Who better than a finger-wagging teen bereft of accomplishment, or any comprehension of basic economics or history, to be Time magazine’s Person of the Year in 2019?
Greta Thunberg’s canonization is a perfect expression of media activism in a deeply unserious time.
Has there ever been a less consequential person picked to be Person of the Year? I doubt it. I mean, Wallis Simpson, 1936’s Person of the Year, got King Edward VIII to abdicate the throne. Thunberg can’t even get you to abdicate your air-conditioning.
These days we celebrate vacuous fire and brimstone. “Greta Thunberg” — the idea, not the girl — is the concoction of activists who have increasingly taken to using children as a shield from critical analysis or debate.
She’s the vessel of the environmentalist’s fraudulent apocalypticism-as-argument. Her style is emotion and indignation, histrionics and fantasy. She is a teenager, after all.
How dare you attack a poor defenseless child who suffers from Asperger syndrome!
You’ll notice that, on one hand, Thunberg’s champions demand that the world take her Malthusian crusade seriously, and on the other, they feign indignation when you actually do.
The argument that young people, because they will inherit the future, are also best equipped to comprehend it is as puerile as any of Greta’s positions.
Perhaps a better question is, What kind of parents, editors, producers, or U.N. officials would thrust a vulnerable child with Asperger, no less, into a complex and contentious debate? I have great sympathy for her. It’s her ideological handlers who have stolen her childhood.
Surely we should be allowed to consider the positions of Time magazine’s 2019 Person of the Year?
Because the problem with Greta Thunberg — the idea, not the girl — is that she proposes not only that the people of her native Sweden abandon modernity but that billions of people in Asia and Africa remain in destitution as well.
Greta, unlike many of her ideological allies, does not hide the truth of modern environmentalism. She believes that wealth and economic growth — modernity — are the problem.
Shamefully, radical environmentalists have convinced Greta and millions of others that the world is on the precipice of “mass extinction.”
Even poor Prince Harry struggles to get out his Kensington Palace bed and start the day, so crushed is he by the weight of “eco-anxiety.” (You know, I have some ideas on how he might be able to lower his carbon footprint.)
Like Joan of Arc, as Greta’s mother tells it, she experienced her first vision in her early teens, going months without eating properly.
Greta, her heart rate and blood pressure indicating starvation, stopped talking to anyone but her parents and younger sister.
Rather than helping Greta overcome this irrational dread, her parents sacrificed her childhood to Gaia.
Now, Greta is a child warrior, unrestrained by fact or reason, the human embodiment of years of fearmongering — in our schools, in culture, in our news — over progress, technology, and wealth.
Greta is merely repeating “unassailable science,” Time claims. “Oceans will rise. Cities will flood. Millions of people will suffer.”
The unassailable truth is that climate deaths have plummeted dramatically and billions of people have been lifted from abject poverty by the system that Greta assails.
There is no “unassailable science” that tells us how the future looks: what technologies humans will devise, how they will adapt.
One imagines a magazine such as Time, which once published pieces about now-discredited predictions of a “population bomb” and global cooling, might understand that the future is always more complicated than we imagine.
And, as I’ve noted elsewhere, the reality is that Thunberg was bequeathed the healthiest, wealthiest, safest, and most peaceful world that humans have ever known.
She is one of the luckiest people ever to have lived. And unlike most of her ancestors, she can continue to be a professional activist her entire life, thanks to market economies and emerging technological advances.
In a just world, she would be sailing her high-tech, multimillion-dollar ocean-racing yacht and crew to the United Nations to thank the United States for helping to create this uniquely wonderful circumstance.
In a just world, she would be in school with her friends and teachers.
It’s been years, of course, since Time, or the magazine’s Person of the Year, mattered very much. The truth, though, is that Time did an admirable job of mapping out consequential people of the 20th century.
Looking back now, I see a list populated by the men and women, nefarious and heroic, who helped shape the modern world.
Sadly, Time has come a long way from “The Hungarian Freedom Fighter,” its choice for Man of the Year in 1957.
If we Americans lived in a more serious time, the Hong Kong freedom fighter, the men and women who risk their lives for liberty, would be Time’s Person of the Year.
We don’t.
Read more at National Review
Vogue magazine’s “Climate Runaway Model” for 2020 ?
Not surprised that that liberal rag Time would make her their Person of the Year back a few years ago this same liberal rag called the radical enviromentalists Paul Watson founder of the extremists Sea Shepard’s as a HERO OF THE PLANET not bothering to tell anyone he once said INSTEAD OF THE IDEA OF GOING OUT AND SHOOTING BIRDS I WOULD GO OUT AND SHOOT THE KIDS THAT SHOOT BIRDS
Time magazine’s Person of the Year has about as much credibility as the “Nobel peace prize” going to Obama. The left live in an alternative universe where good is bad and bad is good, poor dopes. Still I wonder about the whole basis of climate change being over plant food and why it was chosen… weird really, especially when food production is up and up year after year. Then there is the greening of the planet, one would think that would count but no, I wonder what really does count? Power, money?
Carbon dioxide is perfect for the anti-capitalist, anti-West, anti-humanity Left and its assorted hangers-on, because it can be blamed for everything. Everything they don’t like can be blamed for emitting CO2 and thus destroying the planet. Industry, travel, transport of goods, private car ownership, air travel, petrochemicals, plastic, even eating meat, you name it, all their favourite bogeymen can be blamed for destroying the planet and so have to be taxed/controlled/banned. “Climate change” gives these loonies the best chance they’ll ever get to try to make us conform to how they think we should live.
‘Money’ as root of all evil has been replaced by ‘Fire’. Fire makes carbon dioxide. People won’t give up their love of money, but very few realize their dependence on fire. It’s under their car hood, it’s at the other end of their power lines. They get on an airliner and never see the fire that gets them to their destination. They plug in their Tesla and believe that they’re divorced from fire.
It’s the same for their food supply.
Modern society has been willingly blinkered from its underpinnings. They don’t want to know.
I seem to recall reading that a certain Herr A. Hitler was Time Magazine “Man of the Year” in the 1930″s. There was a very significant number of Americans who were impressed with the economic recovery of Germany after Adolf became Chancellor.