In a discussion of ‘alternative energy’ at a social media site, someone raised the practical issue of the difficulties involved in high-volume energy storage. Someone else came back at him with a comment to the effect that “climate-solution deniers are as bad a climate change deniers.”

This is probably just the leading edge of a new insult-meme: I expect to see a lot more of the climate-solution-denier accusations being made. We are getting uncomfortably close to a pervasive climate of Lysenkoism.

In Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon, set in the Soviet Union, his character Rubashov (an old Bolshevik who is now on trial for his life) muses:
…
” Each wrong idea we follow is a crime committed against future generations. Therefore we have to punish wrong ideas as others punish crimes: with death. ”
… [shades of Ms. Hugo-Award-Winner!] …
The assertions now being made that anyone who challenges catastrophic CO2-caused climate change is complicit in the deaths of thousands/hundreds of thousands/millions parallel the above rather closesly.
…
In America today, we are seeing even topics that lack the claimed apocalyptic overtones of climate change treated in this way. For example: in another social media post, a woman remarked on the extremely skewed postal rates that exist between China and the US. Someone came back accusing her of being a tinfoil-hat-wearing right-winger, or words to that effect. Even a discussion of postal rates has to degenerate into mud-slinging in no time at all.

Of course, neither the original post nor the comment included any such thing as a link. (It took me all of two minutes to locate a comprehensive Forbes article on the subject, which I then linked.)

I believe that there are still people who are subject to rational persuasion, but wonder whether there will be enough of them to make a difference.

That’s assuming the Internet Gateblockers even allow them to hear the rational arguments in the first place.

On Lysenkoism:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/05/self-censorship-campus-bad-science/589969/

Self-Censorship on Campus Is Bad for Science
Amid heightened tensions on college campuses, well-established scientific ideas are suddenly meeting with stiff political resistance.

MAY 28, 2019
Luana Maroja
Professor of biology at Williams College

Big Tech censorship is the malignant synthesis of campus deplatforming culture and U.S. tech companies working extensively with authoritarian regimes, especially China. They have grown enamored of China’s demonstration that information CAN be controlled, given enough power.
We’re also in the final operational stages of a 15-year war launched by the Left after Rathergate and the rise of the bloggers. They were very determined to neutralize the subversive power of bloggers on the Right and their ability to slip information past the media gatekeepers.
…
The Internet isn’t really a limitless expanse of information that cannot be suppressed or policed for ideology. It has choke points – big platforms that can be controlled by either government censors or a few big companies working together.
You don’t really have to impose complete silence and rigidly censor every single word to maintain ideological control. You just have to make dissidents shout through cupped hands while giant megaphones are handed to those who toe the ideological line.
Remember what happened in Rathergate, when a few intrepid bloggers with relatively limited followings broke a story that blew up into major media coverage? All the Left had to do was figure out how to arrest the “blowing up” process.
If you broke a Rathergate story today, you would quickly find yourself removed from YouTube, banned from Facebook, demonetized, yanked off popular social platforms. Major media is HEAVILY influenced by social media today. That influence CAN be controlled, and so it is.
Dissidents can’t be silenced completely, but they can be denied the kind of billion-watt blowtorch influence granted to the preferred left-wing orthodoxy. Speed is vital to the viral spread of information. Big Tech is slowing down the Right while giving the Left the express lane.
…
If the media politically approves of your story, it swings from one news hook to another like Spider-Man, never out of the top search results and top news aggregation sites. If it doesn’t approve, your story trundles along through the back alleys of information space.
So the new censors can’t really shut you up entirely, but they CAN slow you down. They can quarantine your information from achieving viral penetration by forcing it to spread more slowly, while the stuff they like spreads with insane speed and few “content rules” to worry about.
Real journalists, people truly committed to the spirit of free inquiry, would be fighting this tooth and nail. They would understand the SPEED of information is vital. Governments and corporate cabals should not be allowed to slow it down to protect their interests.
But instead, Big Media is primarily interested in re-establishing the guild privileges it lost so decisively in the time of Rathergate, concluding a process that began with the dissolution of Big Three network power. Censorship is their ally, not their mortal enemy.

https://www.projectveritas.com/2019/06/26/rep-crenshaw-grills-google-executive-over-leaked-email-published-by-veritas/

I do like Mr. Crenshaw.

https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2019/06/28/swedish-man-convicted-hate-comments-he-did-not-write/

A 52-year-old Swedish man has been convicted for “hate” comments posted in a social media group, despite the comments having been written by other people.
The “hate” comments were written in the Facebook group “Stand up for Sweden” and contained material that was deemed to have broken Swedish law against threats or intimidation towards ethnic groups, Swedish broadcaster SVT reports.

The 52-year-old, who was the administrator of the group, was found guilty of breaking the BBS Act of 1998, according to news website Nyheter Idag, which held him liable for not deleting the comments made in the group, even though he had not made them himself.
…
The 52-year-old denied having committed a crime saying that he had not even seen the comments that were highlighted and it was noted that the group has around 162,000 members and saw three million comments per year.

A witness from the NGO Juridik Fronten (Legal Front), a group which engages in “opinion-forming activities related to nationalist right-wing populism and violent offences”, claimed that they had sent a pdf file of hate comments to the defendant.

The man claimed that he had not opened the file, telling the court he did not open attachments from people he did not know and therefore had not seen the comments.
…
The group was founded in 2017 by former police officer Tomas Åberg who described the group’s work in 2018 saying: “We have developed a programme that searches for criminal networks on social media by searching for keywords, combinations of words, and phrases that can constitute criminal acts.”

Åberg also admitted the majority of those reported were elderly men and women, including a 70-year-old man who was convicted earlier this year after being reported to the police by the organisation for writing on Facebook that Somalis were”lazy”.

Looks like Swedish ethnic groups can be pretty easily threatened or intimidated.

Still, it is easier to hit on one “publisher” than the thousands of commenters, but I’m sure their names are in the leftists’ data base and social media is being mined for more hits.

This is why Facebook et al. wanted the protection of being platforms, not publishers; it remains to be seen how far over they line they can go in suppressing speech they don’t like before they get tipped back the other way.

From the comments:

Dave • 15 hours ago
“…which held him liable for not deleting the comments made in the group, even though he had not made them himself…”
Very puzzled here.
If he, as the administrator of the group, is liable for what is posted on the group, then surely Facebook, as overall administrator of the site is equally liable? Why aren’t they being prosecuted?

chaswarnertoo Dave • 14 hours ago
Some administrators are more equal than others?

About that portion are beginning to recognize that the whole Globe Earth Theory they got force fed from K-12, was mostly deception or a lie or just wrong.

The Tyranny of the Majority is about to end on Geosciences.

Aside from the poor rhetorical formulation, he was expressing something the Left has put into practice, which may be why (a) conservatives recoiled in visceral anticipation; and (b) “liberals” mocked because they were afraid their tactics were being co-opted against them.

Goldwater also said, “Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies. Absolute power does corrupt, and those who seek it must be suspect and must be opposed. Their mistaken course stems from false notions of equality, ladies and gentlemen. Equality, rightly understood, as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences. Wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism.”

I think the problem arises because the Left has radically misdefined “liberty” and “justice” to mean the opposite of what Goldwater meant.

Ah, if it were only “conformity” that “diversity” led to….

(Actually, it’s violent intolerance, shunning, shaming, and ostracism. Alas….)

But this is—simply(!)—because it’s “Diversity for me but not for thee”; “Tolerance for me but not for thee”; “Free speech for me but not for thee”…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Speech_Movement

Simply….

Bridges for sale here, Ann.