Global Warming and Other Leftist Censoring and Indoctrination

Hum with me, fellow sinners and beg forgiveness for violating Gaia. It's interesting hearing the defense of His Highness Most Self-Righteous Goracle the Magnificent. It's even more fascinating witnessing his own indignation at the unwashed daring to question him. The Anchoress notes this, too:

And no, Gore did not take questions from the press after his little scold. He often does not take questions. He doesn’t have to answer questions or engage in debate: He is the savior, after all!

Gore’s Shark-jumping line: “I think if it is important to look at the pressures that made it more likely than not that mainstream journalists in the United States would convey a wholly inaccurate conclusion about the most important moral, ethical, spiritual and political issue humankind has ever faced.”

Of course, this IS religion and there are rules, remember. Here's what to hold ever present in your consciousness:

Please note that their are caveats, sub-rules, regulations and various legal minutiae that must be followed in order to please Gaia and her faithful overlords. It is nearly impossible to comply with all the rules, the rules change and the rules are completely at whim of said overlords. It is your job to comply anyway and please thine masters.

With this in mind, Iowahawk will help you "earn eco-salvation". Here is a shortened version, but to fully repent, you must read it all. MUST. Gaia demands it:

STEP 1: Catalog Your Sins

Your first step on the road to salvation is to take a frank inventory of your eco-transgressions. When answering the following questions, remember to be honest. We are all sinners in the eyes of Gaia, and it is important not to incur her wrath by fibbing.

STEP 2: Calculate Carbon Credits

As we say in the environmental community, now it's time to "pay the piper" for your carbon use. If you answered "yes" to ALL of the questions in Step 1, your fee is $9.95. For each "no" answer, add an additional $19.95, plus $4.95 carbon credit shipping and handling. Once you have calculated your total fee, send it to the Iowahawk EcoPals Network via the "Beer Fund" tip jar located on the left sidebar.

STEP 3: Spread the Holy Eco-Word

Hallellujah, brother/sister, you are officially saved! The holy spirit of PayPal has washed away your CO2 sins in the healing Polar glacial waters! You are born again in the sweet bathing flourescent light of carbon neutrality! Feel that spirit enter! The power of Mother Earth compels you! Hunga mwa blabla glooba flambla hoomcha doomcha gluppa!

Can you join me brothers and sisters in an "Amen"? Amen.

Perhaps the most offensive part of this exercise is the attempt to silence dissent. Truth is assumed. Truth gets unfettered, unquestioned, uncurious obeisence from those that Know Better. And this isn't just some reflexive revulsion at Leftist, some would say fascist, speech policing. Ann Althouse called leftist progressive Eric Alterman on the carpet and upon thought, he agreed. Speech should be filtered by those who are better. Here's the exchange:

Notice that phrase "media's gatekeeper function." The media deliver information, but Alterman characterizes that as gatekeeping. The emphasis is on what they don't let out. Not having read his book, I'm not sure what he's driving at in point #1. I get the sense it's that voters are dependent on the media filtering the information well, and bloggers ought to improve that filtering, not bypass it. You don't want too much information, because it might be bad.
3) If bloggers are going to perform this function -- that is, helping busy and usually uninformed people make sense of the world -- we are going to have to employ some sort of standard with which to judge their reliability. If they are pathological liars, psychopaths, religious or ideological extremists who cannot be trusted to tell the truth, well then, it'd be useful to have them branded as such -- in order to keep them from further infecting the body politic with even more lies, ideological obsessions, and intellectual corruptions. True, the mainstream media do not do a great job of this themselves anymore, but many people inside it do try. In many cases, their brands and relationship to their peers depend on it.
Speech as disease! Some speakers are sick, and they may cause infection! He would justify quarantines. This man does not believe in free speech. He will not put his faith in the marketplace of ideas and the remedy of more speech. [Do any of the Leftists, really? And this issue will take down John McCain, too. McCain-Feingold is the elitist, against free-speech rope, that will hang his presidency hopes. -ed.]
4) Bloggers tend to argue that this problem will sort itself out over time.
That's scarcely some eccentric blogger thought. It's the core idea of American free speech.
I worry about the "over time" part. I also worry about all the damage that can be done in the interim.
This is the mindset of a censor. Of course, you mean well. You're here to save us from ourselves.

