Andrew L. Urban
Three climate activists were arrested and charged on Tuesday, March 5, 2024, after parking a large truck across three lanes of Melbourne’s busy West Gate Bridge, causing peak-hour traffic delays on day two of the ASEAN-Australia Special Summit.
The Extinction Rebellion Victoria activists sat on top of a truck they parked across Melbourne’s Westgate Bridge just before 8am, unfolded a large banner which read “climate breakdown has begun” and “declare a climate emergency.”
I live in Sydney so I wasn’t physically inconvenienced by the extinction of reason among those activists. But I was deeply agitated by it – as I am by all climate activist performances. It’s the stupidity, stupid.
First of all, in a country that is defenestrating itself out of windows of rationality, thanks to stupid climate change related policies such as Net Zero, making demands to do something about the horrors of climate change, is redundant to the point of stupidity.
Second, to harp on about a “climate emergency” that is simply a mantra not a reality, is made redundant by the UN’s Antonio Guterres’ earlier declaration that we are, actually, “in the era of global boiling”. “Climate emergency” is so old hat – and stupid.
More than 11,000 scientists have united to deliver a grim warning about our future on earth unless drastic action is taken.
Third, most climate desperates such as those three men and a truck on the West Gate Bridge, are pathetically uninformed, suggesting by their actions that they believe Australia could do something (more than it already, sadly, does) to mitigate against the “emergency”.
Fourth, claims such as “climate breakdown has begun” are plain stupid, absurdly made up, adding infuriation to the inconvenience of those disturbed by the street theatre. Where? What? How? What breakdown? It’s a false excuse, not a reason for activism.
These arguments against climate stupidism accumulate into a tsunami of irritation that provokes a boiling of its own.
The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity is a short essay written by the Italian economist Carlo Cipolla. The first edition was written in English and released in 1976. It’s the bible for the anti-stupid cohort. Here are some of the laws:
1st Basic Law
Always and inevitably everyone under-estimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
2nd Basic Law
The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
3rd Basic Law
A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
Carlo Cipolla considered this the golden and most important law, never to be forgotten. He did not consider stupidity a matter of IQ, but rather a lack of relational skills. In particular, he believed that it is possible to classify people based on their behaviour. Stupid people are the ones who harm others and often themselves.
Clearly, the 3rd Basic Law especially applies to these activists.
But I detest climate activists, from soup throwers to glue warriors, mostly for the reason articulated by the late Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his letters from prison about stupidity: I am defenceless against it.
“Against stupidity we are defenceless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed – in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.”
And achieves nothing.
I detest them because their stupidity makes me furiously impotent.
Andrew L. Urban is the author of Climate Alarm Reality Check (Wilkinson Publishing).
Yep, blocking a major highway bridge was a threat to public safety.
I looked Bonhoeffer up, … via Wikipedia.
That extended quote of his which comes near the end of your post, had caught my interest. As I read it, I saw that you were using his words against climate activists and more widely, perhaps, against those who accept and promote the view that our climate is warming.
I don’t mean my next comment to be an outright attack on you, Andrew. Rather, I’d just like to make the observation that from my ‘greenie’ standpoint, it seems that it is you – in your drive against those who believe that global warming is occurring – it seems that Bonhoeffer’s remarks might well be imagined to have been directed against you.
e.g. “In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.”
I offer the following, as ‘food for thought’…
https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/
Best wishes,
Garry.
Well, there you go…your comment perfectly illustrates the apparently unbridgeable conflict between those who accept climate alarm as based on science, and those who do not. As for the ‘evidence’ from institutions eg NASA, the whole problem emanated from the institution of the IPCC setting the mission to examine the dangers of man made warming…a stated result before the research had even started. As you may know from my book, Climate Alarm Reality Check, a great many credible scientists argue (with evidence) against that notion. Hence my attack on those activists who disrupt or damage in their cause: they do not help their cause and cause harm to themselves. Surely stupid. “Do you believe in climate change” is in my view possibly the most inane question, labelling ‘climate change’ as a religion ….
And best wishes to you, Garry.