Eco-Fascism as a Corruption of Causality
Now Playing: Red Barchetta, the tale of a post-industrial future from Rush, 1981 - based on the short story "A Nice Morning Drive" by Richard S. Foster.
A few years ago the whole New Age / Environmentalist / Mystic / Totalitarian axis regurgitated a bit of intellectual fraud going by the name of "The Butterfly Effect," which originated as a theory of that name in the early 1960s. It has since spilled into pop culture in dozens of books, films, television shows, "infotainment" and "reality"[sic] programs - and most significantly, into government policy under the aegis of the environmental cult.
It takes a supposed truism about cause and effect, obliterates all contextual - indeed, causal - requirements and declares every minute, inconsequential act as a causal wild card and assumes it to be an imposition on others. This assumption, in turn, is used to "justify" any arbitrary, coercive act government decides it wants to impose.
The concept of an isolated event setting in motion a chain of events that is utterly unexpected, is a tried-and-true formula in fiction - an entertaining example being the recent film 11:14. Causality is certainly a given in life, but it is constrained by the same contextual limits implied in its definition. In short, it requires proof of a cause-effect link - which is singularly, often boastfully(pg. 5,) lacking throughout the entire corpus of "environmentalist" dogma.
The eco-totalitarian cult has seized upon the "Butterfly Effect"'s conceptual elasticity - not to mention the collapse of rationality within American government and law - to extrapolate negative, usually catastrophic, "externalities" for the most innocuous of human actions. The causal wild card proclaims that, since the most subtle of actions, from moving about within the fluid of atmosphere to respiration itself, allegedly "impacts" others, then every human action - indeed, our very existence - is fair game for coercive control by government.
Thus we have seen the standard - even justifiable, on occasion - laws governing tangible externalities of heavy industry, expanded through the realm of the ridiculous into the area of the openly arbitrary (read: fascistic.) It's the same deterioration we've had as a kind of preview in the last two decades, in the Litigation Lottery phenomenon.
The cause (pun if you want one,) is the same for each: the ejection of reason from law.
The litigation lottery stories are infamous: $3 million awards for "inadequate warning" that...coffee might be hot; the judge who sued his drycleaners for $67 million for...misplacing his pants; the phone company sued by an accident victim who happened to be in one of their phone booths when a car crashed into it; the suicidal New Yorker who sued the city for the subway's failure to kill him after he jumped; the New York snakebite victim who narrowly avoided a suit by "environmental authorities" for killing the snake that bit him, etc.
Eco-fascists are busily integrating that same lunacy into laws purporting to "protect the environment":
- In January of this year, the State of California Energy Commission inserted a shocking bit of Orwell into an obscure section of the California building codes. It would mandate, by 2009, something called a "PCT" or "Programmable Communicating Thermostat" in all new residential buildings. What that device would do is place the control of your home's temperature in the hands of State bureaucrats. That's right: picture a DMV employee remotely controlling how much air conditioning you'll get in July, and how much heat you'll get in mid-January. As Joseph Somsel puts it:
Jon Christian Ryter elaborates:
So far I've been unable to find information as to whether or not this thing has actually passed into law. Update feedback encouraged.
- Los Angeles' corrupt city officious are boasting loudly about their plans to impose an entire new layer of Orwellian regulation to all new development, under the breathless headings of "Historic Front" in the "Battle Against Global Warming." Yesterday, LA Mayor Antonio VivaLaRaza loudly and proudly signed into law a new ordinance that will force all new development to conform to a "standard" cooked up by something called the "US Green Building Council," listed simply as "a Washington-based nonprofit organization." Rest(?) assured, similar laws are being developed across the country for imposition on your town, which means: on you.
- The European Union, that Petri dish of toxic political atrocities, has announced it will apply the all-purpose abracadabra of "carbon emissions" to the problem of sparse funding, via an imposition of quotas on carbon dioxide emissions on airlines. If standard trends apply, the same will happen in America shortly - and inexpensive air travel, not to mention half a dozen current airline companies, will be things of the past, or of "A better, vanished time," as Professor Peart once put it.