And this indoctrination starts early and starts young. It's taught at institutions and what worries me these days is that children are institutionalized from very early now. It is natural for institutions to elevate institutions, isn't it? Betsy Newmark links to an article by Maureen Martin about Orwellian lessons in Washington state. Guess what ideals get elevated according to the lesson?

At the end of that time, Legos returned to the classroom after the children agreed to several guiding principles framed by the teachers, including that "All structures are public structures" and "All structures will be standard sizes."

Teaching contempt for capitalism, indeed. Oh and the indoctrination doesn't just come from schools. It starts at home, with misguided, abusive parents, as Kate at Small Dead Animals notes. Dr. Sanity states this:

Socialist ideologues like those teachers know that in a free market of ideas, their pathetic system-- which has only brought human misery, slavery and death to those who have embraced--cannot function in a real world. Thus they must "stack the deck" and take absolute control over the thinking of the utopia's future citizens.

On some level they even understand that the very foundation of capitalism is human freedom in its most classical, liberal tradition. And that frightens them to death.

Capitalism's incredible production of wealth is the economic side-effect that occurs when political freedom is present. It has been argued, and I agree, that both economic and political freedom are absolute prerequisites for moral behavior.

Children propagandized by dogmatic tyrants like the ones above have had not only their capacity to think for themselves abrogated; they have had their capacity to make moral choices taken from them.

So, from the very beginning, a child is infected (to borrow Eric Alternman's analogy) to see the United States as a corrosive influence on the world. Trust in Western principles, namely individual rights, traditional institutions like family and parents (that's the first and most important because all authority rests on intact families) and ultimately, God is dismissed as superstitious, naive and outright branded as "bad".

In the place of God, family, individual rights, capitalistic impulses and freedom, we have Gaia, the collective, "equal" (some people are more "equal" than others) rights, socialism and government intervention. A great big bureaucracy and infinite rules for all but the oligarchy who "filter" truth, "science", and all the other pernicious ideas passed as doctrine are imposed on the masses because the masses don't really know what is good for them. In addition, the oligarchy can act in the very ways they prohibit in the great unwashed. Sayeth Jeff Goldstein:

Which, of course, is nonsense: we factored it in—we just tend to see it for what it is, namely, a form of indulgence through which the wealthy can pretend toward environmental self-righteousness, and, in effect, purchase their way to “elect” status while maintaining the right to scold the proles for their trips to Wal-Mart in the family SUV.

Teachers begin the scolding. A child says, "If I buy it, I own it" and is "redirected" into a "fair" notion of "sharing". It is absolutely abominable to defy the natural instinct of man, in a child, to replace it with wrong ideas that have proven unworkable, and, dare I say it, immoral over and over and over again. Dr. Sanity says:

Morality, though, must always be a matter of choice, not mandate.

One cannot hold a person responsible for actions that are coerced or forced from him. Morality can only exist when freedom of action exists; and thus moral actions in any field of human endeavor require freedom.

Conduct may only be thought of as moral or immoral when it is freely chosen by the individual. It is only then that the moral significance of the action can be assessed. It is only when we are free to act that we can exercise moral judgement.

In a way, Gore with his religious piety and preening moralizing, leftist would-be censors like Eric Alterman, and Machiavellian marvels like John Murtha have done all of us a big favor: they have revealed the progressive Left's true intent. Control, subjugate, and indoctrinate the individual and elevate the collective, state, and their religious dogma. The state will be the church, the earth the god, the oligarchy the priesthood, with socialism and all their petty rules the "truth" that we must all abide or be smitten, censored, imprisoned, have our children removed, and on and on.

Honestly, I expected the Left to be more subtle and nuanced until after the next presidential election, but in their Gorebasmic state, they just can't help themselves.