I disagree with trying to deplatform ideas you don't agree with.
Engage with them, show them the error of their thinking, but if you drive it underground you just trap those people in a bubble filled with like minded people and the chance they change their mind approaches zero.
Plus there is always the chance you're the one who's wrong - even if you're on the side with the widely accepted viewpoint.
All innovation at least begins with a dissenting voice.
What if it's not an "idea", but actually a provably false statement?
Sadly, it's beneficial to media companies to give provably false statements airtime because they are controverial, which drives views and clicks which drives revenue.
But for society is it beneficial to let false statements have a platform?
One could also argue that it is profitable to claim global warming will effect us all in, so therefore the need for carbon tax is secured. There's so many profit motives on each side it's hard to say which one is at play.
How many times does your tired old argument have to be refuted? Your idea only works if there is a perfect arbiter of "truth." There are nearly no truths in human existence; math probably comes closest, and yet even there look how many things in history were "true" based on knowledge of the time (Earth as the center of the universe is an obvious one).
You fail to consider that humans implement rules (e.g., your movie is illegal because it's not true) and humans are fundamentally corrupt, selfish creatures.
Your comment is a straw man attack, so perhaps cool it with the "tired old".
Provably false statements do not require perfect arbtration of truth.
For example, the president says something on TV, and a talking head straight-face states "that never happened". This is the current level of discourse in the USA.
The article linked cites various rebuttals (by actual scientists) of what seems like a large amount of factually incorrect information in this documentary - are you saying that the documentary actually is factual?
The vast majority of controversial statements happen to be difficult to conclusively prove. The fact that they go against consensus does not mean that they are proven.
What you're actually doing when you say this is giving a select group of people power to decide what is and is not false. And that's pure, soft political power.
Yes. That benefit does have to be weighed against the harm - there are good reasons we don't let people make provably false statements to defraud or slander others. But even if we assume an effective arbiter, which should not be taken for granted here, it's very good for society that people can have spirited disagreements without calling for each other to be deplatformed.
It's too easy to confuse ideas and provably false statements. Many things we hold to be absolutely true may not be so, this has happened with many 'truths' through history, and it would be incredibly arrogant to believe that today there are none of those in the public consciousness.
That's the danger in censorship, it starts with the best of intentions, to protect people from being misled by obviously wrong facts, but inevitably the opinions of the censors are confused with fact.
It takes substantially more time to debunk bullshit than it does to spew it, and you'll generally find they just move onto the next piece of bullshit with no "gee, I was wrong, I should evaluate that..." thinking.
I was familiar with this quote due to Terry Pratchett, which made me wonder where it originated. It doesn't appear to have been from Churchill[1], so the irony gave me a chuckle.
People need to place more effort on maintaining factual reputation. If someone spews bullshit once, they are on probation. If they do it twice, I don't listen to them anymore. I would really like to have this automated and work automatically throughout the web. If a reporter changes newspapers, or I'm viewing them on a different platform, it should just put a big red X through the article or something to let me know that I've found them untrustworthy.
The problem is that not enough people do this, but if you are unconstrained by the truth, you can say things that are much more superficially interesting. This drives engagement, so you will be signal-boosted by social media platforms. All of the comments of people debunking you only add to the engagement, so these articles are the bread and butter of the social media profit machine.
"People need to place more effort on maintaining factual reputation. If someone spews bullshit once, they are on probation. If they do it twice, I don't listen to them anymore."
Bingo. Michael Moore has been on my personal _index expurgatorius_ for decades.
Much of what this film says is outdated enough to constitute deliberate mendacity, and deliberate mendacity is Moore's stock and trade.
Of course, Moore's latest documendacity doesn't mention nuclear as a carbon-free energy source.
I've long said that the moment an energy source -- ANY energy source -- threatens to be able to produce enough reliable 24x7 power to keep technological civilization from collapsing, All The Usual Suspects will find some reason to oppose it. The goal is the collapse of technological civilization and the depopulation of the planet. (These types assume that they will not be personally snapped because they are Oh So Special.)
I hadn't thought wind and solar were likely to meet the challenge of producing sufficient 24x7 energy to power our technological civilization, but Moore & co. seem to think there's a risk that it might.
This is why propaganda, especially state propaganda is effective. First, it comes from an authority. Second, the people that try to refute it are labeled as 'fringe' or 'conspiracy' or 'alt-something'. Next, the state is onto the next big lie.
Iraq soldiers throwing babies in Kuwait on to the floor to die. Iraq's WMD. Syria's usage of chemical weapons and the 'red line.' All little pieces of propaganda to support the wars.
Pretty sure I read at least two links that said that it does indeed work. I think one discussed the Exodus of toxic communities from Reddit, the other something Facebook did about fake news iirc
I agree, but what's the alternative - cynically give up on them as a lost cause?
