the neoliberal vision of the future

[ViolentPanda]

Ah, ok. You've answered my edit to my last post. Thanks.

Nothing is ever a given before it actually happens. I hate that kind of reading of history.

As we used to say when sent on another mind-numbing exercise in Germany's frozen arsehole: "planning and strategy go by the by once the shit starts flying".

But your reading of it is very persuasive, VP.

That is kind of what I was trying to get at – genocide was a logical conclusion of Nazi ideology, which enabled it psychologically, but it was also of course a response to the material conditions of the time. I don't see a contradiction between the two – the seeds are certainly in Mein Kampf, but it wasn't decided upon then.

More importantly, it couldn't have been decided then, in the form it eventually took, because so much depended on people and events over whom Hitler and the Nazis had little or no control. A few examples:
Hjalmar Schact's work on the German economy prior to Nazism's rise.
USA and French "intransigence" and stonewalling of Schact's pleas for revision of the reparation payments schedule.
The relative "success" of Aktion T4 with so little internal dissent.
Stalin's relatively benign (for Stalin) approach to Soviet-German relations post-treaty. Stalin usually took treaties as permission to start squeezing.

As you say though, no-one (except speculative historians!) like getting into counterfactuals.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Pretty much that the systematic annihilation of Jewry was a given. There's a short passage in Mein Kampf that's often cited in support of such a thesis, but taken in context to the rabid end of German anti-Semitism post-the Great War (and I emphasise that context strongly), it's of a piece with a lot of "Let's beat the shit out of the Yids" pogrom rhetoric flying around. Hitler may have meant his rhetoric at a deeper and more sinister level than his political rivals of the time, but we can't know.

So while saying the holocaust was the product of an intentional effort to annihilate Jewry has the feel of a correct statement, and a certain emotional appeal, it's not intellectually-tenable unless you take a lot of other stuff for granted.

Personally, I see the holocaust more as a result of a combination of: extending the rationality that allowed Aktion T4 and the Lebensborn projects; an awareness that expropriation and its' accompanying commodification of the products of murder paid a dividend which allowed another part of the Nazi project (lebensraum) to be taken forward through paying for materiel, and of the intensive deployment (from even before the Nazis tricked their way to power) of a discourse of necessity - of the need to do anything, however horrific, to secure the future of the German Reich.

This is an opinion I've formed after extensive reading, but it's not a "majority" opinion by any means, btw!

I'd be interested in any further reading you (or others) could point me to on the advantages people like Arthur Rudolph and Von Braun saw in slave labour from the camps, not particularly in reference to the rocket programme. I know a fair bit about that, more about the unholy marriage of slave labour and capitalist production methods. I'm thinking that it might turn out to be relevant to the understanding of the privatisation of the prison system.

For people who aren't familar with this material, here's an intro ...

http://www.dora.uah.edu/engineers.html

 

[Crispy]

From what i know of Von Braun, he never outly denounced the use of slave labour at peenemunde. He was actively involved in the selection and direction of skilled workers gathered from concentration camps. I don't think he was concerned, at the time, with the source or welfare of these workers. He just cared that the work got done. He was one of those people whose drives and goals overrode their morality (coupled with the very real fear of reprisal for failure). Long story short: great engineer, lousy morals.

 

[onarchy]

Ah, ok. You've answered my edit to my last post. Thanks.

Nothing is ever a given before it actually happens. I hate that kind of reading of history.

But your reading of it is very persuasive, VP.

That is kind of what I was trying to get at – genocide was a logical conclusion of Nazi ideology, which enabled it psychologically, but it was also of course a response to the material conditions of the time. I don't see a contradiction between the two – the seeds are certainly in Mein Kampf, but it wasn't decided upon then.

Thing is, once it started, once it had finally been decided on, the holocaust was an intentional effort to annihilate Jewry. That's where Himmler's words on it are pertinent. Again, there's nothing contradictory about saying that.

You summarize my position on the matter perfectly, lbj. I regard the holocaust as pregnant logically in the Nazi ideology, it is the logical end station of Nazism. However, that does not mean that Hitler while he was writing Mein Kampf had actual plans of exterminating the Jews, or that the extermination was a historical inevitability. Certain conditions in society and surroundings was necessary to precipitate that course of actions.(i.e. war etc.) My view is that these very conditions were also pregnant in Nazism, i.e. the Nazi ideology had the seeds of war in them. However, in my view the war was not inevitable, and in the same way as the extermination of the Jews it was not planned from an early time by Hitler. (The Nazis certainly planned to take back what they had lost in WWI to restore their national pride, but they did not plan to get into a war with Britain and France. This was incidental.)

