crimson5pheonix said:
The department of energy, under Rick Perry, has decided to rebrand natural gas as "freedom gas", which they will export to the world. Molecules of American FREEDOM. Official department policy is to refer to natural gas as such.
Getting serious...
Let's see what sort of freedom it means for the people of Vanuatu when their whole country goes under the waves. Do you think the USA (and others) will compensate them appropriately? I don't. They'll probably just get refugee-level treatment in somewhere like New Zealand.
To me, this sums up a lot of the outrage: it's a total bullshit notion of "freedom". This is getting tangential but it makes me remember so many arguments I've had with stricter libertarians, and this is a major sort of thing they hand-wave away. They love their negative freedom stuff, that you can do what you like with what's yours, but if you damage other people and their stuff you should pay. But this is only notional: in practice, for things like climate change, they know perfectly well they can fill the skies with pollutants, give millions of people asthma and sink huge tracts of land other people own under rising seas, and no-one's ever going to come and collect from them. And oh so conveniently, we can't tax them either because that's "theft", and, y'know... freedom!
It can be the slimiest, shittiest, most cynical exploitation of how we can practically or temporally assess consequences to allow them to infringe on other people's freedom to their own profit. In some cases it's dodging responsibility by hiding behild layers of moral and legal insulation: "My national laws said I could do this, so you can't hold me responsible." "Well, I didn't totally know at the time, there was merely a 97% scientific consensus." "It was my dad who made that $5billion, you can't punish me even though I inherited it." etc. Perhaps in some cases it's just a complete lack of imagination about how far consequences can spread.
I like to pick on libertarians over this sort of thing because most non-libertarians have much greater appreciation of more proactive structures and regulations to prevent potential harm. Libertarians often want those slashed away, and yet don't seem to be investing thought and effort into systems of post-hoc justice and redress for harm inflicted which might be equivalent.