Probably you won't change their mind, but at least by disagreeing in a rational manner you may shake their faith a little and let them know not everyone thinks like they do.
That's assuming that people are arguing in good faith though. When 100 other people have rationally debunked them already and they still say the same series of falsehoods and gish gallop onto the next one when you point out its incorrect in the same way those other 100 people already have I don't see what benefit there is in engaging with them.
Some people argue about things to win an argument, not uncover the truth, engaging with them as if they are doing the former when they're really doing the latter will get nowhere.
There's probably 10s of thousands of crackpots making documentaries full of falsehoods out there that all sorts of "platforms" choose not to air - is that wrong too? Should we give equal airtime to each individual regardless of the merits of their ideas?
(I have not watched it yet FYI) It is interesting that if what he is saying is easily debunk-able that they would want it taken down. Why not just release a response pointing out what is incorrect with sources? If they are correct, why are they so threatened by Michael Moore of all people? I totally agree it is insane to say you should destroy ideas you don't agree with, feels like some thought police nonsense.
I don't think they are particularly threatened. I think they're just in a subculture where it's normal, to respond to people you don't agree with by demanding they shouldn't be allowed to speak.
Hmm...does this story about a letter signed by climate scientists and activists actually have anything to do with the "poisoned minds of young people"?
Who are these "young people"? The climate scientists, some of whom are libeled in the film, pointing out that's it full of crap? How are they advocating destruction? The letter asks the film's creators to volunteer to retract the film and apologize.
On the perfectly opposite side, personally, I feel that the encouragement to think of any content removals and user bans, regardless of context or platform, as "censorship" and "destroying ideas you don't agree with" is easily the most disturbing social trend of any significant popularity that I've seen in my life. I think it may be extremely poisonous to the minds of the young, and this trend, if any, is the one I think could lead to violence - especially when proponents frequently like to throw out such ironic phrases as "this can only end via a French Revolution" and "they (the bad guys! not us!) want a civil war".
I think it would be a great cultural event if scientists made a documentary as a rebuttal. I've seen this before where they rather deplatform than confront. Maybe they don't want to confront certain facts. Should be interesting to watch.
Should a planetary scientist spend her time making documentaries to rebut the flat earth people? Who is "deplatforming"? They are asking for the film's creators to face up to their mistakes, retract the film, and apologize. Nobody can take Moore's platform away.
Er, a film distribution company already dropped the movie and refused to distribute it further. Moore's platform is film. That's actually people taking his platform away.
They (regrettably) decided to continue to distribute it after all, even though they say they know it is garbage, so as not to seem to be censors. Also, it was far from the only platform that the film had. This is not analogous to actual deplatforming, that goes on on college campuses, for example.
Glad to hear it! I don't actually like Moore, not being a left leaning activist type myself. But he should be able to speak if people want to listen.
As for deplatforming, come on. There is more than one college campus in the world. If it's deplatforming to kick people out of colleges it's definitely deplatforming to bully film distributors into dropping films.
If you claim your film is a “full-frontal assault on our sacred cows” and the immediate reaction from the 'priesthood' is that this work is heresy and must be banned... then it looks like you've really hit the mark.
My point is that the film claims to challenge sacred cows and that the reaction alone is enough to show that that claim is correct, not that all or any of the specific claims in the film are.
There are likely many films that make ludicrous claims about climate change but even absurd ones rarely get called out as dangerous enough to warrant being banned. When films/books/etc get this strong of a reaction there is usually something in there that is worth understanding why it hit such a nerve.
> My point is that the film claims to challenge sacred cows and that the reaction alone is enough to show that that claim is correct
And it's a bad point.
People who claim to be "challenging sacred cows" are often just making provocative, misleading, or downright false claims. This has been Moore's shtick for decades now, in fact.
A strong reaction is not always proof of "sacred cows". Sometimes it's just warranted.
There are a lot of reasons an idea might make you mad, some of them very warranted. If you don't have an emotional reaction about at least a few topics, you probably aren't thinking seriously about the practical consequences of getting those topics wrong.
To be clear, society-wide censorship is rarely if ever a good idea. But I am similarly unsympathetic to the idea that being able to make someone mad means that your arguments have more merit. Being able to troll people and rile them up is a different skill than arguing. It doesn't mean Moore has hidden insight, it means he knows what buttons to push.
I wager that I could make some pretty stupid programming claims on HN that would get downvoted to oblivion, and the fact that I knew which buttons to push to get a reaction out of commenters here wouldn't have anything to do with whether or not they were true. I mean, I know exactly what buttons I would press to make someone like tptacek mad at me about encryption, but those buttons don't really have any correlation to the areas where I agree or disagree with tptacek's general approach to security.