In fact, my view of Hitler closely resembles that of socialists in many respects. I regard totalitarianism, death and destruction to be the logical end station of socialism, it is pregnant in socialism. However, socialists typically do not have a concrete plan to cause these things. Quite the contrary. It is rather certain conditions in society that precipitates the socialists' increasingly totalitarian policies. (e.g. capital flight, tax evasion, dwindling resources and a slowing and eventually a falling economy) And these very conditions are pregnant in socialism itself.

There is even a parallel between the holocaust and the ongoing deaths of thousands of innocent children in the world every single day. The parallel is not direct. While the Nazis were antipathic towards the Jews, socialists are on the surface sympathetic with poor people. And while in the final days of Nazism the antipathy escalated into explicit extermination plans, socialists typically have absolutely no plans of exterminating the poor, quite the contrary. But despite this differences there is still ONE important similarity. There were certainly many Nazis who could not morally stomach the idea of actually exterminating the Jews. Very few Nazis and neo-Nazis publically approve of the Holocaust. In fact, quite the contrary, most Nazis and neo-Nazis vigorously deny the Holocaust ever happened. However, there was ample evidence to many Nazis that something very sinister was going on, and they chose to turn a blind eye. THIS is the way socialists parallel the Holocaust: socialists deny that their policies and ideology has very sinister results (the deaths of thousands of innocent children every single day). Just like most Nazis, they turn a blind eye and deny that their ideology has evil consequences. And unlike the holocaust, there is massive evidence of the sinister effects of socialist ideology and policies available to anyone at the click of a button, and there are lots of people screaming in the streets to try to get the socialists' attention to the fact that they are contributing to structural violence that is killing innocent children.

I don't know the exact number of Jews that the Nazis murdered, but I do know that socialism has murdered far more people in the last 10 years alone, and socialists don't care. They deny. This is in my view far, far, far worse than any Holocaust denial.

 

[onarchy]

I'm puzzled. How are you defining 'more capitalist' here, onar? That list of yours puts countries with high taxes and high levels of communal provision such as Denmark up pretty high in the list.

Unfortunately the Economic Freedom Index is not a perfect measure. It consists of 10 different freedoms, of which only one of them is tax level. Thus, Big welfare states are not penalized much, and thus the Economic Freedom Index tend more to show economic freedom from a business perspective (which is also the most relevant to GDP). A business man doesn't care whether his employers pay 50% tax and get lousy schools and health care in return. He's still able to do business quite ably so long as HE is not taxed heavily. Notice that in Denmark, Norway and Sweden the corporate tax rate is significantly lower than the personal tax rate, and also significantly lower than the corporate tax rate in the US.

Perhaps a graph showing 'Percentage GDP going to the state' versus 'GDP per capita' might be instructive. I think you might find quite a large number of high 'GDP going to the state' countries up near the top.

You can check that assumption right here:

http://wiki.fredsbevegelsen.no/Økonomisk_frihet

In this graph the Y axis is GDP and the X axis is overall economic freedom. If you change the X axis to "government spending" instead you will get a good approximation to the number you are requesting. As you can see overall there is a low correlation between the two (the graph is nearly flat). If we compare the two blue dots on the right (Singapore and Hong Kong) with the cyan welfare states on the left (Sweden, France, Belgium, Denmark, Austria, Finland, Italy) you'll see an interesting evolution. They started out approximately the same in 1995, but by 2009 both Hong Kong and Singapore had outpaced all these European welfare states.

The way to explain this lack of correlation is easy: on the one hand a high GDP *enables* high taxes and spending. (just like a strong man can lift more weight) It doesn't guarantee higher spending, but low GDP guarantees low government spending. That's why you see all the Sub-Saharan African countries clustered down to the right, i.e. low GDP, low spending. This causal factor will tend to skew the graph strongly towards a positive correlation between gdp and government spending. However, since there is no such strong positive correlation there must be an equally strong causal factors the other way, i.e. a factor that causes the high tax countries to not have as high GDP as the low tax countries. High taxes generally tends to slow economic growth and thereby prevent wealth production.

There are lots of ways to slice this particular pie depending on what you want to show. What you have done is show that a list that evaluates countries according to their attractiveness to business shows a correlation with overall wealth.

Precisely! But that is a very, very important point.