- The incandescent light bulb has been officially driven into Black Market territory, at least as of 2014. At that time light bulb manufacturers will be required, at gunpoint, to curtail production of incandescent bulbs, and we will all be forced to use flourescent tube bulbs that a.) give off harsh yet weak light that most of us would deem unsuitable for a garage, much less living areas, and b.) which contain toxic substances like mercury - a bizarre irony that belies the "environmental" agenda's ostensible concern for "the environment" and indicates, rather, the priority of stomping on capitalism and individual liberty. Is it too much of a stretch to assume that by 2024 the same eco-totalitarians will have banned electric light altogether, in favor of "wholesome, organic candlelight?"
- They have already intruded all the way into our restrooms - "low-flow" toilets were mandated by government in 1992 and that mandate is now a reality, admirable attempts to abolish it notwithstanding; Last year erstwhile singer and "environmental activist" Sheryl Crow...ermm...floated the idea of "a limitation...on how many squares of toilet paper can be used in any one sitting."
- As economist George Reisman has reported, in addition to all of the above, the environmental cult now has clothes dryers, hot water, central heating, lawn mowers, elevators and who knows what else in its crosshairs.
The equation is simple and deadly: If anything and everything human beings do in the course of ordinary life can be defined as harmful to others, with no proof required in support of the proposition, then coercive government control of any and every aspect of human life can be justified in binding law, arbitrarily.
The environmentalist cult, in short, is a watershed in the imposition of neo-fascism. It must be opposed - openly, unapologetically, vigorously, and relentlessly. Our lives literally depend on it. As Rand once pointed out, it is often enough simply to register opposition in any situation in which your silence can be construed as acceptance. The simple assertion of disagreement confers a vital judgment on the corrupt idea and plants the seed of self-doubt in the mind of that corrupt idea's supporters. Just do it.
A few years ago the whole New Age / Environmentalist / Mystic / Totalitarian axis regurgitated a bit of intellectual fraud going by the name of "The Butterfly Effect," which originated as a theory of that name in the early 1960s. It has since spilled into pop culture in dozens of books, films, television shows, "infotainment" and "reality"[sic] programs - and most significantly, into government policy under the aegis of the environmental cult.
It takes a supposed truism about cause and effect, obliterates all contextual - indeed, causal - requirements and declares every minute, inconsequential act as a causal wild card and assumes it to be an imposition on others. This assumption, in turn, is used to "justify" any arbitrary, coercive act government decides it wants to impose.
The concept of an isolated event setting in motion a chain of events that is utterly unexpected, is a tried-and-true formula in fiction - an entertaining example being the recent film 11:14. Causality is certainly a given in life, but it is constrained by the same contextual limits implied in its definition. In short, it requires proof of a cause-effect link - which is singularly, often boastfully(pg. 5,) lacking throughout the entire corpus of "environmentalist" dogma.
The eco-totalitarian cult has seized upon the "Butterfly Effect"'s conceptual elasticity - not to mention the collapse of rationality within American government and law - to extrapolate negative, usually catastrophic, "externalities" for the most innocuous of human actions. The causal wild card proclaims that, since the most subtle of actions, from moving about within the fluid of atmosphere to respiration itself, allegedly "impacts" others, then every human action - indeed, our very existence - is fair game for coercive control by government.
Thus we have seen the standard - even justifiable, on occasion - laws governing tangible externalities of heavy industry, expanded through the realm of the ridiculous into the area of the openly arbitrary (read: fascistic.) It's the same deterioration we've had as a kind of preview in the last two decades, in the Litigation Lottery phenomenon.
The cause (pun if you want one,) is the same for each: the ejection of reason from law.
The litigation lottery stories are infamous: $3 million awards for "inadequate warning" that...coffee might be hot; the judge who sued his drycleaners for $67 million for...misplacing his pants; the phone company sued by an accident victim who happened to be in one of their phone booths when a car crashed into it; the suicidal New Yorker who sued the city for the subway's failure to kill him after he jumped; the New York snakebite victim who narrowly avoided a suit by "environmental authorities" for killing the snake that bit him, etc.