In other words, there are a lot of reasons someone can be angry about a public claim -- they can be angry that it's common and they need to respond to it over and over again, they can be angry that the arguments are being accepted by a large portion of the population, they can be angry because the arguments are based on a faulty or fundamentally wrong understanding of how science/research works, they can be angry because they think the arguments are being made in bad faith.
> but even absurd ones rarely get called out as dangerous enough to warrant being banned
It's not the content, it's the source. It's that Moore has a large public following and people know about him. Lots of people deny climate change, but climate scientists get more worked up about Trump doing it than fringe researchers, even though on average the fringe researchers are probably making more nuanced, more insightful, better arguments against climate science than Trump is.
People do need to be careful about falling into ideology traps, but if you want to claim that someone has a mental area where they can't even consider adversarial evidence or question their own beliefs, I feel like I need to see more evidence of that than, "this highly public person made people mad when they said something stupid to millions of viewers."
Because that's just not a hard thing to do. If the head of the FDA walked out on a stage tomorrow and announced that actually we got it wrong, and drinking bleach is a really good cure for COVID-19, lots of scientists would be mad about that, and I don't think that would inherently mean that bleach is one of their "sacred cows".
I disagree with censorship in principle so don't support these "climate experts".
I am no climate change sceptic. It's easy to see that our way of life is far beyond sustainable and has developed in ways which are now harmful to us individually and as a species. It's easy to see and I will support any change which is driven by sustainability first.
But I'm now beginning to see why people are against the "green" movement. They are not starting with sustainability. They are simply trying to profit from giving people the same conveniences but with a "green" badge slapped on it. If it was about sustainability it would be easy to debunk a film like this, but instead they just want to silence it.
One thing I see parroted often and that the article alludes to, is the "fact" that electric vehicles pollute almost as much as regular cars because the electricity they use is generated in coal-firing plants.
What I hate the most about this argument is that it's often presented as a universal fact, and while it may be true in some areas in the world, it's definitely not true everywhere. A lot of Europe has nuclear electricity, for example, and here in Canada we're mostly on hydro power.
The overall numbers start to look very different when you assume hydro power instead of coal, for example, and I bet the film doesn't mention that (haven't seen it, though).
Turns out all fossil fuels combined contribute less than 1% of out electric capacity. A significant part of that 1% is in remote communities such as the Îles-de-la-Madeleine, which uses a diesel plant. This means that the percentage is even smaller in the "general" mix outside of these communities.
That is hilariously wrong. There’s no “right” way for an ecosystem to be. A hydro dam changes the landscape and the ecosystem re-adapts. Natural dams form all the time in nature as well, should we go around breaking these up to “save” the ecosystem?
Well no, building a dam fully destroys a valley's ecosystem. A point of comparison: Chernobyl also has a new ecosystem around it, where re-adaptation has occurred. We know the radioactivity is too high around it for a 21st century's human lifespan of ~80 years.
Boars and birds are having a ball. Does it not follow that your accepting the environmental damage from a dam means also that you accept the environmental damage from an early generation fission clusterfuck?
Ok, does that mean that we should drain the Great Lakes so we can "restore" them as valleys with their own ecosystem? (supposing that we could make them off limits to building, so Chicago and Gary and other cities on what are now lakes couldn't encroach; and never mind that we don't know what they were like before the glaciers carved them out, or if they were even valleys back then) Would that be better in some objective way?
Somewhat true, but it doesn't harm the environment from the same angle. The #1 enemy right now is greenhouse gases, and you can't deny that hydro power produces much less of it than coal.
You're right that there's a real impact on ecosystems; flooding large areas and such. However, I'd describe it more as a disruption than a destruction; 30 years later the ecosystems around it have adapted and the reservoir serves the ecological function of a large lake. Sure, it's not perfect, but it's better than burning coal.
except not. WAC Bennett dam in BC was built more than 30 years ago, and you still can't eat fish from the area for miles and miles around, including feeder streams and streams downstream because of methyl mercury issues. The dams in the Pac-Northwest are a major reason for the collapse of the salmon fisheries which absolutely has a huge impact on all wildlife in the area, and trees and plants too. Everything up and down stream.
Ok, but the link doesn't seem to say what would happen to that organic material if it weren't trapped behind the dam. Wouldn't it decompose anyway? (or get turned into fish, but I would expect that to happen either way)
One analysis I read ages ago showed that an electric car (even of that time) was enough more efficient than a gasoline or Diesel car that even if the electricity to charge the batteries came entirely from coal, it was a net CO2 win.
Not saying that couldn't be, but it seems unlikely: you're going through several additional conversion steps: from heat to steam to electricity to chemical energy (in the battery), back to electricity and then to motion--whereas a gas engine has a single conversion step: from heat to motion. Given that each conversion step introduces new inefficiencies, I would be surprised if coal-> heat-> steam-> electricity-> chemical-> electricity-> motion path were more efficient than the heat-> motion path (even granted that coal-fired power plants are, considered alone, probably more efficient than gas engines).