That's not really very surprising or interesting of itself given that there are many, often contradictory, measures of what makes a place good to do business in: for instance, low govt spending vs sound infrastructure/well educated workforce.

Aaah, but there is also a strong correlation between economic freedom and educated workforce/sound infrastructure, and the evidence shows that it is the economic freedom that is the primary causal factor, not the other way around.

 

[SpineyNorman]

Onar, I'm on my phone and a bit busy so don't have time to read or respond to all that but I have one thing I want to say. If you believe that neo-Nazis deny the holocaust because they find it repugnant and don't want to think their hero and their political views played a vital role in it then you really haven't been paying attention. Holocaust denial, in Nazi circles, is done mainly with the aim of sanitising the image of Hitler and more omportantly to them their idiology. As I said, I'm posting from my phone but can provide you with links to prominent neo-nazis making this clear in internal communications (party newsletters and stuff like that).

 

[8ball]

That holocaust was a PR nightmare waiting to happen - where's Cameron when you need him?

 

[Idris2002]

Re:

That 'Economic Freedom Index' - here's a handy little piece which pulls the whole load of bleeding rubbish into itty bitty pieces.

The index does not even pretend that its definition of economic freedom has anything to do with political freedom. Take the two city-states, Hong Kong and Singapore, which top the index's list of free countries. Both are only "partially free" according to Freedom in the World, an annual country-by-country assessment published by the nonpartisan think tank Freedom House, which the Journal's editors themselves have called "the Michelin Guide to democracy's development." Hong Kong is still without direct elections for its legislature or its chief executive, and a proposed internal security law threatens press and academic freedom as well as political dissent. In Singapore, freedom of the press and the right to demonstrate are limited; films, TV, and other media are censored; preventive detention is legal; and you can do jail time for littering.

Moving further down the list of "free" countries, the rankings are no better correlated with any ordinary definition of "freedom," as economic journalist Robert Kuttner pointed out when the index was first published in 1997. For instance, Bahrain (#20), where the king holds an effective veto over parliament and freedom of expression is limited, ranks higher than Norway (#29), whose comprehensive social insurance and strong environmental regulation drag down its score. Likewise, Kuwait, an emirship no one would term free or democratic, is tied (at #54) with Costa Rica, long the most vigorous democracy in Latin America.

 

[Idris2002]

Edit: I forgot to mention that this implies that economic freedom currently is measured incorrectly by the Heritage foundation. It penalizes a poor country equally much by having, say 10% taxes, as it does a rich country. But to a medieval economy 10% tax is devastating while to a rich industrialized economy it is a walk in the park. Thus, generally speaking the poorer a country is, the more it should be penalized (in terms of economic freedom) by high taxes.

What fucking contemptible nonsense. Firstly there are no medieval economies anymore: even an absolute monarchy like Swaziland has been integrated into the Southern African industrial economy for decades. As for the implication that LDCs should throw away their few sources of revenue, that would be guaranteed to destroy any prospect they might have of breaking out of poverty - because it's only those revenues which can pay for education and health care. And without a literate, educated and healthy population their can be no hope of development.

Why don't you just fuck off, alright?

 

[nino_savatte]

Economic freedom correlates positively to GDP, literacy rate, low infent mortality, longevity AND happiness (self-reported well-being). There is ZERO statistically significant correlation between Economic Freedom and GINI. Interestingly there is also ZERO statistically signficant correlation between GINI and happiness, i.e. social inequality in itself does not contribute to making people unhappy (or happy).

I wondered when the word "happiness" would make an appearance. This pre-occupation with people's happiness has taken quite a Bernaysian turn. In truth, happiness is fairly meaningless word when it is used by politicians and others. It's an entirely subjective word that means a great many things to many people. Material wealth does not necessarily make people happy anymore than a stroll in the park at sunrise does.

I reckon you're a closet technocrat as well as a Randist.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Aaah, but there is also a strong correlation between economic freedom and educated workforce/sound infrastructure, and the evidence shows that it is the economic freedom that is the primary causal factor, not the other way around.

What evidence?

As I said earlier, it would seem to me to be a very likely case of a dialectical relationship – each feeding the other in a virtuous circle. For instance, as infrastructure improves, there is less scope for corrupt practices: a well-run rail system leaves no room for extorting bribes in order to buy a ticket; you need a badly-run system where trains are unreliable and overcrowded for that to be possible.

All you're saying with your comparison is that it is, generally, harder to do business in poor countries than rich countries. Well duh!

