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Comment by aww_dang | Hacker News Reader

I'm not convinced that the author's favored political positions are above satire.

>A blunt-smoking doctor at the hospital (Justin Long) is shocked that Joe doesn’t have a barcode on his arm, like everybody else, and asks, “Why come you no have a tattoo?”

Yet, the author seems to be a fan of the bio-security state rationalized by the covid emergency.

>...climate deniers...

Is this not also a bastardization of language? Is anyone denying that the earth has a climate? To be fair to the author, it seems like a deliberate trashing of nuance.

Yes, the movie is funny, but the review is a bit smug. The depopulation part was a bit over the top. From the opposing perspective the causes he champions such as "BirthStrikers" seem like willing rubes for authoritarians. If he can dish it out, then perhaps he should look in the mirror.

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> Is this not also a bastardization of language? Is anyone denying that the earth has a climate? To be fair to the author, it seems like a deliberate trashing of nuance.

Do you actually not understand what the author means by “climate deniers”? The intended meaning seems quite clear to me.

I'm sure everyone knows what the author means. Yet you can still say that it's inaccurate and only used for effect: the framing is that it's adjacent to holocaust deniers.

If you're not a fan of that kind of use of language, you can criticize it while still understanding what the author wanted to convey ("those people").

The specific complaint was that it “trashes nuance.” But if everyone knows what the author means, in what sense is nuance being trashed?

Everyone knows who you mean when you call one US party "fascists" and the other "communists", but you've lost pretty much all nuance. And all you've won is a bit of impact, for a while, because the tool will blunt with constant use. You'll have to reach for "super fascists" and "mega communists" next time and that will barely move the needle and you'll be far away from the effect you got when you tried that hack the first time.

But the original commenter literally feigned confusion, as if the term might have referred to people who deny that the Earth has a climate.

No, the original commenter questions whether anyone denies that earth has a climate, which would make "Climate Denier" an accurate and useful term. Of course, it's a rhetorical question to point out that the term is just used for effect, thereby reducing the utility of language.

I believe you can apply Kant's categorical imperative to language as well and you'll quickly arrive at the point that misusing language to score a point will lead to language becoming less useful and you'll do much more harm than you gain.

This is a silly view of how language works. The point of language is to communicate ideas, which is why I asked about whether there was actually a failure to communicate ideas (there wasn’t). You might as well invoke Kant to complain about how hot dogs are not actually dogs, and they’re often sold in refrigerators so they’re not even hot!

Calling frozen frankfurters hotdogs doesn't deliberately or dishonestly reframe the discussion in an overly simplified, pop culture manner. Hotdogs might be an everyman's food for sporting events and children, but they don't invoke a flippant, immature dismissal. Hotdogs aren't even adversarial. In this sense the use of "climate denier" fits with the coarsening of culture theme of the film.

The space for discussion is prematurely attacked by the overly simplistic frame of "climate denier". Perhaps the author isn't capable of operating in that space, therefore he requires defensive rhetoric. Maybe it isn't deliberate or conscious. Perhaps he is simply bleating the preferred partisan slogan?

Nuance is deliberately or unconsciously removed in lieu of shallow arrogance. That's ironic in my reading of the article and view of the movie. There's no feigned confusion in my comment above. Perhaps you misread it.

You serious? Nuance is when things are more complicated than the initial basic message would indicate. Elevating the primary message at the expense of those details is exactly what trashing nuance means.

Sure, in the same sense that I also understood what Justin Long's character meant when he said, "Why come you no have a tattoo?”, which is entirely what your parent comments point was.

The bigger issue for those who object might be ceding control over personal energy consumption to authoritarian central planners. It fits with a pattern of usurpation of individual liberties under the pretense of emergency.

Whether or not the Earth has a warming climate is largely irrelevant to this point.

The next question would be what the optimal climate is and how do these experts know what it is? We've gone from weather forecasters being wrong about rain over the weekend, to politicians and their pet technocrats asserting that the current climatic trajectory is somehow "wrong". The solution as always, is to give politicians more power.

This is a really good example of not liking a solution and resolving that conflict by denying the problem. Was there a single point in your life where your worldview crystalized or was it an evolving process? I'm genuinely interested in how people arrive at the place your at.

Your comment is patronizing, but I'll do my best. Pollution is still a problem for me.

I'd say I evolved as I matured as an individual. There was only so much fearful propaganda I could consume before my curiosity led me to examine the premises. The repeated invocation of apocalypse to scare people has direct historical parallels to other religious financial schemes.

What is an ideal climate, and how would fallible men determine that? Does it not seem backwards for man to dictate what nature should be, when man will never have sufficient information to describe nature?

Who knows, maybe your views will also continue to evolve? I hope I can retain enough curiosity to do the same for myself.

Obviously a lot of directions to take this, but how is climate different from say the ozone hole story? To me it bears the same hallmarks. We don't fully understand the atmosphere, should we have left the problem alone? Who are we to say what the right size the hole should be. To top it off a lot of people seem to be afraid of it and claim it will mean the end of most life on earth. I'm curious how either you frame it as a different thing. Is it that we do understand ozone dynamics, or that people weren't afraid of it, or something else?

The "denier" language is a dishonest way to associate whatever the topic is with Holocaust denial. It certainly isn't exclusive to climate talk, though.

This movie is ripe for a remake where the world is stupid-Left instead of stupid-Right.

Starbucks offers gender reassignment surgeries and Costco employees say “Welcome to Costco, I apologise”, and the world-ending crisis is that nobody can actually reproduce any more.

> This movie is ripe for a remake where the world is stupid-Left instead of stupid-Right.

What makes you think it isn’t currently both?

Not sure which “it” you mean.

The movie is clearly a caricature of the stupid-Right.

The world is indeed currently both stupid-Right and stupid-Left.

Just like Heathers was ripe for a remake where the misfit kids bully the white jocks. It's not.

don't be surprised -- it's just your typical moronic media propaganda used to label and denigrate anyone who questions an established narrative, shutting down any discourse in the process. Much easier to call someone a "conspiracy theorist" in a pointless article with zero value creation to the world than to actually peel back some of the layers.

There's some irony here though. It isn't entirely without value. The author points the finger while assuming his ideology is beyond mockery. Yet, for some of us the article is hilarious.

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