It's possible that "Little Boots" intended that outburst as a joke. If so, the depraved tyrant had a sense of humor quite similar to the one displayed by the 10:10 Campaign, an English environmentalist group that seeks to hector the public into reducing its collective "carbon footprint."
On October 1, 10:10 rolled out a four-minute film -- written by the immensely talented Richard Curtis -- entitled "No Pressure." The film is a series of vignettes involving an updated riff on Caligula's depraved daydream. Each of the short scenes features an environmentally enlightened authority figure -- a teacher, a middle manager at a corporation, and a soccer coach -- extolling the virtues of those who are willing to take part in the grand campaign of collective self-sacrifice on behalf of Gaia.
In each setting those not convinced of the wisdom of this undertaking were asked -- after being assured that "no pressure" would be used to impose conformity -- to identify themselves. This being done, the commissar pushed a large red button that caused the eco-heretics to explode, thereby drenching the stunned and terrified faithful in the liquefied viscera of the less enlightened.
The closing voice-over -- performed over the haunting strains of Radiohead's "Weird Fishes" -- briefly lists some of the institutions and political figures who have signed on to the 10:10 Campaign, ending with the tagline: "Care to join us? No pressure."
***
***
No Pressure was unveiled to representatives of government-recognized charitable groups on October 1. It went over about as well as Gilbert Gottfried's notorious post-9/11 joke at Hugh Hefner's Friar's Club roast ("I have to fly from New York to L.A. tomorrow, and I couldn't get a connecting flight -- we have to stop at the Empire State Building first").
"Our job is to encourage proactive decisions at class level to reduce carbon emissions," sniffed ActionAid, which is presiding over 10:10's schoolroom indoctrination efforts. "We did it because evidence shows children are deeply concerned about climate change.... So we think the 10:10 campaign is very important, but the moment this film was seen it was clear it was inappropriate."
Were an inmate of the government school system in either the People's Republic of Blighty or the U.S.S.A. to submit a student film depicting fantasies of mass murder, he would be charged with terrorism and consigned to the nearest psychiatric gulag. Yet when the same diseased fantasy is submitted by a government-aligned eco-lobby, the sternest adjective used to describe it is "inappropriate." There's something other than the storied British understatement at work here.
The 10:10 campaign's official reaction is a variation on the familiar non-apology, "I'm sorry that you were offended" -- a formulation commonly used by people seeking to deflect blame for genuinely offensive acts.
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| A premature environmentalist: Sade |
I'm struck by the fact that 10:10's "apology" follows the same collectivist logic displayed in its perverted mass murder fantasy: The enlightened understand the joke, even if a few reactionary holdouts aren't enchanted by it. Pity, isn't it, that we don't have a master detonator that would reduce such charmless people to a bloody mist?
The real problem for 10:10 is not that the stolid bourgeois didn't find No Pressure funny; instead, it's that the film laid bare the totalitarian misanthropy that resides at the core of the radical environmentalist movement. Progressives are expected to epater le bouregoise, and they revel in giving offense. Giving away their true intentions is a much more serious matter.
"It has been suggested that we call a United Species Conference -- a conference far more representative than the United Nations is - and put this one question to the ten million representatives (one for each species): `Should the human species be allowed to continue on this planet?'" wrote eco-theologian Matthew Fox in his book The Coming of the Cosmic Christ. "The vote would most likely be 9,999,999 to 1 that we humans, with our dualistic hatred of earth ... be banished to some distant place in the galaxy so that Mother Earth could resume her birthing of beauty, amazement, colors, and health."
Fox is a peripheral figure. David Graber, Chief Scientist for the Pacific West Region of the National Park Service, is not. In a 1989 book review for the Los Angeles Times, Graber unflinchingly expressed the idea that in order for Gaia to prosper, countless millions of human beings must die.
"Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, are not as important as a wild and healthy planet," insisted Graber. "I know social scientists who remind me that people are a part of nature, but that isn't true.... We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the earth. Until such time as homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along."
Oh, if only the unregenerate masses had a single neck that could be severed by an immense guillotine -- or if the exalted "some of us" to whom Graber refers could annihilate the rest by pushing a single red button.
"Anything that reduces human populations or reduces their growth is a benefit to just about everything else on the planet," Graber said in a 1999 Reason magazine interview. "Ecology is a game where some win and some lose," he continued, and in that conflict human beings have no greater intrinsic worth than other organisms. Pointing out that "Death is by far the crudest and cruelest solution to a problem of crowding," Graber did express at least a measure of sympathy for the human victims of what he considers to be an inevitable culling-out process. Repellent as his ideas may be, Graber apparently doesn't traffic in self-indulgent, sadistic "humor" of the kind found so winsome by the people behind the 10:10 Campaign.
