If I hear the word green one more time...

Okay, it's ranting time.

Here's what's setting me off: I listen to talk radio at work. "Well THERE'S your problem!" No, not quite. The radio programs I listen to are excellent. It's the ads that I have a problem with. Take one from earthshare.org that I keep hearing. This was my rant to Ashley the other day:

Man, even on Rush's radio station, I get some of the most retarded ads. Pesticides are evil and will make your children retarded and asthmatic!" Yeah, and no pesticides will make their food twice as expensive, making me spend more on food and less on medicine and doctors. Yay for pesticides! Nuke the bugs, and club the seals! It sounds like some sweet grandma telling you super-uber-important advice about your kids. But it's really just some idiotic anti-pesticide rant.

I think that summarizes my feelings on that ad pretty well. Nuke the bugs, and club the seals! The simple truth is that pesticides have done way, way, WAY more to improve the human condition than any alleged harm they may have done. And they can STILL do plenty if we just grew a pair as a society and used DDT to combat malaria in Africa, for example.

Then, today, I hear an ad similar to this:

How can you choose between the eagle and the buffalo? Between the elephants and the whales? Between drinking clean water and breathing clean air? Between parks and beaches? How can you choose? Would there be a right choice? Now there’s a way to help not just one, but all these things. It’s called Earth Share of California – the world’s leading environmental and conservation charities working together.

The radio version is more detailed and annoying, since it has some low-voiced guy speaking way too slowly and with more dramatic pauses than William freaking Shatner, but I couldn't find a transcript for it. As soon as I first heard this ad, my internal fallacy alarm was just screaming "False Dichotomy! False Dichotomy!" I shall explain this to those of you that don't have an internal fallacy alarm. The idea is they are presenting a bunch of choices, suggesting you must either choose the eagle or the buffalo, when in fact there is no such choice. You can save them both. In fact, I would argue that they are probably just fine and don't need any more saving, since you can no longer hunt them. Then they proceed to say that now, because of their miraculous organization, you can finally choose both! Oh yay, that's so wonderful! Please liberate me of the immense guilt I feel as a member of the human race, destroyer of habitats, extincter of species, fouler of the atmosphere, raper of the entire planet and enemy to all righteousness! And then, on top of the logical fallacies, they announce that they are Earth Share, of California.

Three strikes, you're out. Environmentalism, logical fallacies, and California, all at once. You're not even worth the time it would take to destroy you and all your premises. Maybe I'll do it later.

But there's MORE! The other day, Ashley was doing some shopping, and saw a cute bag for $1, so she went for it. The person bagging was like, "So, you're starting to go green?" and bagged everything in the bag she had just purchased. Go green?! If I had been there, I would have been like, "No. Take those out. Bag them in plastic. And bag the bag in plastic. And then bag THOSE in paper. And then wrap them in a dead baby seal pelt, preferably one that has been illegally poached by a diesel fume-spewing death ship and flown around the world to get here." Ashley almost did herself. Going green?!? Seriously?!? You people... Not using plastic bags is not going to do one bit of good for the environment. Ever. No matter how long you do it and how many you get to participate. It won't do jack! In fact, you should be happy that we're using them. You see, plastic bags are made from natural gas. And if we're making shopping bags from natural gas, we're not burning it, and therefore the carbon is not released into the atmosphere and the planet is saved! But you people won't be happy until we're living in caves, eating nothing but pesticide-free fruits and vegetables, without so much as a spark to keep us warm. And then we'll have plant rights activists trying to get us to pick fruits more humanely...

Here's the kicker, the icing on the cake for me. Ashley's grandma and great-grandma were in town this weekend. One of the things her grandma wanted to do while here was help redecorate. I figure that's fine, as long as I don't have to decide which weird something looks cuter or anything. But she got my attention when I heard her talking to Ashley about energy efficient lightbulbs...

I came home from work Monday, and among other things there is a new floor lamp behind the couch. We definitely needed a floor lamp. But what did I see IN the lamp? CFL's?!? Plus a whole package of them on the couch?!? This shall not stand! I said, "What the heck are these Al Gore Sissy Bulbs doing in MY house?!?" That got a surprised look from grandma, that's for sure. Anyway, for a refresher on how I feel about those, check out an old post from 2008, entitled From My Cold, Dead Hands.

And I'm done.

Surgeon General's Warning: Mentioning the word "green" around David Merriman may be hazardous to your health.