whether the supposed atmospheric effect has a physical basis. This is not the case. In summary, there is no atmospheric greenhouse effect, in particular CO2-greenhouse effect, in theoretical physics and engineering thermodynamics. Thus it is illegitimate to deduce predictions which provide a consulting solution for economics and intergovernmental policy.”

  22. EBD @ 12:30 AM. Thanks for well-written words, especially the “textualizing” of visual images that we see every day.
    I figure that a lot of the climate change “scientists” should be re-tasked (“re-educated”, and, no, the irony of that term is not lost on me) to learn about the psychology of manipulation. They’d have to learn and teach about how mass media can easily influence viewers/readers by omission, selective endorsement of stories/opinions, celebrity myopia, fancy easy-to-manipulate moving graphics and flat-out contempt for those they claim to represent.
    Wouldn’t that be somehow appropriate?

  23. PiperPaul: my initial impression was that your question was so far OT that I didn’t want to incur Kate’s wrath by answering it, but after further consideration, it is of relevance although somewhat peripherally.
    In short, the reason why we’ve never heard about the soviet invasion of Poland is because the winners of a war get to write the history books. Having parents that were on the “wrong” side of WWII, I experienced strong cognitive dissonance from a young age when I read the “official” history of WWII as promulgated in my elementary school textbooks which was at complete variance with what I heard from my parents. I’ve found some of my history textbooks where I’ve annotated passages with things like “blatent apologism for British imperialism” and “total lies”. Winston Churchill, in my parents outlook, was one of the greatest war criminals who should have been hanged with the others. The other thing that we hear little about is the million or more Russian and Ukrainian soldiers who were fighting on the Axis side and, in 1945, were handed over by Churchill to the Russians where most died in gulags.
    The only reason that I’m here to write this is because my father decided to attend university in Zagreb in the summer of 1939 and survived the 5 years he spent in a commie concentration camp when Tito’s partisans came to power in 1945. Prior to this he lived in Polish occupied Ukraine and there was no damn way he was going to fight on the side of the Polish occupiers. Most of his brothers died when the USSR invaded Poland and western Ukraine has now been reunited with the remainder of Ukraine where it belongs.
    This is probably why I question everything and have always been aware of the web of deception that statists use to control their populations. In my teenage years I was an anarchist psychonaut and then drifted towards Libertarianism and learned how to pretend I was “normal” when I got accepted into medical school.
    Just as the manifold similarities between the Stalinist USSR and Hitler’s Reich are airbrushed out of the history books, so too is the truth about AGW hidden. Unfortunately this form of selective presentation of the truth is the norm in human societies. The vast majority of people are prepared to believe what they are told by an authority figure even if it contradicts their own sensory perceptions. This is how totalitarians find it so easy to come to power.
    Another aspect of history which is deleted from high school textbooks is the purely democratic process by which Hitler assumed power in Germany. If people are made aware of how easy it is to exploit innate wetware obedience routines then coercive governments all around the world would no longer be able to oppress their populations. Official histories attribute the Reichstag fire to the Nazi’s whereas in truth Marinus Van der Lubbe acted alone and this was too good an opportunity for the Nazi’s to pass up to rush through their equivalent of anti-terrorist legislation with the full approval of the German populace.
    We have our own equivalent of the Reichstag fire and that is the destruction of the WTC. Again, this was far too good an opportunity for totalitarian politicians to ignore and with barely a murmur of discontent we have a legal framework in place just waiting for another Hitler to exploit. The main reason I detest GWB is because of his assault on the US constitution in his anti-terrorist legislation. I think GWB is an honorable man but very short sighted. He was acutely aware of the islamist threat, but being an elitist had no trust in the common man. He personlly did not abuse his anti-terrorist powers, but left the legal apparatus in place for a totalitarian like BO who has no scruples to create a clone of the third Reich in the USA.
    Unfortunately, the proportion of individuals in the population who have the stick it up your ass response to authority that I do likely represent 5% or less of the population. This was graphically demonstrated to me in October of 1970 when out of a class of 35 people only myself and another student were opposed to the imposition of the war measures act. I was the only one in class who ranted about trudeau’s dictatorial actions and how we should all oppose it. I couldn’t believe that only one person in the class supported me. The Calgary police made full use of the war measures act powers to round up drug users but ignored some friends of mine that decided to march through downtown Calgary carrying FLQ banners in defiance of the war measures act. Hey, if trudeau can ride a motorcycle during WWII dressed as a German soldier, why not pretend you’re supporting the FLQ to let trudeau know what you think of his dictatorial ambitions.
    A significant proportion of the people who frequent SDA are in that 5% of people whose natural inclination is a FY response to authority. I’ve been told, usually by uber-conventional don’t rock the boat types, that a society comprised entirely of people like I was at the age of 20 would not function. My response to them is to do an experiment where one puts 50-100 thousand libertarians into the same town and watches to see what happens. The free state project in the US is an attempt to do this but I think they’re only up to about 7000 people participating now.
    With regard to AGW, we’re up against conventional “wisdom” which is damn hard to fight. Most people don’t like to think but unquestionably accept what they’re told. The reason for this is that evolution has selected for people who react quicly in dangerous situations; if you’re in a crowded bar and someone yells “fire” you’re much more likely to survive if you’re one of the first people out the door. That’s assuming there actually is a fire. Totalitarians know very well how to make use of peoples innate wetware survival routines for their own purposes. When people are doing the metaphorical equivalent of running out of a burning building it is hard to get them to question whether they should be running in the first place. That is what the warmists are doing now as we get closer to Copenhagen with their increasingly dire disaster scenarious in an imaginary world headed for thermal runaway as a result of fossil fuel use.
    What we have in our favor is that people don’t like to be conned and the usual response when someone finds out that they’ve had their hardwired wetware routines hijacked for an ulterior motive is rage. That’s why I think this you tube video is a good idea (assuming it will get through to the modern wandervogel types) as we might see a complete reversal in the opinion of counterculture AGW supporters who realize they’re the tools of corporate interests.