Electric cars would, I suspect, only be more efficient in terms of CO2 if the production of their electricity did not produce any CO2, i.e. the electricity came from hydro, nuclear, wind or geothermal.
Want to talk about conversions? Look at the complexity in ICE vehicles vs. electric.
Let’s just look at fluids:
Oil
Cooling
Brake
Transmission
Differential
Power steering (although more and more ICE cars are coming with electric, so this is waning).
Many of those must be changed on a routine basis. Changed. That means old has to be drained and disposed of and new fluids have to be made to be used for replacement.
Look at all the parts in ICE vehicles that need replacement/maintenance - spark plugs, air filters, PCV Valves, accessory and timing belts - those are pretty common, but there are just more moving parts so more to potentially break beyond that stuff.
By comparison, electric cars are extremely simple. Brake fluid and windshield washer fluid are generally all they have. There are far fewer moving parts. If there is a transmission, they are dramatically simpler/less complex. Yes the battery packs are liquid cooled but it’s a sealed, non-serviceable system. The lead acid batteries in my ICE cars are sealed too.
This is one of the biggest reasons electric cars aren’t popular with dealers. Car dealers survive on maintenance, not new car sales. Fleecing people on used cars (buying or selling - most people suck at dealing with used vehicles) can be a significant source of revenue, but nothing beats steady service revenue. Hell just try to get a modern car that doesn’t flog you to see your dealer for routine service - whether it’s really needed or not.
Electric cars have dramatically fewer service requirements and this has a substantially positive environmental impact - has to. If you don’t have to create a bunch of stuff on a routine basis x millions of vehicles then there isn’t much of an environmental impact, eh?
That said, I still think current battery tech isn’t practical enough to totally supplant ICE vehicles. Electric cars make great commuter vehicles - except with the pandemic most people are teleworking :) Maybe the new Samsung solid state batteries will finally tilt things where electrics are a no-brainer.
Very informative thank you. From this rebuttal I see that the movie probably packages true information, some of it outdated, in a provocative way.
The only fully scientific rebuttal is to run the experiment: run the whole economy without fossil fuels or nuclear, and see how much it looks like the middle-ages, how much it looks like utopia. My guess is 80/20 on the middle-ages side, but who know.
The rebuttal is in the beginning stating that Germany's renewable electricity production is important and not it's total energy consumption, at the end they claim that we need to shift all of our energy consumption to renewable electricity. This is a fundamental contradiction.
I'm definitely going to watch it, now. Heterodoxy is more important than ever in society. I'm capable of disagreeing with an argument and want the freedom to do so.
If what Moore presents is taken out of context, which is probably what is happening here, it doesn't matter what he presents.
wow, this is great marketing for the film. now i want to see it to see what all the controversy is about.
i've seen a couple michael moore docs before, and while i often sympathize with his position on a given topic, i'm rarely impressed by his persuasive documentary powers.
As someone who disagrees with Moore 99% of the time, this is absurd, and tells you more about the state of institutional "experts" and "science" than it does about the contents of Moore's movie.
Moore can publish (obvious!) bullshit for years and never really get called on it by "experts" or popular media. Now, he publishes something that goes against the dogma of a highly cathedralized and politicized field with such low predictive power that it hardly qualifies as a science at all, and there's a huge (and very successful) censorship effort.
I wonder, is the divergence between the predictive power of the field and the strength of its dogma enforcement an anomaly, or is it to be expected that fields with low predictive power will more aggressively defend their orthodoxy?
Michael Moore represents the very unusual combination of being left-leaning and populist. He points out flaws in western governments/corporates that get ignored most of the time and puts them into a narrative. (I don't agree with everything but Bowling for Columbine is very good, I think) It gets problematic how he exaggerates things, doesn't seem to be ashamed of distorting ("enhancing") arguments by stringing together unrelated - though concerning - topics.
FWIW I think one needs to differentiate between Climate Science and the narrative of the Climate Movement. The former is more than 100 years old, the latter kind of under-developed and easy to attack. It's surprising though that Moore does it...
Describing itself as a “full-frontal assault on our sacred cows”
temporarily took down the film after describing it as “full of misinformation”
“trades in debunked fossil fuel industry talking points” that question the affordability and reliability of solar and wind energy.
the film includes “various distortions, half-truths and lies”
It is written, therefore it must be true. They crossed my accusation threshold, no more thinking required, case closed. But seriously I'd love to see their actual rebuttals to the film. In the meantime I'll check out the free YouTube link they include in the article.
Good eyes, I definitely glossed over the linkage in the parent article. Nice stance they're taking with all the transparency about their decisions. Pretty level headed public response.
