Extraordinary assertion
I was watching Planet Earth on the Discovery Channel tonight and was struck by the closing sermon:
We control the fate of the whole natural world!
Really!
So now we not only control the weather, we control the entire natural world. The very FATE of the natural world.
And the stars revolve around us. We have actually regressed. Instead of seeing man as a cog in the machinery of nature, man now sees himself (once again) as the controller of it. It's exactly the same mentality that said the stars and the sun revolve around the earth. A smaller universe perhaps, but once again, man, in the center, and this time, in complete control of the natural world.
I'm feeling much more powerful than when I turned on the television tonight.
Of course, the liberals are feeling really guilty. And, I kind of like that. I see them sort of sniveling themselves to sleep tonight. Oh woe! Boo Hoo! Mankind (whoops!) Humankind controls nature and yet it is fucked up. I shall throw some seaweed on the barbie. I shall drive Mini Coopers. I shall not exhale.
We control the fate of the whole natural world!
Really!
So now we not only control the weather, we control the entire natural world. The very FATE of the natural world.
And the stars revolve around us. We have actually regressed. Instead of seeing man as a cog in the machinery of nature, man now sees himself (once again) as the controller of it. It's exactly the same mentality that said the stars and the sun revolve around the earth. A smaller universe perhaps, but once again, man, in the center, and this time, in complete control of the natural world.
I'm feeling much more powerful than when I turned on the television tonight.
Of course, the liberals are feeling really guilty. And, I kind of like that. I see them sort of sniveling themselves to sleep tonight. Oh woe! Boo Hoo! Mankind (whoops!) Humankind controls nature and yet it is fucked up. I shall throw some seaweed on the barbie. I shall drive Mini Coopers. I shall not exhale.
posted by Walker at 10:59 PM
1 Comments:
As Rush Limbaugh likes to say: when you don't believe in God, you'll believe in anything. I don't know if that's entirely true--there are plenty of agnostics and atheists who don't sign up for the Global Warming mythology--but it certainly doesn't help.
While I make the argument all over my blog that global warming and environmentalism is a secular religion, it is, more particularly, an excellent example of magical thinking. With magical thinking, the point is: it's magic! It can be anything! When it's negative magical thinking--as is the fantasy of man-made Global Warming--there is no real solution. Sometimes there is a promised solution--outlaw incadescent light bulbs, replace fossil fuels with bio-fuels, windmills, and so on, but negative magical thinking is like a slasher movie: you can't ever really kill the bogeyman. So if everybody replaces their lightbulbs with fluroescent lamps, suddenly the cost and energy of manufacturing, the mercury in them, even the very wavelength of the light (I'm sure most of you remember the accusation that fluroescent lights were making people sick because of the "kind of light" they put out several years ago)--all that will become an environmental disaster in the making. Nuclear power, since billions have been spent on it and we were well on the way to having meaningful nuclear power, became a huge problem. It became a bogeyman for a long time--even though the only problem, ever, with nuclear plants have all been due to government mismanagement, and when the government has stepped out of direct management of nuclear power, there have been zero mishaps. But I digress.
Right now, biofuels are the rage. But there is a high cost in producing them, there are energy and polution issues, refining biofuels skips all the zillions of insane regulations liberals have irrationally heaped onto the the gas and oil industry (which, I guarantee you, will be a "Big Problem" as biofuels become mainstream), ethanol adversely effects the price of staple grains in the 3rd world, and on and on and on. There are hints of it already, but biofuels will eventually be worse than oil! If solar power was deployed widely--that is, Joe and Jane Six-Pack were using solar panels on their house--then suddenly solar power would not be a solution, it would be a problem. The heat envelope generated by the absorption of solar radiation would be causing glacial melting that was killing the aquatic polar ice monkey.
If you've ever watched a teen slasher movie and for the umpteenth time wondered: why isn't she running? Why is she just standing there while he advances with the axe? The answer is: because there is no point. They will not get away. Even if they manage to survive this movie, they'll get killed in the sequel. Because you cannot kill the bogeyman. And Global Warming is the current incarnation of the left's perpetual bogeyman. It will always have two unchanging aspects: it is disasterous, and it is humanity's fault. Just as Victor Von Frankenstein was to blame for the monster his scientific curiosity unleashed upon the world, so is the desire to progress, to invent, to create, to start a business and live a good life, always going to somehow, in the mind of the left, spawn some terrible consequence. Global warming, or a new ice age, or acid rain, or Y2K, or perpetual smog, or towering infernos, or earthquakes, or wild animals. M. Knight Shamaylan is currently working on a movie that, in essence, is about the earth acting as a vengeful Goddess and killing off humanity (and perhaps animal life, I'm not sure) because Man has been a poor steward of nature, what with the polluting and the SUVs and the incadescent light bulb.
While there is an absurd presumption of center-of-the-universe power with most in the Global Warming movement, it is, like most egotism or narcissism, an illusion. It always turns out that we are powerless to put the genie back in the bottle. We replace the old light bulbs, and the new ones will be worse. We replace fossil fuels, and the new fuels will be worse. We finally prove the planet isn't warming, and it will be cooling--so fast that an ice age is imminent. And, strangely, the culprit will always be something symbolic of man's scientific and spiritual triumphs: technology and capitalism, generally, or things like the automobile, the factory, or the light bulb in particular. It's never, say, Hollywood movies or Cable News Networks that are destroying the world. It's always the meaningful achievements of man where we actually have "subdued" nature: whether it's domesticated live stock or "catching lightning in a bottle" (the electric light!), those who are Global Warming alarmist will always find some doomsday scenario in which to believe, and some area of real human progress and achievement upon which to blame their fantastical doomsday.
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