Sure, there's no seemingly obvious reason for alarm or desperatism today -- but it's not implausible to suggest that quai-totalitarian frameworks will arise as a result of the calamitous effects of global warming. Once the environment truly goes to hell and it becomes overtly obvious that a catastrophe is actually happening, our respective governments will find ways to a) control its fearful populace, and b) compell its citizens to live and work a certain way. It would be George Orwell on hydraulic despotism.
Thursday, July 13, 2006
Global warming and the end of human freedom
5 comments:
Dvorsky is an interesting discovery -- sort of Noam Chomsky on acid? I hadn't read enough transhumanist stuff -- which honestly mostly bores the crap out of me, since it strikes me as being even less reality-oriented than other socialist/anarchist animadversions -- to really get into him previously but he looks like he might be worth picking a good fight with.
A lot of people believe that global warming does not exist simply because the planet gradually gets warmer and cooler with time, but the fact lies within the word "gradually." Gradually, not quickly. The rising and falling of earthly temperatures takes millions of years. An advancement in temperature of one degree celsius, in the past, took a thousand years. Since the 1950s, the temperature has risen several degrees. That's only fifty years, if my mathmatical skills are functioning properly.
Righteousdude,
Global warming naysayers are, typically, fuckwits. Usually with a political sentiment at stake.
It's happening and we're causing (or massively exacerbating) it.
It's scary as hell, but it's true.
WMB--
I kindda like Sentient Developments. Although Dvorsky's thoughts on ETI are so ideologically entrenched as to be laughable (e.g., SETI good, UFOs bad).
Mac -- Actually, I think he's probably right about adverse clmate change leading to an increasingly dictatorial political climate (so to speak). Hell, we're already seeing the beginnings of a fascist police state in this country and we haven't even gotten warmed up yet (pun intended ;-). But heavy academic ideologues (and Dvorsky strikes me as one) are a turn-off for me in general, by and large because they always seem to have some ax or other to grind that gets in the way of thinking clearly -- which is to say, factually/logically/imaginatively/creatively -- about a subject (for example, UFOs/ETI).