  24. Speaking of scholarly, the utube on the plastic coffins stashed near Atlanta’s airport sounds like a really, really scholarly effort on the part of some paranoid good ole boys.

  25. Oz notes, regarding “environmentalists”:
    It saves them their dignity and self worth, showing them they can come over to our side of the issue against a common enemy of a totalitarian cabal who has attempted to con the world in the name of environmental concern.
    Exactly; as I noted in a previous post people hate being conned.
    The other approach is to question these people about their beliefs. If it is done the right way one can instill considerable doubts. During my anarchist/environmentalist teenage years I was in a protest carrying a sign in front of the US embassy in Ottawa protesting a planned nuclear test in Amchitka. Those of us who were protesting knew that if the test was carried out this would start an earthquake which would devastate the west coast. (Hey, just read PJ O’Rourke to find out the weird beliefs one can have at that age).
    A group of us were approached by a man who started asking questions about why we were protesting. We ended up going to a restaurant where this conventionally dressed “old” guy bought 3 scruffy hippies a meal and handed out cigars later as we talked (back in the good old days when smoking cigars in restaurants was the norm). What struck me is that I couldn’t answer any of his questions. What seemed self-evident to me when I was heading to the protest suddenly didn’t make any sense when I was asked to explain it. I was forced to admit that this sceptic was right and I might have been wrong. My two companions weren’t convinced but they also couldn’t come up with any reasonable objection to his points and resorted to irrelevent answers. IIRC my main argument at the end was that the money being spent on nuclear weapons was a total waste and should instead be put towards establishing a human presence in space and that the nukes should be used to power Orion type spacecraft instead of being aimed at cities. That was the last “environmental” protest that I participated in.
    I used a similar tactic in the 1980’s when the Vancouver disarmament movement was protesting the 1980’s equivalent of incipient global thermal runaway and massive crowds used to block the Burrard street bridge every year to protest the mere existance of nuclear weapons. At a party I started talking to a leftist female who was fully involved in this movement and she went on in great detail about the dangers of nuclear weapons and how they should be all destroyed, etc. I then asked her how she proposed to deal with the threat of near earth asteroids and gave her a quick summary of the dangers faced by the earth from large rocks whizzing by like the on that wiped out the dinosaurs. She had never heard of this or considered this threat and suddenly faced the prospect that if her kind were successful in eliminating nuclear weapons they would leave the earth defenceless against a big rock that could potentially do far more ecologic damage than a nuclear exchange between the US and USSR.
    At no point did I ever attack her position on nukes but just asked a question about a matter that she had never concieved of that probably caused severe cognitive dissonence and most likely changed her mind about what she believed. My experience has been that just asking people to explain things can often cause considerable doubt. Most people obtain their information from trusted authority figures; SDA regulars know that Suzuki is a moronic charlatan but there are people who see him as sitting on the right hand of God.
    Attacking Suzuki is the surest way of tuning these people out so don’t question their beliefs, just ask them detailed questions about some of the things they’re proposing. By doing this in a non-threatening manner many people will quickly start to doubt what they believe if they can’t answer a simple question that is outside of their comfort zone. They can regurgitate canned answers based on what they’re “environmentalist” gurus have told them, but usually have great difficulty when the question is not something they can give a canned answer to.
    My experience is that the threat of near-earth asteroids is an excellent curve ball to throw in such discussions as the vast majority of people have never heard of this threat let alone thought about it much. It helps to have the kinetic energy of a 1 km diameter asteroid plowing into the earth at 20 km/sec memorized (left as an exercise for the reader assuming a density of 3 gm /cm^3) in both joules and Mt equivalents.
    Nothing destroys the fantasy of a rural simplistic non-technologic lifestyle desired by these people (or at least they think they want it with the majority of these people having spent little or no time in actual wilderness or rural living) faster than the unexpected arrival of a dinosaur killer asteroid. One can also talk of solar variability and the geologic history of ice-ages and mention that the place we’re discussing this happened to be under 1.5 km of ice a mere 18000 years ago. These people talk a lot about ensuring the future of their grandchildren and questions about whether they think their grandchildren would appreciate their actions more if they were living shivering in animal skins fleeing approaching glaciers or comfortably in a space habitat watching the reglaciation of the earth from thousands of miles above are appropriate.
    When it comes to “renewable” energy ask them why wind power was abandoned in the 1800’s. Ask them about energy density of various means of producing electricity, effects of land use of various energy production schemes and effect of windmills on bird populations. Ask them about what one does during the night if solar energy is the only option available and the environmental cost of every person having a large batery backup system in their home for evening use.
    People are particulary ignorant about radioactivity and I point out that cancer rates are lower in Denver than at sea level and that nuclear plant workers have lower rates of cancer than the general population. It doesn’t hurt to throw in data about levels of radiation that were present hundreds of millions of years ago and the ubiquitous presence of DNA repair enzymes that evolved specifically to deal with this problem. Knowing a bit about radiation hormesis also helps as too little environmental radiation increases ones risk of getting cancer. Virtually no environmentalist knows that potassium 40 is radioactive and the body burden of radioactive exposure one gets from eating plants which are high in potassium.
    I’ve gotten lots of experience as a doctor in being non-judgmental when I try to convince people who are terrified of radiation that they need a chest xray (especially if they’ve recently done a trans-pacific flight) or convincing the pharmacophobes to take a drug they need for their particular disease. I can’t believe how easy it is now to convince people that come into my exam room telling me there is absolutely no way that they are going to try anything except the “natural” route to treat their disease and 15 minutes later walking out with a drug prescription which they will fill and take.
    EBD, I agree we won’t get a massive swing in thinking, but, based on personal experience, a 33% conversion rate isn’t bad. I’ve often wondered who the guy was in Ottawa who took 3 hippies out for a meal after an anti-nuclear demonstration and convinced one of them that he was on the wrong path.

