The Anglo-American public has been socialized into the militarist conceptualization of many other abstract social and political issues through frequent exposure to the WAR metaphor as an expression of unwavering resolve (e.g., war against crime, war against inflation, war on cancer, war on poverty, war on drugs, war on global warming, war on human trafficking, to name just a few).
Problems of health, poverty, global warming, wars.
July 31, 4 50 p.m. | Updates below | Last weekend saw a remarkable pulse of pre-publication publicity for fresh climate studies lobbed into the global warming wars.
The oil companies know this. Lee Raymond, former CEO of Exxon and the Darth Vader of global warming wars, always spoke the truth on this, saying in 2004, "I think that the notion in the United States of energy independence, which was first proposed in the Nixon administration, was a poor concept 30 years ago and it is a poor concept today".
It's a warm war in the global village.
And later, I understood that the Dekemvriana was not a local conflict, but the beginning of the Cold War that had started as a warm war here in Greece".
But cyberwarfare is an even deeper, more sinister kind of undeclared aggression, a kind of digital warm war, with huge banks of servers thrumming endlessly as they promote continuous pre-emptive attacks and intelligence raids.
Icy swim that warmed Cold War rivals Jump to media player In 1987, Lynne Cox swam from the US to the USSR.
In its "Doomsday" report, the United Nations climate-change panel offered a very clear analogy for the mobilization required to avert catastrophic warming: World War II, which President Franklin Roosevelt called a "challenge to life, liberty and civilization". That war was not waged on hope alone.
Have you ever participated in a parade not involving global warming, a war protest, or gay rights?
Selfishly, I always figured that even if global warming caused war, famine, and pestilence elsewhere, here in the Northeast there might be some upside.
