This is environmentalism jumping the shark:
Click image above to play the game
I don’t know where to begin, except to say that when we see things like this, we should complain loudly and incessantly. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation has crossed a line beyond science, beyond decency, and beyond rational thought.
This is what you get after pressing “start”:
The screen above says: When you’re done, click on the (skull and crossbones) to find out what age you should die at so you don’t use more than your fair share of Earth’s resources!
Hat tip to CallonJim who writes:
This “kids” games at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Tell’s kids depending on their magical “carbon footprint” how long they should live?
The actual title is “Professor Schpinkee’s Greenhouse Calculator – find out when you should die!”
The thing I find amazing is the average foot print is 24.6 tonnes of CO2, which calculates out to 9.3 years old! Where it tells the child “YOU SHOULD DIE AT THE AGE 9.3!” Guess what age this kids games is marketed to? That’s right, 9 year olds.
What is most disgusting about this is that ABC ignores their own published Code of Practice
In section 2.12 they talk about content for children:
2.12 Content for Children. In providing enjoyable and enriching content for children, the ABC does not wish to conceal the real world from them. It can be important for the media, especially television, to help children understand and deal with situations which may include violence and danger. Special care should be taken to ensure that content which children are likely to watch or access unsupervised should not be harmful or disturbing to them.
I venture that any child who takes this carbon footprint test “unsupervised” without mommy and daddy around, and who may be old enough to read, but not old enough to understand he/she is being brainwashed by an agenda, would be “disturbed” find they should die at age nine, since just clicking through with default choices gives you that age.
Here is where you can contact the ABC and give them an inbox full of your opinion. This kind of propaganda needs to be removed.
http://www.abc.net.au/contact/contactabc.htm
UPDATE: There is a row developing in the Austrailian press over this.
UPDATE2: The New York Post highlights this site on June 1st with the headline “Enviro Mental Institution“
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It’s hard to describe how I feel about such a website, but there certainly would be no positive terms whatsoever. Typical “Man is a disease upon this sacred planet” way of thinking. Very, very sad.
Yes, and it’s deliberately provocative. I had a very low rating–yet according to that I deserved to die two years ago. Does anyone “deserve” to live until age 70 according to this? I doubt it.
Not only is it demeaning, but it is stupid (and socialist). there is not one iota of understanding that an economy might (gasp) expand.
Idiotic. Sanctimonious. Bogus.
I put everything into the calculator, and it said that I should die at 2.8 (I’m assuming years) It also says my carbon footprint is 82.5 tonnes (yay me!), so gee, I should have been dead 37 years ago!
You have to be kidding. At least Dick Lamm had the ‘decency’ to only tell old people that they had a ‘duty to die’. What next? A ‘master race’ of enlightened environmentalists that are allowed to live longer? “Sieg Gore”? (OK, that’s in bad taste, but @ur momisugly#$% like this raises my blood pressure)
When all else fails, adjust the data and brainwash kids.
Here is what I just posted to the site http://www.news.com.au/technology/story/0,25642,23765244-5014239,00.html:
ABC managing director Mark Scott appears to be misleading the Senate when he says, “the site was not designed to offend certain quarters of the community but to engage children in environmental issues.”
I respond: No, this is incorrect. If it was designed to “engage children in environmental issues”, then it would give children both sides of the issues covered and let them make up their own minds concerning what approaches they agree with and what they don’t (and, more probably, those they don’t know enough about and need to learn more). Obviously, people who work in the field being ‘shot down’ (literally – I tried the game) would of course feel offended, and justifiably so.
Next Scott says, “It’s not an attempt to write public policy… it’s an attempt to educate school students on the impact of the modern Western lifestyle on carbon emissions and the whole issue that we are dealing with.”
I respond: I disagree. It is clearly an attempt to frighten children into pushing society into an entirely different lifestyle, so it is promoting long range policy changes through propaganda. It is not education at all – it is clearly propaganda in the fullest as explained here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda. Does this violate ABC’s mandate as a public broadcaster? Besides, what gives ABC the audacity to decide for the country that they know what scientists do not, namely that so-called ‘carbon emissions’ are causing a climate crisis.
Tom Harris
International Climate Science Coalition
http://www.climatescienceinternational.org/
It’s worse than your headline says. It’s not when you will die. It’s when you should die, because you have used up your share of the Earths resources.
This is a judgment that the car I drive, the house I live in, and how far I drive to work each day is a capital offense.
By the way I should die at 2.6 years, so I’m about 39 years late.
REPLY: Thanks. I agree and made a change
In other media news, the AP(!) reports Hurricane season outlooks of little use.
“It’s a lot like Groundhog Day—and the results are worth just about as much.”
Book mark this website in the “just plain evil” folder
I scored pretty good, I should have died at age 7.2 Just precocious I suppose.
