I suggest everyone on either side of the debate read this by Michael Crichton, no matter what you currently think of his opinions on global warming: Environmentalism as Religion. In it, he makes the incredibly accurate case that environmentalism is actually a repackaging of Judeo-Christian values for urban atheists--the natural Eden marred by an unnatural, unclean mankind who has to save everyone before doomsday by following specific tenets of belief. It's so clear-cut that he suggests it might be hard-wired into the brain to believe this "perfection marred by man" scenario in any given society in some form.
"Environmentalism as Religion"
by Michael Crichton Commonwealth Club San Francisco, CA September 15, 2003
I have been asked to talk about what I consider the most important challenge facing mankind, and I have a fundamental answer. The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance.
We must daily decide whether the threats we face are real, whether the solutions we are offered will do any good, whether the problems we're told exist are in fact real problems, or non-problems. Every one of us has a sense of the world, and we all know that this sense is in part given to us by what other people and society tell us; in part generated by our emotional state, which we project outward; and in part by our genuine perceptions of reality. In short, our struggle to determine what is true is the struggle to decide which of our perceptions are genuine, and which are false because they are handed down, or sold to us, or generated by our own hopes and fears.
As an example of this challenge, I want to talk today about environmentalism. And in order not to be misunderstood, I want it perfectly clear that I believe it is incumbent on us to conduct our lives in a way that takes into account all the consequences of our actions, including the consequences to other people, and the consequences to the environment. I believe it is important to act in ways that are sympathetic to the environment, and I believe this will always be a need, carrying into the future. I believe the world has genuine problems and I believe it can and should be improved. But I also think that deciding what constitutes responsible action is immensely difficult, and the consequences of our actions are often difficult to know in advance. I think our past record of environmental action is discouraging, to put it mildly, because even our best intended efforts often go awry. But I think we do not recognize our past failures, and face them squarely. And I think I know why.
I studied anthropology in college, and one of the things I learned was that certain human social structures always reappear. They can't be eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion. Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people---the best people, the most enlightened people---do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form. You can not believe in God, but you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.
Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it's a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.
We only contribute 0.28% of greenhouse gases according to official numbers. 5% if you remove water vapor, which most global warming kooks do to jack up the numbers. Temps haven't risen since 1998.
You won't hear any of this in the media. They have an obvious agenda.
There really isn't any doubt that the Earth has warmed up over the last 25 years.
Uh, yes there is. You just haven't looked up the stats. We only contribute less than 0.5% of greenhouse gases according to official numbers, and global temperature hasn't risen since 1998 according to the official temperature record. This kind of critical eye is censored in the mainstream media, who absolutely wants you to believe the world is going to end to fit some goofy liberal agenda. It's easy to say "Republicans don't want to fund the research," but you have to examine those bills, which often include other things inserted by the Democrats that don't belong there or discriminately punish industries.
People who disagree with global warming lack imagination
People who say such things are ignorant of the hard facts about the lack of actual global warming going on.
I suggest everyone read Michael Crichton's lecture about how environmentalism is a religion--it has the concept of an untouched natural Eden marred by man with a judgement day for the sinners who don't follow the creed.
The temperature hasn't even risen since 1998 according to official global temperature record. Funny how none of the mainstream media is reporting it, eh? I bet you never even heard about it until this post. Think about that for a second. What else isn't being reported?
According to the official global temperature records, it was already "fixed"--global temperature hasn't risen since 1998. It's the big unreported fact about so-called "global warming." You won't hear it from Al Gore.
You have to stop believing alarmists spreading the religion of environmentalism:
1.) The untouched natural Eden 2.) The Eden marred by man's unnaturalism 3.) Impending doomsday only preventable by following a religious creed to revert the unnaturalism (recycling, fixing global warming, etc.)
It's a repackaging of Judeo-Christian religious concepts. It must be hard-wired into the brain or something, as most of the believers of this religion--as Michael Crichton puts it--are "urban atheists."
