Brilliant? To whom, exactly?
Every argument is a narrative. Every single one. It does not matter how many measurable datapoints are embedded within it, how many peer-reviewed papers are footnoted, how many charts glow in authoritative blues and reds. It is still a story. A structure of meaning imposed upon a chaotic world.
Facts are facts only to those willing to treat them as such.
To the climate zealot, the same fact is heresy. It is sabotage. It is moral contamination. They are fully capable of denying gravity while remaining suspiciously upright. They can announce the “hottest year ever recorded” while wrapped in thick beanies and even thicker wool coats, shivering through a winter that refuses to cooperate with the script. Flip-flops and linen shirts are optional; proclamation is not.
Reality, you see, is pliable in the human mind. It always has been.
We do not perceive the world as it is. We narrate it into something we can tolerate. Something that fits the emotional architecture we have built around ourselves. Something that confirms our tribe, our virtue, our sense of control. The zealot’s imagined reality has no entry point for discordant data. It rejects it the way a body rejects a foreign organ.
But before we get too smug, let us ask the more uncomfortable question: have you never done the same?
Have you never told yourself a soothing bedtime story to blunt the sharp edges of an unpleasant truth? Have you never massaged reality into something slightly more flattering? Slightly less threatening? Have you never believed your own carefully crafted nonsense because it felt better than confronting what stood before you?
Of course you have. We all have.
This is not brilliance. It is not rhetorical genius. It is not intellectual triumph. It is a banal and verifiable feature of human cognition. We are narrative machines. We construct meaning because the alternative—raw, unfiltered reality—is too indifferent to our preferences.
And here lies the impasse.
Realists, by disposition, will concede points when confronted with evidence. They may not like it, but they will swallow it. Alarmists, by contrast, are often animated by moral fervor rather than empirical curiosity. To them, dissent is not disagreement—it is wickedness. Data that contradicts their worldview is not information; it is junk. Manufactured idiocy. Dangerous disinformation.
In their eyes, we are the fools.
And that is the trap. You cannot reason someone out of a position they did not reason themselves into. Extreme convictions are rarely the product of dispassionate analysis. They are emotional fortresses. Siege engines of identity. You do not dismantle them with polite debate and well-formatted spreadsheets.
I was once told—correctly, I suspect—that people entrenched in extreme views are almost never persuaded by counter-argument. What you can do, at best, is contain the damage.
This is not a romantic strategy. It lacks the theatrical satisfaction of the grand debate. It offers no viral mic-drop moment. But it recognizes a sober truth: when ideology mutates into destructive action, the objective is no longer persuasion. It is prevention.
Do not waste your life arguing in circles.
Ignore the shrillness. Starve it of oxygen. And when laws are broken, enforce them. Firmly. Consistently. Without spectacle.
Will that change their minds? Probably not. They will most likely keep their convictions polished and intact. But they will keep them in an environment where they cannot inflict harm on others.
We are narrative creatures. That cannot be undone.
But societies survive not by winning every argument, but by limiting the damage when arguments turn into coercion.
Brilliant? No.
Merely human.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2026/02/05/a-brilliant-take-on-cows-methane-and-climate/