Discussion > B*gger Godwin
Yes, what works in terms of turning a pejorative label to one's advantage depends on context in many subtle ways. I was reminded of one striking example by Charles Moore. Here's the Wikipedia version of the story:
On the evening of 4 July 1948, Aneurin Bevan, the Labour Government's Minister of Health, addressed the annual Labour rally for the North of England at Belle Vue, Manchester, and described Conservatives as 'lower than vermin'. This was at a point when Conservative fortunes were starting to turn and Bevan's Labour Party was facing disillusionment and division. Young Tories took on the description with ironic self-deprecation and set up the Vermin Club.Members took to wearing 'vermin' badges - a chrome badge featuring a rat and the word VERMIN. A whole hierarchy was established, so that those who recruited ten new party members wore badges identifying them as 'vile vermin'; those who recruited twenty were 'very vile vermin'. Margaret Thatcher, a Vermin Club member, described a Chief Rat, who lived somewhere in Twickenham.
That seemed to work for them. But note some crucial characteristics. Bevan only used 'vermin' once, highly controversially, and only he used it. That's very different from 'denier' today. Young Tories of the time adopted it with gusto but one can imagine more dignified ones didn't feel quite so keen to do so. Most importantly, 'vermin' didn't carry the connotation 'denier' does today of holocaust denial (though it's strange indeed to my ears that Bevan was prepared to echo Nazi propaganda against the Jews so closely just three years after they'd finally been defeated and the Holocaust revealed).
If we were en masse to say "Yes, we are deniers and proud of it" we would be in grave danger of being heard by many to say "Just like holocaust deniers." Lindzen and Solomon can and do get away with their form of derision as individuals, with clear explanations of what they mean, not least because they're Jewish. But I don't think this one can ever work as the Vermin Club did. We're well past that stage. This is not a one-off insult but a pervasive smear. 'Nigger' remains the more accurate parallel.
as they realise if debaters have to resort to such pre-framing then they can't have much of an argument.
You can say that again. In fact, we should all say that again, many times. Disgusting epithet turned fatal boomerang. One doesn't need an advanced understanding of principal component analysis or uninformative priors to get this message. For many it's all they are going to need.
Richard Drake
not least because they're Jewish.
Yes. Denise Lasalle is black.
Martin A
So the comeback to someone using "denier" in a public platform (not blog)
is "that is just used as a smear word like the word nigger,
so likewise it reflects on the user"
stewgreen
Skiphil: you quote Ellen Goodman as saying "that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future". But Clive Hamilton, "an Australian public intellectual" and "supporter of internet censorship", believes that climate deniers are potentially morally worse than Holocaust deniers:
Instead of dishonouring the deaths of six million in the past, climate deniers risk the lives of hundreds of millions in the future. Holocaust deniers are not responsible for the Holocaust, but climate deniers, if they were to succeed, would share responsibility for the enormous suffering caused by global warming.It is a ghastly calculus, yet it is worth making because the hundreds of millions of dead are not abstractions, mere chimera until they happen. We know with a high degree of certainty that if we do nothing they will die.
He goes on to say that
climate deniers are less immoral than Holocaust deniers, although they are undoubtedly more dangerous.His article (dated 2009) is worth reading.However, as the casualties from a warming world mount over the next decades, the denialism of those who continue to reject the scientific evidence will come to be seen as more and more iniquitous. So the answer to the question of whether climate denialism is morally worse than Holocaust denialism is no, at least, not yet.
Robin Guenier
'denier'='climate nigger', that's the way this derogatory loaded term is used is to frame the debate.
- Are we suggesting we should we could take ownership of the label "climate nigger" ?
stewgreen
no ownwership - just reject it
as just political rhetoric to shut somebody down/out ( the linkages is almost irrelevant) this intent is the real issue
Barry Woods
Barry, sometimes rejecting the term overtakes any other argument under debate. You can't tell people you're not a denier, you can only demonstrate it. Originally warmists considered the term sceptic an insult until we adopted it. Then they realised they'd handed us the scientific high ground.
I’ve not said it’s wrong to object to 'denier' or even point out that it’s an attempt to smear us with Holocaust denial but trying to make a link between how blacks and Jews were marginalized as a precursor and stimulator to being brutalised, is wrong. There is a link but only in so far as it’s standard technique for how one group of people tries to diminish another. You see it everywhere, from the play ground to the boardroom. Sceptics do it too, we’ve just got a different arsenal. Yes, it could escalate into something else. The Bengtsson thing shows that the name calling can morph into more sinister behaviour, but so far it’s only amongst a small group of core warmists.
TinyCO2
Robin Guenier, if CAGW was real, if the evidence for it was any good and if climate sceptics were the barrier to action on CO2 then Clive Hamilton would be right. But that's a lot of ifs. When it comes to sceptics, warmists are... in denial.
