The Free Speech Union has just published a briefing on carbon literacy training by Thomas Harris, its Director of Data and Impact. The FSU is concerned that it will have a chilling effect on free speech in the workplace in the same way that unconscious bias training and anti-racism training does, with employees reluctant to challenge the ideas behind it for fear of jeopardising their careers.
Carbon literacy training is spreading rapidly across UK offices and places of study, with over 67,000 citizens certified as ‘carbon literate’ according to the Carbon Literacy Project (CLP), the main organisation behind the initiative. (Between financial year-end September 2021 and September 2022, CLP’s income grew from £183.8k to £637.7k, an increase of nearly 250%.) The training takes it for granted that we’re in the midst of a ‘climate emergency’ and recommends that employees embrace various radical solutions, including net zero.
The Free Speech Union is concerned that this training is embedding a particular orthodoxy about climate change in British workplaces, leaving employees feeling unable to challenge it. While it’s indisputable that average global temperatures have increased since the mid-19th Century people hold a range of views about the causes and severity of climate change and that in turn influences their opinion about the best way to tackle it – or, indeed, whether tackling it is possible or necessary. Different solutions to the problems created by climate change are informed by different values and recommending one approach over another inevitably involves making a political choice. There is no-such thing as an apolitical, ‘scientific’ solution. Consequently, employees should not be put under pressure to endorse a particular approach or threatened with disciplinary action if they fail to adjust their behaviour to follow this approach, particularly in their private lives.
In those companies seeking accreditation as a ‘Carbon Literate Organisation’ (CLO), up to 80% of staff are expected to become ‘carbon literate’. Carbon literate accreditation requires employees to embrace a particular view about climate change and identify at least one action they can take to reduce their own carbon footprint, as well as at least one action involving other people. The FSU fears that employees may be penalised if they refuse to comply with these requirements because they do not share a particular point of view.
The FSU first became aware of this new threat to free speech in the workplace when it was contacted by a member who is concerned about his career after he challenged the carbon literacy training provided by his employer. The FSU believes he was right to be concerned. To secure CLP’s platinum, gold, and silver CLO accreditation, companies are expected to embed carbon literacy in the annual targets of staff members and evaluate their performance accordingly. This means that employees who don’t subscribe to a particular view on climate change could find themselves missing out on pay awards or promotion unless they self-censor or pretend to hold convictions they don’t have.
If you’re being forced to undergo carbon literacy training in your workplace and are worried you might get into trouble for challenging the climate activist agenda behind it, you can contact Thomas Harris at the Free Speech Union here. And if you’re not already a member of the FSU, you can join here.
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Amazing ! If only we had known these things before this Crucial Survey ! Life could have been so much different , we are so far up our own arses now ( if you’ll pardon the pun) that I wonder if it would be better if we did die out due to chasing the chocolate starfish instead of the bonus hole !
Couldn’t resist. Not sorry!
https://todayleaked.com/why-is-huw-edwards-trending-on-twitter-snapchat-photo-leaves-internet-scandalized-amid-bbc-presenter-scandal/
Oh, I say.
“chocolate starfish instead of the bonus hole !
”
Oh, I say.
I vote Freddy for giving sex ed in schools. He’s quite the wordsmith and has the lingo nailed! Who could fail to enjoy such imagery?
Go on. Behave like macaques. It’ll be fine.
And here’s me thinking it was only the bonobo that was into this sort of behaviour. I consider myself enlightened! lol
Many mammals have private lives that make those of BBC presenters look tame by comparison – dolphins really are sleazy, for example. However, they’re not ‘gay’, even if they have lots of same-sex action.
Firstly it’s one of my bug bears when animal studies are extrapolated to imply anything whatsoever to do with humans ( like that mouse city article the other day ) but also my heart sinks whenever I see ‘ICL’. They’re like the QAnon of the academic world, so ridiculous is the bilge that we’re used to seeing them produce. I mean, of course this stuff will get published straightaway ( and not get retracted ), unlike quality and meaningful work which has significant impact, such as the McCullough et al Lancet paper about the autopsies proving the death jabs are just that. I just assumed monkeys did this because they couldn’t get a girlfriend anyway, but if the majority were that way inclined I guess they’d eventually die out. Same as the human race really.
Ref mouse city, there was no mention of the Douglas Adams report on the vastly hyperintelligent pandimensional beings that are the white mice that gave us the answer of 42, for the meaning of life. Pour me another pangalactic gargle blaster. no ice.
Let’s face it, monkeys just don’t care. They’ll have sex with a scooter if they could. Their sex drive is legendary, just ask Tarzan…
Gives a new meaning to the line “I’m the King of the Swingers” from the Jungle Book song.
LOL
Yeah, and worms are asexual.
So what?
