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Eco-Terrorism
shmert writes: "NYTimes has the scoop on some recent eco-terrorist activity. The most titillating being the torching of an SUV dealership. Wonder if this could ever lead to anything productive? Seems like I'd think twice about buying a new SUV if the tires got slashed every week. Although antics like this never really worked in those Carl Hiassen books." Are these sorts of actions justifiable? If one of the companies developing bio-engineered plants/animals messes up, the consequences to the rest of the world could be extreme and it's doubtful the company would be in any position to make restitution. Is it right to destroy property in an effort to prevent this sort of gambling with our quality of life? Is that the most productive way to deal with bio-engineering risks?
Depending on where you live, how often does that really happen? In moderately deep snow, yes a 4WD vehicle is going to have an advantage. But not on ice. I've seen way too many SUVs and Jeeps whose drivers thought that spinning like tops and ending up in the ditch and/or hitting someone else. For all but the most extreme conditions, a front wheel drive car and an alert driver with a clue is sufficient. I've driven through enough blizzards to know that. My father spends a lot of time on the road (500-1000 miles a week before he retired..probably only 300 now) mainly in rural areas where 'on-road conditions often turn into off-road conditions'. Unless he needed to pull a trailer or haul a bunch of stuff with a pickup, he used a car and has said even he can't understand why anyone would need a SUV.
Look at the demographics of those who are buying SUVs. They are usually upper middle class & up people in urban and suburban areas (again not counting Hutterites =). These people are buying for status and for a perceived need that they _might_ use it for once or twice a year, if ever, instead of what they actually use it for on a day to day basis. Sure, having a 4WD may help you if you're in an area that gets socked with lots of snow. Get a Subaru or an AWD Audi if you don't think a FWD can hack it. But what's the excuse for those in the sunbelt states? I mean, if I bought vehicles on some rare need, I'd buy a Hummer with a .50 cal machine gun on the top so I could mow down rioters and drive over the pieces of shit.
If your CRV is only getting between 25 & 30, something is wrong with it. My parents' big ass Buick Park Avenue gets a consistent 28. My Mitsubishi econobox gets 35. You should be getting at least that if not more. I've hauled a lot of stuff in a similar Hyundai Excel (mattresses, a freezer, 10+ computers & monitors, dressers, a swingset, etc.) and even pulled a U-haul trailer cross country over the Rockies w/o any problems. Renting a small trailer from time to time isn't that big of a hassel.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
A sniper kills an abortion provider in Buffalo, NY, because he believes that abortion is murder, and that his single act of murder would prevent hundreds of children from being killed.
Was it justifiable?
An ecoterrorist group torches an SUV dealership because they believe that the increased fuel consumption disproportionately contributes to the destruction of the environment, and that their single act of pollution will prevent many others.
Was it justifiable?
If you can answer 'yes' to either of those questions, then you better damn well feel comfortable supporting the other. Left-wing or right-wing, the goals are irrelevant. You'd better be prepared to defend all uses of violent resistance, or agree that none are acceptable.
As a side question, what the hell did this have to do with "News for Nerds"?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Here in Western Australia, we have forest protesters. Nice idea, but the implementation is a little... well, lacking.
For example, they tend to litter. And to track a disease known as ``dieback'' through the forests because they don't take care to clean down their vehicles. And to chop down a lot of little trees in order to build a platform from which to protest about the decimation of big trees. What? Use branches instead? Oooh, we never thought of that... nor did we think that the locals, who depend on the forest products for their own livings as well as the survival of their townships, might be a tad upset by us disrupting their livelihood. Of course, digging out culverts to stop logging trucks is de rigeur, but the environmental damage which this does is not important. And so on.
I firmly believe that we ought to leave some forests - large areas of them - strictly alone, because the fact remains that we don't really know what forests are for or how they work, and messing with mysteries before they're unravelled is generally not a survival tendency. However, a consistent, rational and energetic education and lobbying campaign is going to do a whole heap more towards this aim than the vandalism supposed-short-cut. The real motivation of many eco-terrorists is instant heroism, a ``usefulness high,'' and it shows in their actions.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Even if it's well intentioned, the problem with vigilante justice is that there is rarely any justice in it. Just emotion. And thus it usually targets the wrong victim through ignorance.