The term "sadism" is singularly appropriate here, given that the Marquis de Sade, from whose name that term derives, gave voice to ideas very similar to those dramatized in the No Pressure film.
Decades ago, while researching an article on the "culture war," I made the mistake of trying to read Sade's Juliette, in which the author laid out what passed for his philosophy. Sade's opus reads like what might result were Larry Flynt to dictate a novel under the influence of Tourette's syndrome. I quickly discovered that the book -- as Dorothy Parker might put it -- was not one to be set aside lightly, but to be thrown away with great force. I was able to endure just a few chapters before a hurling both the book and my gorge.
Sade is widely recognized as a libertine, and regarded by some misinformed people as an individualist. He was certainly devoted to the unqualified service of emancipated appetites, but he had nothing but disdain for the non-aggression principle: "Were I to discover that my only possibility of happiness lay in excessive perpetration of the most atrocious crimes, without qualm I'd enact every last one of them this very instant, certain ... that the foremost of the laws Nature decrees to me is to enjoy myself, no matter at whose expense." (Emphasis in the original.)
By way of social prescription, Sade recommended that children (those who survived abortion and infanticide, both of which he believed should be commonplace) should be treated as property of the State.
"[Let us] create public schools where, as soon as they are weaned, the young may be reared; installed therein as ward of the State, the child can forget even his mother's name,"opined Sade through one of his literary creations. This element of Sade's manifesto resonates with the opening scene from the No Pressure film, in which a schoolteacher enlists children as eco-socialist missionaries with a commission to convert their parents.
Significantly, Sade was on the same page with modern "Deep Ecologists" like David Graber and the 10:10 collective, who believe that human beings are alienated from the environment. "Nature stands in not the slightest need of [human] propagation," he wrote, "and the total disappearance of mankind ... would grieve her very little."
This is the same deified "Nature," recall, that according to Sade, had ordained self-gratification of the elite as its highest law. So why couldn't Nature's priestly class get its jollies by liquidating everybody who disagrees with them? If there is a problem with this suggestion, Sade couldn't identify it: "If from immolating three million human victims you stand to gain no livelier pleasure than that to be had from eating a good dinner, you ought to treat yourself to it without an instant's hesitation."
Sade would see the humor in 10:10's No Pressure film, which isn't so much an exercise in persuading the unconvinced as an expression by the bien-pensants of their self-satisfied, bottomless contempt for those of us who don't share their theology.
After the audience at the Hugh Hefner Roast turned against Gilbert Gottfried for his 9/11-themed joke, the adenoidal comedian did exactly as Sade would prescribe: He doubled down on the depravity, winning back the audience by telling the filthiest joke imaginable. This isn't surprising, given the crowd to which he was playing.
I wouldn't be surprised to see Sade's disciples a the 10:10 Campaign take a similar approach. Given that their opening bid was to use mass murder as a punchline, I find myself wondering what they will do for an encore.
(Note: This version has been corrected with valuable input from sharp-eyed readers; thanks!)
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Sorry is not the same as "I'm Sorry" or "we're sorry" it just meant regret that it was such a disastrous flop. Here is the comment I left for those eco-Nazis:
ReplyDeleteI knew you faux conservationists were psychotic, I didn't know you were suicidal. But by all means continue this mad spiral into oblivion, I will cheer you all the way to the end. Then maybe, just maybe, the conservation movement my generation spearheaded can be brought back to life to help both people and the earth. And guess what, it didn't involve blowing children into a million pieces.
You can comment here: http://www.1010global.org/uk/2010/10/sorry
The wonderful James Delingpole is calling this Splattergate!
It is debatable whether or not the underlying ideology of a totalitarian system is what causes these states to engage in mass murder, or functions as simply a catalyst for a deeper cause: bloodlust for the exercise of absolute power. But whether an ideology serves as a cause of totalitarian horrors or as a catalyst, certain ideologies raise red flags. Reading the Communist Manifesto or Mein Kampf, it's not difficult to see where implementation of these ideologies will lead. And it's also not difficult to see where implementation of the kind of radical environmentalism Will describes here will lead.
ReplyDeleteThere are always people eager for any excuse to control, kill, and destroy. Destroying the heretic, the infidel, the untermensch, the kulaks, the capitalists, whatever will function as an excuse. This radical Gaia-worship will do nicely. Well golly, I wonder what kind of people will gravitate to this? Same kind of people who gravitated to the ranks of the Inquisition, the NKVD, the Einsatzgruppen.