I’m actually self-identifying as a Gibbon for the entirety of this thread, and I don’t want any smartarse remarks suggesting I’m ‘out of my tree’..
Would that be one of the Funky ones?
Here, have a 
But of course.. is there another sort..
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/under-starmer-or-sunak-things-can-only-get-worse/
An OT Dump.
Simon Dolan failing to understand that our politicians are now simply order takers and their orders are to destroy the country socially, politically and economically. Very naiive.
Specifically what part of this is naive and fails to recognise that they are “order takers”? If you mean the bit where he talks about them wanting to get elected, I sort of agree as I’m not sure they care much – certainly the top people on both sides seem to have more of an eye on their next job with the WEF, EU, UN or whatever.
But his sentiments about the wrongness of what’s being done are correct.
I suppose anyone who has used the “homosexual behaviour is aberrant – you don’t seen animals doing it” has kind of walked into this one. I would answer this though:
But agree with points BTL that applying this to humans is a bit daft to say the least. If none had been “gay” the authors may not have been so keen to draw conclusions and would have said “ah well humans are different”.
Some points: one, are these people actually telling us to behave like a more primitive species of primate? Two, are they hence suggesting that we should be violent, careless, tribal, unthinking? And three – the standout point – why do they fail to emphasise the extreme rarity of exclusively homosexual behaviour (1 monkey in 236)? We know why, of course, because, following their own logic, it suggests that it might indeed be regarded as an abnormality.
Now compare the way that foolish fellow Tom Holland, with his latest rubbish about ancient Rome, is saying that antique sexuality was vastly different, that it didn’t matter with whom or with what a person “went to bed” etc. But only thirty years ago, in “Courtesans and Fishcakes” among other publications, another author – whose name escapes me – pointed out that whilst casual buggery was not uncommon in ancient Greece, those who could not or would not consort with women at all were derided and mocked. From these two examples, we can see that today accounts of the past are being twisted to accommodate either extreme “liberalism” or its ugly “woke” offspring.
Surely the truth, emerging both from this study of monkeys and earlier studies of ancient society, is this: that where erotic behaviours are concerned there has always been a degree of flexibility among humans – think of old style public schools and prisons; and the marker is not what a person is willing or capable of doing but that of which they are incapable. And anything which blocks a vital biological and species function, such as reproduction, is ipso facto an abnormality.
If we’re going to draw conclusions from nature studies, this strikes me as the most germane and powerful to emerge from this peep into the lives of macaques. But nobody in public life dares even to hint at such a possibility. Perhaps the scientists have put out this nonsense about the splendours of bisexuality to cover themselves against “cancellation” for the other, much more important findings of their research.
Wouldn’t it be interesting if you cold measure the amount of gay people that existed throughout history, starting right from before records began, and obviously taking into account relation to population size? I wonder if humans are gay due to our highly evolved brains. Of course it can’t possibly be called ”natural” in the context of reproduction because being homosexual is hardly conducive to the survival of the human species, which is why they will always remain a minority, but they are sizable minority.
I’m also wondering if there are more gay people now just because it’s more socially acceptable or are there just literally more gay people now anyway? However, if Islam didn’t condemn homosexuality would there be more gay Muslims? It’s a very interesting topic once you scratch the surface. I don’t even know if there were gay cave men and women, but that’s something we’re never going to know for sure with no records. Any way you look at it having a highly evolved brain is a double-edged sword.
I’m convinced that there is a good deal of truth in what you say, which – if I may extrapolate – seems to suggest that the relations between sexuality and consciousness are not as simple as we’ve all been taught to think; that erotic desires and behaviours can themselves be affected by the wider condition of the consciousness and that if this is diseased or oppressed in some way, sexual processes can be adversely affected.
I’m absolutely not convinced that a majority of humans have highly evolved brains.
The question is really immaterial. Homosexual behaviour is perfectly normal for humans and has been documented for millennia. It’s ubiquitious in Xenophon’s Anabasis, Thucydides mentions it normal occurence in Athenian society and at his time, Caesar’s enemys mocked him as someone who Was a woman for men and a man for women. Different cultures have and had different appreciations of it: The monotheistic religions from the near and middle east (Islam, Christanity and Judasim) reject it as against the will of God. The ancient Greeks considered it perfectly normal, explicitly including men having sex with boys. The Romans regarded it as normal but somewhat shameful for Men who were women to other men. Historic Icelandic society (presumably extending to other Germanic peoples) strongly disapproved of it as unmanly and dishonourable conduct. Germanic and Christian traditions caused it to be strongly disapproved of in Europe from the end of antiquity until the end of the 20th century. The postmodern, hedonistc consumer society of today celebrates it in the same way it celebrates all (lucrative) ways of achieving instant physical gratification of some animal desire.
