Saturday, October 02, 2010
These greenies have the worst public relations in the history of the universe
The climate advocacy group 10:10 put out a propaganda video that was beyond horrible. After Anthony Watts and company exposed it the group withdrew it and apologized, but not before it was captured and annotated. The video is so over-the-top and violent that I first assumed it was anti-green Alinskyesque agitprop, but Bill McKibben (who was not responsible for the video and has denounced it) confirms that it is genuine. Don't watch it in front of your children, or if you have eaten recently. Short commentary follows.
Commentary
Of course one bad video by one group does not discredit the global-warming alarmists in general. I know a fair number of environmentalists, including some activists, and they do not seem to be violent to me. The video is, however, a helpful reminder that the activists do hope to harness the state to coerce everybody in to behaving according to their norms. Now, you might believe that the ends justify that coercion, but putatively good ends do not make their program any less coercive. In that regard, the climate alarmists are invoking the same moral calculus, or lack thereof, that informed the Truman administration's intentional infection of Guatemalans with syphilis in order to test penicillin.
Collectivism is always brutal in retrospect, when the sun has risen and you can see the bodies.
MORE: More here and here.
8 Comments:
By 
JC, at
Sat Oct 02, 11:31:00 AM:
I put off watching for a day because I'm not into spatter movies, but decided I had to watch to comment..
I see the ad on two levels.. the horror movie where the audience employs the well known "suspension of belief".. in this mode an audience can "get" spatter humour.
But on the other level my viscerial reaction was I couldn't suspend belief.. the ad felt disturbingly true..
School teachers do indeed indoctrinate their pupils with their own political and environmental views.. climate skeptics do indeed get ritually spattered in the media, on blogs.. or Climategate emails, sportspeople do indeed shill for the warmers and everywhere the rhetoric against skeptics is violent.
To me, on this level, the act of blowing up people in a climate jihad seemed believable and a logical progression of the Warmer theology.
JC
By 
, at
Sat Oct 02, 11:53:00 AM:
What is really troubling is the number of leftists that who think this video is necessary, provocative and a job well done.
By , at
Sat Oct 02, 08:46:00 PM:
"I know a fair number of environmentalists, including some activists, and they do not seem to be violent to me"
Give them a chance.
When I lived in Dallas, a buddy of mine's neighbor got arrested by the FBI one morning for providing support and financing to an Islamic terrorist organization. By all accounts, the neighbor was a friendly guy and good family man who took good care of his yard, etc. He's currently doing life in prison (well, 65 years, which is effectively life).
If you think your environmentalist friends wouldn't kill you in a heartbeat for disagreeing with them if they believed they could get away with it, you're mistaken. We haven't seen much hard core terrorism from environmentalists in this country yet, but that day will come, and for the same reason the 9-11 hijackers did; we've offended their religion. If this video isn't sufficient warning, I don't know what would be.
By Foxfier, at
Sat Oct 02, 10:04:00 PM:
It's like that "Dream Police" video... but with the whole blow-up-children stuff.
By John, at
Sat Oct 02, 10:55:00 PM:
Collectivism is always brutal in retrospect, when the sun has risen and you can see the bodies.
I really like this line.
The PSAs are a good example of how fear can be used to induce ordinary people to do horrible crimes.
By , at
Sun Oct 03, 09:43:00 AM:
10:10's "apology" is cited by FoxNews at http://politics.blogs.foxnews.com/2010/10/02/climate-change-group-apologizes-violent-video?test=latestnews . The so-called apology itself can be found at http://www.1010global.org/uk/2010/10/sorry . However, 10:10's calling this an apology is just another lie; early in their "apology" they insist many found it funny, but unfortunately some didn't [emphasis added]. And then they toss it off with this concluding remark: "...in this instance we missed the mark. Oh well...." Oh, well, indeed.
So we have this crowd still thinking it's entirely appropriate to advocate mass murder of all those who disagree with them. And I have no reason to conclude that this gang isn't typical of the entire climate change fascism movement.
Eric Hines
By , at
Mon Oct 04, 03:31:00 PM:
"Many a truth is said in jest"
By Carolyn, at
Tue Oct 05, 02:39:00 AM:
Master satirist Iowahawk wrote a rare "straight" piece on the production of this video. Worth a few minutes of your time. He brings up an important point to ponder at the end of the piece.
Remember, the people involved in the production of this "humorous" video were quite mainstream, and some were quite prominent.
