Yes, I’m guessing that you never thought that you’d ever read that meant in a more-or-less non-ironic fashion on a right-leaning website, given that the man is supposedly the inspiration for the word ‘moonbat.’ Still, the poor fellow’s going to have an unpleasant voyage of discovery. You see, George Monbiot has made a classic mistake of committing religious apostasy in public:
Over the last fortnight I’ve made a deeply troubling discovery. The anti-nuclear movement to which I once belonged has misled the world about the impacts of radiation on human health. The claims we have made are ungrounded in science, unsupportable when challenged, and wildly wrong. We have done other people, and ourselves, a terrible disservice.
…and in a fashion that is actually going to be hard for him to walk back*. And he’s going to get hammered for it, too.
It’ll be interesting to see whether he cracks, or not: if he doesn’t, well, that’s how it begins. You commit heresy, and they hammer you for it, and you don’t crack, and you start to get mad, and then you start looking at all the other stuff that you maybe weren’t entirely sure about, and you start committing heresy on that stuff, and then they hammer you some more, and then you realize that if you’re going to burn bridges anyway then you can finally at least tell that one particular [expletive deleted] off in the process, and at some point in all of this somehow Those People on the Other Side have suddenly stopped sounding like lunatics and have started sounding like people who may be a little odd, sure, but who have a bit of a point, and that’s when the fun really starts.
Or you crack. Monbiot may still yet crack. Guess we’ll see, huh?
Via neo-neocon and Little Miss Attila; and I believe that both of them are familiar with the character arc displayed above.
Moe Lane (crosspost)
*He actually called anti-nuke people the equivalent of global warming skeptics, which is pretty much the nastiest thing in his current ideology’s lexicon after “Sarah Palin supporters.”
Wait’ll he peeks under the hood of the Global Warming folks.
Nahhhh…never happen. Wonder what made him question the scientific cred of the anti-nuclear lobby?
That’s also the Lee Stranahan growth curve.
Lee Stranahan is late to the party–but it’s lovely to see him here.
Thank you for the link. Monbiot definitely has a long way to go in the transition, and Stranahan has made great strides in a relatively short period of time. I wonder if Stranahan understands how far he’s already moved.
If I may paraphrase…
He fell victim to one of the classic blunders – The most famous of which is “never get involved in a land war in Asia” – but only slightly less well-known is “Never become an apostate from the Church of Gia”
Stranahan appears to be coming round to what he says he is, a liberal, rather than a Progressive pseudo-Marxist.
One can, of course, hope for the same from Monbiot, but I wouldn’t advise giving up anything you care for whilst waiting for the process to work out.
Regards,
Ric