I can't tell if that's the climate experts they refer to but these film advocates breath of freshair response is equal to or more newsworthy than the original article. I'm really digging their tone and open invitation.
Instead of censorship, perhaps we should codify universally acceptable ideas and put them into a book. This book would be distributed to everyone that wants one and once a week we would gather and read a portion of it together and receive guidance from an expert on the subject. Over time this should lead to a more virtuous society.
I think this would be preferable to the clumsy "whack-a-mole" system we currently use to silence unacceptable ideas.
What happens when one of your "universally acceptable ideas" aren't acceptable anymore, or gets proven wrong? More importantly, who gets to decide what's included in the first place?
>Summary: The new movie Executive Produced and promoted by Michael Moore, Directed by Jeff Gibbs and distributed by Films for Action, PLANET OF THE HUMANS is unscientific, flies in the face of decades of renewable energy science, engineering and research and is counter productive in the age of urgent need for Climate Action. Because the film is based in misinformation and not in truth, we request that the film be retracted by its creators and distributors and an apology rendered for its misleading content.
Michael Moore is ultra-leftist environmentalist.I watched the video entirely because climate experts are so angry.
The video starts off explaining that he is an environmentalist. Certainly makes the video provocative.
The actual video seems to suggest what the right-wing has been saying for 20 years. VERY interesting to see Michael Moore agreeing with the right-wing folks.
Makes you wonder if perhaps that he is right here.
Everyone is so angry at Michael Moore because they are terminally anthropocentric. The point of the film is that we need to achieve fewer humans, and this makes the anthropocentrists rabidly angry.
Moore makes an excellent point: creating solar panels and wind farms requires fossil fuels. Doing so in such a way as to accommodate perpetual growth is unsustainable.
We need to prune the human species to a sustainable level and keep it there.
We need forced sterilization, now. We need to limit waste and useless economic activity, now. Or else we will become extinct.
COVID-19 is clear and unequivocal evidence that population density has reached unsustainable levels. We are looking at The Great Filter.
We can have innovation, technical progress, and a good life. But we can only do that on a smaller scale.
Millions have viewed the video, yet so few understand its message. "Growth is Good", but population growth without limits is suicide.
Forced sterilization is not the only answer. Fifty years ago, Paul Ehrlich explained the problem in considerable detail, and he has offered numerous solutions. Today, most people have never heard of him.
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_R._Ehrlich )
Perhaps Covid-19.is too tame. Just wait. If we are unwilling to live in harmony with nature, the problem will soon be resolved - one way or another.
( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWMyWr9_CVo )
"COVID-19 is clear and unequivocal evidence that population density has reached unsustainable levels. We are looking at The Great Filter." You are aware of course that there have been other plagues in the past, going back to at least the Roman Empire: the Plague of Justinian, shortly after the fall of the Western Empire; and nearly a millennium before that, the Plague of Athens. Just how small does the human population have to get, in your opinion?
I see dangerous is in quotes - having read the article and seen the vitriol and scorn heaped on this movie, that fact begs the question, who is actually in harms way here?
I think Moore makes some really good points that need to be addressed by environmentalists but taking down the film should not be the first form of action.
3 points that are absolutely true. 1) that most green power is backed up by fossil fuels. 2) that solar and wind power hardware needs to be replaced on a regular cycle and that every cycle deals with adding pollution to the environment. and 3) that the real problem is the size of the human population. There are too many people overpowering the planet's available resources.
They are uncomfortable issues but they need to be addressed rather than swept under the floor because we don't like them. If we don't address them they will never be fixed.
1)Duh. Green power (except nuclear) cant just scale whenever it is needed, sun is there during the day only, wind is there when wind is there, etc. Why is this even an issue? Over time green power and power storage technologies will get cheaper and flexible, allowing us to use green power as higher and higher percentages of our power needs.
2) Who ever said that green power hardware had some magical resistance to wear and obsolescence? Obsolescence is great because it means newer hardware works better and can have lower environmental impacts.
3) Something that’s been a mainstream topic for over 50 years, so what’s the point? what’s their and your solution? We know that increasing living standards and empowering women leads to lower birth rates, the US and Japan are supposedly already below replacement level birth rates. What else do you propose?
The first two points are under-appreciated and it shouldn't be assumed that the environmental cost is negligible.
As for the third point, I don't think the film comes right out and says there are too many people, though it is implied. Specifically the film claims that in the last 200 years the population as well as the consumption rate per person has increased tenfold, for a total increased impact of 100 times.
Under appreciated or not, why the complaints? What alternatives are there that are economically competitive?
It’s ridiculous to complain that technologies that significantly reduce our environmental impact aren’t zero impact. It’s throwing babies out with the bath water levels of cluelessness.
