Already reached the mindset where terror is funny
Submitted by Anonymous on Fri, 2010-10-08 04:45.It is a common feature of extremists that they believe they are doing it in a good cause; that the ends justify the means. If your cause is saving the world, is it not logical that any means necessary are justified to achieve it? We have a problem with animal rights protesters who have taken to terrorist methods against businesses they oppose. Only the week before the video the eco-terrorist gunman James Jay Lee did it in America. Greenpeace recently used the "we know where you live" line to warn deniers.
Luckily, extremists who think it should actually go that far are presently in the minority. But their presence is having a pernicious influence on the wider environmental movement.
There is a tendency towards intolerance and dehumanisation of any dissent or scepticism. An attempt to make it socially unacceptable with accusations of evil by the allusion to holocaust "deniers".
And it's already happening. Many teachers already do political advocacy for Green politics, and it would be a brave child who stood up against a teacher and the rest of the class to express a contrary view. Employers already do the same, mostly for more cynical reasons it has to be said, and there are few employees independent enough to speak up against the boss.
No, mostly people will stick their hands up in support in public, and then ignore it in private. They don't believe, but they're not going to make their own lives any harder by opposing it.
But that's just the first stage of social conditioning. Once you have made it socially unacceptable to speak in defence of scepticism, you can then introduce stronger methods of encouragement without anyone being able to object. Not execution, of course, but regulation and compulsion to authority.
And that's what scares people about this video - that it portrays a ridiculously exaggerated version of this already worrying tendency.
We're not worried that they're actually planning to explode sceptics, we're worried that they're already in the mindset where they find it funny. Where they don't even seem to notice that the authoritarian message they're sending is horrifying.
The scariest bit of the video was not the explosions, but the authority figure's (teacher, employer) speech leading up to it.
But I'm sure that next time a teacher or employer tries to get people to follow along, the words "no pressure" will make an amusing and useful riposte.