Shared. Thank you for writing this.
ReplyDeleteHere is a link to a story about a so-called philosopher that promotes the slaughter of millions in the name of species cleansing and re-education.
http://www.prisonplanet.com/global-warming-alarmist-calls-for-eco-gulags-to-re-educate-climate-deniers.html
I've always felt that if the "carbon footprint" of mankind is so terrible to planet Earth then these eco-warriors should launch themselves off this mortal coil as a leading example to us all.
ReplyDeleteMoT, to carry your thought even further: If the "carbon footprint" of humanity were as terrible and destructive as the envirotards would have us believe, this prompts a key question: Wouldn't the cumulative effects of several millennia of human existence have wiped all life forms off the face of the planet long, long ago, or degraded the ecosystem to the point where most forms of life would be all but wiped out? Would we as a species exist in numbers significant enough to sustain a civilization, let alone cause serious damage to the planet through our actions? Would we even be here at all?
ReplyDeleteTo answer this question would be to venture outside the realm of junk science motivated by nihilist ideology, so it's unlikely that it will ever be asked.
Ahh the carbon footprint. Kinda hard to not have one since we are carbon based life forms. Hopefully Radiohead is not associated with these enviromaggot petri dish pond scum, I will throw their discs into the trash in a NY minute. Tree huggers and animal huggers are a funky bunch. They want all thte people to go die off so they can snuggle with the trees and animals.
ReplyDeleteLiberranter... The irony, no... the hypocrisy, of this non-debate by eco-fascists, is that they probably view man through the typical Darwinian filter. Where they fail in their argument is that they refuse to accept "mankind" as being "natural". How utterly absurd! If humans are the product of evolution then everything we've ever done up to and including the now is NATURAL and we're simply playing our part in the natural selection game. To say otherwise makes the argument a bigger joke than it already is.
ReplyDeleteWinston also makes the observation, and one that anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear can grok, is that these individuals want YOU to die so that THEY and their buddies can somehow live without being burdened by someone questioning their lunacy.
I've already been told once that my criticism of "No Pressure" shows I lack a sense of humor. My response was that I did, in fact, find the mini-movie funny but that my amusement was overpowered by my astonishment that the creators and their supporters would so blindly lay their ugly souls bare for all to see.
ReplyDeleteAnother small amusement: Go to the parent organization's web site http://www.1010global.org/ and take a look at the spinning globe. It is spinning backwards. These cretins don't even know that the Sun rises in the East, and not the West.
"These cretins don't even know that the Sun rises in the East, and not the West." LOL Uncle Al! I guess they are members of the brigade that persecuted Galileo! It certainly explains where their "science" comes from, thanks! Maybe we should start a movement called 50:50, encouraging everyone to exhale only half as much. to reduce your carbon footprint. Maybe we should also declare a war on termites? I mean, all that methane and all.... It CAN'T be good!
ReplyDeleteMr. Grigg,
ReplyDeleteWhere do you find these things?There is a deeper message here than just the alleged conflict between the ecology and human convenience.
The people who made that vile movie, (which, given the prevalence of suicide bombings and real-life expolsive dismemberment of living human beings with cluster bombs, white phosphorus and Hellfire missiles, is disgusting,) clearly subscribe to a certain philosophy.
That philosophy is that the State and its minions who are endowed by the State with its limitless brute power, can coerce its subjects on pain of instant death to blindly ahdere to its least whim. Contempt of Cop, failure to allow taxes to be extorted, expressions of dissent, all can cause the subject to be instantly crushed, or exploded as the case may be.
And evidently the makers of this film think this is just as it should be. Disagree with the Party Line at your own peril.
Notice in the movie that the other subjects recoil in horror, while the perpetrators of bloody murder remain serene and unruffled. That, at least, is about as true to life as one can get. Minions of the State sleep well at night, secure in the belief that the goal of unlimited State Power justifies any and all means.
This movie was not funny. It was not even cute. It was simply gross. As an ecologist who believes the powers that run this show we call "civilization" need to be curbed in their excesses, this pseudo-Sam-Pekinpah moral diatribe is distressing. It is beyond tasteless. It is counter-productive of the worthy aims of the ecological movement.
As Chief of Police Joseph Fouche remarked to Napoleon upon his (Napoleon's) judicial murder of the Duc d'Enghien on trumped-up charges: "Sire, this was worse than a crime. It was a mistake." It turned a great many of Napoleon's former supporters against him, and contributed to his downfall.
The cretins who made this movie, with their message that the State should, and will, coerce servile obedience if it is not given voluntarily, have done immense harm to their own cause with that completely off-subject and anti-human message.
