Big Sky Cairn

To most native Montanans, the name Ted Turner is a four letter word. A reminder of the Moorish invasion by wealthy non-natives whose hunger for land can only be sated by expanding their holdings to gargantuan proportions.

Turner also draws the ire of many for his increasingly bone headed comments, like the time he exclaimed during a public speech that Christianity was “a religion of losers” shortly before divorcing his wife because she had found religion. But while I have come to expect insensitive and crass remarks from the CNN founder, a recent interview with PBS host Charlie Rose has given me new reason to deplore the man.

Interviewed Tuesday, CNN founder Ted Turner argued that inaction on global warming “will be catastrophic” and those who don’t die “will be cannibals.” He also applied moral equivalence in describing Iraqi insurgents as “patriots” who simply “don’t like us because we’ve invaded their country” and so “if the Iraqis were in Washington, D.C., we’d be doing the same thing.” On not taking drastic action to correct global warming:

Not doing it will be catastrophic. We’ll be eight degrees hottest in ten, not ten but 30 or 40 years and basically none of the crops will grow. Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals.

Turner ridiculed the need for a big U.S. military, insisting “China just wants to sell us shoes. They’re not building landing craft to attack the United States,” and “even with our $500 billion military budget, we can’t win in Iraq. We’re being beaten by insurgents who don’t even have any tanks.” After Rose pointed out the Iraqi insurgents “have a lot of roadside bombs that kill a lot of Americans” and wondered “where do you think they come from?”, Turner answered:

I think that they’re patriots and that they don’t like us because we’ve invaded their country and occupied it. I think if the Iraqis were in Washington, D.C., we’d be doing the same thing: we’d be bombing them too. Nobody wants to be invaded.

If Turner is right and global warming is a terrible scourge, and if I am one of the handful left standing after the apocalypse, I’ll vote that we eat Ted first. For the good of humanity, of course.

Hmm. It’s my understanding that Jane dumped Ted. And frankly, I pretty agree with most of what you’ve quoted from him.

But to each their own ….

[…] thinking when someone claims that global climate change will lead to planetary extinction or human cannibalism? Where is the critical thinking when the same rhetorical devices that were used in the 1970s are […]