Friday, January 14, 2011

The invisible mountain of skulls

It's not often that I get a little cross when I read Tam, but that happened today.  No, I didn't get cross at her, but her post triggered a rant at my former compatriots on the left.  She wrote about the moral emptiness of the proposed bans on standard "high" capacity magazines, and serves up j'accuse:
So, by saying you're in favor of magazines that hold no more than X rounds, you're publicly stating that it's only X+1 bodies that bother you.
As Weer'd points out, these proposals would not have prevented either the Texas Tower or Virgina Tech massacres.  There's your first mountain of skulls, invisible to the Paladins of the Left.  Which was precisely Tam's point.

But that's not what got be cross.  The Left's own policy Prescriptions result in mountains of skulls, and these are equally invisible to our Moral Betters.  Consider the floods in Queensland, Australia:
I am sitting here in my home in South East Queensland, watching the news come in about the flooding everywhere. Entire suburbs around Brisbane and several smaller towns are either isolated by flood-waters or have been evacuated. Highways are cut everywhere.

People have been dying. So far about 20 people have died in the past week – nine just this morning when a deluge went through the Lockyer Valley. Most of them children. Another 70 are missing. One could put it all down to “just” weather.

Except EXACTLY the same floods occurred in EXACTLY the same places back in 1974, with much the same tragic loss of life and destruction of property.
C'mon, Borepatch, I hear you say.  You can't blame weather on the Left.  No, I can't.  But I can blame the Left for canceling projects that would have prevented a repeat of 1974:
And that’s what we did – or at least started. Wivenhoe Dam got built as the first step, but by the time it was finished clever people like you lot [Environmentalists - ed] who “knew” that such things were never going to happen again had taken over. CO2 AGW madness had already taken hold.

Instead we had “post modern” minds like Tim Flannery “advising” the government that because of Anthropogenic Global Warming, SE QLD would be perpetually in drought from then on. “Forget dams and flood mitigation programs”, intoned the wise Dr Tim – “build desalination plants instead”.

So that’s what our government did. And that is why thirty five years later, we are once again suffering exactly the SAME tragic loss of life and destruction of property, pretty-much exactly where, and when, and how, those stupid scientists who foolishly believed climate was cyclical had predicted.
And when push came to shove, what was the winning argument?  I mean, this was a do it for the children project, right?  What did the Left think was more important than children?
Federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett ... said he made the interim decision to reject the controversial $1.8 billion plan to dam the Mary River because evidence showed it could kill off endangered species.

“The project would have serious and irreversible effects on national listed species such as the Australian lungfish, the Mary River turtle and the Mary River cod – both of those endangered.
So, the same people who tell us that we're monsters because we think their magazine ban is idiotic, the same people who want to shut down our right to speak our mind "hate speech" - these Moral Exemplars For All Time seem curiously unable to see the corpses created by their own philosophy.

Color me unimpressed with their for teh childrens pleading.  This Republic could use a vigorous, intellectually and morally strong Left.  We don't have one.

4 comments:

Mark Alger said...

Not only that, but...

A source on the ground in suburban Brisbane assures me that most of the inundated areas, where the flash floods have been the worst and most deadline, are "poor" areas.

Women and minorities hardest hit and all that.

M

BioBob said...

I don't intend to diminish the importance of flood control efforts, but none of the aforementioned envisioned projects would have stopped the deaths resulting from allowing building on flood plain land.

Greed and stupidity are human equivalent of hydrogen, aren't they.

Paladin said...

Yeah... but surely the Left will focus their efforts in the right direction *now* that tragedy has struck, wouldn't you think?

http://www.digitalspy.com/odd/news/a298039/bat-clinic-cares-for-abandoned-pups.html

Oops...

Luton Ian said...

Memory Vault; he's an impressive guy, fearless, and a Gentleman with it.