 

[LLETSA]

I wondered when the word "happiness" would make an appearance. This pre-occupation with people's happiness has taken quite a Bernaysian turn. In truth, happiness is fairly meaningless word when it is used by politicians and others. It's an entirely subjective word that means a great many things to many people. Material wealth does not necessarily make people happy anymore than a stroll in the park at sunrise does.

And with the whole economic system hingeing on childish notion of the pursuit of happiness through material wealth, there can only be one outcome, and that's the exhuastion of the planet's natural resources (regardless of what happens to slow the process down, and regardless of 'human ingenuity.') And once they're exhausted, we're finished. All of us. In actual fact, most of us will be done long before the planet's resouces are used up, due to the many negative effects arising out of their decline.

And there is no way out, as there is no way of keeping the economic system (in capitalist or socialist or any other guise) needed to sustain eight or ten billion people, particularly in the manner to which many of us have become accustomed, without maintaining the illusion that material success will make us all happy.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

onarchy, I'm still not seeing any of this as providing a convincing argument that "socialism = mass murder" which frankly strikes me as a rubbish argument.

You can show a correlation between economic growth and general well being, but equally there's plenty of research out there (see e.g. http://go.worldbank.org/OIMMW9OD20 for a reference list) showing that you also need to address inequality.

From the point of view of eradicating poverty a high GDP does you no good if that wealth is all concentrated in the hands of a few rich people and everybody else is below the poverty line. Further, there are strong correlations between both poverty and income inequality and violent crime (see e.g. http://cjr.sagepub.com/content/18/2/182.short)

Further, we have already established that in your favourite example, Chile, the actual mass murderers were the representatives of the Chicago Boys' economic theories and that any claims you might want to make about socialism damaging the economy there don't stand up until you've given a convincing explanation of how you're separating the effects of US driven economic warfare from those you want to blame on Allende.

You sort of waved your hands about and blustered back there, but produced no convincing case. Indeed you ended up seeming to claim that all those people Pinochet had killed and tortured were an example of socialist mass murder because he had to kill them for being commies (or something like that, you weren't very coherent) and that the well-documented and referenced economic warfare in question wasn't really economic warfare but that socialists were to blame for it somehow. Your reasoning comes full circle there, you're in effect assuming what you're trying to prove and hence, your argument simply doesn't stand up. What you're saying in effect seems to be:

'Socialists wreck economies, thereby becoming mass-murderers, because when capitalists wreck an economy as a punishment for being 'irresponsible' (Kissinger's actual term) enough to elect socialists, it's the fault of the socialists'

or where actual rather than metaphorical mass murders are concerned ...

'Socialists are mass murderers because when capitalists mass-murder them it's their fault for being socialists'

I would suggest that similar considerations are likely to arise with any other example of 'socialists always wreck the economy so badly that people die of poverty and associated evils' which I take it is what you're claiming above. So if you want people to take your claims seriously, back them up properly and try to make them at least a tiny bit credible ...

 

[phildwyer]

Any system that encourages the untrammeled pursuit of material wealth is evil. There is no need to say anything more to prove the turpitude of capitalism.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Any system that encourages the untrammeled pursuit of material wealth is evil. There is no need to say anything more to prove the turpitude of capitalism.

Well, once we start talking good and evil, he's probably going to want to claim that altruism is inherently evil and greed is inherently good.

If he wants to go around spouting shit like that, it's his choice. If he wants to start making assertions about history and why this or that happened though, then I want to see some facts and logic to back it up. Not a bunch of circular bullshit.

 

[Hocus Eye.]

This thread just takes and takes.

 

[Random]

Aaah, but there is also a strong correlation between economic freedom and educated workforce/sound infrastructure, and the evidence shows that it is the economic freedom that is the primary causal factor, not the other way around.

Because education and infrastructure got worse after the establishment of the USSR? And got better after its breakup? Me and Karl popper seem to say you're wrong.

 

[Random]

I have to say I'm impressed by onarchy's stamina. Are there any comprable pro-liberal forums where I could go and try a similar endevour? Maybe one time when I'm working a weekend and bored.

 

[SpineyNorman]

I think I may know the cause of Onarchy's "genius": Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments (PDF) For a brief overview: Wiki article

 

[littlebabyjesus]

I think I may know the cause of Onarchy's "genius": Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments (PDF) For a brief overview: Wiki article

If you read on in that article, it seems clear that this is not a universal phenomenon, but is particular to American culture.

Onar does seem in certain circumstances to be prepared to reexamine his views. He appears to have backed down on the holocaust gas chamber question. Credit where it's due, and I always give credit to people admitting they might be wrong on here.

