Tom Toles Rant- Call It Evil

[n2doc]

I don’t like the word ‘evil’ much. People use it a lot, but it’s slippery in definition. I’ve asked people who have used it to define the categorical difference between ‘evil’ and ‘bad in the extreme.’ Different answers arrive. I guess the best of them is “bad in the extreme committed with an unusual attitude of deliberateness or deliberate indifference.’ But that just pushes the problem over to the word ‘unusual.’

But I’m going to try the word ‘evil’ out anyway today. It is used, not so much as a philosophical construction anyway, it is used to get people to focus. Climate change is an area on which we, collectively, have determined not to focus. With the recent news about the destroyed temperature record in the US in 2012, it seems like this might be the time. The word ‘foolish’ is no longer sufficient. You can debate and debate weather stats all day long, and many of you love to. But this is, and always has been an argument about probabilities. The evidence keeps pushing the probability of lethal climate change higher. And higher. And higher. And still, our response: nothing. As though the probability was zero.

It’s also clear by now what that change entails. Wildfires. Massive storms. Floods. Drought and its implications. In short, people dying. Some likely have already, many more likely to come. The stupid, stupid jokes about enjoying extra balminess make sense only if you take the word balmy to mean crazy. But today I’m taking it to mean evil. It’s one thing to let yourself be gulled by others who keep trying to confuse the issue, the same way people used to try to confuse the tobacco/cancer issue. Maybe that makes you innocent and maybe it doesn’t. But there are people who know full well the probabilities involved in this subject and choose, out of deliberateness or deliberate indifference, to ignore or even actively work against the prudent steps that the probabilities now dictate. And deaths, many, many unnecessary deaths are going to be the probable result. That’s evil.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/tom-toles/post/friday-rant-live-spelled-backwards-edition/2013/01/10/40d792e4-5b4a-11e2-beee-6e38f5215402_blog.html

[lunatica]

1. Evil is the profit driven people who refuse to acknowledge facts

I truly believe Al Gore would have us definitely in a far greater alternate energy mode now. Instead we got the true child of Big Oil and Big Business. And we still sit around doing practically nothing.

We can only blame ourselves.

[bvar22]

2. President Carter's conservation and energy programs certainly would have.

One of the things I haven't forgiven Bill Clinton for was his neglect in re-installing Carter's Solar Water Heaters back on the White House roof on Day One.
Leadership comes from The Top.

[ellisonz]

3. There is evil in this world, no doubt about it. n/t

[rhett o rick]

4. Evil and Cheney are synonymous. nm

[ladym55]

5. There are so many complicit in this evil

I learned this a.m. that it is SO hot in Australia in places they have had to add two new temperature colors on their temperature map.

I also learned that M$M has ignored the issue almost completely.

The perpetrators of this evil don't get that they won't get a pass on this one. So not only are they evil, they are profoundly stupid. Sadly we all pay.