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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?
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?
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 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.
--
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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!