High energy civilization is not a birth right. Just thought I would put a line out there for both leftists and right wingers to censor. And I will be happy when they do and they will.
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 120 ms ] threadEngage with them, show them the error of their thinking, but if you drive it underground you just trap those people in a bubble filled with like minded people and the chance they change their mind approaches zero.
Plus there is always the chance you're the one who's wrong - even if you're on the side with the widely accepted viewpoint.
All innovation at least begins with a dissenting voice.
Sadly, it's beneficial to media companies to give provably false statements airtime because they are controverial, which drives views and clicks which drives revenue.
But for society is it beneficial to let false statements have a platform?
You do realize scientists need salary for food, clothing, housing, health care, etc.?
As with anything, follow the money. The grant systems that power our “scientific research” these days are anything but unbiased.
You fail to consider that humans implement rules (e.g., your movie is illegal because it's not true) and humans are fundamentally corrupt, selfish creatures.
Provably false statements do not require perfect arbtration of truth.
For example, the president says something on TV, and a talking head straight-face states "that never happened". This is the current level of discourse in the USA.
What you're actually doing when you say this is giving a select group of people power to decide what is and is not false. And that's pure, soft political power.
That's the danger in censorship, it starts with the best of intentions, to protect people from being misled by obviously wrong facts, but inevitably the opinions of the censors are confused with fact.
This tends not to work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
It takes substantially more time to debunk bullshit than it does to spew it, and you'll generally find they just move onto the next piece of bullshit with no "gee, I was wrong, I should evaluate that..." thinking.
[1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/26/books/famous-misquotation...
The problem is that not enough people do this, but if you are unconstrained by the truth, you can say things that are much more superficially interesting. This drives engagement, so you will be signal-boosted by social media platforms. All of the comments of people debunking you only add to the engagement, so these articles are the bread and butter of the social media profit machine.
Bingo. Michael Moore has been on my personal _index expurgatorius_ for decades.
Much of what this film says is outdated enough to constitute deliberate mendacity, and deliberate mendacity is Moore's stock and trade.
Of course, Moore's latest documendacity doesn't mention nuclear as a carbon-free energy source.
I've long said that the moment an energy source -- ANY energy source -- threatens to be able to produce enough reliable 24x7 power to keep technological civilization from collapsing, All The Usual Suspects will find some reason to oppose it. The goal is the collapse of technological civilization and the depopulation of the planet. (These types assume that they will not be personally snapped because they are Oh So Special.)
I hadn't thought wind and solar were likely to meet the challenge of producing sufficient 24x7 energy to power our technological civilization, but Moore & co. seem to think there's a risk that it might.
Iraq soldiers throwing babies in Kuwait on to the floor to die. Iraq's WMD. Syria's usage of chemical weapons and the 'red line.' All little pieces of propaganda to support the wars.
Probably you won't change their mind, but at least by disagreeing in a rational manner you may shake their faith a little and let them know not everyone thinks like they do.
Censorship is not the answer.
Some people argue about things to win an argument, not uncover the truth, engaging with them as if they are doing the former when they're really doing the latter will get nowhere.
It just feels like it is a matter of time until we have something as insane as the French Revolution in the US.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World
As for deplatforming, come on. There is more than one college campus in the world. If it's deplatforming to kick people out of colleges it's definitely deplatforming to bully film distributors into dropping films.
So yes, I would definitely watch "rebuttle" documentaries! Are there any others out there?
"Cancer can be cured by drinking methylmercury."
"That's dangerous and you should stop saying it."
"Looks like I hit the mark!"
There are likely many films that make ludicrous claims about climate change but even absurd ones rarely get called out as dangerous enough to warrant being banned. When films/books/etc get this strong of a reaction there is usually something in there that is worth understanding why it hit such a nerve.
...or it could just be good marketing.
And it's a bad point.
People who claim to be "challenging sacred cows" are often just making provocative, misleading, or downright false claims. This has been Moore's shtick for decades now, in fact.
A strong reaction is not always proof of "sacred cows". Sometimes it's just warranted.
What do you mean when you say sacred cows?
There are a lot of reasons an idea might make you mad, some of them very warranted. If you don't have an emotional reaction about at least a few topics, you probably aren't thinking seriously about the practical consequences of getting those topics wrong.
To be clear, society-wide censorship is rarely if ever a good idea. But I am similarly unsympathetic to the idea that being able to make someone mad means that your arguments have more merit. Being able to troll people and rile them up is a different skill than arguing. It doesn't mean Moore has hidden insight, it means he knows what buttons to push.
I wager that I could make some pretty stupid programming claims on HN that would get downvoted to oblivion, and the fact that I knew which buttons to push to get a reaction out of commenters here wouldn't have anything to do with whether or not they were true. I mean, I know exactly what buttons I would press to make someone like tptacek mad at me about encryption, but those buttons don't really have any correlation to the areas where I agree or disagree with tptacek's general approach to security.