And to repond to a couple other posts you made, we need to think about global warming with a clear head. We still don't know if mandating everybody to drive a Prius is going to stop it.
According to the official global temperature records, it already stopped eight years ago in 1998. Temperatures haven't risen since then according to the record! I and others have already posted about it elsewhere, but it's simply LUDICROUS that nobody in the media is even reporting the fact, including Slashdot.
I understand that MS releases patches on a scheduled, monthly basis because lots of corporate IT departments demanded it (to make their jobs easier). I understand that; there's at least some logic to it.
I don't think there's logic to it; as you point out, the patches should come out when they're ready. If IT departments want a monthly schedule for patches, they should set one themselves. Why do they have to have Microsoft do it? Nobody's forcing them to install patches right away.
How many Microsoft fanbois are going to use the strawman argument that Microsoft is being "punished for being successful?"
They're not being punished for being successful. The EU didn't say, "Hmm, Microsoft is being successful, let's fine them for that."
The issue is the lack of interoperability documentation with their monopoly platform, which prevents competition from Microsoft's own server products, furthering Microsoft's monopoly. There are laws against that because it's the antithesis of a free market.
The idea is you don't punish the good for being the good.
They're not punishing them for being good. They're punishing them for not allowing interoperability with their monopoly platform, thereby preventing competing alternatives. When the world's computers are over 90% Microsoft-controlled, that changes things.
And any fool who says Linux or MacOS X don't need to be patched, are just that, fools.
Uh, Linux and OS X didn't need to be patched to fix RPC exploit worms that rebooted two-thirds of the world's computers, or database server worms that gave SQL Server the dubious distinction of being the platform for the fastest spreading worm in history. It's not foolish to say OS X and Linux have not needed such patches; it's truthful.
There are plenty more holes in Windows that aren't patched yet, most of them in IE, and most of them critical.
What if Apple had not hit the iPod jackpot? Would they still be suing small-time bloggers?
Hell, yeah, Steve Jobs instituted a strict "no leaks" policy when he returned to Apple. A few people got into trouble, including one lady who inadvertently had the upcoming "Think Different" ad budget published in an industry newsletter.
The saddest part of this story is (from a consumer point of view) how a loyalist is kicked in the nuts by the company he/she has loved.
Since when do "loyalists" have the right to kick a company in the nuts by blabbing about all its secret in-development products? I love the way people on Slashdot assume they have the "right" to absolutely anything at anyone's expense, especially if it's a company. Because companies are evil, right? Yawn.
It amuses me how people on Slashdot make fun of fundamentalist values like "Jesus" and "evil," but when a company dares try to protect leaks of its future in-development technologies, it's EVIL! In fact, apparently there is "Microsoft evil" and "lawyer oriented evil."
And what is this "old Apple" crap you're talking about? Apple has always been litigious, and this claim that they will "further alienate" the fan base, as if they're alienating them now, has no basis in fact. Actually, they're doing quite well as the quarterly results call is expected to show in May.
Basically, I'm out of quotation marks here to throw around your goofy phrases.
It's good for Dell to push Microsoft and Intel around a little. Microsoft needs to have the #1 PC manufacturer tell them, "Uh, we're not under your thumb." Remember the 90s, when Microsoft controlled OEMs with an iron-fist, illegally coercing them into shipping only Windows through license revocation threats?
Look who posted it--Zonk, who was formerly editor of the Slashdot Games section before replacing Michael. These are obviously "gaming websites" Zonk visits and decided everyone else gave a shit about enough for him to post on the front page.
For the record, I fucking hate gaming websites. You can feel your brain being squeezed when you visit.
