Enviro: “Climate deniers like ignorant patrons of ’80s gay bars”

Dan Savage writes at The Stranger:

Now every time I read about fires in Colorado or rising seas or Canadian tar sands or Native villages already being washed away in Alaska or preparations for the next hurricane that slams into New York City, a slightly modified version of Buchanan’s vicious line about AIDS plays in my head. We have declared war on nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution.

We have declared war on the water we drink and the air we breathe. We have declared war on the forests and the oceans. We have declared war on the honeybees. All of us have—liberal, conservative, independent. Some of us, however, are ready to start making the changes that must be made if we want to survive in this world.

But the conservatives, the poor conservatives, they’re like those faggots in gay bars in 1983. They’re standing around, drinks in hand, insisting that the conflagration currently engulfing them—the conflagration that is engulfing us all—isn’t happening. That it can’t be happening. But just as denial and anger and shooting messengers didn’t save those gay men in Chicago’s bars in 1983, denial and anger won’t save Colorado’s ranchers in 2013. Nature is exacting an awful retribution.

Read more…

20 thoughts on “Enviro: “Climate deniers like ignorant patrons of ’80s gay bars””

  1. That has got to be one of the most desperate tirades by Dan Savage I have come across in a long time. What happened, did Frank, kick him out?

  2. Nature is dark, dangerous, and uncomfortable.

    Tell me Jake, do you wear clothes?

  3. Human beings are as much a part of nature as any other critter. I’ve seen no evidence to the contrary.

  4. Okay, so this Proton and a Neutron go into a gay bar.
    The Neutron asks, “Why are we going in here?”

    The Proton says, “I lost an electron here last week.”

    Neutron asks, “Are you sure?”

    Proton, “Yes, I’m positive.”

  5. As a ‘denier’ I have been called many things and compared to many other things, but “the conservatives, the poor conservatives, they’re like those f*gg*ts in gay bars”?
    With a single word, Savage has antagonized the *entire* LGBT sub-culture.
    Like grabbing a sword by the blade and swinging it like a club, such epithets harm the user far more than the intended victim.
    I could not live with myself if I had but a fraction of that much hate in my soul.

  6. Ollie, How can stars produce hydrogen? Care to explain how or why the existence of quarks or nuclear fusion is a lie? While the iron sun is an interesting theory, why don’t we see the spectrum of hot iron in the sun’s rays? No, in fact we discovered Helium (literally, the “sun gas” from Helios based on the fact that that was the unidentified gas in the spectrum we found, which did not include iron). While I find your work interesting, that seems to be a bit of a buz-kill concerning your core thesis.

    No, sorry, buddy, but you are alone for good reason

  7. Who’s using violence against whom? I seem to recall Michael Mann calling for Nueremberg trials of fossil fuel executives and environmentalists sabotaging coal power plants. On a financial level, I know of severe pressure by environmental groups to block funding of fossil fuel fired interests and outright harassment of anyone who dares to challenge their assertions. However, what has been done in return is equivalent to beerhall bravado at best. “We should let all the environmentalists go to nature for a week and see how many are left” has as much support in reality as Shakespeares’s “First we kill all the lawyers”. It’s fun to say, but really no one would actually do it.

  8. Dan reminds me of the guys who used to make it between parked cars in the castro, 1981.

  9. So it turns out denialists are hip, free-living and free-loving people. Savage should love us.

  10. At first I was going to challenge Savage’s credentials to speak on this subject, but then I realized, Savage is the world’s foremost expert….on 80’s gay bars.

  11. It is more retrograde than that. The history of Man is our attempt to separate ourselves from nature. Mr. Savage’s “fires in Colorado or rising seas or Canadian tar sands or Native villages already being washed away in Alaska or preparations for the next hurricane” are WHY we try to separate ourselves from nature.

    Except for that “Canadian tar sands” boogeyman, which reveals a degree of his insanity.

    Savage’s ilk want us to go back to living streamside, in thatched-roofed huts. Or further back – to living under open skies.

    “We have declared war on the honeybees.”

    Dumbass. We brought them here.

  12. I’d rather talk about why there isn’t any global warming on Titan. It has a thick green house gas blanket, made out of methane (25 times the global warming potential compared to CO2) and yet there is no global warming on Titan, relative to it’s neighboring airless moons.

    Why is that?

    No, but you want to talk about gay bars.

    As far as that goes, you go around calling gun toting biblebelt conservatives a bunch of faggots, in that instance you should consider it luck that there have only been noises.

  13. If you would read the article you would learn that it’s the denialists who are using violence against their opponents.

    Just like the commenters right here on junk science, who are making noises about shooting their opponents dead.

  14. The lad yearns for the good old days when humans were still firmly in control of the weather and climate. We can return to those times if we just live right. Mother Nature will forgive us if we make the right sacrifices.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Discover more from JunkScience.com

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading