One
of my little ‘work in progress’ side projects is an epistolary called Letters
To Troubled Youth. It’s a mix of good cop, bad cop letter writing, aimed at the
younger generation, warning them about all the highly damaging nonsense they
are letting in to their souls, and encouraging them of the greater rewards
found in more rigorous truthseeking. I might share the occasional excerpt as a
blog post on its own stranding.
Excerpt 4 – taken from Letter 20: Just Stop Idiocy
In an old blog post from about 10 years ago, about the costs of terrorism, I once calculated the less obvious but still significant associative costs in terms the millions of hours of time robbed from innocent citizens having to have extra security checks, extra queuing, etc. And this should be brought to mind with the Just Stop Oil lunatics right now. It’s not just the mere inconvenience and stupidity of holding up sports events for a few minutes – it’s that event organisers will respond by imposing much more rigorous checks on spectators/customers on entrance.
Once you calculate how many thousands of wasted hours and robbed time that will amount to every year for innocent citizens (on top of all the other costs associated with blocking roads, destroying property, wasting police resources, court time, and so forth), it becomes obvious to me that these stupid, destructive acts should incur a mandatory prison sentence for the offenders. The only way to stop it is to properly disincentivise with punishments commensurate with the costs.
Just Stop Oil members, especially the under 25s, think of themselves as rebels, engaging in freedom fighting to win a climate war against the bogeymen of capitalism. In reality, they are doing nothing new - their absurd behaviour resembles every other former cult and lunatic fringe group that has ever existed, and its members have fallen for the same old con tricks, skewed narratives and suppression of intellect that has bedevilled every cult group that preceded it.
As someone who has listened to their arguments, observed their behaviour, and even spent time with them, it's easy to recognise the same patterns as we see in just about every other crazy sect. You see the inadequate ways they present their arguments, the underlying incentives, the need for attention and to be accepted and listened to, the psychopathology that underwrites their paranoid mindset, and the credulity with which they uncritically swallow up any old nonsense. Once you've seen one of them, you've seen most of them; and once you've seen most of them, it's easy to spot the next one.
But these Just Stop Oil chumps don't just emerge from a vacuum - they are the natural result of a world in which the majority of the most powerful and influential people are so power hungry, self-interested, narcissistic, narrow-minded and short-termist that you can't actually believe they get away with it, and elicit such widespread support for their actions. On top of that, the media drives the continuation of the elite's top down influence, and social media and our education system ensures that young people are caught in the net from the earliest age possible. This is the birthing pool for insane groups like Just Sop Oil, and numerous others like them - the world has been so misdirected by the magician's sleight of hand tricks that they have missed what the hand does while focusing on the deck of cards.
Climate alarmism is another of the conjurer's classic misdirection tricks - by averting your eyes towards the distraction, they make you lose sight of what's fully happening. The tactics are the same as ever; they get you fixed on costs while ignoring benefits; they stir you up with virtue signalling and guilt-trip with bogus ethical proclamations; they grossly exaggerate the negatives and ignore the positives - while all the time many of the most powerful organisations and political establishments continually lodge supporting information in their brains to the point where the truth becomes so abstruse that few know how to find it, and where to even start looking. You'll have noticed how the biased mainstream media and social commentators get everyone focused on images of floods, wildfires, struggling animals in the wild, as though that's the whole picture. This is the magician's sleight of hand again; he wants you to be distracted by the small picture so you miss the bigger picture.
The behaviour and misjudgements of groups like Just Stop Oil are not original or unique, and the provenance of the misguided rhetoric they spew out is easy to analyse once you realise that what they do typifies the same patterns seen in countless other groups just like them, in a world that is run by people who readily implant this stuff into their minds for their own personal gain. It would be quite boring pattern recognition, were it not such a damn nuisance.
