Imagine how much better our planet's future could be, if only those who claimed to be the most knowledgeable and concerned about it could somehow acquire the basic social skills need to stop behaving like Bond Villains.
quantified · 2h ago
You make this sound like the real problem. Does raising the alarm about the mechanisms and effects of GHG-accelerated climate change count as Bond Villain villainy?
bell-cot · 1h ago
> Does raising the alarm about...
No - but after a few decades of endless "raising the alarm" (so pretty much everybody who might possibly care has lost track of how often they've heard that message), the impression which it give is a mixture of:
- Sports cheerleading. The kids in school-colors uniforms, bouncing around with pom-poms and chanting "Our Team Will Win!", are not there to inform anyone. Let alone change their minds. It's an in-group feel-good exercise, for the benefit of folks who already are fans of that team.
- A person suffering from dementia, who repeats the same phrase or sentence over and over and over. Their words may reflect an important truth - "nurse, I need help to the bathroom". But the broken-record behavior pattern also guarantees that almost no one will believe the person to be a mentally competent adult.
(It's usually the start of the Dangerous Mad Scientist's monologue where he outlines what he has decided is Wrong With the World. Regardless of what other people think. It's usually a bit later in his monologue where he talks about how he plans to Fix The Problem, without regard for the consent of anyone else. That later stuff is where the danger music gets the loudest. And where these scientists seemed all-to-eager to go.)
Imagine how much better our planet's future could be, if only those who claimed to be the most knowledgeable and concerned about it could somehow acquire the basic social skills need to stop behaving like Bond Villains.
No - but after a few decades of endless "raising the alarm" (so pretty much everybody who might possibly care has lost track of how often they've heard that message), the impression which it give is a mixture of:
- Sports cheerleading. The kids in school-colors uniforms, bouncing around with pom-poms and chanting "Our Team Will Win!", are not there to inform anyone. Let alone change their minds. It's an in-group feel-good exercise, for the benefit of folks who already are fans of that team.
- A person suffering from dementia, who repeats the same phrase or sentence over and over and over. Their words may reflect an important truth - "nurse, I need help to the bathroom". But the broken-record behavior pattern also guarantees that almost no one will believe the person to be a mentally competent adult.
(It's usually the start of the Dangerous Mad Scientist's monologue where he outlines what he has decided is Wrong With the World. Regardless of what other people think. It's usually a bit later in his monologue where he talks about how he plans to Fix The Problem, without regard for the consent of anyone else. That later stuff is where the danger music gets the loudest. And where these scientists seemed all-to-eager to go.)