There’s a men’s room at my campus that’s undergone several renovations. One of the things they do from time to time is replace the hand-drying mechanisms.
First they had a hot-air dryer of the “press button, receive bacon” variety. It was immediately vandalized with graffiti to the effect of “Hydro dams flood valleys and kill fish”. (We have a lot of hydroelectric power here in BC.) Well, okay. You don’t like hot-air dryers; we get it. And admittedly turning electricity into heat is not the least inefficient of processes.
So as part of the next renovation, they replaced the bacon machine with a paper-towel dispenser. You can imagine how that went: “Waste paper overruns landfills and paper mills pollute rivers.” So the paper towels were on their way out.
By this point, some of the faculty and staff had been carrying their own towels to the men’s room. Seems reasonable, right? So the poor Facilities folks replaced the paper-towel dispenser with a continuous-roll cloth towel dispenser. No electricity, no waste — finally, the will of the people had spoken!
Lol n00b. “Washing detergent runoff kills fish and destroys rivers.” Unbefuckinglievable. During the middle of the H1N1 scare, the goddamn hippies want you to quit washing your hands.
Brian Dunbar has a similar complaint, this time about the MA wind farm that Ted Kennedy tried to kill:
- A view not spoiled (Space For Commerce)
He concludes:
This is people who want teevee, ipods, cheap electricity in a never-was 18th century New England Shangri-La.
It’s also people who, by complaining about fucking near everything they see, attempt to achieve some measure of significance without all that hard work and stuff their parents yammered on about. We should club them like seals and burn their tallow in our powerplants.
Blunt Object 
“We should club them like seals and burn their tallow in our powerplants.”
If only. In the decades before dog training I worked as a consultant to big companies on environmental issues. The most stressful and distasteful part of my job was not the day my co-workers and I had to collect samples from a pond holding liquid wastes from a slaughterhouse or the weeks we spent collecting data at a site filled with unexploded buried ordinance. It was the time I had to spend at public meetings of various types defending the decision trees we had used to choose the location for a new landfill or powerplant.
The FUAH-based system the NIMBYs and BANANAs accused us of using would have been a much simpler algorithm than the years of hoop-jumping studies and engineering calculations we (apparently) wasted our time on.
If we had been allowed to implement the FUAH system, we could have achieved the kind of deliciously appropriate environmental justice symbolized by surrounding the Kennedy compound with wind turbines and putting a coal plant in Al Gore’s backyard.
We should club them like seals …
That’s a lot of work. Be a lot easier to round them up and stuff them into Coventry where they can live a noble life free of the ravages of modern technology.
You know what they say — do something you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.
Or think of it as a way to combat the National Obesity Epidemic(tm). We’d be bending the cost curve!
Fucking Luddites? Well, clearly, you’d have to do it without mechanical equipment.
Don’t forget to wear a rubber — genital dumbworm infestation sounds utterly horrifying.
“genital dumbworm infestation”
&%#$@ – I just blew a perfectly good shiraz out my nose
Did anyone ever put up a sign to the effect of, “OK Smart Guy, you tell us the best way to dry our hands without using our pants.”?
Even better.
“We should club them like seals and burn their tallow in our power plants.”
I know that Greens oft refer to human beings as diseases or vermin–and mean it, unlike this exaggeration for comedic effect. But given the unpopularity of prior governments which have attempted mass clubbings and tallow burnings of human beings, perhaps luddites can be gathered on a technology-free reservation, as in Brave New World or “The Village.”