According to the Independent
An advertising campaign urging people to help tackle climate change has been banned by Northern Ireland’s Environment minister because he does not believe humans are the main cause of global warming.
Ah, Ulster! Land of Battles! At least there’s someone left in that haven of controversialism with the courage of his convictions.
The Green Party and the campaign group Friends of the Earth demanded his resignation…
Naturally.
…but Mr Wilson said he had a right to hold his own opinion on the issue.
As he does. But:
…a Green Party assembly member [confusingly also called Wilson], said the minister was being “grossly irresponsible”, adding: “While the minister is entitled to his own views, he is not entitled to ignore the overwhelming scientific evidence that man-made climate change exists.”
“Not entitled.”
One cannot help but wonder when the legislation was passed that prohibits ignoring things. Yesterday, perhaps. It is a bit worrying because I habitually ignore things. In fact I have quite a long list of the things I ignore; readers of the blog might, for example, have deduced by now that I ignore, insofar as I can manage to, the Middle Eastern goings-on. I also tend to ignore Barack Obama. And television, whereof my studied and technically facilitated ignorance is almost proverbial.
If we are no longer allowed to ignore certain things then, since ignorance of the law is doubtless no excuse, I feel quite strongly that a list of those things should be published at once.
Of course Mr. Wilson (primus) could argue with Mr. Wilson (secundus) that he is not ignoring global warming at all, but that, having duly considered it, he still thinks that it is bollocks. I don’t suppose this would do for long, but it would be a start.
The trouble with trying to force people to believe stuff is that one never really knows whether they actually do believe it, or are merely pretending to in order to avoid being taken away by the thought-police. This doesn’t seem to be apparent to the watermelons.
Kevin Myers, the grand old liberal Irish journalist, once wrote that the diffreence between tyrannies and free civilisations is the concept of what he called “forgetting”.
He prophesied that, one day and soon if we were left free, it would be possible for people to prepare for an annual celebration in which people gave plastic poppies to complete stranegsr in the street on about 11th November, not really knowing why, but it would be a pickup excuse for teenagers and for special discos at clubs. Cards would be sold in Tesco, featuring poppy-fields, at about that time and for a moth or so before.
In contrast, tyrannies never, never ever let you forget. Anything. They won’t let you forget the anniversary of YEAR ZERO: they will parade their missiles to make sure you remember…and they won’t let you forget the Dear Leader’s birthday (Al gore?) or the date when James Hansen articulated the Greenazi-myth (sorry) truth.
Well, I can’t remember either of those dates, since neither of them appears to be either of the dates given in ‘1066 And All That’. Other dates are not memorable.