The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto:
What kind of people blow up children?
White supremacists, for one example. On the morning of Sept. 15, 1963, members of a Ku Klux Klan “splinter group” set off dynamite under the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., killing four girls: Denise McNair, Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley. Denise was 11; the other three were 14.
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Islamic supremacists, for another example. Groups like Hamas and al Qaeda not only attack civilians indiscriminately but frequently employ Muslim children as suicide bombers. Our friend Brooke Goldstein made a whole movie about it.
There’s a new kind of supremacist on the scene: green supremacists. They haven’t blown up any children–not in real life. But they’ve been thinking about it.
A British outfit called the 10:10 Campaign hired Richard Curtis, a writer and producer of cinematic comedies, to produce a four-minute video promoting its effort to encourage people to cut “carbon emissions.” The result, titled “No Pressure,” struck James Delingpole, a global-warming skeptic who writes for London’s Daily Telegraph, as “deliciously, unspeakably, magnificently bleeding awful.” He’s being too kind.
Read Taranto’s full piece here.
Kyle Smith weighs in:
Moreover, the sort of ingratiating, I’m-just-getting-a-show-of-hands-here do-gooder niceness that blends smugly into savage violence strikes a very creepy note. How many of us have dealt with smiling clean-cut activists and sensed a streak of contempt or even cold hatred underneath?
Curtis is a funny guy and it would be easy to forgive him if this film were funny. Is it? It’s the same joke repeated about four times. Its message is coarse and obvious, not wickedly satirical. The movie is really beneath him. And it does set back Curtis’s cause substantially. It’s just one more clue that fabulously wealthy Hollywood types are living in a completely different world from the rest of us, for whom the hazy specter of supposedly catastrophic climate change is much less worrisome than immediate economic hardship, either real or potential.
Read the full article here.