Shot in the Dark

Extreme Measures

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

It occurs to me that the Obama administration may be quietly supporting a Final Solution to global warming.

World population increased from 2 billion in 1950 to 7 billion today.  All those extra people exhaling carbon dioxide, raising cattle that produce methane flatulence, heating their homes with natural gas, driving cars, charging their iPhones with electricity generated from burning coal . . . they all contribute to global warming.  Hey, Liberals are right, global warming IS produced by mankind: the world simply has too many people emitting too much carbon.

It wouldn’t, if we could reduce world population back to 1950 levels.  But how would we do it in a politically acceptable way?  No Blood For Oil is still a favorite Liberal hymn.

If we support policies that undermine world-wide oil prices, the economy will collapse in oil-producing countries, leading to mass starvation, reducing the population, freeing up carbon credits for Americans.

If we release terrorists from Gitmo and also foment insurrection in Arab countries, civil war will break out leading to bloodshed, disease and starvation, reducing the population, freeing up carbon credits for Americans.

If we unleash the Ebola virus in Africa and the Zika virus in South America and warn women not to get pregnant for three years, we reduce the birth rate below replacement level, reducing the population, freeing up carbon credits for Americans.

If we let felons out of prison and decline to prosecute killers based on color, thousands will die in inner cities, reducing the population, freeing up carbon credits for wealthier Americans.

Europe is getting ready to eliminate millions of asylum seekers.  North Korea is making noises – maybe a major war on that peninsula will draw in some neighbors to die fighting?  And how are things between India and Pakistan right now, any chance they might massacre a few millions of each other’s citizens for us?

Genocide could turn out to be nicely guilt-free, as it’s not a choice, it’s a necessity to survive global warming.  Settled science, doncha know?  Maybe President Obama really will halt the rise of the oceans and begin the heal the planet.  Boy, would I have egg on my face.

Joe Doakes

Omelette/eggs.  Just saying.

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7 responses to “Extreme Measures”

  1. justplainangry Avatar
    justplainangry

    Intended consequences.

  2. DMA Avatar
    DMA

    I’m inured to big numbers. I suppose 2 billion in 1950 seemed like an inconceivably large number. But every day for decades now I read about trillion dollar debt, and billion dollar stadiums and to tell you the truth, 7 billion seems like peanuts to me.

  3. kel Avatar
    kel

    7 billion human beings excrete, on average,1lb of carbon rich fecal waste per day that accumulates to approximately 2,555,000,000lbs per year. The process of decomposition will release the carbon dioxide contained in that waste and more importantly will feed the uncontrolled production of planet killing methane. In the words of Dr Smith from “Lost In Space” “We’re doomed! We’re all going to die!”

  4. Bento Guzman Avatar
    Bento Guzman

    Umberto Eco passed away this month. Eco was the author of The Name of the Rose, Foucault’s Pendulum, etc. He ws also a highly highly respected academic. In a 1980 conference given at Columbia, Eco gave a lecture on “The American Myth in Three Anti-American Generations.” In this lecture Eco explained how he had found, to his delight, that philosophers in the the Anglo-Saxon world (the US, Britain and her English-speaking ex-colonies) still held Aristotelian philosophy in great respect. In continental Europe Aristotelianism had vanished completely. It had been replaced by Marxism and positivism.
    Eco’s academic training was in semiotics. He studied knowledge as symbols. Eco once described what a semiotician did this way (I’m paraphrasing) “If you ask a person if Superman is alive or dead, that person will tell you that it is a nonsense question because Superman is a fictional character, he is neither alive nor dead. If you then ask that person where Superman was born, he will instantly respond ‘the planet Krypton.’ Why?”
    Aristotelianism, as Eco described it, is the idea that our minds interface with the universe by the use of symbols that stand in place of an ineffable reality. As another modern day Aristotelian put it, We perceive reality as symbols (mental activity induced by sense information), and we express it as allegory (our thoughts are compositions of the symbols we call language). To an Aristotelean, being is a continuous act of creation of the only universe we will ever experience.
    So no beings, no universe.
    Compare this with positivism (which Eco called “Popperism”, after the philosopher Karl Popper). Positivism says that we must ignore the reality that our thoughts of the world are just thoughts. In practice we can assume that our senses give us real information about a real universe, and our thoughts about the universe reflect that. A positivist believes the senses and the mind can be clear lens to perceive the real universe. The symbols we use to think about the universe can be either tight or wrong in an absolute sense. To an Aristotelian, there are only interpretations of symbols that either work or do not work. We can never know how right or wrong they are, because we can never directly experience what Eco called “the signified.”
    So, long way round, but if you are a positivist, people don’t really matter in the universe, except to people. The world may be better off without people. If you are an Aristotelean, a universe without human beings, or mind, at any rate, is literally unimaginable. No mind, no meaning, no universe.
    Sorry for this Dog-Gone length rant, but it is necessary to explain why positivism is a deal with the devil. You get to live in a rational universe that has its own meaning, but you leave humanity behind. Eventually you begin to think of irrational humanity as a danger to the world, and not its creator. This is the inevitable end point of modern environmentalism: human existence is a problem which needs to be ‘solved.’

  5. kel Avatar
    kel

    RE: “This is the inevitable end point of modern environmentalism: human existence is a problem which needs to be ‘solved.’”

    In the past 10 years I’ve heard almost a dozen recent graduates of the Mpls School District state, without equivocation, that humanity is “a lethal virus that has infected the earth”.

  6. justplainangry Avatar
    justplainangry

    BG, them are scary thoughts and an insight for what’s going on in what passes for grey matter in a libturd mind. Thank you.

  7. Bento Guzman Avatar
    Bento Guzman

    It is a complicated topic JPA and I did not really do it justice here. The problem, as I see it, is that the modernist worldview is that metaphysics is not real, and yet, when you look at what the founders of modernist philosophy (Bertrand Russel and Ludwig Wittgenstein) actually wrote, they did not believe that they had shown that there were no metaphysics. The social and political side of the modernist project needed to disbelieve in metaphysics absolutely, so a certainty was said to exist when none had been demonstrated.
    So you end up with craziness around the edges of modernism, as when, for example, you believe that the universe would have an aesthetic when there would be nothing to perceive the aesthetic. Eco would probably say that a thing can not be signifier when that thing cannot possibly be signified.

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