Everyone’s as Bonkers as the Unabomber Now

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/06/12/everyones-as-bonkers-as-the-unabomber-now/

by acheron • 3 years ago

2 4 3 years ago

Of course this is being used to attack the media for talking about climate change (Can't be a Contrarian® without checking that box, I guess). Sigh. But if you want a comparison to the Unabomber and his treatment in the press, just read anything about terrorists in general. They are always given some kind of interest for their "ideology." Think pieces about "understanding" them.

There are a lot of people left and right who probably wouldn't mind if Osama bin Laden's vision was accomplished too "except for the 9/11 stuff lol!"

eternityforest• 3 years ago

Climate change has nothing to do with the Unabomber. In theory a return to the stone age would reduce emissions, but that's not likely to happen, and isn't what those types care about. They would gladly do things that actually create more emissions in the name of more independent life, and they openly say it's not really about saving endangered species or making future kids lungs healthier, it's more about abstract ideas and values. They'd rather work 18 hours a day to survive than work 8 hours making someone else rich.

In practice, it seems like what happens is they push for older tech and we wind up with wood stoves and waste oil instead of heat pumps and solar. If they actually had their way, it would incidentally save the planet, at the cost of, you know, probably a whole lot of people dying.

It scares me, sometimes I wonder if mainstream tech will just stall out, and smartphones will be a thing only a small number own, like BlackBerrys, thermostats won't be smart, and we'll all have to actually own filing cabinets again and use reams of paper a year for random everyday stuff, and all the big problems we try to solve with tech will just be ignored and accepted.

Or, worse and still plausible, I could imagine it being no longer safe to even be known as having anything to do with tech, and power plants being bombed weekly, while the national guard and police do nothing because nobody really cares and everyone kinda wants the collapse to happen.

garbagecoder2• 3 years ago

Yeah, I will never get over the Environmental Movement® being against nuclear power because it was a way to be anti-establishment in the 1970s. I consider myself to be an environmentalist but the orthodoxy is really more like the Unabomber's manifesto and is just antimodern. Imagine the timeline where people realized Chernobyl was because it was a shit design (as with lots of Russian tech) and we were already doing better. It would be a lot like... France is today! (But not how Germany is today lmao)

And with full acknowledgment that the resource extraction and everything else involved is nonzero to say the least, I see they are already pumping out anti-EV stuff. The Movement® made this movie about how GM killed the electric car 15 or so years ago and it was like an example of how evil people don't care about the climate... and now SWITCHEROO it was really just about cars (and modernity) at the same time.

BMc2020• 3 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_O%27Neill_(columnist)

Isn’t that what climate-change alarmism really represents? A political veneer for the narcissistic frustrations of the upper-middle classes who cannot believe they have to live with the tiny nuisances that spring from yesteryear’s revolutionary liberation of the peasantry from slavery and ignorance?

Every accusation a confession, as they say.

Everyone’s as Bonkers as the Unabomber Now

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