Enviroloony of the Day

You can always rely on the Groan’s Comment is Free for sheer, unadulterated idiocy. Today, we mustn’t be mean to the beardy-weirdy enviroloonies, ’cos it upsets them and they get all offended by it.

Should the mockery of the environment be tolerated?

Er…? For sheer stupidity, that takes some beating. I mean… the obvious answer is; “yes”, absolutely, because we believe in things like, er freedom of speech anyone?

Not for the enviroloonies, though:

It’s a question asked by Paul Keeling, a philosopher and environmental writer, in the latest edition of Philosophy Now. “By mockery of nature,” says Keeling, “I mean an insincere, disrespectful or trivialising portrayal of nature, albeit in a way that is not deliberately rude or mean-spirited.”

You may want to take a little time to allow that thoroughly stupid statement to assimilate – go make a pot of tea or something and chew it over. I can think of a few very sincere things to say about Paul Keeling that are intensely disrespectful, rude and mean-spirited. Paul Keeling is a totalitarian fuckwit who deserves to be dancing the Tyburn jig alongside all the New Labour politicians who encourage his ilk. Freedom of speech means saying what you damn well please no matter who it offends. Paul Keeling, though, seems to think that he shouldn’t be offended:

Keeling argues that by tolerating the mockery of nature “we implicitly excuse and perpetuate our abuse of the natural world”.

Oh, for fuck’s sake – what at prick!

Examples of such mockery, he says, include the large number of car adverts that now display vehicles in union with, or conquering, nature. (It’s a subject that I also wrote about in the Guardian this week.) So we have cars – invariably SUVs, it seems – with names such as Yukon, Canyon, Tundra, Forester, Cougar, etc cutting a dash on mountain tops, in polar landscapes, deep within forests and the like.

Vehicles have always had daft names. I recall, for instance, the BSA Barracuda – less like a Barracuda than this dreadful little bike, it is difficult to imagine. No one takes the names of vehicles seriously – they are just names, just as no one takes seriously images of SUVs perched on mountain tops; they’re just fucking adverts for chrissakes – you know, adverts aren’t actually real life… duh!

Keeling says that he is offended by how car companies use names that evoke wilderness areas and endangered species – both of which are being increasingly threatened, most notably by mankind’s dependence on and love of the automobile. He says he is as offended by this as much as any religious person might have been if confronted by, say, an advert for a “Messiah XL” or a “Ford Prophet”.

Oh, diddums. Paul Keeling is offended. Well, grow the fuck up and get over yourself, you self-righteous, prissy, pompous arsehole. And, no, you should not be protected from being offended, just as religions should not be afforded any such protection. Mockery of stupidity is perfectly right and proper. In a free society, you have the right of rebuttal. That’s how freedom of speech works. Don’t like what car manufacturers call their vehicles? Well, don’t buy one. You could even write to them and tell them that you don’t like it and they can file your letter where it deserves to be filed.

Rather than point out that Paul Keeling is a whiny self-righteous fuckwit who deserves derision and ridicule, the author of the piece, Leo Hickman, credits him with a degree of hugely undeserved gravitas:

I agree with him that it is both ignorant and ill-judged for companies to use such names, but I wouldn’t say that I personally feel offended by it.

Um, if it helps to sell cars, it is far from ignorant and ill-judged (although whether it actually does, or not is moot). That was the point of the exercise.

But Keeling’s deep-felt faith in nature leads him to argue that mocking it can be described as being akin to mocking one’s religious beliefs,

Idiocy of the first water. Although, environmentalism has, indeed become the new religion. So much so, that any real concerns about the ecology have been subsumed and corrupted by morons such as Paul Keeling. And, religious belief should have no protection from freedom of speech.

Environmentalism is often dismissed by its critics as a religion, a fundamentalist one at that.

Having read the drivel above, that is a fairy reasonable conclusion. Only a bigoted fundamentalist could come out with the utter crap spouted by Keeling.

As I’ve written here before, I can live with being accused of being, say, a climate change “believer”, but should such name-calling be tolerated?

Yes. It’s called freedom of speech.

Should environmentalism join all the other “isms” that are now warranted protection such as sexism and racism?

No. Freedom of speech is more important than the sensibilities of thin-skinned pillocks like Keeling.

I have to admit that I’m not of such a sensitive disposition to demand or seek such protection, but I can certainly foresee a time when such car adverts are as much a part of history as, say, golliwogs being used to sell jars of marmalade, or near-naked women used to sell men’s magazines (sorry, I forgot that that isn’t part of history yet, is it?). Over time, they will simply become socially unacceptable.

This country really is going down the pan when this type of idiocy is given such credence.

More widely, being disrespectful of the environment – both through your actions and what you say – is likely to ultimately go the way of drink-driving, spitting in the street, or even smoking. In decades to come, we’ll probably watch an archive clip of Top Gear presenters driving a Toyota pick-up to the North Pole and wonder how we ever thought that was funny.

Then I shall have to make a point of being disrespectful at every opportunity that I get, because I will not tolerate such totalitarian behaviour. I would also point out that idiots like Keeling and Hickman do not speak for those of us who love the natural world.