TinyCO2
Quite so, Tiny. And especially, in my view, the commonly held view that sceptics are the barrier to action. It's not unconnected with the view that, if - for example - the RSPB puts a few windmills on its land, it's somehow saving birds from the (alleged) devastation of GW and that therefore the death of a few birds is acceptable. It seems many people truly believe this nonsense: what better example of denial?
Robin Guenier
TinyCO2:
Barry, sometimes rejecting the term overtakes any other argument under debate.
A very important point, if I understand the writer correctly.
It wouldn't be the first time in the climate debate. Much worse for me is when intricate, sometimes ignorant interactions about little-understood aspects of greenhouse theory completely displace Robin Guenier's vital arguments about climate policy. That happens again and again and again.
I'm more relaxed about the same kind of thing happening over 'denial' because, as I've made clear, I think that if we get our act together on this issue we can hole the SS CAGW below the waterline, exactly the other end (moral high ground) from the Guenier torpedo (complete realism). And all this can happen while accepting the warming effect of CO2 based on an intelligent explanation of a radiative-convective greenhouse. I'd only be concerned if a greater focus on 'denier' detracted from Robin's argument. But I don't think it will. As he's begun to show his line just shows how stupid 'denier' is.
However, and I assume Tiny was partly driving at this, introduction of the Holocaust into any debate - something which wasn't the choice of sceptics in the climate case, it's worth remembering - does tend to absolutise as well as stigmatise. Put simply, it tends to shut down debate. I wonder why CAGW advocates introduced it.
On a personal note, I have hated 'denier' and the holocaust denier allusion, from the first time I picked it up, with a passion. Please hear the next part particularly carefully. 90% of my disgust is about the fact that anyone using this rhetorical device clearly doesn't give a damn about the real victims of the Holocaust. 10% is about its incredibly harmful effect on decent, intelligent public debate of climate, science and policy.
That's why I so resent the idea that I am in any way trying to insinuate that we sceptics are victims on the same level as those that were tortured and killed in the real thing. No, we are the ones that care about those victims so much that we cannot stand for language to be abused in this way.
Think difference between a gang rape of a woman as a premeditated part of intimidating a whole people and comforting one who has endured tragedy of that kind. Use of 'denier' is like the first, our response is like the second. That may give a more accurate idea of how I feel about this issue. But the point about absolutising of course applies to this paragraph too.
Richard Drake
if the term is used.... you rapidly find you are excluded from the debate!
which is, of course the intent of the person using it.
Barry Woods
@Barry, yep agree.
Skeptics can't claim the sae pain as holocausr victims,
But the denier term is successfuln at excluding us from pubic debate.
So I think the "climate-nigger" analogy is a good one.
..greens are saying "let's run those 'deniers' out of town (out of the debate)"
.. It's a marginalise/delegitimise opponents tactics.
stewgreen
Some perspective.
At a university-hospital parking lot in the southern United States there is, or was, one particularly zealous parking warden. You know, the sort that like to hide behind trees and jump out to book people as they are walking away to help someone in a wheel chair.
I used to chuckle at my supervisor's German wife who regularly referred to this person as "the parking nazi".
One day I was walking towards his usual locus of activity when a very dark-skinned local family passed me in the other direction, muttering about "the parking nigger". It made my day.
[Actually, it was not the first time I've heard the word used in similar such circumstances in the USA.]
michael hart
"the denier term is successfuln at excluding us from pubic debate" - (stewgreen)
Perhaps. But not when the public debate is about the the pointlessness of the UK's costly, inefficient and dangerous energy policy when the developing economies (+ Canada, Australia, Japan and Russia) have no intention of curbing their emissions.
Robin Guenier
I concur absolutely with Richard Drake's 90/10 abhorrence of the term - very well expressed.
But at the same time I do feel that there are "pause deniers" out there. Get that expression used just once in the MSM, and you never know - it might start to redress the balance.
Ugly tactics, but this is essentially a propaganda war, and I'm not sure the voices of reason are winning.
Richard Brown
Richard Brown: Thank you. FWIW I think "pause deniers" is good, not bad or ugly. Nobody on the sceptic side has ever made the analogy between our opponents and holocaust deniers. We are completely entitled to allude to their use of denier in a sarcastic way. All good.
Richard Drake
Use of words depend on context. Among each other you maybe could embrace the word 'denier'
But beginning a debate on the BBC with it, then it has the same force of 'liar" or 'b'stard' to the impressionable minds like children or arts graduates, so it should not be accepted.
"Now Mr 'Wife Beater' lets talk about domestic violence."
- Actually I do think it's use on the BBC etc and politicians actually turns the public against them
.. as they realise if debaters have to resort to such pre-framing then they can't have much of an argument.