A Place to Stand

This report, care of WattsUpWithThat & the Guardian of all places, finds that far from being nice altruistic people devoted to bettering mankind, they make "environmental sacrifices" simply as an excuse for being lying, thieving bastards in other things.

Because purchasing green products affirms
individuals’ values of social responsibility and ethical consciousness, we predict that purchasing green products will establish moral credentials, ironically licensing selfish and morally questionable behavior...

[part of the 3rd experiment] Ninety undergraduate students (56 female) from the University of Toronto volunteered for this experiment in exchange for five Canadian Dollars. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions (store: conventional vs. green). Upon arrival they were seated at desks equipped with a computer and one envelope containing $5 in different denominations. Participants were informed that they were going to engage in a number of unrelated tasks. In the first task, they were randomly assigned to make purchases in either the
conventional or green product store as in Experiment 2. Afterwards, they engaged in an ostensibly unrelated visual perception task in which they saw a box divided by a diagonal line on the computer screen (Mazar & Ariely, 2009). Participants were told that on each trial they would see a pattern of 20 dots scattered inside the box. The pattern would stay on the screen for one second, and participants had to press a key to indicate whether there were more dots on the left or right side of the diagonal line. Participants were paid 0.5 cent for each trial identified as having more dots on the left and 5 cents for each trial identified as having more dots on the right.
The dots were always arranged such that one side clearly had more dots than the other side (15/14/13 vs. 5/6/7); thus it was fairly easy to identify the correct answer. We emphasized that it was important to be as accurate as possible because the results would help design future experiments...We found a significant difference in performance in the dots task, t (79) = 2.26, p = .027, prep = .913. Participants who had purchased in the conventional store identified 42.5% (SD = 2.9%) of trials as having more dots on the right side, which was not significantly different from
the actual 40% (t (37) = 1.66, p = .106, prep = .811). Participants who had purchased in the green store, however, identified 51.4% (SD = 2.67%) of trials as having more dots on the right side – suggesting they were lying to earn more money...

Together, our studies suggest that social and ethical acts may contribute to a more general sense of moral self than previously thought, licensing socially undesirable behaviors in distant domains
pdf in full

Not so surprising. Basically Greenism involves people saying that the taxpayer, ie other people, should provide vast amounts of money to satisfy their hobbies. Almost every Green I have met insists onn his right to such extortion/theft whereas the few rich people I have met have generally been courteous & thoughtful though tough minded. The lying to promote false scare stories has now been partially exposed & one result is that almost all "environmentalists" have, to a greater or leser extent justified the frauds. They have, of course, continued with purely ad hominum & dishonest attacks on decent sceptics.

I have yet to hear a single member of the movement personally apologising to any of the people they have slandered. Clearly such behaviour is consistent only with the entire movement being not only corrupt liars but immoral, theiving liars. Of course i am willing to accept there are individuals in it who are not wholly dishonest scum - all they have to do is show they have publicly disociated themselves from the liars, thieves & parasites.

Even then Heinleins division of the human race into those who want to control others & those who have no such desire clealry puts the eco-fascists in the former category. Green activism, even in theory, involves controlling what people are allowed to do & in practice consists of little else., apart from the demand they get paid for doing so. That would make even honest & decent members of the Luddite movvement pretty nasty people, though far nicer than most Greens.

Labels: eco-fascism, Media, Social