  27. Dear Loki
    What you say makes good sense and might work. But here’s a great quotation from Jonathan Swift to think about
    “It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into”
    But the “conventionally dressed ‘old’ guy(‘s)” approach of patient questioning sounds worth trying.
    I’ll have to try it (But patience is the problem!)

  28. Loki,
    maybe the pothead gaia types will watch it and be transfixed by the neat pictures for the whole 5:22.
    That is precisely why it is such an excellent piece of propaganda; a classic I would say. It is directed directly at the believers, not the skeptics like you and me.
    It appeals to the youthful socialist idealism found in most greenshirts; it sympathizes with them for the breaking of their dreamful hope-world.
    I’d like to know who did it. It may be an appeal, a rallying cry, to the deep-green.

  30. @ loki,
    Like you I also learned to “hide” my inner libertarian beliefs in order to get into medical school. I have watched with bemusement and sometimes cringed as our Canadian medical association made pronouncements on my behalf that I was complete odds with.
    I have come to realize that while there are a few in our profession who idealize and even hope to live for the glory days of the Red Revolution, most don’t care, and there are many of us with libertarian and classical liberal ideals (commonly conservative in today’s politcal definitions).
    It’s almost humorous to think that there is possibly a silent majority of us out there who told the elites what they wanted to hear, in order to get into medicine. I still remember my interview – one of the community committee members was an old NDPer – and she was the easiest to fool because it was so easy to know what to say.
    Heck we might even now be working side by side…

  31. Great comment, Loki 2:47.
    I think this could sway some “food bank” socialists that really do want to improve people’s lives.
    “It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into”
    ~Patrick Armstrong
    True, but the short route is to show them they’ve been conned into the thing, that their movement was “hijacked” as the video puts it, and as loki says the universal gut reaction to one’s realization that they’ve been conned is rage against the con man.
    Nobody likes to wake up to the notion that they’ve been treated like a lemming to be stampeded over a cliff.