They haven't. The increase in high resolution graphics has only made PC games worse, closing the levels in to compensate for framerates (Doom 3) and skyrocketing development costs as well as hardware costs ($400 video cards just to display grassy hills), ignoring gameplay. F.E.A.R. was a series of gray warehouses for three hours. Almost everything is now a technology demo instead of a well-balanced game like the original Doom that felt great to control and play. I have yet to play a shooter that moves as smoothly as the original Doom.
Half of the pretty graphics you see in top of the line shooters could be done using today's shaders and technologies. Nobody wants to do it because they don't sell "DirectX 10 capable PCs" that way.
Since Linux is growing in China, will we be seeing headlines on Slashdot about how Linux violates human rights in China? For some reason, I think we won't.
Penn and Teller ARE bullshit, first off. That show is not science, their analyses of basically every topic they've tried have been lopsided and skewed, and you would do well to not take it as anything more than a fictional bit of entertainment.
Lopsided and skewed? They present facts and interview the key figures, and they make the very important point that environmentalism has just become a shell for anti-globalist forces. They even talk to the co-founder of Greenpeace who left the organization for just those reasons, and they explain where the hysteria began and how it was inflated by the media.
You just don't like what they say in the episode, so you're dismissing it without addressing the points raised. I especially love the rally they go to where they get a bunch of people to blindly sign a petition banning water, to prove a point about groupthink.
As for the "we don't really have any control" thing... cite your sources and we'll see.
Well, aside from this very article we're discussing claiming cleaner air still means rising temperatures, there's also the fact we only contribute 0.28% of so-called greenhouse gases. It's just over 5% without water vapor factored in, which is what most environmentalist outfits do to inflate the numbers and make it look like we're destroying the planet.
But even if it's true, it doesn't decrease the steaming pile of shit that humanity finds itself in at the moment.
Well, it suggests it's a natural cycle. Remember that temperatures dropped half a century ago.
If global temperatures really are rising without our help, that just means that there's NOTHING to stop the mass destruction that's going to happen in the next couple hundred years. The end effects of global warming aren't in dispute, and they are not pretty.
Unless the cycle reverses itself like last time. I'm sure that then, all the scientists will be claiming a new ice age like they were decades ago, which didn't turn out to be true.
So if we clean the air, temps rise. Kind of suggests a natural rise in temps, doesn't it? Now watch as most of the media completely ignores this news piece.
I suggest everyone here read Michael Crichton's essay, "Environmentalism as Religion". in it, he says environmentalism is the religion of urban atheists, and posits that environmentalism is a remapping of Judeo-Christian religion through the following comparison:
1.) Both preach of a romantic, natural Eden in the past unsullied by Man then destroyed by the folly of Man.
2.) Both preach of a return to that natural Eden through prayer/worship/recycling/naturism.
3.) Both preach of a judgment day whereby those who didn't adopt the tenets are judged--either by God on Judgment Day or by the world when a natural disaster strikes.
He goes on to describe how there never was an Eden and that naturism doesn't work and that there has never been some mythic symbiotic relationship between man and nature. In fact, nobody actually wants to experience real nature.
It's really quite an interesting read, and it's funny to apply this religious mapping to other movements, even OSS. Perhaps this return-to-Eden mindset is hard-wired in the brain, as Crichton suggests.
Point is that man-made pollution is more than the earth can absorb because there are too many humans. If we reduced the population, earth would be better able to absorb the naturally-created pollution.
You have not cited any evidence for this, and you're in fact advocating "reducing the population." Hmm.
The fact is--and this is the number none of the environmentalists will admit--we contribute around 0.5% to so-called greenhouse gases according to official stats. The rest is from volcanoes and the natural exchange of water vapor from the oceans.
So what this article is saying that even if we clean the air, temperatures rise. Isn't this simply suggesting the point that temperatures are therefore rising naturally? Temperatures may end up dipping naturally again like they did 50 years ago (another point environmentalists won't acknowledge).
The real truth is that environmentalism today is a mask used to instead spread anti-capitalism and anti-globalism and has little to do with actual environmentalism. It's the reason the founder of Greenpeace quit the group.
