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| Climate Change Zadigski zadigskiz (at) yahoo (dot) com Category: Edge Fiction
Author's Note: She was naked, tied wrist to ankle, with a rope around her waist suspending her in the air, while the inquisitors lashed her buttocks, "Did you write an article saying that all scientists who disagreed with global warming, should be given a Nuremberg type trial?" She screamed as the lash cracked across her bottom, "Yes, yes, I didn't know. I am sorry!" "Did you write articles claiming that honest scientists opposing global warming were just tools of the oil companies?" CRACK! "Yes, yes," she screamed, "please let me go, please!" "Did you write articles hounding the employers of scientists opposing global warming until they lost their jobs?" CRACK! "Yes, I am sorry. I didn't know!" "All right, let her go and take her back to the pens. And get another one!" said the inquisitor. All they gave her was a little blanket. That was not much protection against the intense cold. They threw her into a cell with a lot of other people. At least they could huddle together to try to keep warm. "Why are they doing this to us?" she cried. "It is because of their weird religious ideas. They have to make sure that the victims understands why they are doing the terrible things they are going to do." "But I thought all the scientists said that global warming was true." "No, that is just propaganda. Most of the scientists never believed in it. There was plenty of evidence that it wasn't true. But we thought that the worst that could happen is that we would clean up pollution. But then the government got into it, there were all these laws that people hated, the carbon offsets and the ration stamps. By the time it was clear that an ice age was returning, the government just couldn't say that global warming wasn't true. The people would have revolted. "And then the ice age came on faster than we had anticipated. Of course, all the crops failed and because we didn't prepare there is no food. So we are returning to cannibalism. And they are eating the proponents of global warming first." |
| Readers
Comments: |
| Alex:
alexbirch (at) blueyonder (dot) co (dot) uk I think the author is being a little hard on himself here, because there is no torture and cannibalism discussed in any gut wrenching detail just an observation at the end. It is in fact a straight forward, albeit harsh, spanking story with what happens later occurring well after the 500 words has expired. I think this writer is quite keen on his political messages, and in fact this is more of a political parable than a spanking story. It's not my favourite story in the contest but it's not as hard and edgy as the writer has indicated either. |
| Zoey:
zprymantis (at) smilingwithteeth (dot) com This had no spanko appeal to me at all. I am sorry, I just couldn't even follow it as a story, it seemed more like the author wanted to give a message and perhaps just writing a politically motivated essay and posting it to the newsgroup would have been the best way to get a long three month discussion going. (what I just wrote was suppose to be funny!) :-) Honestly though, just the words "global warming" have more spanko appeal to me than this story did. |
| CK:
CrimsnKid6 (at) aol (dot) com I don''t know where to begin discussing this story, so I'll just generally state that a story that includes false accounts of modern history should be set in an alternate reality. Some of the narrative's "past" events, given that the story is set in the future, are merely speculative but the part claiming that scientists were coerced into claiming to believe in global warming is just point-blank false. (Actually, the current administration paid numerous supposed "scientists" to write articles attempting to publicly discredit the concept of global warming even as the overwhelming majority of actual scientists were coming to believe in it.) This story reflects an excellent example of what happens when the scientific method is tossed aside on ideological, partisan and/or theological grounds, although it's demonstrated not through the actual plotline but rather in the way the author has made scientific fact subservient to his own political beliefs–ironically the exact same thing that the people shown being punished in this story supposedly did in promoting public awareness of the need to deal with global warming. (If this were intentional by the author–which I see no evidence of however–it would be quite a clever double-edged self-parody.) The term "Nuremberg type trial" is seemingly used here to indicate some sort of "kangaroo court," but whatever the legal weaknesses of the postwar Nuremberg trials (1945-46) most of those being tried were clearly guilty of very serious crimes and were hardly facing punishment just becauses of having unpopular personal beliefs. Finally, who writes a spanking story about climate change without using the obvious (albeit possibly a bit corny) play on words suggested by the term "global warming"? |
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Domino: domino at Domin-o (dot) org (dot) uk After all, if the ice age had descended and the old wrong-thinking government had been deposed, why would our nameless female victim not know why she had been imprisoned? This was an interesting future history concept which suffered in its implementation. |