In other words, there are a lot of reasons someone can be angry about a public claim -- they can be angry that it's common and they need to respond to it over and over again, they can be angry that the arguments are being accepted by a large portion of the population, they can be angry because the arguments are based on a faulty or fundamentally wrong understanding of how science/research works, they can be angry because they think the arguments are being made in bad faith.
> but even absurd ones rarely get called out as dangerous enough to warrant being banned
It's not the content, it's the source. It's that Moore has a large public following and people know about him. Lots of people deny climate change, but climate scientists get more worked up about Trump doing it than fringe researchers, even though on average the fringe researchers are probably making more nuanced, more insightful, better arguments against climate science than Trump is.
People do need to be careful about falling into ideology traps, but if you want to claim that someone has a mental area where they can't even consider adversarial evidence or question their own beliefs, I feel like I need to see more evidence of that than, "this highly public person made people mad when they said something stupid to millions of viewers."
Because that's just not a hard thing to do. If the head of the FDA walked out on a stage tomorrow and announced that actually we got it wrong, and drinking bleach is a really good cure for COVID-19, lots of scientists would be mad about that, and I don't think that would inherently mean that bleach is one of their "sacred cows".
I am no climate change sceptic. It's easy to see that our way of life is far beyond sustainable and has developed in ways which are now harmful to us individually and as a species. It's easy to see and I will support any change which is driven by sustainability first.
But I'm now beginning to see why people are against the "green" movement. They are not starting with sustainability. They are simply trying to profit from giving people the same conveniences but with a "green" badge slapped on it. If it was about sustainability it would be easy to debunk a film like this, but instead they just want to silence it.
What I hate the most about this argument is that it's often presented as a universal fact, and while it may be true in some areas in the world, it's definitely not true everywhere. A lot of Europe has nuclear electricity, for example, and here in Canada we're mostly on hydro power.
The overall numbers start to look very different when you assume hydro power instead of coal, for example, and I bet the film doesn't mention that (haven't seen it, though).
EDIT: I found a source describing my province's electricity mix: https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/nrg/ntgrtd/mrkt/nrgsstmprfls/qc-en...
Turns out all fossil fuels combined contribute less than 1% of out electric capacity. A significant part of that 1% is in remote communities such as the Îles-de-la-Madeleine, which uses a diesel plant. This means that the percentage is even smaller in the "general" mix outside of these communities.
You're right that there's a real impact on ecosystems; flooding large areas and such. However, I'd describe it more as a disruption than a destruction; 30 years later the ecosystems around it have adapted and the reservoir serves the ecological function of a large lake. Sure, it's not perfect, but it's better than burning coal.
I can't vouch for this but I read stuff like this
https://news.wsu.edu/2016/09/28/reservoirs-play-substantial-...
td;dr: Bacteria in reservoirs decompose organic material trapped behind the dam releasing CO2 and methane.
Electric cars would, I suspect, only be more efficient in terms of CO2 if the production of their electricity did not produce any CO2, i.e. the electricity came from hydro, nuclear, wind or geothermal.
Let’s just look at fluids: Oil Cooling Brake Transmission Differential Power steering (although more and more ICE cars are coming with electric, so this is waning).
Many of those must be changed on a routine basis. Changed. That means old has to be drained and disposed of and new fluids have to be made to be used for replacement.
Look at all the parts in ICE vehicles that need replacement/maintenance - spark plugs, air filters, PCV Valves, accessory and timing belts - those are pretty common, but there are just more moving parts so more to potentially break beyond that stuff.
By comparison, electric cars are extremely simple. Brake fluid and windshield washer fluid are generally all they have. There are far fewer moving parts. If there is a transmission, they are dramatically simpler/less complex. Yes the battery packs are liquid cooled but it’s a sealed, non-serviceable system. The lead acid batteries in my ICE cars are sealed too.
This is one of the biggest reasons electric cars aren’t popular with dealers. Car dealers survive on maintenance, not new car sales. Fleecing people on used cars (buying or selling - most people suck at dealing with used vehicles) can be a significant source of revenue, but nothing beats steady service revenue. Hell just try to get a modern car that doesn’t flog you to see your dealer for routine service - whether it’s really needed or not.
Electric cars have dramatically fewer service requirements and this has a substantially positive environmental impact - has to. If you don’t have to create a bunch of stuff on a routine basis x millions of vehicles then there isn’t much of an environmental impact, eh?
That said, I still think current battery tech isn’t practical enough to totally supplant ICE vehicles. Electric cars make great commuter vehicles - except with the pandemic most people are teleworking :) Maybe the new Samsung solid state batteries will finally tilt things where electrics are a no-brainer.
https://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/skepticism-is-health...
