He's ascribing intent to the planet, which in my opinion is not a conscious being, though some people believe that it is.

I don't think we need to hedge this statement outside of an explicitly religious conversation.

The idea that the planet (Earth) is capable of having intent and performing self defense is absurd, that is the joke.

Absurd to who? There is a long history across many religions of attributing natural disasters to karmic divine wrath. You yourself acknowledge that some people think the planet is a conscious being.

Ecofascists want to kill people.

The first step to doing something is getting people to be okay with it when it happens.

Comedy is the absurd and unexpected.

Then echoing a common and sincere sentiment of first world Malthusians isn't very good comedy, is it?

people that think jokes need to be truth

Jokes need to be in some way distinguishable from actual common reactionary sentiment.

You posted the same comment when I posted this same thread 4 years ago

Okay, and? Am I still under some moratorium I was unaware of?

To be fair given that there were five or so previous mass extinction events before this one something else would have eventually come to take us out even if apes never learned how to use tools.

This is the moment where we either consciously take up the reins of the planet to harmoniously guide and protect it's development or we will unconsciously kill ourselves. Literal do or die shit

Stopping our own self inflicted mass extinction event is just the tutorial mission before we face many more dangerous terrestrial extinction events

Misanthropy and ecofsscism are different things.

Good point, some misanthropes just wind up celebrating school shootings on 8chan

Orca's sinking boats, wolves eating ranchers, beavers flooding a housing development, those sound awesome to me and I've seen plenty of people celebrating such things on here.

The difference in basically every one of those cases is the perception of nature attacking the rich and powerful or directly fighting back against abusers (there are also stories about elephants that I've seen come up once or twice for that reason). That is not the same as killing "humans" in a generalized sense as a form of collective reprisal or whatever.

Nobody here was celebrating the climate change-induced glacier collapse that killed hundreds in Tibet.

First part. Not the second. He was saying that framing it like you're saving the planet when really we're trying to save ourselves comes off as arrogant. The vast majority of George Carlin jokes are about semantics

Isn't George Carlin the guy that said "the planet is doing fine, the people are fucked"

The joke was able how "saving the planet" was self-aggrandizing bullshit from people who are obviously more concerned about saving themselves or saving humanity rather than saving the planet. If there was a choice between saving humanity or saving the planet minus humans, of course most people would elect to save humanity over the planet. To think otherwise just makes you some ecofascist.

He did say the first part. It's very annoying how it smugly dismisses the point while also completely misunderstanding it.

Dunno about the second.