The Internet is chock full of bad takes these days, opinions that just really don’t need to be shared and op-eds that sell problems as solutions. So we try our best not to use this space as a showcase of oddities and idiocies contained in the variety of climate denial content that makes one say “why would you write that, on purpose, for other people to read?”
But every once in a while, it’s worth turning up a rotten log to see what’s scurrying around down there. So, we occasionally take a peek at the assortment of invertebrates posting at CliScep dot com.
And yesterday we were blessed with a “you kids get off my lawn”-style rant from a very, very old man named Tony Thomas, who very artfully compares a School Strike 4 Climate campaign to “the Iraq-Iran wars of the 1980s,” when “Ayatollah Khomeini sent 12-year-old-Iranian schoolchildren swarming into no-man’s-land to detonate the mines.”
Tony is very mad about a campaign by Australian schoolchildren -- and again steel yourself for this because it’s so shocking and outrageous that apparently it’s appropriate to equate it to an army forcing children to kill themselves with land mines -- to talk to their parents and other adults about the climate crisis.
Be afraid of the horror of the Action Your Adults resources, with its suggestions to call or send a letter to an adult asking how they’re doing, and then when appropriate, talking about your anxiety and frustration about climate change, what sorts of things we can do about it.
This is not only a completely normal and anodyne campaign, it’s also exactly the sort of thing deniers themselves try and do all the time!
Every couple of years Heartland or CFACT tries to get its climate denial propaganda into schools,where teachers mostly treat it as the garbage it is. They’ve mostly failed (of course) to get any real traction in schools, whereas watching PragerU videos were included as extra-credit for one 10th grade class in Ohio. (Before, obviously, administrators were notified and they directed the teacher not to use the racist, misogynist, denial-filled alt-right Prager propaganda.)
To be fair though, despite writing a whole post based on it, Tony does admit that “the analogy with enrolling Australian kids as zero-emission fanatics is not perfect.”
Oh really? You think? “Not perfect”?
An analogy that your overheated hyperbole is like the spittle-spraying rant of a senile recluse hurling slurs as passing children would be “not perfect.”
Comparing kids who don’t want to inherit a burning world with children forced at gunpoint to blow themselves up for a religious tyrant is about as far from “perfect” as it gets.
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