It breaks down to the right tool for the right job. Some people spend a helluva lot of time in their vehicles so I'm not about to claim they should not enjoy some luxury. And the soccer moms out there don't want to buy a mini-van because of the image of it being a soccer-mom vehicle, so they need a SUV with equal human cargo capacity. OK, fine (but it's still a soccer-mom vehicle!). But by golly, a Cadillac pick-up truck? Why? It's just ridiculous. You take a truck chassis, then over engineer the shit out of it to make it drive like a car. Just buy a friggin luxury car and if you really need to go to Home Depot to haul some goods once in a while, rent a real pick-up truck...
It costs $50,000. I'm at a loss. A pick-up truck is supposed to be a REAL utility vehicle, not some super-luxurious penis-enlarging toy. Just look at this thing.... Is someone going to haul a load of manure in this thing? Or throw a bunch of lumber in the back? What good is it for?
Oh, and for our foreign readers, you can't imagine how big that really is from the pictures. Here's a hint. The wheels are 17 inchers and they look tiny compared to the rest of that vehicle.... It's 221" long, 91.5" wide, and 75.6" tall.
(On second thought, you probably STILL can't imagine how big it is since the measurements aren't metric... :)
I mean, what the hell kind of anarchist golfs? "Say, Moonchild, what say we get in a quick nine before we torch that Land Rover dealership?" I guess you have to have a hobby outside of blowing stuff up.
But I've got to agree that grass is a bad idea. There are dozens of better ways to fight erosion, that don't require you to use massive quantities of poison and fertilizer. In the town I grew up in, there was a pond at the bottom of a large hill. The hill was covered with nice houses with nice beautifully manicured lawns. One spring a lengthy rainstorm sent runoff from all these lawns downhill into the pond. A day later, all the fish were dead--poisoned by all that fertilizer and insecticide. Eventually fishing in the pond was banned; what fish remained were incredibly toxic.
The moral of the story is that just because one or two people doing a thing is harmless doesn't mean the thing remains harmless when done by a hundred thousand people.
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This is not my sandwich.
What, you say? Arson is not an act of violence? Tell that to the firemen who risk their lives trying to put it out! One of these days, one of these arson fires IS going to kill someone... I wonder what these twits will say then?
In Arizona, it is legal to shoot to kill to stop arson of an occupied building. Maybe these clowns should come to Phoenix. We would show them a good time!
Of course, one of these loons was here. He was showing his love of the environment by burning houses under construction next to our mountain preserves. Never you mind that he himself had a house on the preserve! Never you mind that burning these houses added pollution to the environment, and used up water and wood - which these environmentalists are supposedly so much in love with.
There is no excuse for destroying private property in a democratic society. If this were a dictatorship, then the destruction of the dictator's property would be OK. But these days, people seem to believe that just because they don't like something, they can violate the law and peoples' rights with acts of violence! They seem to think that because a "corporation" is an owner, it must be evil - so go ahead and destroy its property. Well, how many of these people have pension funds invested in corporations? How many other people lose some of their savings as these corporations lose money and opportunity.
These ecofreaks are nothing more than misfits. They are poorly informed about environmental issues, and are rather narcissistally pretending to be heroes and heorins... but really they are just scum.
The only good weather is bad weather.
The big problem I see with current trends (especially in the U.S.) is that nothing we're doing is sustainable. We're using up our natural resources at a frightening fast rate. We're still polluting like mad, we're pumping tremendous amounts of C02 and methane into the atmosphere and eventually we'll kill off the human race or just most of the planet. If every one in the world lived like the US did, we'd need 3 Earths to handle the demand on natural resources.
Unfortunately, from the extent of your hyperbole above, it sounds like you've adopted the opinion of a very few, largely-self-styled experts as if they were handed down to Moses on stone tablets. (Sorry -- it really is tough to avoid the "religion" metaphor when discussing these things.)
Are you aware that as recently as the 1970s we were supposedly heading for another ice age? At least, we were according to the same clique of "environmental scientists" who are now telling us we're heading for imminent global heat death.
The effects you're talking about constitute, in the words of Carl Sagan, "extraordinary claims." Do you really think it's unreasonable for us to demand "extraordinary proof" to go along with them?
