Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumJohn "Pornstache" Stossel Cites Same Old Hacks In His Climate Swill, Then Attacks Fact-Checkers
Links at original.
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As one of the Kochs highest-paid contractors in recent years, its perhaps no surprise that Stossels complaints appeared at professional and/or Koch-funded climate denial hubs like Heartland, and the Daily Signal, TownHall and elsewhere, despite being a difficult-to-read semi-transcript of his video. If Stossel were looking to shore up the credibility of his fellow fact-checked martyrs, he likely couldnt have chosen worse examples than the three he did: Michael Shellenberger, Bjorn Lomborg, and John Tierney.
First up is John Tierney, who wrote something about masks and children that Science Feedback fact checked and found wanting. Tierney is a former New York Times columnist who Joe Romm described as the countrys worst science writer due to his deliberate contrarianism. In more recent years, Tierney has only grown dumber, for example describing disgraced Trump EPA administrator Scott Pruitt as a warrior for science, despite his very deliberate war on air pollution science. Just to give you an idea of how small and stale this talent pool really is: Teirney also believed then-president-elect Trump would handle science issues better than Obama, and while he didnt speculate on how a Trump administration might handle a global pandemic, he did compare Trumps perspective to that of Bjorn Lomborgs Copenhagen Consensus, a group of prominent economists who have concluded that other problems are far more pressing than climate change. (Of course, Lomborgs project was hardly as prominent as he claimed, given that the seven Nobel laureates he once claimed were part of his consensus in 2015 included someone who had died years before.) And this was not Teirneys first brush with Bjorn, as he had cited Lomborg back in 2007, and got (accurate) criticism for it.
Next up was Michael Shellenberger, introduced with an old Colbert Show clip Stossel used to suggest Shellenberger is somehow credible or particularly relevant. Supposedly he was fact checked for contesting that were in a sixth major extinction event, but the actual content was much more detailed than that. Surprise surprise: people who are dishonest are also dishonest about work proving their dishonesty!
Stossel then goes to Bjorn Lomborg, whose false claims about warming saving lives are still unsupported by the study Lomborg cites, according to the actual studys co-author. As Teirneys old citation of Lomborg and Shellenberger on Colbert illustrate, these guys have been doing this same exact shtick for quite a while now. Theyve had plenty of time to make their argument to the public. Theyve largely failed, and now, finally, theyre facing actual noticeable repercussions to their career of disinformation in the form of (mildly) reduced virality on Facebook.
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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/12/2/2067168/-John-Stossel-Attacks-Fact-Checkers-Because-Now-He-Can-t-Supplement-Koch-Funding-With-As-Much-FB-Ad#view-story
Bernardo de La Paz
(48,935 posts)Is appearance shaming only allowed against right wing people you hate?
But we should be outraged if someone draws attention to Stacey Adams appearance, for example? Or Jan Psaki's appearance while she was pregnant?
Does Mark Twain have a "pornstache"? So what if he does?
Are you going to attack John Conyers' moustache next?
No mention of his moustache in the original article, so it is all on you, and it kind of mischaracterizes the article, cheapens it.