An Inconvenient DVD

T

Teabag

Guest
I went into my local video/dvd hire shop yesterday. I was scanning the shelves for something good to watch when I noticed there was only one copy of "An Inconvenient Truth". There was only copy - I checked.
However, just down the shelf were 7 copies of "Snakes on a Plane" (with 3 already rented behind the counter).
I thought to myself - Are we losing perspective here ?
Isn't Al Gore's movie a must-see ?!
People are aware of the global warming threat but do they realise the significance of it yet ? Will it ever sink in before its too late ?
Democratic politicians dont really care cos they only care about 4/5 years in advance.

It saddened me so I went straight up to the counter and demanded to know why there was only one copy of "Final Destination 3" !!
 
...especially from a geezer who once claimed during an election campaign to have created the internet!
 
Before this turns into a Republican love-in, Al Gore did not claim to invent the internet. The Republicans said he did, in order to discredit him.
His original comments, his original actions together with the spin put on it are available here:
http://sethf.com/gore/
 
He was vice-president of the USA for 8 years; that was his opportunity to do something about reducing CO2 emissions
 

Did you read the article you linked to? The transcript in the first paragraph pretty much undermines totally what you are saying. Here's a Gore quote from it:

But it will emerge from my dialogue with the American people. I've traveled to every part of this country during the last six years. During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.
Click to expand...

which is exactly what I said...
.... a geezer who once claimed during an election campaign to have created the internet!
Click to expand...

Btw, dunno how that makes me a Republican??
 

Yes we are losing perspective. I think it should be a must see but unfortunately all most people care about is their pay check at the end of the week.
And due to the long hours they dont have time to read up about stuff like this. Damn Celtic Tiger.
Politicians hardly ever care. They usually only worry about being in power and doing as little as possible to stay there.
 
Superman said:
Read the rest of the article.
Click to expand...

In fact, I did read the rest of the article, the main point of which seems to be that Gore didn't claim to have "invented" the internet, he merely claimed to have "created" it. Frankly I don't see the difference.
 
"he merely claimed to have "created" it. Frankly I don't see the difference"

Oh no he didn't. The actual words used by Gore appear to have been

"I took the initiative in creating the Internet. "

In all fairness this - though undoubtedly putting the best possible spin on whatever it is that Gore actually did - just does not mean
"I created the Internet".

Nor does it mean

"I was the only\main person who took the initative....."

I assume the comment was made in the context of comparing himself to other politicians. Presumable he feels he took action where others did not. What was that action? I have no idea, but perhaps he helped pass laws which allowed the internet as it now is to come into being. Perhaps he stopped laws being passed which would have hindered the development of the Internet. Maybe he did something to assist the rollout of broadband. Who knows? (or cares) The political sin (if he comitted it) of taking undue credit is on a wholly lower scale (in my opinion) than that of pouncing on his words, distorting them and mounting a smear campaign (for that is what it was) based not on the actual words but on that distortion.

There is these days a nasty and fundamentally dishonest political climate where politicians' words are frequently distorted (or just plain misquoted) by others for political ends. The US Republicans seem to be particularly adept at this; but our own politicians are no slouches either (see exchange between Rabbitte and McDowell in Dail reported in todays Times)
 
Problem is, if Gore is so careless about his choice of words that he (perhaps inadvertently) exaggerates his role in "creating" the internet (something for which Bill Gates, for example, would have been excorciated had he said the same thing, imho) it makes one wonder if he is capable of similarly exaggerating the global warming phenomenon in his movie?
 
Have you read any of the other side of this argument? There are a number of serious scientists who dispute the impact of humans on global warming. I'm not saying they're right, but I do object to the way that they are dismissed as a bunch of cranks. This issue gets very one-sided coverage in the media.
 
On the internet controversy, here is what Gore did:

Both as a Senator and Vice-President, Al Gore has been involved in the mainstreaming of the Internet since the 1970s (see Campbell-Kelly and Aspray, Computer: A History of the Information Machine, 1996:298). This involvement led to legislation during the late 1980s known informally as the 'Gore Bill'.[3] It was passed, however, as the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991 [4] on December 9 1991 and led to the NII or National Information Infrastructure [5] which Gore referred to as the Information superhighway.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_controversies

http://www.snopes.com/quotes/internet.asp

http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue5_10/wiggins/
 
He's a statistican not a climatologist. What the Global warming Deniers crave is a heavyweight from the climatology sciences to weigh in on their side. Apparently they're prepared to pay for it.
There are plenty of people who are sceptical about global warming, many of them academics. But there are very few serious climatologist who do not subscribe to the theory that human activity is changing our climate.
 
Hmmmm.

Good to see we are not losing perspective at all.

So there is no global warming and Gore did not invent the internet...
 
And as the original poster says there is only one copy of Final Destination 3 in his local store!

Besides - who here said that there was no global warming?
 
What worries me more is:
a) A film with a premis like “Snake on a Plane” ever got to production and
b) People went to see it.
If the human race is that stupid how can they be expected to worry about global warming?
 
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