Indistinguishable from malice
<p>I believe it was the historian Robert Conquest who said that every organization eventually behaves as though it is run by a secret cabal of its enemies.  I have seldom seen any more convincing evidence of this than the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/verify_age?next_url=http%3A//www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DPDXQsnkuBCM">&#8220;No Pressure&#8221;</a> video released by the anti-global-warming activist campaign 10:10.</p>
<p>Watch it.  Go ahead, I&#8217;ll wait.  You might have to Google for &#8220;no pressure video&#8221;, as there seems to have been a concerted attempt by 10:10 and its allies to scrub this thing off the public Internet when they realized what a colossal blunder it was.  It&#8217;s not pleasant viewing &#8211; children being blown up and rivulets of gore spattering in all directions &#8211; but you have to actually see it to grasp how callous, awful, and anti-humane it actually is.</p>
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<p>The reaction from AGW skeptics was no surprise; many fulminated that the mask had slipped, and this video is the agenda of environmental fascism writ large.  Thoughtcrime brings death!  Conform!  Obey!  Or die&#8230;and the survivors get pieces of their friends spattered all over them as a warning.  I think we open a more interesting inquiry by taking the 10:10 campaign at their word.  <em>They</em> thought they were being funny.</p>
<p>The question this video really poses is: what kind of person thinks it&#8217;s <em>funny</em> to show schoolchildren being blown into bloody gobbets for any reason at all, let alone for merely disagreeing with a teacher&#8217;s chirpy sermonizing?  And another, which I haven&#8217;t seen anyone else articulate: what kind of idiot could fail to foresee what a gift this bit of grand guignol would be to 10:10&#8217;s opponents?</p>
<p>There&#8217;s a mind-boggling disconnect from the feelings of ordinary human beings implied here, a kind of moral and emotional incompetence.  It&#8217;s as though the 10:10 campaigners were so anesthetized by the secretions of their own zealotry that they became incapable of understanding how anyone not living deep inside their reality-tunnel would react.</p>
<p>In its own way, I think this is actually a more frightening possibility than the obvious hypothesis that these people are conscious eco-Stalinists who let the mask slip.  C.S. Lewis has an apposite thing to say about idealistic tyrants: &#8220;Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron&#8217;s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.&#8221;</p>
<p>To update Lewis, your garden-variety power-mad monster might commit the atrocities in this video, but only because they are <em>not</em> funny &#8211; because they spread fear or demonstrate power and ruthlessness.  The kind of idealism that aims to be &#8220;tormenting us for our own good&#8221; may be what is required before you think blowing up schoolchildren with the push of a button is <em>funny</em>.</p>
<p>Ultimately I don&#8217;t think it matters. There&#8217;s an adage known in some circles as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clark%27s_Law">Clark&#8217;s Law</a> that reads &#8220;Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.&#8221;  There is <em>no</em> interpretation hinging on either malice or incompetence under which the 10:10 campaign is, after this, qualified to tell anyone how to live.  It has self-destructed any moral authority it ever pretended to.</p>
<p>From now on, this video should be Exhibit A whenever the global-warming alarmists pretend to moral or intellectual superiority over the rest of us. All we have to say to them is this: Your kind thought this was <em>funny</em>.</p>
