Three Words Too Many From Time

Jonah Goldberg points out the pure, unadulterated propaganda Time Magazine pumped out for their celebration of Earth Day.

Time magazine recently doctored the iconic photo of the flag-raising at Iwo Jima in order to "celebrate" Earth Day. Instead of Marines valiantly struggling to lift the stars and stripes, they are depicted planting a tree.

No doubt Time's editors think they will be celebrated in poetry and song for generations to come for their high-minded cleverness. Still, if the symbolism wasn't clear enough, Time writer Bryan Walsh spells it out: "Green is the new red, white and blue."

There are any number of problems here, starting with the fact that this is simply a lie. Green is not the new red, white, and blue. Concern over climate change may be the most honorable and vital thing imaginable. But if "the red, white and blue" means anything, it means patriotism or love of country. Patriotism and environmentalism simply aren't synonymous terms. Two things can be good without being the same. Fatherhood and all-you-can-eat chicken wings, for example, don't describe identical phenomena.

Time should have left off the words "white and blue" and they would have been accurate in their assessment.

The yearning for a moral equivalent of war is an understandable desire, perhaps even noble in its intent. But it is not democratic. It is fundamentally authoritarian, which might explain why so many environmentalists envy China's ability to ban plastic bags without reference to a vote or a court or anything other than the will of the China's technocratic rulers. Indeed, the authors of "The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy" openly question whether the crisis of climate change should render liberal democracy obsolete. For some it seems the moral equivalent of war requires the moral equivalent of a police state.

Green is the new red. Go read it all. Goldberg hits it right on the head. I have posted about the increasingly authoritarian green movement for some time. Others have been pointing this out for quite some time as well.

Meanwhile, what Time is apparently unable to grasp is that there is heavy snow in the Dakotas and Minnesota. Or that the south polar ice extent is almost 2 million square kilometers greater that the average (which only goes back a very short time indeed.) 

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  By kidrob, Saturday, 26 April , 2008 @ 6:15 am

  yeah but all that snow and ice is caused by global warming. remember!

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1. Blue Crab Boulevard » The Starving Peasants On The Far Horizon. — Saturday, 26 April , 2008 @ 10:48 am