But aren’t you ignoring the point about exclusively homosexual behaviour? How acceptable has that been? Has it ever been enshrined as preferable? Or preferable for the majority? Or the norm? Would societies which managed any such tricks survive?
The point, I repeat, about ancient Greece – as some say with modern Afghanistan – is that an overarching commitment to heterosexuality for most people, most of the time confines alternative practice to some people with some others at certain moments of their lives.
No society before ours has pretended that it is just a matter of “choice”; or that there is no difference between the sexualities when it comes to the foundations of family life. And no society before ours has pretended that the two forms of expression are each as central to humanity or its survival as the other.
The traditional variables, I put it to you, are merely forms of permission and / or toleration, and these were always limited by social factors. Even the monotheistic religions in deciding heavily against even that, in practice left wide areas of latitude through wilful ignorance.
And had the whole business been viewed as purely abstract and symmetrical, such that the choice between which sexuality should prevail or predominate would appear as arbitrary, then I put it to you that the society indulging in such anti-natural nonsense would have sunk into the desert sands.
Yes, there has always been homosexuality, but there has always been cancer, madness, genetic disease. To say, therefore, that these are “normal” in the way that health, sanity and heterosexuality are normal is no more than a hackneyed abuse of language.
No society before ours has pretended that it is just a matter of “choice”
It’s a matter of choice for Xenophon’s Greeks fighting their way back into Greece from Persia: After conquering another city, some of the men of the army prefer taking female prisoners, some prefer male prisoners and some take both. The difference is that it’s not regarded as some form of hallowed, innate identiy which is to be celebrated as the ultimate meaning of life. The warriors Xenophon describes are, first and foremost, warriors and expected to have some very traditional (from our viewpoint) male qualities like courage, strength and a readiness to sacrifice themselves to accomplish some higher end if need be. They have little in common with contemporary effiminates wearing high heels and painting their nails.
What I’m trying to get at is that (to the best of my knowledge) no society before ours has ever openly chosen sex as the golden calf to dance around.
I read it decades ago – in English translation -but remember Xenophon regarding the queers with mild contempt.
Didn’t seem that way to me. The one episode I remember was one of the men being slightly mocked because he was so much infatuated with a certain boy, ie, not because his sex partner of choice was a boy but because he overvalued him so much. But I read it only once and may well have missed something.
A one-off observation of 236 monkeys from a colony of 1700 (Why were 86% of the colony excluded? Desired phenomon not showing up?) means absolutely nothing for monkeys, let alone humans. That’s just another case of someone having been provided with a budget to go and find something the people the budget came from wanted to be found.
Well, it does certainly put the lie to the tired old zombie canard that homosexuality/bisexuality is somehow “unnatural” and therefore wrong, because reasons. And it does dovetail nicely with what we already know about bonobos, as well as various ancient and so-called “primitive” human cultures too. The famous book “Sex at Dawn” by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha, as well as “The Bonobo Way” by Dr. Susan Block, certainly come to mind.
And while of course we should not read too much into studies like these, they still provide important information nonetheless. And for those who think it is somehow a million miles away from humans, especially modern humans, please feel free to take a look at the Kinsey Reports or the Wolfenden Report. Or any number of studies done after that as well.
To all the downvoters, you know it’s true. Methinks they doth protest too much, lol.
Blindness and deafness are natural.
Talk about missing the point, lol.
Anyone else fed up with ‘experts’ & ‘scientists’?
A hole is a goal to a non centiant creature!
!
It’s not by intention it’s a safe guard to ensure the procreation of the species. I’m sure humans are intelligent enough to know males can not give birth to young and no matter how much you shag the male he never will!??? …and right there is a problematic box of frogs
True, humans are not monkeys. We are in fact the only species dumb enough to do the following:
1) Pay to live on the planet on which they were born.
2) Believe that if they work themselves into an early grave to make the rich richer, they too will become rich via the “trickle down” theory.
3) Turn billions of barrels of dead dinosaurs into…microliters of dopamine.
4) Wage large-scale wars for fun and profit, and also access to #3 as well.
5) Believe that infinite growth on a finite world is somehow possible or desirable.
6) Destroy the Earth in pursuit of the above.
“Homo sapiens” is a misnomer, as we are not very sapient after all, it seems.
If you believe that oil is made out of dead dinosaurs you’re operating on an intellectual monkey level.
Perhaps the abiogenic petroleum hypothesis is correct after all. I am on the fence about that myself. In fact, I was waiting for someone to say that.
I can believe that homosexual men have the sexual self-control of monkeys.
Reminds me of one of my bosses back in the 80s who went on holiday to Gibraltar and sent us a postcard (remember those) picturing some of the macaques. “Help! It turns out “monkey” is Spanish for gay,” he wrote, continuing, “And I only wanted to feed them fruit and nuts.”
Are they incestuous?