Anthony,
This is revolting indeed as the underlying view is entirely consistent with the eco-fascist view of the world espoused by the likes of Paul Watson [Sea Sheppard Society] who view Homo Sapien’s presence as a blight on the face of the earth and something ultimately to be eradicated, even that requires some sort of collective suicide. What is truly shocking is that this sort of extremism has made its way into the top editorial echelons of public broadcasters like the ABC. Here in Canada things are nearly as bad: David Suzuki, a virulent and extreme proponent of “environmentalism” not only has his own program [The Nature of Things] on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, but is an advisor to our public broadcaster as well. You can no doubt imagine the resulting bias…
If it’s targeted towards kids, why do they ask how much you drive? And how much for work?
Evan Jones question about whether anyone could live to 70 inspired me to
retake the test. I lied about everything and after my angelic pig floated up, up
and away its said I can live forever.
This is the most disgusting thing I’ve seen in a long time.
Heck, I made 49.1 years. And the recycle question wasn’t reasonable. They give no ground between “recycle and compost” and “sometimes recycle”.
I ALWAYS recycle. No because I want to or would voluntarily, but ONLY because the building gets an 800$ fine from the garbage police every time they find a single item in the wrong bag.
Oh, did I mention? I live in NYC. None of that stuff I sort actually GETS recycled. It just goes in the landfill. But I still am required by law to waste large amounts of fresh water (which arguably IS a legit resource issue) to rinse the cans and bottles. I am required to do so because they want to “get me in the habit” of recycling even though what I separate never gets recycled. My contempt for this is boundless.
If it’s targeted towards kids, why do they ask how much you drive? And how much for work?
As someone–very–well trained (at CCNY and Columbia University) in agitprop, dialectic, and deconstruction, I can answer that.
It’s an effective technique we call “indirection”. (They get you and then they get your kids THROUGH you.)
P.S., I am a liberal apostate. And OOOOH, how my liberal brethren HATE it when you turn their own methods on them! (As a class traitor, they hate me even more than they hate the conservatives. Because my kind is a real threat to them. And they are right to fear us: we will in the end defeat them.)
The thing that’s most interesting is it’s all about income… Try a little test enter the most “green” answer to every question – no car, recycling etc. except for one. Tell it you spent $100,000 dollars or more and that none of it was an investment in green products or organic foods (ie. your whole $100K was spent on things that aren’t green).
If you though Catholics were tough – the rich can’t make it past age 10.
Want to live a long time – just be poor.
though = thought…
btw – presumably this means when your medical bills reach a certain point you are just using too many of the earth’s resources and should be dead.
Everyone who is “should die” needs to invest more in “ethical investments.” You can pick the least eco-friendly choices and as long as you invest enough in “ethical investments,” you can live forever.
The “500 Millioner” lurks clandestinely under many disguises, but their message is always the same: you should die so that we alone can live. Ugly creatures they are. I would suggest legal recourse against ABC for something like this.
I made 3.5 years when I took this a few weeks ago.
Nothing that Always Been Communists say surprises me. When the polar bears were listed as endangered a couple of weeks ago the ABC news story on TV here managed to say that there were only 25000 bears left implying that their numbers were falling and had been for some time. No mention that there are more bears now than there were a few decades ago.
That was frickin’ hysterical! I should have been offed at 2.6! Yay! I win!!!!
It was the spending that put me over the top – maybe I should have adjusted for Oz exchange rates.
Excuse me, I must now go into hiding, lest the Aussie Eco-Terminator hunt me down!
I really should make my “If you really cared about AGW, You’d Kill yourself” T-Shirts. Of course, it probably wouldn’t be too long after that we’ll start seeing global warming suicide bombers.
All funding should be stopped for the abc, for their continual propagandas of rubbish. I hope someone sues them for this ! abc the commo station .
This is obviously a projection of some group’s self-loathing onto other people. Maybe the people who wrote that do indeed feel THEY should die for having used up what they have determined is “their share” of the world’s resources. But to carry that on to mean that everyone else should also feel that THEY should die appears to me to be a manifestation of some serious mental health issues, narcissism being among them.
What about people that use up more than their share of people’s patience? What about the accident prone who use more than their share of rescue resources? But what really upsets me is this notion of “if you do more of something than I am willing to tolerate, then I think you should die” is arrogant to the extreme. I suppose that would have been an extremely effective way to ration sugar in World War II. Imagine something like “You get to use all the coupons in this book, and then we kill you”.
The people who made that website need some serious help.
I’ve been saying for some time that Australia’s tax funded national broadcaster the ABC, fails to report proper science because all it offers is a sneak view into the madness, power, politics, funding and control of the global warming industry which is best understood as a religious calling. It points to weak people, a weak media and an outcome where proper science faces a diminishing role in public policy.
This “Professor Schpinkee’s Greenhouse Calculator” is an inexorable and schemingly designed piece of propaganda targeting young impressionable minds. It crudely promotes the worship of a fictional view of life with the monstrous lie that CO2 is a dangerous pollutant. This is a paradox and when you find every paradox you also find incorrect assumptions.
It is now not education at the ABC because it is deceptive, ugly, damaging, indoctrination and a place where young people learn to be stupid and get proselytised by being relieved of their commonsense.