- Lemuel Gulliver.
From what I've seen and read from the people I know who are into the ultra eco-wacko, the PTA and support the warmongering, they would very much like to have that button.
ReplyDeleteIt was slightly humorous.
It was tame compared to video games and popular movies these days.
The beauty of that awful video is that the victims were small enough in number to still be tragedies instead of statistics. The two children even had names.
ReplyDeleteCan't agree strongly enough with the comment that this lays bare the utter nastiness of their souls. Hopefully some of them will be shocked into sanity.
How can I interpret this video as anything other than a declaration of WAR. They are threatening me with violent death if I do not subscribe to their lunatic theories. Osama sends similar videos and they are considered CAUSUS BELLI.
ReplyDeleteNot I will conduct myself towards all soi-disant enviromentallists as if they were enemy combatants.
Their desires, I will Thwart
Their Dreams, I will destroy
They want less carbon, I will start burning things just for fun.
I have had enough. This is my line in the sand.
You misspelled "épater la bourgeoisie," which is understandable. It's not nearly as bad as Paul Joseph Watson stating (twice!) in his article on this topic that the global warming movement is in its "death throws."
ReplyDeletehey Anon @8.35pm
ReplyDeleteThat's a convincing demolition of this article!
Pedanticism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.
Excellent post, Omega Man.
ReplyDeleteOf course the watermellon crowd doesn't want to exterminate ALL human beings, just the WRONG kinds of human beings -- i.e., the benighted refuse who have the poor taste to insist that no earthly being has a higher claim to their lives, time and minds than themselves.
I love how the video depicts those not completely sold on the party line as dull, confused, sullen, misanthropic losers.
Vile isn't the word. These people should be prayed for (hard) and their goals should be exposed at every opportunity and their efforts to implement them resisted at all costs.
Well said, Todd. This elitist mentality would lead, one would think, to painting green stars on those untermenschen who don't goose-step to the party line. No?
ReplyDeleteDon't give them any ideas, MoT! :)~
ReplyDeleteThese people are no better--and in ways----much worse than Nazis.
ReplyDeleteI have heard that the singer of Radiohead is a total wreck over global warming or whatever they're calling it now. I have often wondered, would their music be as awesome if they had real-life worries inspiring them (instead of tripping out about BS end-of-the-world stuff)? What is it about England that churns out so much awesome music, so full of emotion and intensity? I wonder, if there were no liberals, would there be any miserable people at all? Who would write music?
ReplyDeleteI have heard that the singer of Radiohead is a total wreck over global warming or whatever they're calling it now. I have often wondered, would their music be as awesome if they had real-life worries inspiring them (instead of tripping out about BS end-of-the-world stuff)? What is it about England that churns out so much awesome music, so full of emotion and intensity? I wonder, if there were no liberals, would there be any miserable people at all? Who would write music?
ReplyDeletePerhaps I should start a movement called Adopt a 10/10er. For every person who joins the 10/10 movement (over 100k according to their site), we will attempt to recruit someone who promises to increase their carbon emissions by 10%.
ReplyDeleteWinston: Start tossin' buddy...
ReplyDeletehttp://acapella.harmony-central.com/showthread.php?t=1281742
Campaigning RADIOHEAD frontman THOM YORKE has confessed he is a hypocrite, because it's impossible for him to be a world-travelling rock star without damaging the environment. Yorke is a vocal ambassador for the charity Friends Of The Earth, but admits he isn't "flawless", since big concerts, tours and festivals rely on fossil fuel and create tons of unrecyclable waste. He says, "I don't drive a big car, but I don't come out of it dirt-free. "The whole apparatus of big festivals is not cool. If we could go to them and say, you can only use paper cups, you can't use generators, you have to use solar panels. "You technically can't make it happen. That stresses me out, because I am a hypocrite. As we all are."
Greg: I'm already doing my part, I think about it every time I pass a Prius in my open exhaust turbo charged, AWD sports car. :oD I tell them thank you for balancing me out. lol
ReplyDeleteEnvironmental wackos hate the middle class the way Nazis hated "social undesirables".
ReplyDeleteNatural "Climate Change" will eventually impose a new ice age or searing warm period as has happened cyclically many times in the past. With it will come mass extinctions, a radical change of the geography, a renewal and redistribution of resources, and a new evolution. This if you assume it will be driven strictly by the known natural variations in Earth's tilt and orbit. The changes will be more extreme if driven by a cataclysmic event like a comet, supervolcano, or event similar to those which formed the Rockies, Andes and Himalayas.
