Quote of the Day
I for one, would like to live in a society where people can have differing opinions without becoming “Koch funded anti-science denialists” or “Soros funded socialist hoaxers”.
It’s something to strive for shoot for, no?
UPDATE: See comments for explanation of cross out.
I understand you’re in ny and I’m in az, but ugh, today’s a bad day for a shooting metaphor.
Hear hear
Totally unthinking and unintentional. That is a terrible, terrible thing that I was going to talk about tonight.
I’m in Europe, but I know what you guys are talking about! Expect more of those terrible things as long as we distract yourselves with the symptoms, instead of the root causes. It can only lead to violence.
But Like I said in the thread that contained Keith’s quoted comment:
I for one, would like to live in a society where people can have differing opinions without becoming “Koch funded anti-science denialists” or “Soros funded socialist hoaxers”.
Too late for that I fear. AGW is a serious threat (Keith agrees), it’s not the only global problem (Keith agrees), and most if not all the global problems are caused by the fact that the big driver of our Western economy, and by proxy culture and society, is an economic concept that states that growth is always good and therefore must and can be infinite (Keith doesn’t agree, but has decided to ignore me on this point, as has Romm).
And as long as you do not ditch this concept you will continue to have an increasing polarization as limits to the symptoms (AGW, diminishing resources, deterioration of ecosystem services, disappearing wealth and minimum standards) start to impose themselves more and more, combined with powers that want to preserve the status quo (that the mantra of infinite growth proscribes) by using this polarization as a divide-and-conquer tactic. And coincidentally, polarization is something that’s very lucrative to the media (which are in large part owned by the status quo powers), so don’t expect them to ignore the nagging and whining cranks.
You can forget about the polarization getting less and you can forget about the society you would like, as long as you do not ditch that economic theory for something more rational and more sustainable. Looking at what you want is not going to get us anywhere. We have to look at how it is, not how it should be.
Again, I just want to say that I wrote that line on the run, so my apologies for not appreciating or thinking of the tragic news of the moment. I’ve spent a lot of time reporting in southern Arizona, especially Tucson. My heart goes out to the victims and the community.
Neven, about a millionth of the sun’s energy hitting the earth is used to sustain human life. A tiny increase in the efficiency of our use of that energy will sustain human life in much greater numbers than we have today. That is not infinite growth, but it is a lot bigger than you are able to imagine.
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That’s how I live already. Avoiding places like CP and WUWT helps a lot.
Keith, it’s quite clear it was unintentional, and there really is no need to apologize.
I agree with you and Menth 100% on the sentiment of the quote.
To use Dave Roberts lingo…the divide between climate hawks and climate doves became a place of scorched earth years ago. My first recollection of it was in 1997, when I asked someone at the Sierra Club to review a draft policy paper I had written, and they refused, saying that because we were unlikely to agree on policy outcomes, even reviewing the work would give it legitimacy they would prefer to deny it.
What I think people are missing here is that, first, the US has always been a country of extremely divergent political philosophies. That isn’t the problem. The problem is that civility, and a mutual understanding of the value of preserving civil discourse (and behavior) have broken down.
Over the years, I have sponsored many climate-policy and climate-science events at libertarian think tanks. Far more climate hawks would simply refuse to appear with climate doves than vice verse.
http://rfkmemorial.mediathree.net/lifevision/onthemindlessmenaceofviolence/
On the Mindless Menace of Violence
City Club of Cleveland, Cleveland, Ohio
April 5, 1968
This is a time of shame and sorrow. It is not a day for politics. I have saved this one opportunity, my only event of today, to speak briefly to you about the mindless menace of violence in America which again stains our land and every one of our lives.
It is not the concern of any one race. The victims of the violence are black and white, rich and poor, young and old, famous and unknown. They are, most important of all, human beings whom other human beings loved and needed. No one – no matter where he lives or what he does – can be certain who will suffer from some senseless act of bloodshed. And yet it goes on and on and on in this country of ours.
Why? What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No martyr’s cause has ever been stilled by an assassin’s bullet.
No wrongs have ever been righted by riots and civil disorders. A sniper is only a coward, not a hero; and an uncontrolled, uncontrollable mob is only the voice of madness, not the voice of reason.
Whenever any American’s life is taken by another American unnecessarily – whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of the law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence – whenever we tear at the fabric of the life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded.
“Among free men,” said Abraham Lincoln, “there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and those who take such appeal are sure to lose their cause and pay the costs.”
Yet we seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilization alike. We calmly accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far-off lands. We glorify killing on movie and television screens and call it entertainment. We make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire whatever weapons and ammunition they desire.
Too often we honor swagger and bluster and wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others. Some Americans who preach non-violence abroad fail to practice it here at home. Some who accuse others of inciting riots have by their own conduct invited them.
Some look for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear: violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.
For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is the slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter.
This is the breaking of a man’s spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among other men. And this too afflicts us all.
I have not come here to propose a set of specific remedies nor is there a single set. For a broad and adequate outline we know what must be done. When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies, to be met not with cooperation but with conquest; to be subjugated and mastered.
We learn, at the last, to look at our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community; men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear, only a common desire to retreat from each other, only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force. For all this, there are no final answers.
Yet we know what we must do. It is to achieve true justice among our fellow citizens. The question is not what programs we should seek to enact. The question is whether we can find in our own midst and in our own hearts that leadership of humane purpose that will recognize the terrible truths of our existence.
We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of others. We must admit in ourselves that our own children’s future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred or revenge.
Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land. Of course we cannot vanquish it with a program, nor with a resolution.
But we can perhaps remember, if only for a time, that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short moment of life; that they seek, as do we, nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and in happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can.
Surely, this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something. Surely, we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men, and surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our own hearts brothers and countrymen once again.
Nev, you are a guinea a minute, really.
‘most if not all the global problems are caused by ….. an economic concept that states that growth is always good’. Really? So, at random, infant mortality in sub-Saharan Africa, Aids?
And the shooting itself is to be expected? ‘Expect more of those terrible things as long as we distract yourselves with the symptoms, instead of the root causes. It can only lead to violence.’
Ken Green – from over here (UK) the US has been the least divergent country politically, compared to pretty much any European country over the last 100 years?