Next challenge is to make him see that his reasoning about the destructive nature of socialism is circular, and that he has not demonstrated what he thinks he has demonstrated.

 

[SpineyNorman]

If you read on in that article, it seems clear that this is not a universal phenomenon, but is particular to American culture.

Onar does seem in certain circumstances to be prepared to reexamine his views. He appears to have backed down on the holocaust gas chamber question. Credit where it's due, and I always give credit to people admitting they might be wrong on here.

Next challenge is to make him see that his reasoning about the destructive nature of socialism is circular, and that he has not demonstrated what he thinks he has demonstrated.

Should have added a to that, I wasn't being entirely serious.

I'm on the phone now, tim Mason is who you need to look for. I put loads of his stuff online, probably on the libcom site now. He's the one.

Thanks. If anyone else is interested in this I found these on libcom.

E2A:

In that link:

Ends and beginnings - Tim Mason
(Notes on a paper Tim Mason was preparing in the last year of his life on Nazism. In PDF format.)

National socialism and the working class, 1925-May 1933 - Tim Mason
(Tim Mason on the development of National Socialism in Nazi Germany, and the role of the working class. In PDF format.)

Germany, "Domestic Crisis" and War in 1939 - Tim Mason
(Part of a debate between Tim Mason and Richard Overy about whether crisis at home was the catalyst for Nazi military expansionism. In PDF format.)

The Workers' Opposition in Nazi Germany - Tim Mason
(Tim Mason on resistance to the Nazis from the German working class.)

 

[diptera]

You've nailed it. Onar in fact sees himself as an expert on Philosophy, Climate science and Physics (Einstein was wrong, Onar on the other hand is on the right track. Ether-theory and all. Quantum mechanics are inherently evil and goes against Objectivism ... ). For a while he was interesting to me. That was when he was focused on the state vs. individual. Now it's mostly junk science and general crackpottery as you can see for yourself in this thread.

Edit: Yes, he can reexamine his views, and he has done so in the past as well. I also believe he actually means well, and that he is convinced that Laissez-faire would benefit all of humanity. What he does not see is that his and his circle of "liberals" rhetoric is dehumanizing, not just his branding of "" as fascists, his focus on racial differences in IQ is also quite something ...

 

[TruXta]

You've nailed it. Onar in fact sees himself as an expert on Philosophy, Climate science and Physics (Einstein was wrong, Onar on the other hand is on the right track. Ether-theory and all. Quantum mechanics are inherently evil and goes against Objectivism ... ). For a while he was interesting to me. That was when he was focused on the state vs. individual. Now it's mostly junk science and general crackpottery as you can see for yourself in this thread.

Links?

 

[onarchy]

Re:

That 'Economic Freedom Index' - here's a handy little piece which pulls the whole load of bleeding rubbish into itty bitty pieces.


View attachment 14792

Let me first say that I do not in any way (nor does anyone on the liberal side) pretend that economic freedom from coercion is the ONLY freedom from coercion. There is a whole host of personal freedoms from coercion as well: free speech, LGBT freedom, freedom to use drugs, alcohol and medicine, freedom to abort a pregnancy, freedom to research on stem cells and embryos, freedom to take one's own life (euthanasia) etc. These freedoms are not captured by economic freedom from coercion, and no-one has pretended to do so.

However, when that is said political freedom is NOT a freedom from coercion for the individual. Political freedom as it is defined today (freedom for the majority to rule the minority) is only freedom from coercion for the majority. Political freedom unfortunately today means enslavement and coercion of minorities, and as such the measurement is rotten fruit. It is a mixture of liberalism (for the majority) and fascism (for the minority). So political freedom only measures the degree of liberal fascism in a society. It's a very very bad metric which has done a lot of damage.

We in the Free State Initiative will develop a new metric that measures freedom from coercion at all levels in society, not just economically. Also, we will present a new and updated form of democracy, which gives a proper meaning to political freedom. We will design a democracy that does not only give political power to the majority, but also to the minority. Or put differently: in a proper democracy (i.e. PEOPLE's rule rather than majority rule) each individual has equal political rights and power, not like today where we have two feudal political classes, the majority upper class and the minority serfs.

I give a brief outline of the new and updated form of democracy here.


