at the risk of sounding like a republican jackass or an annoyingly frequent complainer about the news media, i'm going to have to come down on ridiculous one-sided alarmist articles like this time magazine article from a week or so ago about global warming. i mean, just look at the fucking cover. the first words are telling you to "be worried. be _very_ worried." what the fuck? is global warming a problem? quite possibly. is our government not doing enough to curb pollution and protect the environment? yes, definitely. should we, as people who might want to sustain a planet capable of supporting the continuation of the human race, stop fucking everything up? well, probably to the best of our ability. i wouldn't trade in my suv for a bicycle tho*. there are important points being brot up for sure, but the way in which it is brot up just grates at my insides. the article makes it sound like tomorrow (or perhaps the day after tomorrow), the polar ice caps will all have melted and polar bear corpses will be floating down the street while we're on our commute. there is absolutely no need for this brand of false urgency (might it be an urgent situation? sure, but is it as urgent as this article makes it out to be? hell, no). it treats its audience as if we're all a bunch of bumfuck asshole idiots, and i thoroughly resent that implication. i might be an asshole, but i'm not an idiot, and i don't need some chicken with glasses and zach braff's voice to burst into my room with his hands (or wings) frantically waving, screaming at the top of his lungs about the sky falling. please also note that this is not the first alarmist global warming article that mr. jeffrey kluger has written for time (i wonder if it has anything to do with his winning a whitman bassow award for best reporting in any medium on international environmental issues for a "global warming" cover package). you might call him the official time magazine global warming mascot. going backwards from the one published a week or so ago, here's one from january 2006, another from september 2005, august 2005, and august 2002. so perhaps, he wasn't alarmist enuf in the previous articles, so he's stepping it up, hoping that people will listen. well, did they? did they listen? i'm thinking not so much. i sure didn't. all that was accomplished is that now i think jeff kluger thinks i'm an asshole idiot, which annoyed me a week or so ago (and i suppose still does a little bit, if i'm still talking about it). i just feel like this style of news reporting, the "oh no, we're all gonna die!" sort doesn't really have a place where we are in our day and age. it just stinks of old school propaganda and manipulation. talk to me like i'm a normal person and leave it up to me to decide whether or not i think i am going to die tomorrow because of what i'm doing today.
*i'm lying. i don't actually own a car.
2 comments:
what about you spelling "brought" as "brot".
i also spell "enough" as "enuf," "night" as "nite," "right" as "rite," "going to" as "gonna," "though" as "tho," "know" as "kno," "thought" as "thot," and there are some other deviations from the norm. i think of this as more of a written down version of something i would say (that is, a representation of speech), and therefore doesn't really require as many of the formal conventions of written english (including capital letters at the beginning of sentences, for the pronoun i, or for proper nouns). english, after all is notorious for how many different ways there are to pronounce something written with the same orthography. it's a great reflection of all the different influences there has been on the language over the years. however, i think most literate native english speakers can read what i write without any trouble (see, you knew that "brot" is "brought" spelled differently) because i use standard pronunciation rules to shorten words and of course, everyone can rely on context. i'm not going to claim that it makes typing faster, but i still do it all the same. just call it a linguistic experiment.
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