“Project(ing) Fear” or “then it fell apart, like it always does.”

Roger Hallam has gone off on one again. It is, as ever, anthropologically fascinating and politically terrifying.

You can read the thread here.

1. 1.5C is not a point of data but a religious artifact. It is imbued with the sacred taboo of the global liberal class: the all pervasive dogma of progress, the unspeakable terror of regression and fall (a proxy for death). It can never be allowed to be passed.

— Roger Hallam (@RogerHallamCS21) October 27, 2022

As ever with Hallam, there are some robust and intelligent takes on people he does not rate/like, (in this instance the liberal intelligentsia and their delusions)

(source)

And as ever (afaik) with Hallam, those insights about the stupidities of Them Over There are mixed with a bizarre but soothing prediction that “the sheeple will wake up SOON, there will be a drawing back of the veil” (i.e. apocalypse). This time the drawing back will happen when global average temperature rise reaches 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial times (scheduled, he says, for 2024).

At that point, apparently, everything ends, everyone admits that it Is Over. There is a wailing of teeth and a gnashing of clothes, people cover themselves in whips and thrash themselves with ashes. Or something along those lines; tbh, my attention may have wandered.

But yeah. Yeah, sure. Because humans never simply throw their old now-inconvenient beliefs down a memory hole and become holy (see what I am doing here?) convinced that they have ALWAYS believed x, not y. “We have always been at war with Oceania” etc etc. And our present-ism, our historical amnesia never makes this easier to do.

Look, (finally, why did I not lead with this?) this is the new version of “once you have x people arrested, the government falls” isn’t it? That shtick from 2019 that was a super-useful motivating tool. For about five minutes. Then prophecy fails, but that does not mean everyone goes away.

For all his semi-informed rambling about history and people not being able to see their own blind spots, Hallam has one or two blind spots about his own blind spots. Projecting, I guess. Don’t we all, as the fear and bewilderment and Goya-drawn terror engulfs us.

So it goes.

See also – “From the book of Roger“