Eco-fascists are busily integrating that same lunacy into laws purporting to "protect the environment":
- In January of this year, the State of California Energy Commission inserted a shocking bit of Orwell into an obscure section of the California building codes. It would mandate, by 2009, something called a "PCT" or "Programmable Communicating Thermostat" in all new residential buildings. What that device would do is place the control of your home's temperature in the hands of State bureaucrats. That's right: picture a DMV employee remotely controlling how much air conditioning you'll get in July, and how much heat you'll get in mid-January. As Joseph Somsel puts it:
"In other words, the temperature of your home will no longer be yours to control. Your desires and needs can and will be overridden by the state of California through its public and private utility organizations. All this is for the common good, of course."
Jon Christian Ryter elaborates:
"It turns out the PCT is a universal thermostat. Not only will it regulate the temperature in the home, it can also determine when power is allocated to other receptacles in the home—appliances the State doesn't think you need to run during peak hours—your water heater, washing machine and dryer, and your dishwasher. Big Brother, after all, always knows best."
So far I've been unable to find information as to whether or not this thing has actually passed into law. Update feedback encouraged.
- Los Angeles' corrupt city officious are boasting loudly about their plans to impose an entire new layer of Orwellian regulation to all new development, under the breathless headings of "Historic Front" in the "Battle Against Global Warming." Yesterday, LA Mayor Antonio VivaLaRaza loudly and proudly signed into law a new ordinance that will force all new development to conform to a "standard" cooked up by something called the "US Green Building Council," listed simply as "a Washington-based nonprofit organization." Rest(?) assured, similar laws are being developed across the country for imposition on your town, which means: on you.
- The European Union, that Petri dish of toxic political atrocities, has announced it will apply the all-purpose abracadabra of "carbon emissions" to the problem of sparse funding, via an imposition of quotas on carbon dioxide emissions on airlines. If standard trends apply, the same will happen in America shortly - and inexpensive air travel, not to mention half a dozen current airline companies, will be things of the past, or of "A better, vanished time," as Professor Peart once put it.
- The incandescent light bulb has been officially driven into Black Market territory, at least as of 2014. At that time light bulb manufacturers will be required, at gunpoint, to curtail production of incandescent bulbs, and we will all be forced to use flourescent tube bulbs that a.) give off harsh yet weak light that most of us would deem unsuitable for a garage, much less living areas, and b.) which contain toxic substances like mercury - a bizarre irony that belies the "environmental" agenda's ostensible concern for "the environment" and indicates, rather, the priority of stomping on capitalism and individual liberty. Is it too much of a stretch to assume that by 2024 the same eco-totalitarians will have banned electric light altogether, in favor of "wholesome, organic candlelight?"
- They have already intruded all the way into our restrooms - "low-flow" toilets were mandated by government in 1992 and that mandate is now a reality, admirable attempts to abolish it notwithstanding; Last year erstwhile singer and "environmental activist" Sheryl Crow...ermm...floated the idea of "a limitation...on how many squares of toilet paper can be used in any one sitting."
- As economist George Reisman has reported, in addition to all of the above, the environmental cult now has clothes dryers, hot water, central heating, lawn mowers, elevators and who knows what else in its crosshairs.
The equation is simple and deadly: If anything and everything human beings do in the course of ordinary life can be defined as harmful to others, with no proof required in support of the proposition, then coercive government control of any and every aspect of human life can be justified in binding law, arbitrarily.
The environmentalist cult, in short, is a watershed in the imposition of neo-fascism. It must be opposed - openly, unapologetically, vigorously, and relentlessly. Our lives literally depend on it. As Rand once pointed out, it is often enough simply to register opposition in any situation in which your silence can be construed as acceptance. The simple assertion of disagreement confers a vital judgment on the corrupt idea and plants the seed of self-doubt in the mind of that corrupt idea's supporters. Just do it.
2 Comments:
SB 1491 is on the Governor's desk awaiting signature. It would make remote controlled thermostats voluntary, or at least no mandatory.
Thanks to State Senator Tom McClintock for carrying this bill through the liberal Democrat-controlled California legislature.
I'm assuming you mean that it has been mandatory, and that this bill would change it to voluntary? I suppose we're stuck with the fascist majority that we're stuck with in Sacramento, but I would've preferred an instant, no-compromise smackdown of the whole concept. Truly frightening.
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