The level of discourse is common to many sites featuring pro-environmentalist views where free marketeers are derided and ridiculed. My suggestion would be not to read things that you find offensive.
Some people are ridiculous and deserve to be mocked. “Are you a mod, or a rocker?” asks the reporter. “I’m a mocker!” responds Ringo.
It is alarming and disheartening that a term like “sustainists” is used for proponents of “sustainable development.” A much better, and simpler, word already exists for such people. Statists. Sustainable development is just another code term for central planning. So the politicians get to pass out favors to their cronies, and the rest of us are forced to pay for it all.
Many environmentalists describe themselves as tree huggers. Try it some day. Hug a tree. They’re full of fiber. Many environmentalists describe themselves as green, which is outwardly true. But as Lew Rockwell and many others note, they are in fact watermelons - green on the outside, red on the inside. Red as in communist, and as in mass murdering.
Consider, for example, the hundred million or so who have died from the ban on DDT.
The Christians got there late. They came up with Darwinist as a rejoinder to “fundamentalist” and other names, like “moron” and “Kansan” to deride their views.
Why is it irrelevant that environmentalism is a religion to many of its adherents? The separation of church and state would apply if that is as true as it seems to be. The state should not be involved in the establishment of a religion of environmentalism, but it is.
Ideas are attached to people. People are the source of ideas. It is relevant who has the idea, and why. Thus, it is relevant that the ideas exposed in Climate Gate show that the liars in the climate change controversy were motivated by a desire to get lots more money for their “research” in spite of overwhelming evidence that the nonsense they were spouting was provably false.
If you mean to object to ad hominem comments, that’s nice. But the author of the essay to which you object doesn’t seem to be singling out individuals so much as arguing against the ideology of a group of people. So I’m not sure that objection fits.
Words like socialist and fascist have real meanings, and ought to be examined. They also ought to be used, and if the shoe fits, wear it. I don’t like people who focus on only one such word, and use it in a Procrustean fashion against all opponents. But there are real difficulties with fascism, socialism, communism, and state capitalism or corporatism. By “real difficulties” I mean mass murderers have used these ideologies to justify the extermination of hundreds of millions of persons.
I think Godwin is an ass. To suggest that bringing up the Nazis or Hitler is a bad thing because it reduces the level of discussion to a “subhuman” level (to use your word) seems to me to be an attempt to cover up the holocaust. If we cannot compare an existing policy of mass murder (banning DDT, say; capping carbon emissions, say) to other efforts of dictators and central planners to exterminate millions because Godwin is upset by such talk, we are all much worse off. We have to remember Hitler, the Nazis, Stalin, the commies, Mao and Pol Pot and all the others. We have to remember who they were, what they thought, and how they acted.
Yes, we have to remember that Hitler was an artist, a vegetarian, an environmentalist, anti-smoking, and pro-gun-control and question those characteristics in others. No, not all artists are mass murderers. But many environmentalists are eager to see a lot of humans die.
Economics hasn’t always been a decent and humane subject. Malthus made it seem dismal. I think Malthus was short sighted, arrogant, and foolish. Tyler Watts, on the other hand, seems to be having fun with this essay. It is light hearted, enjoyable, and at the same time able to make compelling and sincere points about the importance of market clearing prices, etc.