Let’s first remind ourselves of The Poor Have Less Money Fallacy. This is most commonly seen when the price of a thing rises (which often happens because of government “solutions”), and we hear from the “media” or academia something like “This price increase hurts the poor!” That is not the fallacy, because that is of course true. The Fallacy comes in intimating (below the headline) this deprivation ought not to be: that the poor ought not to have less money. That, and you saw this coming, Equity ought to reign instead.
The Poor Have Less Money is yet another false theorem derived from one of the greatest errors of our time: Equality.
The solution to the Fallacy is not to do do anything straightforward like remove the previous “solutions” which causes prices to rise, but to subsidize the poor. Which, as you know, continues the cycle of solution-inflation-increase-subsidize-solution…etc.
It’s not only price increases where we see the fallacy, but in any supposed calamity that “impacts” the poor hardest. Anything in which Experts can make the poor into Official Victims. And therefore eligible to be wards of Experts. Experts are the highly credentialed well-titled people under the spell of scientism who know just how to bring Utopia about: by the studied application of Theory.
The Growth of the Expertocracy
Experts are anxious to have as many under their wings as possible, so calamities multiply both in claimed number and alleged strength. The more and stronger calamities, the more who can claim Official Victim status, or the more who can be defined as Official Victims.
In a culture centered around Victims, their inherent moral superiority, and therefore immediate qualification and need for whatever handout is going, everybody, I am fond of reminding us, wants to be a Victim. Experts find willing volunteers.
The trick is easy. Look into any organized activity and find plaints of how Victims are being especially harmed by whatever it is you’re looking in to, or that Victims need more of whatever it is, or that Victims aren’t being sufficiently considered in the thing. Victims are always to be found. And whenever they are, the need for Experts grows.
Climate of Experts
This is why whenever we hear the world is about to end (again), such as because of “climate change”, the headlines all end with some form of the cliched joke “Victims Hardest Hit.”
Take this UCLA School of Law Williams Institute report “Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in the Global Climate Change Architecture“. They note:
- “LGBT people face persistent invisibility and exclusion in global climate policy and planning.” The invisibility is not true. You can often seem them coming, and everybody knows a T when they see one. It’s not clear exactly what planning is needed. Will PrEP stop working when “climate change” hits? Will programmers be unable to create new face filters?
- “Recognition can determine whether the unique needs of LGBT people are considered in planning and response efforts.” This is like “raising awareness”: because once you are made aware, you are instantly supposed to know what the right and proper thing to do is. Or to not object to anybody’s demand of what that is.
None of this is, or must be, coherent. And, of course, it isn’t. All that is necessary is to identify the Victim group, here the LBGTQWRTY “community”, claim rights of in loco parentis over it, and then begin making demands of its behalf.
“Climate change” is a particularly good vehicle as an Expert-manufactured calamity. Its ravages are always on the horizon, it is impossible (as in not possible) for the climate to cease changing so the threat is perpetual, and the evils can only be proved by adept masters, superior beings who decide who is allowed to speak for the subject and those who must remain silent.
It would have remained the perfect crisis, too, were it not for oligarchs learning that they need ever-increasing amounts of electricity, which cuts directly into the impetus of “climate change”. Experts will have to move to something else. Yet there is tremendous inertia in Expert theory, so for at least a little while longer we’ll see variants of “climate change” and a morphing of “environmentalism” into something that doesn’t involve “sustainability” or anything touching energy production. We’re coming full circle back to “Community of property (soviet) power plus the electrification” as the slogan of the day.
But that is a subject for another day. Let’s suppose, then, we’re still in the heyday of “climate change” and see how it is used by Experts to advocate for various Victim groups. There is nothing special in this calamity is our point. That any calamity becomes the excuse for the Poor Have Less Money to advocate Equity because Equality is what interests us.
Easy As Shooting Victims in a Barrel
Our go-to source is once again Google scholar search, which does a good job cataloging Expert (academic) papers. Let’s try for a start the search phrase [marginal group “climate change”] (this exact term; you want to include the quotation marks). Experts do not often use Victim and prefer marginal group and other euphemisms.
Here in order are the top 6 searches I got (you need only scan these):
- Climate adaptation: marginal populations in the vulnerable regions: “Indigenous peoples living in vulnerable regions are and will be among those most affected by climate change.”
- Political Marginalization, Climate Change, and Conflict in African Sahel States: “Small, politically insignificant ethnic groups experience most conflicts related to environmental pressures.”