  32. Well, for what it’s worth, every history of the Second World War that I’ve ever read (no, I haven’t read all of them) goes into the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the partition of Poland in some detail. It was the German invasion of Poland that atually prompted Britain and Canada to declare war on Germany; neither power ever went to war against the Soviets, and vice versa. (Churchill was quite willing to take on the Russians, but over Finland, not Poland; and he wasn’t yet calling the shots.) So if you’re talking about the war from the Canadian point of view, as most popular and especially television accounts would do, it’s not really part of the story.
    I do agree with you that the odious history of the Soviet Union is not given enough exposure, but the fact is, you can’t cover every topic at once, and this one is entirely peripheral to the story of Canada’s war, which is the story most people want to focus on.

  33. Langman, I agree that there are a lot of doctors around who have classical liberal views but I am mystified why they are not more open about their politics. I suspect in many cases the persona they tried out to get them into med school has become their real persona now. I’ve also had some doctors tell me that if we want to keep the autonomy we have now we need to keep a low profile and not let it be known that a lot of us were whacked out hippies in the 1970’s.
    I’ve brought up the idea of starting a libertarian physicians group in the BCMA and no-one has gone along with it thus far. It seems that being a physician and espousing radical crackpot environmental causes if fine but the medical profession isn’t ready for libertarianism now.
    One of the things I learned when I finally did get into medical school was that one could obtain information about a person’s emotional state by watching their face and body motions! This was a major revelation at the time as prior to this I had assumed that what people said was what they were thinking – I did (which often got me into trouble) but this concept of someone having 2 separate streams of dialog expressed in different ways was fascinating. When I told a psychiatry prof this when I was a medical student his look was one of horror and he mumbled something about my being a very high functioning Aspergers and that maybe I should consider pathology or radiology.
    The other thing I learned at this time was that it was possible to manipulate ones facial muscles and involuntary body movements in ways that they weren’t used to being used; ie I discovered acting. My first practice interviews were videotaped by my girlfriend and they are hilarious to watch now as I would talk to my shoe for a while, then the upper left corner of the room and parse questions idiosyncratically with the answers only making sense if one was talking to a computer (this was when I was doing fulltime programming and dealing with grad students who, while brilliant, had zero social skills).
    Creating a new doctor persona was fun, but I suspect that most medical students didn’t have to go through as elaborate a process as I did. When I was a medical student I found it very difficult to attend to both a person’s body language and what they were verbalizing as the novel concept of someone being able to express a completely different stream of dialog through involuntary movements of body muscles was still so unusual to me. After 20 years of practice I can do both at the same time.
    Now that I have a new window into people’s inner feelings, I use a few standard comments to trigger emotional responses which let me know where they stand on issues. Telling a doctor I think medicare should be abolished immediately tells me whether they believe in socialized medicine or not. Most doctors are too polite to tell me that they are totally opposed to what I’m saying and usually I get a response like “that is an interesting point of view”, but their facial reaction tells me that they are horrified that I would be thinking such thoughts. Other doctors will verbally defend medicare but their facial reactions tell me that they don’t believe a word of what they’re saying and have reflexively gotten into defending medicare because “it is the right thing to do”.
    There aren’t many libertarian doctors based on my casually bringing up, while in a discussion about some of our drugseeking patients, that perhaps it would be simpler to just have all opiates available without a prescription so we wouldn’t be dealing with patients lost prescriptions and wouldn’t have endless arguments with patients about why a months worth of narcotics seems to have been used in 2 weeks. It would be far simpler for us to deal with people that wanted help with their addictions that they had been entirely personally responsible for than us being part of the problem. The emotional response to this is almost universally negative but I have found a few closet libertarians this way.
    As far as influencing young “environmentalists” it’s not going to be through logic. The probability of changing someones mind as a result of them stumbling onto SDA and reading the reasoned arguments on the various threads is essentially zero. Their commitment to their cause is emotional. At the base of our political positions is an emotion that is non-rational; I’ve never wanted anyone to tell me what to do and libertarianism was the way I got socialized.
    That is why face to face discussions are the only way that peoples views are going to be changed. If someone has no idea how they appear emotionally to a person they’re arguing with, they’re not going to get anywhere. There is an emotional dialog going on at the same time which is absent from online discourse.
    I see this in medicine all of the time; I’ve had patients whose diagnoses were a mystery to other physicians often over a few years and I had absolutely no difficulty in one session obtaining a history of either hidden very heavy recreational drug use or bizarre sex. By not reacting negatively to a drug or sexual reference the patient is more willing to reveal more and when I think I’ve got their emotional communication figured out I’ll verbalize it and that usually results in them telling me everything I need to know. If you’re arguing with an environmentalist and being verbally neutral but emotionally hostile you’re not going to get anywhere. Try not to confuse someones viewpoint with the person. Young people hold lots of strange beliefs and these are usually transient. Having kept all of my writings over the last 45 years I find it very bizarre sometimes to see what I was thinking about certain issues in 1968.

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