Next you’ll be telling me maps aren’t territories!
I like to think of non-denominational as the name of the denomination that other denominations want no part of.
-Tom
Of course the denomination isn’t the faith, but perhaps denominations are what happens when people take their faith seriously enough to disagree about it, and recognize that those disagreements matter.
Man, I really miss the -opses.
Don’t we all, Tom. Don’t we all.
Maybe, but I think it’s just as likely that people just like to think of themselves as part of a particular group. In some cases, I don’t think it even really matters what the group is “about”, they just want to be part of something. For some this facilitates some sense of shared responsibility for each other, and for others it’s about being able to segregate themselves from people who aren’t members of their club, creating a sense of worth and superiority over those non members.
Denominations are communities more than clubs, or even faiths. The Amish figured it out, once a group gets too big it becomes more and less than a community, so they split up and make a new one. You have a few denominations that might be the exception, like the snake handlers and whatnot for the seriously fringe, but by and large church serves the purpose in our modern overpopulated world that the town common used to serve.
I think the most unrealistic thing about the movie was that the “Republicans” had an epiphany when they saw that the meteor was truly real. We all know that would never happen in the real world. Republicans would be consumed by the final fireball thinking it was a Democratic trick.
A friend of ours recommended this movie and now my wife wants to watch it. I just gave a non-committal shrug, so I assume she’ll watch this on her own. I feel like I have no desire to see this – even less so after reading the comments in this thread. I mean, I know how shitty things are out there, I don’t feel the need to watch a movie about it, but with slightly overblown caricatures.
I read this opinion piece this morning. This guy sounds a bit dramatic.
How is he dramatic? It’s pretty much the way he describes it, and the movie being so on the nose about it and basically only stating the obvious without being particularly insightful or analytical is why it was a bit boring for me to watch it.
I agree with Menzo that the part about people changing their opinion once the the comet is visible to the naked eye is off.
Im pretty sure he’d point to your post as another example of how his warnings are downplayed or ignored.
We watched this the other night. The ending made me incredibly depressed. I think it hits too close to home.
He has a lot of links in that op-ed, so I followed a couple of them, and they were other op-eds by him in the Guardian. His solutions to climate change sound completely impractical to me. We’ve discussed here how fossil fuel companies love pushing the idea people personally aren’t willing to change their behavior, and therefore due to people’s personal failings, the problem is too difficult to solve. Well, apparently this guy pushes the same kind of thing, he wants everyone to voluntarily use less energy and change their lives. How is this a practical solution to climate change? And the actions he wants governments to take like completely stopping all fossil fuels including transition ones like natural gas immediately? How is that practical in any way for the governments whose green parties would promptly lose the next elections if they tried stuff like that? I mean, it’s fine if we lived in a world only ruled by autocrats and they all handed out decrees and changed policy everywhere, but we don’t live in that world. Anyway, so yeah, he sounds a bit dramatic. And that’s fine. It’s a terrible situation we’re in.
I don’t think he’s unreasonable.
In his other editorial (Forget plans to lower emissions by 2050 – this is deadly procrastination | Peter Kalmus | The Guardian), he says:
It will be easy to tell when society has begun this shift: leaders will begin to take actions that actually inflict pain on big oil, such as ending fossil fuel subsidies and placing a moratorium on all new oil and gas infrastructure.
and
Stabilizing the rapidly escalating destruction of the Earth will require directly scaling back and ultimately ending fossil fuels
so at least in the editorial I found, he wants to stop the development of new carbon infrastructure, not to immediately get rid of our current infrastructure. So that part seems rational.
And if the argument is “well, people won’t stand for that”, part of what his editorial is trying to do is to change the culture so that people will support such actions. I think he’s one of the good guys.
Not all of them did. At the end, it shows the “Patriot” need network talking about some random garbage instead of the meteor.
I agree, I very much took from the movie that it was trying to ape the climate change “debate” of the last three decades except with a short-fuse, no-doubt scenario to heighten the effect.
Flip side to @menzo , see: Vaccinated GOP leadership, it was actually spot on because the GOP leadership fought tooth and nail to do nothing while also preparing an escape route for themselves. I thought it nailed the pandering pretty well.
It was not random garbage; it was topless urgent care centers, an idea who’s time has truly come.
You know men are far less likely to go to doctors than women. I’m sure topless urgent care centers would help with that imbalance. Plus after the meteor strikes there is going to be a real need for urgent care centers.
I loved Mark Rylance in this. His “rant” on Leonardo DiCaprio was simultaneously stinging and loony.
The only joke I think I really laughed at was the bit where his character busts into the meeting room, and when DiCaprio asks if he can just do that, the answer he’s given is, “He’s a platinum-level donor. He has full clearance for everything.”
And also wrong! Unlike what the algorithm said about the President. Which of course was another ridiculous part of this movie.
Yep.
/ note to self: check movie section at QT3 for thread on movie before making the mistake of wasting 2 hours of your life you’ll never get back.