In short, read what you're writing, for Pete's sake, and understand what you're asking of the rest of us. If you successfully convince me to buy that happy neo-Malthusian crap you're selling, you'll have compelled me to rearrange my lifestyle more drastically than anything short of a severe car crash, life-threatening disease, or limited nuclear war could have done. I'd have to destroy my own car (of course, we ran out of fossil fuels about 10 years ago according to the prevailing environmental opinions^h^h^h^h^hscience of the 70s era, so no great loss there), stop washing my clothes, and swear not to reproduce (of course, not washing my clothes should take care of that problem nicely).
No, I'm not going to take decisions like this lightly... and no, you're not going to win me, or any other typical American I know, over to your cause by resorting to violence and vandalism. At a minimum, it's going to take irrefutable proof of anthropogenic contributions to global warming and undeniable evidence of consequential harm. We don't have that right now, and we won't for a long time, if ever. Will it be too late then? Maybe.
But then, I'm willing to bet that somehow, things aren't quite as bad as you're making them sound.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
She is practically booed every time she tells someone that she works in genetics
:-(
That really sucks. It's no different from the Catholic Church's persecution of Galileo and Copernicus, if you think about it. When a gang of ignorant religious wackos (which is what this tree-spiking, library-burning, SUV-vandalizing thing is: a religion) disagrees with you, it's unlikely that your differences will be resoved in any civil forum.
Unfortunately, the enviro-wackos won't be happy until we're all living in trees and caves. They simply aren't interested in solving the problems of how to clothe, feed, and house six billion+ healthy homo sapiens at anything beyond a subsistence level.
Make no mistake: today it's the "rich" who are their targets of convenience. Tomorrow, it will be you.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
Burning the dealerships is not the way to combat this problem. I was hoping that gasoline prices would stay high this summer (they are much cheaper in the US than other countries). But they seem to be heading back down now as well.
I would love to see SUVs included in the federal bill that mandates a fleet average for gasoline mileage from a car company. Either that or taxing cars/SUVs that get really poor mileage (some sort of environment destruction tax) would help flip this recent trend.
Let's not even get into the problems SUVs cause on the road by decreasing the visibility of those around them . . .
Regardless of how you feel ethically about what the Eco-Terrorists are doing, there are two *major* points to consider:
... as did our organization.
1. Terrorism has one, and only one effective place in revolutionary history. Terrorism is a very effective way to dissuade a colonial pover from maintaining its commercial operations in your country. However, all attempts to use terrorism against domestic authority result instead in a backlash against the terrorists; there has been no occasion, historically, where this has not been true. In fact, this principle is so effective that from 1970-72 the FBI's COINTELPRO branch used it to destroy the Black Panthers, simply by having undercover agents urge them on to more and more outrageous acts (more about this later).
Thus, whatever you feel about the goals of the "eco-terrorists", their methods will, if anything, cause the opposite of the desired reaction. Non-violence is not just ethical; it's essential for survival.
2. In all probablity, some of the "eco-terrorists" are CIA operatives *posing* as radical environmentalists in order to inspire a counter-reaction. Think about whose father remains the de-facto "old man" of the CIA, and which U.S. executive officer is currently have a lot of trouble with environmentalists in Congress.
You may be ready to dismiss this as "conspiracy theories", but it's not far-feteched at all. When I was a member of a certian radical environmental organization ('scuse the vagueness, this could still lead to legal trouble for me) we decided the best way to stop a certain factory operation was to unionize the factory workers. Two undercover FBI agents in our organization (as it turned out) used the organizing effort to sneak into the factory and sabotage the equipment, against organizational policy. The result nearly killed some of the workers and the unionization effort broke up
-Josh
Yes, a 1997 Honda Accord pollutes more than a 2001 Ford Excursion. The Accord first met LEV requirements in 1998, and the 2001 Exursion is LEV certified. The Excursion may use twice the gas, but it has lower emissions per mile than does the Accord. The Exursion will more quickly deplete us of our fossil fuel supply, but the greenies want that.
I'm somewhat biased, as my life was saved by our suburban when a drunk driver smashed into the back of us at 55mph (It also saved the lives of the five teenagers in the Hyundai Excel in front of us). Personally I prefer full-size pickups myself, but I can entirely understand the reasons people buy SUVs. No I don't need one, but I also don't "need" a 15k RPM hard drive and a gig of RAM.
Is torching an SUV dealership justifiable? Michael, are you a complete moron? Could someone please add a checkbox to slashcode to filter out articles that are complete RADICAL left-wing bullshit? Some of us here are just programmers who want to hear about the latest technology... and I can't readily filter out articles related to "Science" to obtain this!