- Climate Change and Food Insecurity: Institutional Barriers to Adaptation of Marginal Groups in the Far-Western Region of Nepal: “…the paper suggests that reformations of institutional barriers are essential for increasing the ability of such groups to resist impacts and adapt the negative impacts of the changes on production, access and consumption of food of marginal groups in sustainable away [sic].”
- A Right to Adaptation: Securing the Participation of Marginalised Groups: “While climate change does not discriminate among lines of class, caste, age, sex, physical abilities or financial insecurity, it is exacerbating existing inequalities and driving those with poor adaptive capacity into deeper conditions of vulnerability to shocks and stresses.” My favorite because I enjoy the contradictions are a direct confirmation of the Poor Have Less Money.
- Empowering the Voiceless: Securing the Participation of Marginalised Groups in Climate Change Governance in South Africa: “Existing evidence suggests that the poor, particularly those in the developing world, are the most vulnerable to any changes in climate variability and change.”
- Climate Change and its Impacts on Social Structures in Marginalized Communities: “The study suggests that climate change exacerbates poverty and social discrimination, which negatively impacts the capacity of marginalized communities to adapt to environmental changes.”
There were over 700,000 returned results. Doubtless many of these are marginal—get it? get it?—but you’d have to spend days scrolling through them to find out. There are at least tens of thousands of academic papers alone on the subject, not to mention the uncountable number of bureaucratic and “non-governmental” organization reports.
Everyone’s favorite marginal, which is to say, Victim group is there. Try it. Name a Victim group. Swap the name of that group with [marginal group] and keep “climate change” in quotes. They are all there. Even ones you never heard of.
Women? What better that this? Mental Health Impacts of Climate Change on Women: a Scoping Review: “Women are disproportionately affected by climate change”.
Blacks? No, even better. Black women. BLACK WOMEN AND CLIMATE CHANGE IN BRAZIL: AN INTERSECTIONAL ANALYSIS: “The results showed that climate change disproportionately affects Black women, intensifying race, gender, and class inequalities.”
We saw above the “LABTGQWERTY” community suffers the scars of “climate change”. But what about the chaste community? If there was ever an under-discussed group! But they’re covered. Climate Change and Original Sin: The Moral Ecology of John Milton’s Poetry: “The angels’ alteration of the heavens and the corresponding decimation of the earth’s temperate climate are among the most programmatic and severe penalties imposed in the epic.”
The handicapped are wheeled in, too. Halin ai: Intersectional Experiences of Disability, Climate Change, and Disasters in Indonesia: “We call for an intersectional and decolonial approach to better understand how disabilities intersect with social and structural injustices in urban settings to shape diverse responses to climate change and disasters.”
I defy the reader to put in his or her favorite Victim group and not find multiple papers devoted the subject.
The Poor are Still Broke
The Poor Have Less Money is there is all its glory, as you have seen. A couple of examples.
- The Impacts of Climate Change on the Poor in Disadvantaged Regions: “Populations in developing countries that are located in less-favored agricultural areas (LFAAs…are not only at risk from the most severe and long-lasting climate change impacts, they are also susceptible to poverty-environment traps … that further increase their vulnerability to these impacts.” (I cut this sentence short because it went on for a hundred words.)
- How climate change mitigation could harm development in poor countries: “Avoiding dangerous climate changes requires emission reductions in not only industrialized but also developing countries.” The poor get shafted coming and going in this one.
- Unjust waters: climate change, flooding and the urban poor in Africa: “ActionAid undertook participatory vulnerability analysis in five African cities, to explore local people’s perceptions of why floods occur, how they adjust to them, who is responsible for reducing the flood risk and what action the community itself can take.”
The intersection of the Poor and other Victim groups are found in using the search term [“disproportionately affected” “climate change”] (again, keep the quotes). Here I’ll show only a picture of the top results.
There is no need to show more than a picture because every one of these 31 thousand (they say) articles is the same. For fun, though, I went to the 100th page and found this gem:
These papers all use the same patterns, same arguments, often the same words. They could save a lot of time by issuing a list to which Experts can append whatever Victim group they like, tied to the most popular calamity of the day. This would be a tremendous service because then we could use standard demographic analysis to discover who, if anybody, does not belong to at least one Victim group.
Probably no one. Except Yours Truly, naturally.
Reader Challenge
Identify a calamity—other than “climate change”—and search for the Poor or your favorite Victim group.
I won’t give any hints of calamities. If you have followed any “news” as an adult you’ll be able to think of plenty.
I didn’t look at any “solutions” to redress the grievances of Victims, but it’s always the same anyway. To be put under the ministration of Experts.
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