I suggest everyone watch the Environmentalism episode of Penn & Teller's "Bullshit!" series.
Re:Apple is going to make a killing...
on
Going To Boot Camp
·
· Score: 1
That's odd. You are already a Mac zealot. What can you possibly gain by being able to run Windows since OSX is so superior?
Games. Now I can devote a 60GB partition to the toy OS that is Windows, and play video games now and then. Then switch back to OS X and get the real work done.
The idea of portable Oblivion gaming on a MacBook Pro...come on...you're telling me you don't salivate at the idea?:)
Slashdot Mirror
No problem.
I suggest everyone on either side of the debate read this by Michael Crichton, no matter what you currently think of his opinions on global warming: Environmentalism as Religion. In it, he makes the incredibly accurate case that environmentalism is actually a repackaging of Judeo-Christian values for urban atheists--the natural Eden marred by an unnatural, unclean mankind who has to save everyone before doomsday by following specific tenets of belief. It's so clear-cut that he suggests it might be hard-wired into the brain to believe this "perfection marred by man" scenario in any given society in some form.
We only contribute 0.28% of greenhouse gases according to official numbers. 5% if you remove water vapor, which most global warming kooks do to jack up the numbers. Temps haven't risen since 1998.
You won't hear any of this in the media. They have an obvious agenda.
There really isn't any doubt that the Earth has warmed up over the last 25 years.
Uh, yes there is. You just haven't looked up the stats. We only contribute less than 0.5% of greenhouse gases according to official numbers, and global temperature hasn't risen since 1998 according to the official temperature record. This kind of critical eye is censored in the mainstream media, who absolutely wants you to believe the world is going to end to fit some goofy liberal agenda. It's easy to say "Republicans don't want to fund the research," but you have to examine those bills, which often include other things inserted by the Democrats that don't belong there or discriminately punish industries.
People who disagree with global warming lack imagination
People who say such things are ignorant of the hard facts about the lack of actual global warming going on.
I suggest everyone read Michael Crichton's lecture about how environmentalism is a religion--it has the concept of an untouched natural Eden marred by man with a judgement day for the sinners who don't follow the creed.
The temperature hasn't even risen since 1998 according to official global temperature record. Funny how none of the mainstream media is reporting it, eh? I bet you never even heard about it until this post. Think about that for a second. What else isn't being reported?
According to the official global temperature records, it was already "fixed"--global temperature hasn't risen since 1998. It's the big unreported fact about so-called "global warming." You won't hear it from Al Gore.
You have to stop believing alarmists spreading the religion of environmentalism:
1.) The untouched natural Eden
2.) The Eden marred by man's unnaturalism
3.) Impending doomsday only preventable by following a religious creed to revert the unnaturalism (recycling, fixing global warming, etc.)
It's a repackaging of Judeo-Christian religious concepts. It must be hard-wired into the brain or something, as most of the believers of this religion--as Michael Crichton puts it--are "urban atheists."
And to repond to a couple other posts you made, we need to think about global warming with a clear head. We still don't know if mandating everybody to drive a Prius is going to stop it.
According to the official global temperature records, it already stopped eight years ago in 1998. Temperatures haven't risen since then according to the record! I and others have already posted about it elsewhere, but it's simply LUDICROUS that nobody in the media is even reporting the fact, including Slashdot.
Ah, anything to dismiss the numbers.
THE TEMPERATURE HASN'T RISEN SINCE 1998. Global warming kooks will never have an answer for this.
I understand that MS releases patches on a scheduled, monthly basis because lots of corporate IT departments demanded it (to make their jobs easier). I understand that; there's at least some logic to it.
I don't think there's logic to it; as you point out, the patches should come out when they're ready. If IT departments want a monthly schedule for patches, they should set one themselves. Why do they have to have Microsoft do it? Nobody's forcing them to install patches right away.
