Epstein, who has argued that fossil fuels are good for developing countries, wrote in 1999 in the Duke Review, a conservative college newspaper, that African countries are inferior to the West. The 1999 article was found by Documented, an investigative group, and reported by the Washington Post in April 2022. In a video response, Epstein denied racial biases but said, "Western culture is overall superior and certainly in terms of government historically, because it’s really the birth of modern freedom," and called for the Washington Post writer, Maxine Joselow, to be fired.
lmao, of course
In 2011, Epstein founded the Center for Industrial Progress (CIP), which he calls a "for-profit think tank".
In 2012, Epstein debated American environmentalist Bill McKibben while representing CIP at an event held at Duke University.
In 2013, Rolling Stone placed Epstein and the Center for Industrial Progress on its list of top global warming deniers. Epstein wrote a rebuttal in Forbes that criticized the term global warming denier, which he said was a smear tactic intended to liken critics of environmentalism to Holocaust deniers.
In 2014, Epstein and CIP publicly supported the Keystone Pipeline. He wrote The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, which reached #17 on a list of bestselling science books in early December 2014. In the book he calls the idea that the majority of climate scientists agree that humans are causing climate change a "fabrication." A Foreign Policy review of the book found that it "doesn't engage with much of the relevant scientific context" and "paints a paranoid picture of a climate science that cannot be trusted."
In 2015, The Guardian published an opinion piece by Jason Wilson critical of Epstein and CIP, stating, "Epstein's work has been popular and influential on the right because it is a particularly fluent, elaborate form of climate denialism. The CIP prides itself on being able to train corporate leaders to 'successfully outmessage "environmentalists"'."
In 2016, Epstein testified before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee at the invitation of the committee's chairman, James Inhofe (R-Okla.), who has called climate change a "hoax." Epstein suggested that rising carbon dioxide levels "benefit plants and Americans." When questioned by committee member Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) as to why Epstein, whose academic training is in philosophy, was even there, Epstein responded, "to teach you how to think clearly." Boxer replied "... you are a philosopher, not a scientist, and I don’t appreciate getting lectured by a philosopher about science."
Holy shit this guy fuckin sucks, what a demon
Western culture = freedom of speech.
Also, please fire this journalist, because I don't like what she says.
to people like this, it's not coercion if "market forces" are doing the coercion
Not true, because if market forces mean that your spokesperson having a heated gamer moment is not okay, that's a violation of :freeze-peach:
“Western culture is overall superior and certainly in terms of government historically, because it’s really the birth of modern freedom,”
Usually there's a logical throughline of deniability to these kinds of excuses, but this truly means less than nothing.
I've been reading The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow lately and they shit on this so hard. The "epic individual liberty enlightenment values" that these types love to jerk off about were the result of cultural exchange between Europe and native North American civilizations, their notions of freedom and their critiques of European societies, as many of the European enlightenment philosophers themselves admitted in their own work.
To the extent that there was a "Western Culture" it was very specifically NOT about having individual liberty because you're supposed to obey authority, not do whatever you want like some godless heathen.
Then they genocided the native Americans, turned "individual liberty" into "owning private property" and claimed to have invented freedom
:took-restraint:
Asbestos Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Asbestos, Not Less, by Tim Bundy.
I'm sure this Alex Epstein guy is a very reliable source, let's just check his NATOpedia page to make sure…hmm, yes, I see.
Holy shit this is the dumbest thing ever. Like....Yeonmi, we know you're a grifter, but COME THE FUCK ON :bruh-moment:
The DPRK grift has been good for her, but she needed to diversify her portfolio with this and the Chicago mugging story
Can't wait for the fossil future. Personally I'm going to drown in a peat bog
All of her posting has really made me reconsider my support of the DPRK way of doing things...
After all, if it produced someone like this there must be some pretty serious flaws in the system
The DPRK didn't produce this version of Park. South Korean missionaries and American conservatives created this beast. Her victory laps celebrating her newfound "freedom" on the right-wing podcast circuit accelerated her transformation to a full-on chud grifter.
Oops, I guess the joking tone didn't come through in text. That's just setting up the reversal, "She's succeeding...by failing so miserably" kind of thing.
At any rate, well said, in case I was confusing people
DRPK double agent Park is executing her mission successfully :deng-salute:
Statistically, their chud to decent human being ratio seems to be much better than ours though.
She's such a snake. Even before she went full fox-news and got surgery her story already didn't hold up. Here's a scrutiny of her story in 2014: https://thediplomat.com/2014/12/the-strange-tale-of-yeonmi-park/
Can't wait for her to get her own slot on Fox News and fully embrace the chud barbie lifestyle.
I just finished reading through that article and her response at the end feels utterly laughable. Like, MAYBE some horrible things happened to her at some point in her life, so I'm not trying to deminish any real troubles she's went through or anything, but goddamn. The desperate need to cover her ass is so thick and tangible that its suffocating. Add that to this picture and she's just a fucking ghoul.
The first paragraph of that response:
I want to thank Mary Ann Jolley for caring so much about the terrible situation in North Korea that she would point out any inconsistencies in my quotes and how my story has been reported. Much of the time, there was miscommunication because of a language barrier. I have only learned English in the last year or so, and I’m trying hard to improve every day to be a better advocate for my people. I apologize for any misunderstandings. For example, I never said that I saw executions in Hyesan. My friends’ mother was executed in a small city in central North Korea where my mother still has relatives (which is why I don’t want to name it). And there are mountains you can even see on Google Earth – maybe you call them big hills in English – outside of Hyesan that we crossed to escape. There are many more examples like this.
There are many things one can say about this, but I want to highlight:
My friends’ mother was executed in a small city in central North Korea where my mother still has relatives (which is why I don’t want to name it).
The DPRK executes families to the eighth degree of relation [as in up to around the sixth cousin] for doing stand-up comedy critical of the Leader, sometimes killing a five-figure number of people [she said 35k], but over the course of years it cannot determine the other family members of people whose specific identities they do know, even when given the area those family members reside in. What a fucking joke.
If the DPRK was in the same plane of reality as she pretends, it'd do fucking city-wide DNA tests or something if people managed to have secret familial relations (having long-ago gotten samples of Park's DNA from her old family home). If the mother ever spoke to these family members, Big Brother Kim would know because 80% of the country is employed as part time Thought Police and part time grave diggers for the constant executions. There is nothing about this claim, there is no set of additional assumptions, that could make this story of hers make sense.
She didn't flee the DPRK, she was ejected because she was literally too stupid
It's fuckin wild how many podcast clips I've seen of her at this point. Like it is such a concentrated effort to spread her bullshit. Like every single clip I've seen is more unhinged than the last one I saw. I want that ability from Black Mirror that's allows people to just block out a person from my entire life
