The Very Definition of Conservative Veriphobia

My letter to the Jakarta Times got picked up by a Colorado Conservablogger.

This is a good one, friends. It’s headlined:

“The Very Definition of America-Hating Liberal Guilt”

Then he cites my letter published in the Jakarta Times a few days ago.

To refresh your memory, I wrote:

As a US citizen, I must accept responsibility for my own nation’s abject failure to take responsibility for its actions.

As the world’s largest per capita emitter of greenhouse gases and as the enabler of a consumerist lifestyle which, if left unchecked, is absolutely certain to submerge the planet in giga tons of toxic trash, the United States has been the driving force behind the climate crisis.

Unfortunately, my country’s responsibilities are unlikely to be met any time soon, for we are in the grip of a political crisis brought about by a national exaltation of demagoguery and ignorance.

Thus our governing bodies are riddled with arrogant men and women who dismiss scientific expertise as irrelevant, preferring the comforts of ancient superstition.

Global warming’s realities are terrifying. But as citizens of ocean states can attest, ignoring those facts will surely lead to outcomes beside which our nightmares will pale into insignificance.

Warren Senders
Medford, Massachusetts

And here’s Colorado Right’s response, with my interpolations:

So we start off with a line that could be lifted from just about any Barack Oprompter speech outside the US apologizing for their country.

Whereas Conservatives know that taking responsibility, either for your own actions or those of your country, is totally wimpy and self-hating! America doesn’t have to take responsibility for what it does, because WE’Z NUMBAR WUN!

Indeed. We’re Number One in the production of trash, for one thing, which is another way of saying America is tops in the world at subtracting value from things (that’s what trash is, right? Stuff from which value has been removed.).

Anyway, USA ROOLZ, just because we can.

Next:

Breast beating about how we use lots of energy since we manufacture and consume so much that our economy is still 20% of global world output. In other words – we generate more economic activity and energy in 2 days than the entire country of Indonesia does in a year. Yeah, that’s something to be really sorry about.

And how much of that manufacturing and consumption is for stuff that, y’know, actually adds value to the world? Just because you pay money for the gas you burn while your Hummer idles outside the coffeeshop doesn’t make it an actual contribution of anything except greenhouse gases.

And the point I was making is of course that if we’re the ones generating all the pollution, we should be the ones taking responsibility for cleaning it up. And, furthermore, if a country like Indonesia, with a carbon footprint that’s less than a rounding error, finds its actual existence imperiled because of rising sea levels (triggered by climate change brought about by greenhouse emissions), then we have a moral responsibility to address the problem, rather than just shouting “USA ROOLZ!!”

Which loops me back to the issue of responsibility, addressed above.

Islamic foreigners think the US is Satan anyway – so knocking your own country as “a national exaltation of demagoguery and ignorance” and “riddled with arrogant men and women who dismiss scientific expertise as irrelevant” will make them feel so good about you. Of course you little knock about ancient superstition – does that include say Islamic beliefs about having 4 wives and marrying off your 9 year old girls?

When faced with irrefutable facts, what do you do?

YIKES SKAREEE MOOOOOOSLIMS!!!!! ZOMG!!!! OH NOEZ!!!!

Mind you, I hold all the Abrahamic sects in more or less equal regard.

Here’s a conditional for you: If America’s founders had been Islamic schismatics in search of a new place to carry on their particular version of their particular version of the tribal creed, and their descendants had written a secular Constitution with a First Amendment just like our own back in the late 1700’s…and modern America was filled with fundamentalist Islamic historical revisionists who were trying to argue that “America has always been a fundamentally Judeo-Mohammedan nation”…and they were denying climate science in the bargain — why, I’d have written exactly the same letter.

And here’s the one sure thing Warren – when Islam takes over America you will be one of the first ones up against the wall. Regardless of how much you grovel from your centrally heated and air conditioned, 24 hour per day electrically provisioned, suburban house that any Indonesian would chew off their arm to live in.

When Islam takes over America? What on Earth are you smoking?

I swear, Conservative Islamophobes are the biggest bunch of bedwetters I’ve ever seen.

On the other hand, when Muslim-majority countries like Indonesia and Bangladesh are submerged or rendered uninhabitable by rising ocean levels, there will be millions of climate refugees, all extremely pissed off at the industrialized West for very good reason. Where will they go? YIKES OMG!!!

Therefore, the best way to avoid an Islamic takeover of America is to fight global warming. Q.E.D.

The ball’s in your court, Spiro.

This article has been crossposted under my Username at Daily Kos.