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"Are these sorts of actions justifiable?"
No.
"Is it right to destroy property in an effort to prevent this sort of gambling with our quality of life?"
No.
"Is that the most productive way to deal with bio-engineering risks?"
No.
Problem solved.
Honorary Member of Jackie Chan's Kung Fu Process Servers
I am extremely disappointed with how environmental groups have handled the whole "GMO" (a term I hate as it encourages the notion that a Holstein cow or a iceberg lettuce is a naturally occurring, "unmodified" creature) thing. Sure, care needs to be taken. Arguably a lot more care needs to be taken. But environmentalists have jumped on this bandwagon because it's an easy way to frighten donors and activists, without the slightest regard for the facts. Even responsible groups like the Sierra Club and Greenpeace have gone for emotion over reason.
I'm a long-time Sierra Club member and put in some time trying to correct some basic misunderstanding on the part of the anti-GMO project leader. She wrote me some courteous responses but ultimately had nothing to say beyond some nonsense about how everyone should eat "natural" foods.
The real tragedy is that the alternative to insect-resistant potatoes isn't that people are going to start eating acorns and grass. They're going to keep eating food that's been drenched in pesticides, fertilizers and hormones, much of which winds in rivers and oceans. We'll have missed the chance to make the world cleaner and safer and the guilt will be on the heads of the activists who couldn't be troubled to educate themselves and their leaders who knew better but decided to attack a convenient boogeyman instead of addressing the real problem.
By the way, the appeal of casually destroying other people's work is indicative of how overrun Slashdot has become by people who have never created anything useful in their lives, but base their self-esteem on how much they can claim other people owe them. No one who has genuinely invested his or her life in creating -- art, software, a business, knowledge -- could be so blase about saying "Well, I think this is bad so I'm going to destroy it."
I'd question how this all fits in with Michael's smarmy "anti-censorship" views but, at this point, the utter hypocracy of Slashdot editors is so self-evident it hardly bears mention.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Hmmm... No.
Anything else I can help clear up?
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The kicker here is a crappy gas mpg tax already exists - for cars - SUV's are exempt. Adding insult to injury, they are exempt from lux tax as well... no wonder abominations like the lincon navigator exist.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
Your parents didn't get approval to have you share the planet with me. May I kill you? Why should I care what they, or you, think of my "personal actions".
The environmental damage from the burning of the dealership is just the thing they are trying to prevent. Funny that they don't seem to recognize that.
It seems to me that torching an SUV dealership would release a lot of non-environmentally friendly garbage into the air. Kind of counter productive for the eco-terrorists when you think about it.
In Oregon recently, some eco-terror people recently burned down a bunch of trees that were genetically modified for purposes of bio-remediayion. It amazes me what ignorance people display through much of eco-terrorism. I consider myself to be a pretty environmentally friendly guy. However, I also happen to be in love with someone who is a researcher in plant genetics (lucky me!), and I've learned how ignorant I was. I used to be one of the people how vowed against all Genetically Modified Organisms(GMO), now I see a great deal of value. For example, in some countries, many people have vitamin deficiencies that can lead to blindness (I think this is vitamin K but I can't remember). Some researchers are working on (or may have finished) corn that grows with the vitamin in it. They did this using genetics. Now go tell a few million parents that their children can grow up without blindess. This corn has no impact on the environment that is different from regular corn. This does not mean that GMO companies should be allowed to act with impunity; and most geneticists agree. There needs be very careful controls on the development and use of GMO's. (Monarch butterflies being a good example of the potential problems). How 'bout another sample: Bio-remediation. What if we created a harmless bacteria that can clean up toxic waste. I know someone working on such a project. She is practically booed every time she tells someone that she works in genetics, but it seems to me like she is doing some very interesting work. In conclusion, if we can create wood that is more efficient, crops that are disease or weather resistant etc, we can solve a lot of problems. Let's just be careful when making them. I heard a quote from a geneticist talking about creating "hardier" crops through Genetic Modification. He said, "The person who has no food has only one problem. The person who has food has many problems." I think his point is well taken, by me at least. That, for those of us who have food, it is easy to complain about GM stuff. And for those who would destory this kind of work, maybe you should go to the far east and tell two parents that their children are going to have to grow up blind, because you destroyed the test field where the GM corn was being grown. -Hobo
--Stupidity is Self Curing!