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Transcript of cartoon:
Panel 1
The panel shows two white men; one is wearing a turtleneck shirt, the other is wearing a necktie with a sweatervest. Both are balding, but Sweatervest’s hair is neatly cut while Turtleneck’s hair looks roughly close-cropped.
Sweatervest is seated behind a desk, and is calm. Turtleneck, looking more intense, is scooting his chair forward to talk more closely at Sweatervest.
TURTLENECK: Shhh! If you listen very carefully, you can hear the tiny grad students hiding in our ear canals.
SWEATERVEST: That’s not for us.
Panel 2
Turtleneck has gotten out of his seat entirely and is leaning forward so far his chin almost hits the desk. He’s yelling. Sweatervest remains calm, and has barely moved.
TURTLENECK: Dogs bark in a code that only the North Koreans understand! Woof! WOOF! (Are you listening, Kim?)
SWEATERVEST: Thanks for coming in, but…
Panel 3
Eyes and mouth bulging open, Turtleneck makes such a big sweeping gesture that he kicks over his chair without noticing. Sweatervest has stood up, smiling, and is offering a handshake.
TURTLENECK: Climate change is a HOAX!
SWEATERVEST: When can you start?
CAPTION: One day at the New York Times
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I don’t get it.
Whether or not I agree with your cartoons I always like them and they are generally quite straightforward; this one is an anomaly.
At the first panel I thought it was headed for grad-students-as-employees, or some comment on the lack of jobs for grads.
The second one was just confusing.
The third panel was even more confusing, though I may be missing something: Is there a big “climate change is a hoax” hiring boost?
Bret Stephens?
-jut
I’m open to being persuaded otherwise, but as of now I think that if this cartoon is about Bret Stephens, characterizing his position as “climate change is a hoax” is unfair. His thesis seemed to be that the earth is warming and humans are contributing to it, but that many scientists and politicians have overdramatized the extent to which it’s happening and the extent of their certainty. Now, he gave basically no evidence for this in his article, and the whole thing is fairly waffling and weak for someone who has apparently won a Pulitzer, but that doesn’t make him a climate change denier.
Chris, Bret Stephens did not spring new born into the world last week. He actually wrote about Climate Change before he was hired by the New York Times (thus the framing of this as a job interview). What has he written before last week you ask?
So, an extreme, and particularly vapid and ignorant, denialist, for whom “climate change is a hoax!” is a pretty accurate summary of his views.
And that’s just one article. If you’d like to be informed on the subject, you can find plenty more easily enough.
Now that I know what folks are discussing and now that I have read the article, I’m not sure why so many people are completely flipping out about it. As articles go that one was pretty mild dissent. Presenting that author as the equivalent of a raving lunatic–literally–is doing a lot more to solidify the “climate tolerates no dissent” side than it will to advance the side of climate.
Gee, g&w, now that you’ve read extensive quotes Stephens quotes describing climate science as a failed religion, and followed up by reading the unsmog profile of Bret Stephens, you’ve decided to pretend that the reaction is to Stephens first article at the NYT, because much of the reaction happened between when Stephens was hired and when that article was published, so it makes perfect sense that it must be a response to the article rather than to his long history of absurd denialism and blatant lies.
If the New York Times hired someone with a history as an ISIS propagandist, would you poo-poo people’s angry responses when that writer wrote a fairly tepid (but still inaccurate and uninformative) anti-America article to start off with? Or would you be able to keep in mind that they hadn’t sprung into existence when the New York Times hired them?
Yup. Which is, in context, not entirely odd.
Er, yes. Did you read those links? I’m confused because I grok that I am supposed to read unsmog and conclude he’s a hard-line, people-don’t-affect-climate denialist, but that requires some definition of “denialist” which is an odd one. (I don’t trust unsmog to accurately pull representative quotes, of course, though I did read them. And even if they’re representative it seems a bit odd to use so many old quotes–the arguments were somewhat different back in 2008–and it seems odd to quote some opinions of Obama. My money’s on cherrypicking.)
But assuming the linked articles are representative: That’s it? Really? Because if that is what people want to wave around as someone who is Such An Evil Denialist He Cannot Not Be Given A Job At A Paper That Claims To Publish Truth, Even With Appropriate Counter-writers, then it seems like they are shooting themselves in the foot.
There’s no “pretense.” That’s what it seems like to me. Maybe Amp wrote the cartoon when he was hired and just so happened to publish it shortly after the article came out. But there’s a lot of talk about the article. [shrug] YMMV.
Out of all the various analogies you could think of, you chose to use an Isis propagandist? Pretty much everyone civilized is anti-Isis, for good reason, which doesn’t apply here.
Anyway:
Yup, or at least I hope so. If I am going to argue against a position, I hope to have an effect. If so, I’ll see that effect in the positions people take after the argument, not the ones which they took before the argument. If I refuse to address what they actually say, why convince them in the first place?
There are some positions which I would consider so beyond the pale that I would probably write off the person even if they changed their mind. Die-hard Isis propaganda might be close to that. But Stephens isn’t even close to that boundary. Painting Stephens as a raving lunatic is as insensible as painting random Trump voters as “deliberately waging war against minorities and women,” which…. huh, that’s odd, looks like that happens too. And it seems like it may be many of the same folks. Weird. Who would have thunk it?
Thanks for the background information, Charles. I now think both the cartoon and the description of Stephens as a denialist are fair.
You’re welcome, Chris. Sorry for the snarky tone of “If you’d like to be informed on the subject”!
It happens to the best of us.
I still think that the cartoon is unfair. Stephens isn’t a wild-eyed loony, he’s an oleaginous bulshitter (and a second-rate one at that). That’s why my comment #1 here suggested substitute phrases for the turtleneck character. Another option would be “I represent a Nigerian prince who needs help getting his fortune out of the country.”
Jameson, the cartoon might have been better if it had been done that way. A problem with doing cartoons focused on current events is that I don’t have a lot of time to reconsider and revise the script.
Regarding other comments in this thread, I agree with Charles (unsurprisingly) – the dude had a long track record of being a climate denialist when the Times hired him. And the cartoon is clearly focused on the hiring decision.
Bret Stephens demonstrates again that he is a climate bullshitter, creating a chart that pretends to show that Germany has failed at cutting CO2 emissions, but actually just shows that the global economic collapse caused a massive cut in CO2 emissions. Long-term, Germany shows a steady trend of declining emissions. Like the “Pause” that only exists if you cherry pick 1998 as the starting year, cherry picking starting years is a great way to bullshit on climate change.
Kevin Drum is wrong though, and Jameson Quinn is right, Bret Stephens isn’t a skeptic, he’s just a bullshitter.