How many Microsoft fanbois are going to use the strawman argument that Microsoft is being "punished for being successful?"
They're not being punished for being successful. The EU didn't say, "Hmm, Microsoft is being successful, let's fine them for that."
The issue is the lack of interoperability documentation with their monopoly platform, which prevents competition from Microsoft's own server products, furthering Microsoft's monopoly. There are laws against that because it's the antithesis of a free market.
The idea is you don't punish the good for being the good.
They're not punishing them for being good. They're punishing them for not allowing interoperability with their monopoly platform, thereby preventing competing alternatives. When the world's computers are over 90% Microsoft-controlled, that changes things.
And any fool who says Linux or MacOS X don't need to be patched, are just that, fools.
Uh, Linux and OS X didn't need to be patched to fix RPC exploit worms that rebooted two-thirds of the world's computers, or database server worms that gave SQL Server the dubious distinction of being the platform for the fastest spreading worm in history. It's not foolish to say OS X and Linux have not needed such patches; it's truthful.
There are plenty more holes in Windows that aren't patched yet, most of them in IE, and most of them critical.
What if Apple had not hit the iPod jackpot? Would they still be suing small-time bloggers?
Hell, yeah, Steve Jobs instituted a strict "no leaks" policy when he returned to Apple. A few people got into trouble, including one lady who inadvertently had the upcoming "Think Different" ad budget published in an industry newsletter.
The saddest part of this story is (from a consumer point of view) how a loyalist is kicked in the nuts by the company he/she has loved.
Since when do "loyalists" have the right to kick a company in the nuts by blabbing about all its secret in-development products? I love the way people on Slashdot assume they have the "right" to absolutely anything at anyone's expense, especially if it's a company. Because companies are evil, right? Yawn.
It amuses me how people on Slashdot make fun of fundamentalist values like "Jesus" and "evil," but when a company dares try to protect leaks of its future in-development technologies, it's EVIL! In fact, apparently there is "Microsoft evil" and "lawyer oriented evil."
And what is this "old Apple" crap you're talking about? Apple has always been litigious, and this claim that they will "further alienate" the fan base, as if they're alienating them now, has no basis in fact. Actually, they're doing quite well as the quarterly results call is expected to show in May.
Basically, I'm out of quotation marks here to throw around your goofy phrases.
Wrong, it means the employee violated the law too.
It's good for Dell to push Microsoft and Intel around a little. Microsoft needs to have the #1 PC manufacturer tell them, "Uh, we're not under your thumb." Remember the 90s, when Microsoft controlled OEMs with an iron-fist, illegally coercing them into shipping only Windows through license revocation threats?
Look who posted it--Zonk, who was formerly editor of the Slashdot Games section before replacing Michael. These are obviously "gaming websites" Zonk visits and decided everyone else gave a shit about enough for him to post on the front page.
For the record, I fucking hate gaming websites. You can feel your brain being squeezed when you visit.
They haven't. The increase in high resolution graphics has only made PC games worse, closing the levels in to compensate for framerates (Doom 3) and skyrocketing development costs as well as hardware costs ($400 video cards just to display grassy hills), ignoring gameplay. F.E.A.R. was a series of gray warehouses for three hours. Almost everything is now a technology demo instead of a well-balanced game like the original Doom that felt great to control and play. I have yet to play a shooter that moves as smoothly as the original Doom.
Half of the pretty graphics you see in top of the line shooters could be done using today's shaders and technologies. Nobody wants to do it because they don't sell "DirectX 10 capable PCs" that way.
Since Linux is growing in China, will we be seeing headlines on Slashdot about how Linux violates human rights in China? For some reason, I think we won't.
Penn and Teller ARE bullshit, first off. That show is not science, their analyses of basically every topic they've tried have been lopsided and skewed, and you would do well to not take it as anything more than a fictional bit of entertainment.
