Thursday 12 January 2012

A broken clock


The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists have put forward the hands of their Doomsday Clock to five minutes to midnight because the world isn't doing what they want.

I never had much truck with this doomsday clock business.  During the Cold War it was always obvious that they were, like the Communist-front CND, more concerned with disarming the free world than the Soviets and ChiComs.  In my view, they lost all credibility when they set the clock back to 18 minutes before midnight after the fall of Communism instead of to 6:35 PM the previous day. Frankly, now that someone is bumping off Iranian nuclear scientists and bombing their production sites I'd have thought they'd be setting the clock back again rather than forward.  But then, this is a group that has stirred global warming into the mix to keep themselves in a job, so don't except much from them except the same tired line.

4 comments:

eon said...

Agreed. In their minds, the only threat to the world is the West. Everybody else is so wonderfully socialist and "mystical", and only need nukes to protect themselves from us evil capitalists.

And now they've factored in our "failure to properly address climate change" as yet more evidence of our stupidity, perfidy, & etc.

We just can't seem to do anything right, in their estimation. (A hallmark of "progressive thought" throughout its history.)

Although I notice that none of the "Atomic Scientists" are exactly falling all over themselves in their eagerness to actually move to the "enlightened" part of the world.

They'd rather tongue-lash us. On our nickel. Thereby feeling good about themselves at our expense on both counts.


cheers

eon

Sergej said...

Either "socialist and 'mystical'" as you say, or... nonexistent. I find a certain solipsism a fairly common ailment among the big brains. We have agency, and are capable of making decisions and exercising will. They act as they do in response to our actions---how could they act otherwise? You will note that this is in reality, denying the humanity of the other guy, since acts-according-to-its-nature is a property not of people but of animals.

Cambias said...

The founding editor of the Bulletin was a botanist. I believe the current editor is a professor of public policy. So "Atomic Scientists" in this case means "Scientists made of atoms."

Sergej said...

Cambias: not necessarily. It might also mean, "scientists who can not be divided into smaller, sub-scientific particles".