Down the rabbit hole they are deeply offended.

This all started when I was discussing how protective mechanisms can lead to us distorting our perceptions of what is going on in this society and how this can occur not only in a person — say who is compulsively hoarding — but those around them, who gradually accede to living down the rabbit hole that one person’s fears and habits make. From this we get low rent TV.

And if it was only Low rent TV I would not worry that much. But it is affecting science. And the people down the rabbit hole demand that we join them. The correct response, as James Delingpole notes, is merciless mockery.

The last thing I would want is for Monbiot, Mann, Flannery, Jones, Hansen and the rest of the Climate rogues’ gallery to be granted the mercy of quick release. Publicly humiliated? Yes please. Having all their crappy books remaindered? Definitely. Dragged away from their taxpayer funded troughs and their cushy sinecures, to be replaced by people who actually know what they’re talking about? For sure. But hanging? Hell no. Hanging is far too good for such ineffable toerags.

Now, the rabbit hole is driven by emotion. It consists, primarily, of protesting that this or that must happen or must not happen. That this offends us, this does not. The idea that ideas are correct, and work… well that is for engineers, not for those who would control society. There is no need for further research, because Gaia is hurting, and that makes it our spiritual duty. It is all about nuance and word choice. Facts, well they are just deeply offensive.

In the same week the Associated Press announced that it would no longer describe illegal immigrants as “illegal immigrants,” the star columnist of The New York Times fretted that the Supreme Court seemed to have misplaced the style book on another fashionable minority. “I am worried,” wrote Maureen Dowd, “about how the justices can properly debate same-sex marriage when some don’t even seem to realize that most Americans use the word ‘gay’ now instead of ‘homosexual.’” She quoted her friend Max Mutchnick, creator of “Will & Grace”:

“Scalia uses the word ‘homosexual’ the way George Wallace used the word ‘Negro.’ There’s a tone to it. It’s humiliating and hurtful. I don’t think I’m being overly sensitive, merely vigilant.”

For younger readers, George Wallace was a powerful segregationist Democrat. Whoa, don’t be overly sensitive. There’s no “tone” to my use of the word “Democrat”; I don’t mean to be humiliating and hurtful: it’s just what, in pre-sensitive times, we used to call a “fact.” Likewise, I didn’t detect any “tone” in the way Justice Antonin Scalia used the word “homosexual.” He may have thought this was an appropriately neutral term, judiciously poised midway between “gay” and “Godless sodomite.” Who knows? He’s supposed to be a judge, and a certain inscrutability used to be part of what we regarded as a judicial temperament. By comparison, back in 1986, the year Scalia joined the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Warren Burger declared “there is no such thing as a fundamental right to commit homosexual sodomy.” I don’t want to be overly sensitive, but I think even I, if I rewound the cassette often enough, might be able to detect a certain tone to that.

Idiots. They consider their feelings but not the consequences of their crusade.

I have seen people talk about the ethics of carbon credits when going to conferences… ignoring the fact that conferences keep people in work. I have seen people demonize pharmaceutical companies for doing research required to get a medication licensed … and when no other agency will pay for the research. (It’s not cheap. It can cost up to 10 000 a patient to complete a controlled trial. When you need a few hundred participants per arm of the trial, the costs mount up).

My son asked today why some people believe we can print more money… and this time, unlike the inflation of the Tudors, or Weimar Republic, this time printing money, increasing the money supply and thus debasing the (fiat) currency we have. Well, there is an idea that this time it is different. But it is not. There are no ways out of this but hyperinflation or default: confiscating all the monies will not deal with the debt we have.

This is known. But it is spoken in code, as Bill notes, for to say the truth will to offend the rabbits, and we do not want to be dragged down the hole with them.

Over the last century or so and especially over the last fifty years, Western elites have adopted a number of bizarre positions. These positions are held not because any evidence suggests them to be true, but, evidently, for reasons emotional, ideological, and self-interested. This, by itself, is not especially comment-worthy: people are like that.

They also, however, adhere with similar intensity to older positions: to modern philosophy, to a kind of Whiggish history, and to the machine—to the Mechanical Philosophy and the scientific program it lionizes. To themselves they are hard-headed, empirical rationalists; guardians, seekers, and producers of truth. Naturally enough, rationalists, realists, and truth-tellers deserve to be high, while spiritualists, super-naturalists, and fantasists deserve to be low. The Logos must rule.

Tensions arise when the new beliefs come into conflict with truths produced by the machine, to which they are committed by the old beliefs. The tensions are not merely internal to the heads of Liberals, either. These two belief-sets are not equally strong in all Liberals, some of them lean heavily towards the machine and some of them lean heavily towards progressivism. Since progressivism is increasingly ascendant, the machinists retreat. One way they retreat, reminiscent of the way their predecessors the alchemists retreated before them, is into esoterica. That is they retreat into producing texts whose exoteric, open meaning is false and progressive but whose esoteric, hidden meaning is true and anti-progressive.

Yeah, but the trouble with esoteric and technical writing is that this allows the media to remain neatly down their rabbit hole, unoffended. This means no person can say anything clearly. The censorship that occurs here — and almost every group of researchers have learnt, as a survival trait, how to use jargon and bureaucratese to say what they mean while not overtly offending the rabbits of offense.

But this no longer works. Modern liberal education trains people in offense. And if we let this continue, we cannot ever consider if something is true. We cannot base our lives on the truth. We are left with mere feelings, and this does not allow us to test ideas, ideologies — to find what is true, noble, right and good.

And we need to consider the facts (Hat tip Captain Capitalism and Wintry Knight)

Christianity is not easy. It doesn’t always “work” for me. There are times when I think it would be easier to do it the old way; easier to cut a corner or take a short cut. There are many times when doing the right thing means doing the most difficult thing possible. There are also times when it seems like non-Christians have it easier, or seem to be “winning”. It’s in times like these that I have to remind myself that I’m not a Christian because it serves my own selfish purposes. I’m not a Christian because it “works” for me. I had a life prior to Christianity that seemed to be working just fine, and my life as a Christian hasn’t always been easy.

I’m a Christian because it is true. I’m a Christian because I want to live in a way that reflects the truth. I’m a Christian because my high regard for the truth leaves me no alternative.

I agree with ColdCase. I’m a Christian because it is true, not because it makes me happy. For truth is not some patriarchal conspiracy. The truth, at times, hurts. It offends. But if we do not acknowledge it and instead just teach some pale simulacrum of the truth, it means we are no longer seeking what is true but what is therapeutic at best and expedient, with the full Machiavellian implications at worst.

That is not science. It is not the gospel. It is a cheap, illogical stance, that comforts the offended rabbit, and ensures that their life becomes so bizarre that reality TV producers want to recruit them akin to the Warders of Bedlam letting the public visit, for a fee, to mock.