If what Moore presents is taken out of context, which is probably what is happening here, it doesn't matter what he presents.
i've seen a couple michael moore docs before, and while i often sympathize with his position on a given topic, i'm rarely impressed by his persuasive documentary powers.
Moore can publish (obvious!) bullshit for years and never really get called on it by "experts" or popular media. Now, he publishes something that goes against the dogma of a highly cathedralized and politicized field with such low predictive power that it hardly qualifies as a science at all, and there's a huge (and very successful) censorship effort.
I wonder, is the divergence between the predictive power of the field and the strength of its dogma enforcement an anomaly, or is it to be expected that fields with low predictive power will more aggressively defend their orthodoxy?
He gets called on it constantly. His reputation is so bad that it would never occur to me to bother watching this film.
'goes against the dogma'
Or, contains objective falsehoods and libels.
> Or, contains objective falsehoods and libels.
All of his movies have this, and they still don't provoke this kind of reaction.
FWIW I think one needs to differentiate between Climate Science and the narrative of the Climate Movement. The former is more than 100 years old, the latter kind of under-developed and easy to attack. It's surprising though that Moore does it...
Then all you have to do is follow the link in the article to the letter that contains those rebuttals.
> Ultimately, we decided to put it back up because we believe media literacy, critique and debate is the best solution to the misinformation in the film. https://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/michael-moore-presents-...
I can't tell if that's the climate experts they refer to but these film advocates breath of freshair response is equal to or more newsworthy than the original article. I'm really digging their tone and open invitation.
I think this would be preferable to the clumsy "whack-a-mole" system we currently use to silence unacceptable ideas.
>Summary: The new movie Executive Produced and promoted by Michael Moore, Directed by Jeff Gibbs and distributed by Films for Action, PLANET OF THE HUMANS is unscientific, flies in the face of decades of renewable energy science, engineering and research and is counter productive in the age of urgent need for Climate Action. Because the film is based in misinformation and not in truth, we request that the film be retracted by its creators and distributors and an apology rendered for its misleading content.
The video starts off explaining that he is an environmentalist. Certainly makes the video provocative.
The actual video seems to suggest what the right-wing has been saying for 20 years. VERY interesting to see Michael Moore agreeing with the right-wing folks.
Makes you wonder if perhaps that he is right here.
Moore makes an excellent point: creating solar panels and wind farms requires fossil fuels. Doing so in such a way as to accommodate perpetual growth is unsustainable.
We need to prune the human species to a sustainable level and keep it there.
We need forced sterilization, now. We need to limit waste and useless economic activity, now. Or else we will become extinct.
COVID-19 is clear and unequivocal evidence that population density has reached unsustainable levels. We are looking at The Great Filter.
We can have innovation, technical progress, and a good life. But we can only do that on a smaller scale.
Because I don't see a chance of that one being adopted.
Forced sterilization is not the only answer. Fifty years ago, Paul Ehrlich explained the problem in considerable detail, and he has offered numerous solutions. Today, most people have never heard of him. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_R._Ehrlich )
Perhaps Covid-19.is too tame. Just wait. If we are unwilling to live in harmony with nature, the problem will soon be resolved - one way or another. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWMyWr9_CVo )
All of them wrong, tho.
"Today, most people have never heard of him. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_R._Ehrlich)"
For good reasons, since he failed miserably at his grand predictions and his anti-humanistic "solutions.
Starting with you and yours?
3 points that are absolutely true. 1) that most green power is backed up by fossil fuels. 2) that solar and wind power hardware needs to be replaced on a regular cycle and that every cycle deals with adding pollution to the environment. and 3) that the real problem is the size of the human population. There are too many people overpowering the planet's available resources.
They are uncomfortable issues but they need to be addressed rather than swept under the floor because we don't like them. If we don't address them they will never be fixed.
1)Duh. Green power (except nuclear) cant just scale whenever it is needed, sun is there during the day only, wind is there when wind is there, etc. Why is this even an issue? Over time green power and power storage technologies will get cheaper and flexible, allowing us to use green power as higher and higher percentages of our power needs.
2) Who ever said that green power hardware had some magical resistance to wear and obsolescence? Obsolescence is great because it means newer hardware works better and can have lower environmental impacts.
3) Something that’s been a mainstream topic for over 50 years, so what’s the point? what’s their and your solution? We know that increasing living standards and empowering women leads to lower birth rates, the US and Japan are supposedly already below replacement level birth rates. What else do you propose?
As for the third point, I don't think the film comes right out and says there are too many people, though it is implied. Specifically the film claims that in the last 200 years the population as well as the consumption rate per person has increased tenfold, for a total increased impact of 100 times.
It’s ridiculous to complain that technologies that significantly reduce our environmental impact aren’t zero impact. It’s throwing babies out with the bath water levels of cluelessness.