It’s “Relating to the Environment” Day over at Blog Action Day. And they’ve bought the stupidity, as evidenced in this quote:
“A blog about money might write about how to save around the home by using environmentally friendly ideas.”
WTF? What is an “environmentally friendly idea?“ The “environment” is just the system around us and it changes constantly. Anything that changes the environment is, by definition, environmentally friendly. Therefore anything you do is environmentally friendly. It’s a term without any meaning and it’s gonna be BIG… medium …. small.. unimportant… Al Gore didn’t get his Nobel Prize for cheesy thinking like this.. he focused on a specific thing that could decrease the quality of life for humans. So that works…
I, as a tree-hugging communist (and practicing abortionist), might say, “save the trees” or “keep Lake Tahoe Blue” for aesthetic as well as practical (we do need that pesky oxygen) reasons. But if Darth Cheney wins and the earth is reduced to a smog-covered grey tableau of pockmarked earth with grey waterholes, smoking tree-stumps, and factory chimneys smoking above hovels, but before dome-covered cities populated by the rich?
Guess what? That’s the fucking environment.
Stupid farking hippies.
Now, get out there and reduce pollution, or hug a tree, but don’t give a shit about “the environment.”
7 comments:
I just came back from a conference where I suffered through several excruciatingly stupid talks, but this really takes the cake for me today:
"Anything that changes the environment is, by definition, environmentally friendly." Sigh. I should just go to bed and avoid further heartache. I don't know who you are (I got here via Medusa's blog), but I hope dearly that you're not an academic. I had enough academic stupidity for one day.
The environment is the sum of all current conditions. Whatever creates the environment is therefore 'friendly' to it whether you like the result or not. You can have preferences towards what kind of environment you want to live in, but that's about it.
Sorry the conference dulled your mind.
well actually the environment is a set of conditions that are neither "good" nor "bad" (except in our minds), so actions that affect the environment (as we know it today) are not inherently friendly or unfriendly. We just like them or we don't.
So it is fuzzy thinking to say "protect the environment", but fuzzy thinking is the norm and we all have some shared idea of what that phrase actually means and stands for....
yer sis
which is obviously a better way to say it than I did. ;-)
I just pissed a person or two off at Medusa by arguing for something like personal responsibility in your relationships..
It makes the anonymice come out.. ;-)
your blog is hilarious! well, you do discuss important stuff but it's just theway you write, i love it!
i will hug a tree today.
you're a freak for eating live octopus but now i highly respect you.
and yeah, jeju is fucking different from the mainland. i'm still debating whether it's good or bad. depends if it's Monday morning or Saturday morning I guess...
I did understand your point the first time -- what I was referring to was the simplistic semantic argument you were making. When we talk about the "environment" today in social discourse, we mean a particular kind of environment.
The conference did not dull my mind, it just made me more aware of dull academic minds, such as yours.
return of the brave anonymice! But this time with a sort of argument and not just name-calling.
your kind of fuzzy thinking is why corporations can claim they are "environmentally friendly." Because it literally means nothing, can't be defined.
This is just the kind of air-filled meme that made Orwell cranky and degrades the meaning of language.
YMMV
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