Climate Change? Nahhh ...

Way to cherry pick the tamest possible example. I expect nothing less from you.

 

It’s in the article. Gizmodo cherry-picked it.

But the story begins with the one that charges a fee for filing a complaint, provided you’ve already you’ve already filed three complaints in the last year that received no action, and allows the fee to be rescinded for “good cause.”

Is that…absurdly evil? Of course not. But the hyperbole is the point and, as a tactic, it can be effective. Liberally define evil, draw a line, and challenge folks who may have a healthy fear of that word to disagree.

 

You have a healthy fear of the word evil? Seems like a you problem that you’re making everyone else’s.

 

Did I write that I did?

I do think language is used by the broadly progressive left to set the terms of the debate on climate.

None of those bills are evil, much less absurdly evil. But the terms of the debate are set: Charging a fee to make a 4th fruitless complaint in a year is absurdly evil. It's not, of course, but one takes into account the kind of person who'd say it was, deem that person not worth debating, and move on.

 

Language like "broadly progressive left"?

C'mon.

 

Oh, you were being intentionally abstract so you could deny saying it. Understood.

 

Wouldn't want to address the science if it's going to hurt people's feelings.

 

No, I wasn't.

 

It's not science to call those bills "absurdly evil." It's language arts.

 

I don't disagree about that headline.

But I wasn't talking about that. I quoted your notion that folks become inured to the evidence. Or that more evidence makes them resistant to . . . more evidence. Or that it makes them sad. Or angry that they might have to change a behavior. Or make a sacrifice. Or endure a consequence for their own actions.

At some point reality intrudes irrespective of people's feelings.

We've gone through this before, as I pointed out upthread.

DDT in the 60s, on the basis of a single book. The environmental movement of the 70s. CFC ban of the 1980s. Fairly successful responses to scientifically demonstrated problems.

Per Darwin, adapt or die.

 

Sometimes reading this thread is like hearing half of a phone conversation.

 

I think some people have become inured to the presentation of the evidence, or perhaps the persistent, extreme, do-this-or-doom-awaits implications drawn from the evidence that seem to be a mixture of science and social activism. When climate change solutions start to become a theory for solving social and justice issues, it reflexively ties intonations of the apocalypse to conveniently progressive social ideas. It's part of the Democratic Party's ongoing conversion from Big Tent - where lots of different kinds of people and ideologies support a platform aimed at practical, field-leveling gains - to Long List, where you're asked to sign off of every constituency's cause or ideology, as well as this, as you put it, Darwinian "adapt or die" way of life.

Most people don't want to live an adapt or die life. Maybe that makes them bad people. Maybe they don't care. Maybe, if we want greater buy-in middle-aged/older adults, more effective messaging would be helpful. Less scolding.