Logical Progression
I saw this article pop up on Memeorandum a while back and was thinking how best to phrase my thoughts on it. A man buys himself a completely legal vehicle, a Hummer, takes it home and parks t on the street. A short while later, two masked, self-appointed environmental defenders thoroughly vandalize the vehicle.
On a narrow, leafy street in Northwest Washington, where Prius hybrid cars and Volvos are the norm, one man bought a flashy gray Hummer that was too massive to fit in his garage.
So he parked the seven-foot-tall behemoth on the street in front of his house and smiled politely when his eco-friendly neighbors looked on in disapproval at his "dream car."
It lasted five days on the street before two masked men took a bat to every window, a knife to each 38-inch tire and scratched into the body: "FOR THE ENVIRON."
"The thought of somebody vandalizing it never crossed my mind," said Gareth Groves, 32, who lives with his mother in a three-story home in the 4300 block of Brandywine Street NW in American University Park. "I've kind of been in shock."
Now, as Groves ponders what to do with the remains of his $38,000 SUV, he has been the target of a number of people who have driven by the crime scene in his upscale neighborhood and glared at him in smug satisfaction.
"I'd say one in five people who come by have that 'you-got-what-you-deserve' look," said his friend Andy Sexton, 27, who is visiting from Arkansas and has been helping Groves deal with fallout from the crime.
As I said, I was thinking about how to phrase how I felt about this. Then found that Jason Steck had nailed it. Writing over at Michael Van Der Galien's blog, he calls the self-appointed environmental "guardians" exactly what they are: Environmental Taliban.
This sort of thing was inevitable. Environmentalists and other moralists from the left have been growing increasingly intolerant of dissent in recent years. Even as they accuse conservatives of trying to dictate how people live their lives, authoritarian elements among liberals have fought to maintain speech codes on college campus and have proposed wide-ranging mandates on speech and action targeting everything from dissent on global warming to bans on cars they don’t like to taxes on food they don’t like. In some cities, certain foods that offend a politically correct interpretation of a “health-conscious” lifestyle have been banned. The “new left” movements that were born out of the “free speech movement” at Berkeley have turned 180 degrees, now prizing the very authoritarianism and repressiveness that they once abhorred.
Precisely. Walt Kelley's famous line from Pogo comes to mind: We have met the enemy and he is us. The extreme rhetoric and continued ratcheting upward of demands for coercive action by the environmental extremists can only lead to this outcome in the end. Vigilantes are vigilantes, regardless of their cause. It is only a matter of time until someone gets killed* by some self-appointed "defender of the earth" for daring to "damage" the environment. And the extremists will continue to define downwards what constitutes "damage". I suspect this kind of behavior was exactly what prompted Mark Twain to write The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg.
* There also exists the very real posibility that some self-appointed "defender of the earth" will get himself shot dead one of these days if he tries his little "direct action" on the wrong person.
Environment, Insanity, Left Wing | Gaius July 18, 2007
Other Links to this Post
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Don Singleton — July 18, 2007 @ 10:13 pm
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Blue Collar Heresy — July 19, 2007 @ 1:28 am
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Giving Liberals A Bad Name — July 19, 2007 @ 1:34 am
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Outside The Beltway | OTB — July 19, 2007 @ 7:26 am
By syn, July 19, 2007 @ 5:28 am
Germany’s National Socialist movement during the 1930’s were big ‘environmental greenies’, they also used to equate smokers with, in their language, ‘dirty black people’, plus they also believed socially engineering the perfect society was done by aborting the unwanteds.
It isn’t the “New Left’ it the same ‘Old Left” it has always been, evil.
By Jess, July 19, 2007 @ 8:22 am
This reminds me of a website I visited not too long ago that was a tribute to the loathing some people have of this vehicle. I think it was F**kTheHummer.com (or something equally cerebral). Essentially it was just pictures that users of the site sent in of them flipping off hummers. It was a stupid as it sounds.
By terrence, July 19, 2007 @ 10:19 am
Haters always find something to hate (or someone).
Syn is correct; these monsters are not new - totalitarianism is totalitarianism; evil is evil, the same old same old.