More information will be added later, but in case it isn't clear how this relates to democracy: today only the majority has any political power. A minority has no influence whatsoever other than to beg the majority to be nice. The smaller and more isolated a minority is, the less influence it has. So already here we can see that there is not equality before the law. Equality implies equal political power, but the smaller the minority one belongs to the less one's political power is. But it's actually much worse than what it sounds like. Power is NOT proportional to the number of people belonging to a group. No, there is a very strong cutoff. People below a certain threshold do not get ANY media attention during election time. Therefore these people are essentially 100% cut off from democracy. They never get a chance to present their case to the public because the media is the arbiter of political information to the public, and they only care about pleasing major groups or to act according to their own political convictions.

In the Free State every single individual has equal political opportunity to try a law before the Supreme Court and have it overthrown. The burden of evidence always lies on the majority proponents to prove that the law is legitimate and necessary. In court the defendant (which may be a single individual) gets equal time to present his case as the prosecution, and he only needs to present a PLAUSIBLE argument against the prosecution, whereas the prosecution must make a case beyond reasonable doubt.

With this system the power of the majority has been exactly halved from 100% of the political power to 50%. The power of the minority, however, has increased infinitely from 0% to 50%. THIS is true 100% democracy. It is a long needed modernization of the halfbaked implementation of democracy from ancient Greece in the form of majority rule.

 

[SpineyNorman]

You've got way too much time on your hands.

 

[butchersapron]

Should have added a to that, I wasn't being entirely serious.



Thanks. If anyone else is interested in this I found these on libcom.

Yep, that's some of the ones i put online. Tim Mason killed himself after being unable to deal with 'the holocaust' in the way he had dealt with the 33-39 period. He couldn't integrate it with how he had come to view how the world worked. There was a youngish historian called Detlev Peukert who was sort of the german equivalent (roughly anyway) who died at the same time. Not a good couple of weeks that.

 

[Idris2002]

You've got way too much time on your hands.

Have you ever kissed a girl, onar?

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Yep, that's some of the ones i put online. Tim Mason killed himself after being unable to deal with 'the holocaust' in the way he had dealt with the 33-39 period. He couldn't integrate it with how he had come to view how the world worked. There was a youngish historian called Detlev Peukert who was sort of the german equivalent (roughly anyway) who died at the same time. Not a good couple of weeks that.

Before you tell me to do some work, I'm going to give those a read.

But what was it about the holocaust that he could not deal with?

 

[butchersapron]

To be honest, talking to people who knew him, it was that he didn't want to even start doing the research, not that he'd done it and couldn't handle the results. I'm talking about someone i never met though and just going from second hand stuff.

 

[onarchy]

You've nailed it. Onar in fact sees himself as an expert on Philosophy, Climate science and Physics (Einstein was wrong, Onar on the other hand is on the right track. Ether-theory and all. Quantum mechanics are inherently evil and goes against Objectivism ... ). For a while he was interesting to me. That was when he was focused on the state vs. individual. Now it's mostly junk science and general crackpottery as you can see for yourself in this thread.

I do NOT see myself as an expert on climate science and physics. I did write the book "The Climate Bubble" a few years ago, where I used 15 years of reading of and discussions and interviews with climate scientists as the basis for presenting the skeptical argument. I'm perfectly well aware of my limitations in these areas, but I am sufficiently well-versed in physics and mathematics to be able to understand the arguments of very good scientists and statisticians. These were the arguments I presented in "The Climate Bubble." Also, it is true that I am skeptical of the interpretation of Relativity and QM. I think that the proponents of Lorentzian Relativity has made a comeback in recent years and presented arguments that explain the paradigm experiments that are used to support Einstein's theory. Lorentzian relativity is a physical theory, whereas Einstein's theory is merely a mathematical description of phenomena, and if the two have the same explanatory power Lorentzian relativity should naturally be preferred. Also, with Lorentzian relativity Einstein's arbitrary speed limit of c is also thrown out, and this opens the door for completely new interpretations in QM, and even a completely classical understanding of the wave/particle duality, slit experiments etc.

If there is one thing I have learned in the last 20 years of studying philosophy, economics and climate science it is that one should never assume that the majority is correct. In fact, I've learned to question EVERYTHING. Most of the time conventional truths hold and unconventional theories really are false/crackpottery, but not always. The solar theory of climate change, for instance, is not proposed by crackpots, and the data supporting it is fantastic. The fact that you can find detailed correlations between solar/cosmic ray variations and climate on virtually ALL time scales ranging from days to billions of years deserves to be taken seriously. The same is true of Lorentzian relativity. It is not crackpottery to propose a PHYSICAL theory of physics which makes the world intelligible.