The people fighting against abortion once had a stroke of genius: they labelled their action "pro life".
How universal.
How noble
Who could be against life itself?
Abortion rights supporters became the de facto PRO DEATH faction. Bad PR ;-)
Well, they decided to fight back, found something more palatable, and named their faction "pro choice". It put a nice spin to it, and it kind of became my litmus test for imbecility. Life and death are pretty simple, on/off, binary concepts, while choice is a question far greater and more complex.
One is an irresponsible oversimplification designed to polarize public opinion, the other is a hard fundamental question that may lead us to inconvenient imperatives.
Guess which is which ;-)
So, when my friends the econazis came up with nice polished marketing slogans like carbon neutral and pro environment, they kind of reminded me of the disturbed retards brandishing foetuses in jars over their head while howling inane slogans you can see demonstrating in front of clinics, right before they decided to bomb the place and kill the staff, all in the name of life, of course.
Nobody is against the environment. To be honest, I suspect that most people do not care and that there are not that many people who are truly concerned about it. But who can say he is against it? Someone with a little bit of honesty may very well say that humanity has made an habit of modifying its environment, that these very modifications made our world and our lives what they currently are. So we literally built our own world to make it agreeable to us, and this is progress. It gave us sapience, science, culture and all of their side effects, good ans bad. Now the same science that we have cherished for so long is telling us that we may have been over indulgent and overlooked some dire consequences. You can doubt science. Hell, you must. This is what it is for.
Correlation is not causation (a lesson the current economic crisis should have made clear to all), most of the effects of the current global warming have been measured for a very short time, and most people do not understand the science anyway. I mean, the chances are good that you, like most people, do not intimately understand why your feet are on the ground. You can answer "gravity", but you cannot explain it, still another empty word covering a very concrete fact. And we are talking about a theory exposed at least three centuries ago. So better not start talking about how some strange gases are behaving in the upper atmosphere and take a leap of faith: the earth is warming, and humanity is doing it.
Or not.
To be honest, I couldn't care less, because it is utterly irrelevant.
What is relevant is that, for the first time since we have won the Third World War, we have a new enemy. Global warming, true or false, is a waking call for us to rediscover a commonality of purpose, a goal and a drive toward progress. So, even if we do not understand it, even if we do not believe in it, let's at least pretend. Better still, take the worst case scenario for granted: there is nothing we can do, the seas will rise, the raging sun will bath all life in lethal radiations, we will start glowing and soon after we will all die (in atrocious pain, of course). We are utterly doomed.
So what?
We were all doomed before. It is not the first time this is happening to us. We have lived for fifty years under threat of nuclear Armageddon, and we are still here to talk about it, brag about it, even regret the time.
So we do as we already did. We find a way out. A way to reverse thing, or adapt ourselves, or adapt our environment or a combination of all that. And we do it fast.
Our present economy is based upon fossil fuel. There is no quick and easy way out of it. Then we better use our dwindling resources carefully and efficiently. We collaborate, communicate, share; organize ourselves.
Find solutions. Fight the circumstances. Haul our methane farting asses out of the stinking pit.
There is nothing like a common enemy to get things moving in the right direction, so let's all be PRO DOOM and enjoy it while we still can :-)
How universal.
How noble
Who could be against life itself?
Abortion rights supporters became the de facto PRO DEATH faction. Bad PR ;-)
Well, they decided to fight back, found something more palatable, and named their faction "pro choice". It put a nice spin to it, and it kind of became my litmus test for imbecility. Life and death are pretty simple, on/off, binary concepts, while choice is a question far greater and more complex.
One is an irresponsible oversimplification designed to polarize public opinion, the other is a hard fundamental question that may lead us to inconvenient imperatives.
Guess which is which ;-)
So, when my friends the econazis came up with nice polished marketing slogans like carbon neutral and pro environment, they kind of reminded me of the disturbed retards brandishing foetuses in jars over their head while howling inane slogans you can see demonstrating in front of clinics, right before they decided to bomb the place and kill the staff, all in the name of life, of course.
Nobody is against the environment. To be honest, I suspect that most people do not care and that there are not that many people who are truly concerned about it. But who can say he is against it? Someone with a little bit of honesty may very well say that humanity has made an habit of modifying its environment, that these very modifications made our world and our lives what they currently are. So we literally built our own world to make it agreeable to us, and this is progress. It gave us sapience, science, culture and all of their side effects, good ans bad. Now the same science that we have cherished for so long is telling us that we may have been over indulgent and overlooked some dire consequences. You can doubt science. Hell, you must. This is what it is for.
Correlation is not causation (a lesson the current economic crisis should have made clear to all), most of the effects of the current global warming have been measured for a very short time, and most people do not understand the science anyway. I mean, the chances are good that you, like most people, do not intimately understand why your feet are on the ground. You can answer "gravity", but you cannot explain it, still another empty word covering a very concrete fact. And we are talking about a theory exposed at least three centuries ago. So better not start talking about how some strange gases are behaving in the upper atmosphere and take a leap of faith: the earth is warming, and humanity is doing it.
Or not.
To be honest, I couldn't care less, because it is utterly irrelevant.
What is relevant is that, for the first time since we have won the Third World War, we have a new enemy. Global warming, true or false, is a waking call for us to rediscover a commonality of purpose, a goal and a drive toward progress. So, even if we do not understand it, even if we do not believe in it, let's at least pretend. Better still, take the worst case scenario for granted: there is nothing we can do, the seas will rise, the raging sun will bath all life in lethal radiations, we will start glowing and soon after we will all die (in atrocious pain, of course). We are utterly doomed.
So what?
We were all doomed before. It is not the first time this is happening to us. We have lived for fifty years under threat of nuclear Armageddon, and we are still here to talk about it, brag about it, even regret the time.
So we do as we already did. We find a way out. A way to reverse thing, or adapt ourselves, or adapt our environment or a combination of all that. And we do it fast.
Our present economy is based upon fossil fuel. There is no quick and easy way out of it. Then we better use our dwindling resources carefully and efficiently. We collaborate, communicate, share; organize ourselves.
Find solutions. Fight the circumstances. Haul our methane farting asses out of the stinking pit.
There is nothing like a common enemy to get things moving in the right direction, so let's all be PRO DOOM and enjoy it while we still can :-)
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