No Pressure

Thinly veiled threat of violence against those who do not tow the party line. [Link]

I predicted this morning that No Pressure – Richard Curtis’s spectacularly ill-judged eco-propaganda movie for the 10:10 campaign – would prove a disastrous own goal for the green movement.

But what I could never have imagined was how quickly public disgust – even among greenies – would reach such a pitch that the campaigners would be compelled to withdraw it from the internet.

That, at any rate, is what they keep trying to do – cancelling it whenever it appears on You Tube, pulling it from their campaign website and so on.

Unfortunately their efforts are being frustrated by people on the sceptical side of the climate debate, who keep peskily insisting on reposting the video where everyone can view it. And rightly so. With No Pressure, the environmental movement has revealed the snarling, wicked, homicidal misanthropy beneath its cloak of gentle, bunny-hugging righteousness.

Update: ESR has some choice words. [Link]

There’s a mind-boggling disconnect from the feelings of ordinary human beings implied here, a kind of moral and emotional incompetence. It’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.

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: “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’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.”

To update Lewis, your garden-variety power-mad monster might commit the atrocities in this video, but only because they are not funny – because they spread fear or demonstrate power and ruthlessness. The kind of idealism that aims to be “tormenting us for our own good” may be what is required before you think blowing up schoolchildren with the push of a button is funny.