Thinking out loud again …
Why are denialists so vehement and loud?
Because “… amidst (their) endless contortions the denialist suffers constant humiliations from adversaries who can always call on more and better evidence. Sure, a global warming denialist may enjoy well-funded think tank positions, but s/he will never ascend to the scholarly pantheon.” (K.Kahn-Harris, Denial – The Unspeakable Truth (Cumbria, UK: Notting Hill Editions Ltd, 2018, p105)
In effect, the denialists only defense is offence, ever offence. Never follow the dictates of logic, the scientific method or rules of argument. Never back up, never say die, never concede. The battering ram is all they have, it’s their faith.
“One of the consequences of the outrage that denialism provokes is that it can become difficult to see denialism as anything other than noxious and false. If one reads denialist works simply in order to debunk them, one can miss the pathos, the desperation and the fierce hope that undergirds them.”(ibid.,100)
Denialists live in a world they don’t understand, don’t like and doesn’t give them what they want, in the way they want it. And, for a great many of them, the ambiguity, the uncertainty, the seeming unfairness of life is frustratingly too much to take.
“Denialists are caught in a trap of their own making. In order to keep the flame of their desire alive, they have to turn their backs on real embodiments of that desire. They have to deny even that which their beliefs would seem to embrace. It is as though their desire fails them at the crucial moment. Everything they argue seems to point at a certain end, yet they have to swerve away just before the moment of consummation.”(ibid.,104)
“If one believes so strongly in free market capitalism founded on the exploitation of scarce resources, then surely the costs of global warming are worth paying in blood. If one believes that industrialized medicine is so dehumanizing, then surely the deaths of untold numbers of children is a small price to pay.”(ibid.,104)
It is an interesting world of tangled, emotional, self justification denialists live in with everything, all demons, externalized. It’s almost a parallel universe to the one most of us live in.