Conversation with a conservative about conservation

The earth is huge and resilient and nothing that we do will break it. It is like pissing in the ocean. And if one believes the heretics, then the earth is like a few billion years old and will be around for a few million if not billion years. True.

So why bother with Environmental Conservation, you say.

It is not about the earth, stupid. You probably think thunder is Thor farting in the heavens.

The earth was here long before us humans arrived and will still be spinning around the sun after we are extinct (unless the Hadron collider sucks it to a blackhole). It is not about saving the earth; it is about saving our own puny asses. It is not about the cute panda bear that was in that Kung fu movie. It is all about you. Us. It is about our lunch and dinner; food production being tied to the climate. It is about the roof on top of our heads. It is the air we need, the water we thirst for. It is about our money, our children and our life. It is not about not ruining the earth, it is about not ruining our chances of existing in it.

Don't do it for the polar bear. You know what, I don't think they are cuddly either. Conservation is selfish self-interest, pure and simple

On a grey and miserable day in the ant-hill called Sydney, people cantering in and out of shops at Pitt Street, I wonder maybe, just maybe, who cares if we survive?

Spin that

Watched a hatchet job on Assange on the Tele. They had ex-associates talk about how Assange was egoistic and how he had yelled at them. Replace the name Assange with the name of any political figure, media editor, school teacher, father, mother, brother, sister, pet dog, random people on the street and it would still sound about right. I mean who hasn't yelled at people. I was called a curry muncher not one hour ago by a drunken bogan with a southern cross tattoo. I don't think the bogan was devil-incarnate. If Assange raped someone in Sweden that is wrong and he is a rapist. If Assange yelled at someone for no fault of theirs, then he is a dick-head. That doesn't change the fact that the US government turned blind eye to civilian brutalities in Iraq. It doesn't change the fact that the government of Yemen has been actively hiding the American covert operations in their country .

The US government and by extension all its allies, including the Australian government and most media outlets are waging a propaganda war. Wikileaks discloses some misdeed of the government that it wished to keep a secret and the Government (it's an Orwellian concoction of all nation states that look up to their true master-state). And the government retaliates by calling Assange names. I haven't seen one instance where they have offered a valid rebuttal of anything that was leaked. So, the only card they can play is 'Demonize' and how they play it!!! Charles Prentiss would approve.

How to have your cake and eat it too? Saying "Wikileaks endangered lives by their indiscriminate dumping of classified information" and "The information they leaked is not important because they are not even new" in the same breath. Cognitive Dissonance... what is that?