Lopsided and skewed? They present facts and interview the key figures, and they make the very important point that environmentalism has just become a shell for anti-globalist forces. They even talk to the co-founder of Greenpeace who left the organization for just those reasons, and they explain where the hysteria began and how it was inflated by the media.
You just don't like what they say in the episode, so you're dismissing it without addressing the points raised. I especially love the rally they go to where they get a bunch of people to blindly sign a petition banning water, to prove a point about groupthink.
As for the "we don't really have any control" thing... cite your sources and we'll see.
Well, aside from this very article we're discussing claiming cleaner air still means rising temperatures, there's also the fact we only contribute 0.28% of so-called greenhouse gases. It's just over 5% without water vapor factored in, which is what most environmentalist outfits do to inflate the numbers and make it look like we're destroying the planet.
But even if it's true, it doesn't decrease the steaming pile of shit that humanity finds itself in at the moment.
Well, it suggests it's a natural cycle. Remember that temperatures dropped half a century ago.
If global temperatures really are rising without our help, that just means that there's NOTHING to stop the mass destruction that's going to happen in the next couple hundred years. The end effects of global warming aren't in dispute, and they are not pretty.
Unless the cycle reverses itself like last time. I'm sure that then, all the scientists will be claiming a new ice age like they were decades ago, which didn't turn out to be true.
You're right, and I got the numbers wrong when I looked at the original stat.
It's not 0.5%, it's only 0.28%.
Global Warming: A closer look at the numbers
In 1998, scientists blamed the sun for global warming. I guess with a Republican in the White House, though, politics dictate that we blame humans and industry.
So if we clean the air, temps rise. Kind of suggests a natural rise in temps, doesn't it? Now watch as most of the media completely ignores this news piece.
I suggest everyone here read Michael Crichton's essay, "Environmentalism as Religion". in it, he says environmentalism is the religion of urban atheists, and posits that environmentalism is a remapping of Judeo-Christian religion through the following comparison:
1.) Both preach of a romantic, natural Eden in the past unsullied by Man then destroyed by the folly of Man.
2.) Both preach of a return to that natural Eden through prayer/worship/recycling/naturism.
3.) Both preach of a judgment day whereby those who didn't adopt the tenets are judged--either by God on Judgment Day or by the world when a natural disaster strikes.
He goes on to describe how there never was an Eden and that naturism doesn't work and that there has never been some mythic symbiotic relationship between man and nature. In fact, nobody actually wants to experience real nature.
It's really quite an interesting read, and it's funny to apply this religious mapping to other movements, even OSS. Perhaps this return-to-Eden mindset is hard-wired in the brain, as Crichton suggests.
Point is that man-made pollution is more than the earth can absorb because there are too many humans. If we reduced the population, earth would be better able to absorb the naturally-created pollution.
You have not cited any evidence for this, and you're in fact advocating "reducing the population." Hmm.
The fact is--and this is the number none of the environmentalists will admit--we contribute around 0.5% to so-called greenhouse gases according to official stats. The rest is from volcanoes and the natural exchange of water vapor from the oceans.
So what this article is saying that even if we clean the air, temperatures rise. Isn't this simply suggesting the point that temperatures are therefore rising naturally? Temperatures may end up dipping naturally again like they did 50 years ago (another point environmentalists won't acknowledge).
The real truth is that environmentalism today is a mask used to instead spread anti-capitalism and anti-globalism and has little to do with actual environmentalism. It's the reason the founder of Greenpeace quit the group.
I suggest everyone watch the Environmentalism episode of Penn & Teller's "Bullshit!" series.
That's odd. You are already a Mac zealot. What can you possibly gain by being able to run Windows since OSX is so superior?
:)
Games. Now I can devote a 60GB partition to the toy OS that is Windows, and play video games now and then. Then switch back to OS X and get the real work done.
The idea of portable Oblivion gaming on a MacBook Pro...come on...you're telling me you don't salivate at the idea?