An assistant philosophy professor at Rochester Institute of Technology has proposed a bold plan to settle the debate on Global Warming. Lawrence Torcello wrote an essay suggesting that scientists who fail to fall in line with global warming alarmists should be charged with criminal negligence, and possibly even be thrown in jail. Nothing screams academic freedom like a little intellectual Fascism. Right?
RTWT.
The safety and efficacy of vaccines is considered “settled science” in the medical community. So maybe we should jail Jenny McCarthy.
And a scientific consensus now exists that the federal corn ethanol mandate is actually bad for the environment. So maybe we should jail all the members of Congress who voted for it.
Hmm … now that I think about it, the latter idea sounds rather tempting.
I wanted to go to a Chick-Fil-A restaurant for lunch today to participate in the Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day buycott, but news of an hour-long wait dissuaded me. It’s not that I wanted to support traditional marriage; I’m in the same camp as Glenn Reynolds:
… as someone who supported gay marriage long before President Obama did (which is to say, long before a couple of months ago), I’m nonetheless gratified to see people standing up to the bullying that the left-political class has aimed at this honest business simply because its owners failed to change their views in synch with President Obama.
In fact, I’ll state it more forcefully: When government officials try to block a business from opening because they disapprove of its owner’s religious or political beliefs — well, if that isn’t fascism, I don’t know what is.
In case you’re not up-to-speed on the whole Chick-Fil-A story, Liberty News Network has a pretty good summary — and a petition you might want to sign if, like me, you weren’t able to join the large throngs of people crowding Chik-Fil-A restaurants around the country.
On Tuesday, I posted the environmentalist 10:10 Campaign's execrable little movie, "No Pressure," and quoted James Taranto, who dubbed these anti-human slimeballs "green supremacists." On Wednesday, Ed Driscoll posted about green supremacists, too, and added another disturbing example of the mindset:
And of course, as was the wont of the original White Supremacists, the Green Supremacists really dig fantasizing about a few lynchings, as Australian journalist Andrew Bolt recently discovered. …
Writing in Australia’s Herald Sun, Bolt notes that the photo below is a screen capture of a flier promoting a tradeshow last year put on in Cannes by ACT-Responsible — the ACT stands for “Advertising Community Together.” Not at all surprisingly, Kofi Annan was announced as attending, meaning that presumably he was OK with this image:
Read the whole Driscoll post, which has much more fascinating information. This image is apparently admired by the leftist advertising community and enviro-bloggers.
The big-name, big-budget environmentalist mini-movie "No Pressure" has drawn sharp reactions in the last few days, with criticism coming from both the right and the left. James Taranto did the most thorough job I've seen of taking apart this light-hearted, tongue-in-cheek, gory eco-fascist murder fantasy. He observed that in the past, white supremacists have blown up children, as have Islamic supremacists. "Green supremacists" are still only joking about it — for now:
There's a new kind of supremacist on the scene: green supremacists. They haven't blown up any children–not in real life. But they've been thinking about it.
A British outfit called the 10:10 Campaign hired Richard Curtis, a writer and producer of cinematic comedies, to produce a four-minute video promoting its effort to encourage people to cut "carbon emissions." The result, titled "No Pressure," struck James Delingpole, a global-warming skeptic who writes for London's Daily Telegraph, as "deliciously, unspeakably, magnificently bleeding awful." He's being too kind.
One may hope that Jim Edwards is right when he denies that "this is actually what environmentalists want." But it's bad enough that this is what they fantasize about–and that they manifestly felt no inhibition about airing such a depraved fantasy in public.
But we have plenty of evidence that this — or much worse — actually is what quite a few environmentalists want. We have their own words:
We have wished, we ecofreaks, for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us into Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in our valley, with our localism, our appropriate technology, our gardens, our homemade religion — guilt-free at last! — Stewart Brand
Everything we have developed over the last 100 years should be destroyed. — Pentti Linkola
I suspect that eradicating small pox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems. — John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal
Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs. — John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal
The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing….This is not to say that the rise of human civilization is insignificant, but there is no way of showing that it will be much help to the world in the long run. — Economist editorial
We advocate biodiversity for biodiversity’s sake. It may take our extinction to set things straight — David Foreman, Earth First!
If radical environmentalists were to invent a disease to bring human populations back to sanity, it would probably be something like AIDS — Earth First! Newsletter
Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, is not as important as a wild and healthy planets…Some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along. — David Graber, biologist, National Park Service
The collective needs of non-human species must take precedence over the needs and desires of humans. — Dr. Reed F. Noss, The Wildlands Project
If I were reincarnated, I would wish to be returned to Earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels. — Prince Phillip, World Wildlife Fund
That's just a portion of the quotes collected at one site. There are many more here, here, and elsewhere.
The leadership of the environmentalist movement is full of people who are anti-capitalist, anti-industrial-revolution, anti-modernity, anti-progress, and ultimately anti-human. There's nothing amusing about the sick self-loathing that causes a person to wish most or all the members of his species were dead.
First they went after executives at bailed-out companies, and I did not speak out because I was not an executive at one of those companies.
President Barack Obama has welcomed plans to force some companies which accepted government aid during the financial crisis to cut executive pay.
Firms paying bosses vast bonuses while getting state assistance offended peoples' values, the president said.
Under Treasury plans, seven companies must slash the basic salaries of their 25 best-paid employees by up to 90%.
…
As well as its top-earners facing a 90% pay cut, the total paid to each firm's 125 top earners would be halved under the proposals.
Then they went after bankers in general, and I did not speak out because I was not a banker.
The Federal Reserve’s new push to regulate pay levels of bankers probably won’t include a review of your friendly neighborhood branch manager’s salary.
But the Fed made clear Thursday that it will be looking at compensation arrangements beyond the executive suites of the 6,000-some banks it regulates.
…
Bottom line: The obsession with financial companies' pay levels, far from reaching a peak, is just ramping up.
Then they hinted at going after all private sector employees, and I did not speak out because I was too stunned.
Discussing Obama administration efforts to limit executive pay in companies that took TARP funds, on Thursday’s CBS Early Show, co-host Harry Smith asked Congressional Oversight Panel Chair Elizabeth Warren: “Chuck Schumer, some others, have said…why wouldn’t we…make this law across the board and put a governor on compensation for everybody in private enterprise?’”
Warren seemed very open to the idea: “Well you know, it reminds us that there is a compensation problem in American industry….executive compensation right now is – has got the wrong set of incentives in it….what we really need to do are change the basic laws to align the incentives of the executives with the long-term health of the company and ultimately the long-term health of the economy.”