ReplyDeleteShould any humans still exist (history shows we cannot expect to live forever, or even too much longer) at this time, they will likely suffer a horrible, painful, and tragic extinction. But what cannot be doubted is that these things will happen, as they have many times before, and we will be powerless to stop them.
This is the fraud of the Alarmists. All these terrible things that they want to happen to humans WILL happen to humans. And while you would think they would embrace this reality, they instead dodge and avoid it at all costs.
Why? The answer is clear. Because by acknowledging this FACT, their bread and butter, that being the idea that the Earth is delicate and fragile and humans are its all powerful destroyers, goes out the window. In fact extrapolating this further, you can conclude that the only context in which the greens arguments are valid is one that is 180 degrees opposite of reality. It should be a source of great happiness to these people-haters to know that Mother Earth will eventually extinct us and we will be powerless to stop it. However they never speak of it because their money is made preaching the factually invalid idea that mankind is all powerful and capable of destroying Earth on a whim. Or SAVING the Earth completely by bumping up taxes as the case may be.
This is the anti-truth that the entire Green movement rests on and it is is hiding in plain sight. The fact is there was never any question that climate change would kill us all just as it has most every extinct species. The scam is the very idea that we can change it. This is why the Global WarmCooling movement, now in its 4th incarnation is always destined to fail and always DOES fail. Nobody feels the need to take up the fight against a proven inevitability. And even if the Green's could succeed in preventing climate change they would fail in their REAL agenda against human advancement. Its literally the most pathetic, doomed to fail movement you could ever conceive. And if that wasn't embarrassing enough, now there's this video. The only thing worse than a born loser, is a born loser that goes out of his way to make everyone hate them. That's the Greens!
The problem with those cretins is that they are harassing the wrong people (us). China pays its workers $1 a day, with the connivance of the Western Money Elite (ehere have we heard of them before...??) who send our jobs over there to make nice cheap shiny toys for us. As a result, China builds one new dirty-coal-fired power plant EVERY WEEK - about 50-60 new plants a YEAR. China needs so much coal to run its economy that it imports 70 million tons of coal a year from the USA. The several hundred coal-fired power plants in China mean that it is now the world's champion polluter.
ReplyDeleteSo why do the beanheads get on OUR case?
What is the gain from my living on lettuce and broccoli instead of steaks, or submitting to taking cold showers, or walking from NY to CA instead of flying (which means 3 months of hot showers and steak dinners on the road,) compared with one NEW coal-fired plant a WEEK in China?
In fact, one of the reasons for the melting of the Greenland ice cap and the rise in sea level (which is hapening, people, don't kid yourselves) is all the soot dropping on Greenland and the Arctic from hundreds of power plants in China, making the ice absorb more heat.
But the eco-terrorists know the government of China would smile politely and refuse them a visa, so they pick on us instead.
When you consider the making of their idiotic video, and count the production crews, trailers, rolls of videotape in plastic boxes, cameras, lenses, copper cables, 3,000 watt stage lighting, and gasoline consumed to lug all those people and equipment around, not to forget the copious clouds of methane all those 10:10-ers fart out into God's clean atmosphere from all the beans they eat, the carbon footprint of that movie probably exceeds that of the volcano at Kilauea.
Sheesh.
- Lemuel Gulliver
These environmentalists have got it backwards, rather than change the world they should start by changing themselves. The quickest way to reduce the collective human carbon footprint would be for the red button to explode the one pushing it.
ReplyDeleteHow humorous would it be if a Hitler impersonator did a 10:10 spoof and the ones being blown up were the untermensch? You know, Jews, gays, Gypsies, etc.???
I imagine a sequel to an animated movie, call it 'ANTZ 2', where the micro-scientists declare that their modification of the environment to suit their needs will doom the entire planet, and legions of obedient insects are marched to their deaths, before the 'science' is revealed to be a Wasp plot to destroy their wingless competition... I claim royalties if anyone actually produces this ;)
ReplyDeleteAs another real conservationist I've been utterly saddened and perplexed ever since the movement got hijacked by the elite-concocted carbon dioxide/ global warming mania. To me the whole point of keeping the planet clean and green has always been to maintain a pleasant and healthy environment for humans as well as all the rest of creation.
ReplyDeleteYes, we have made some grave errors in how we look at and deal with the natural world, especially in the last 2 centuries, but does that mean we shouldn't go on existing? Of course not. It means we keep on looking for better ecological insights and better ways of living synergistically with our natural surroundings. And have some confidence that gentle persuasion is both the only ethical and the more effective way to educate others and win them over to a sensible and sensitive way of treating Earth, with all the benefits in terms of health and prosperity that comes with.