--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "PaliGap" <compost...@...> wrote: <snip> [quoting "a philosophy professor from New Zealand":] > > "Apocalyptic scenarios are a diversion from real > problems poverty, terrorism, broken financial > systems needing intelligent attention.
As if poverty, terrorism, and broken financial systems didn't have their own apocalyptic scenarios. <snip> > This applies, in my view, to the towering seas, > storms, droughts and mass extinctions of popular > climate catastrophism. Such entertaining visions owe > less to scientific climatology than to eschatology, > and that familiar sense that modernity and its > wasteful comforts are bringing us closer to a biblical > day of judgment. As that headline put it for Y2K, > predictions of the end of the world are often > intertwined with condemnations of human "folly, greed > and denial." Repent and recycle!" Whereas, of course, nobody ever suggested the problems the writer believes need intelligent attention--"poverty, terrorism, broken financial systems"--have anything to do with human folly, greed, and denial. <snort> What's really going on here is an attempt at guilt-by- association, linking the problems the writer wishes to deny with eschatological nonsense, thereby implying that concern about those problems is itself nonsense.
