Blackbeard

Worse. Cocaine Sharkicanes.

Whatever the fuck you do in the comfort of your own basement is your business, chief.

How many different ways can I tell you guys that a doomsday clock is the most ludicrous and flatly ineffective tool for communicating the stresses we’re facing in the 21st century? Do you need me to send you a telegram? Maybe a passenger pigeon? I can have it written in the sky by a biplane if that’ll help. Maybe in another language? Hieroglyphics perhaps?

My dude, I studied this. I have two graduate degrees in these subjects. I’m no stranger to the very real problems we’re facing as a global species, and in fact I’ve dedicated my entire career to fighting environmental degradation, often at the expense of my family, my finances, and my health.

A DOOMSDAY CLOCK IS STUPID AND HASN’T HELPED ME OR ANY OF MY COLLEAGUES AT ANY POINT IN OUR ENTIRE PROFESSIONAL CAREERS.

God fucking damn y’all are dense.

The clock is supposed to be about impending doom.

Which I’ve already clarified is ridiculous and unhelpful even if a crisis deserves our utmost attention. That’s on both a pragmatic and a psychological level. If you want a long series of continuous eye rolls, by all means continue telling people the sky is literally falling.

Slow moving disasters can include many things and I used climate change as an example. But there are many others.

None of which include global annihilation as even a remote possibility.

Disease, blight and even an asteroid if it’s big enough.

Do you think telling people we’re seconds from an asteroid hitting will help them do literally anything? What if you tell them that every single day for 40 years? Do you think it’ll help them more in 40 years than it does today?

Since you completely avoided meaningfully responding to literally anything I just wrote and fell back on repeating yourself as if I somehow don’t understand English, I’ll bow out here. Enjoy your masturbatory doom fetish.

I have a graduate degree in climate policy and have worked in the environmental field for almost 15 years. We do not have a high chance of self-ceasing thanks to climate change, and I implore you to stop framing it that way. That kind of language is absolutely and unequivocally unhelpful when it comes to communicating the challenges we face. The fact that laypeople have spent decades saying climate change is going to “destroy the planet” or “kill us all” is exactly the kind of problem I’m talking about. It breeds paralysis because it’s something that you can’t possibly conjure a constructive response to address. If literal Armageddon is coming, then the solution isn’t to try to stop it, the solution is to live your life as best you can, while you can.

Do we face significant challenges as a result of climate change? Absolutely. Is some kind of global food crisis and/or localized famine likely? Absolutely. Will storms and sea level changes displace entire communities of people and worsen an already bad immigration crisis across the globe? Absolutely. Will infrastructure suffer and become increasingly expensive to maintain and adapt? Absolutely. Will changes stress local ecosystems such that extinctions become more likely? Absolutely. Will governments struggle to meaningfully respond when the public purse is constantly stressed by increasingly expensive natural disasters? Absolutely. Will some people die of heat stress, starvation, drowning, etc? Absolutely. Will we “self-cease” as a result?

NO.

So then given that I don’t accept your premise that global annihilation is in any way relevant to climate change, and given that the threat of nuclear Armageddon is something the individual is completely powerless to address, I’d like to counter that a “Doomsday” anything that constantly creeps closer and closer to an imaginary red line, is a completely fucking stupid way to communicate the challenges we face.

Let me put it to you this way: if someone told you an asteroid was going to hit the Earth 90 seconds from now, would you try to stop it? Or would you call your friends and family and tell them you love them?

I agree, to be perfectly honest. I imagine the folks who initially came up with this clock thought it was a good idea, but at this point it’s just a cartoonish shadow of what it was supposed to be. We can only be minutes/seconds from total annihilation for so many years before people shrug and completely lose interest. It’s like listening to a Mayan cultist talk about what’s coming in 2012, or a Christian fundamentalist talk about the coming rapture. It also ignores basic psychology, in that even if you accept the gravity of the clock’s meaning, you’re still left utterly powerless to do anything about it, all while thinking…“ok, so what now?”

As shitty as this will be for the people of Argentina, it will be intriguing to see what a true right-wing fanatic is able to fuck up when given the authority to do so.

https://www.bu.edu/articles/2023/racism-sexism-and-the-crisis-of-black-womens-health/

Yeah that’s the crux of the argument the lawyer is making:

Timko, a former prosecutor, said Ohio’s abuse-of-corpse statute is vague. It prohibits treating “a human corpse” in a way that would “outrage” reasonable family or community sensibilities. “From a legal perspective, there’s no definition of ‘corpse,’” she said. “Can you be a corpse if you never took a breath?”

Howard said clarity on what about Watts’ behavior constituted a crime is essential. “For rights of people with the capacity for pregnancy, this is huge,” she said. “Her miscarriage was entirely ordinary. So I just want to know what (the prosecutor) thinks she should have done. If we are going to require people to collect and bring used menstrual products to hospitals so that they can make sure it is indeed a miscarriage, it’s as ridiculous and invasive as it is cruel.”

She’d already been in and out of the hospital, and so when she got home I’m sure she was so traumatized and confused that she probably thought she just had to release whatever was left and move on. Kinda like what happens in a period. The blood comes out, you flush it and clean up, end of story.

I would imagine the “proper” protocol would be for the doctor to “perform” the procedure in a hospital and dispose of it the same way they do of all biological waste. There is absolutely no way she would have an intimate knowledge of Ohio’s corpse desecration laws. I buried my cat in the back yard and that was that. She should be afforded the same dignity here, since the fetus died in utero.