“Reality is easy. It's deception that's the hard work.” – Lauryn Hill
Among cue sports, snooker is widely believed to be the most demanding. With its massive table size, fast cloth, and tight pockets, the skill needed to play the game at the highest level is almost unfathomable to the average enthusiast. Wildly popular in the UK (and increasingly in China), snooker is accessible to all economic classes. Snooker clubs make for a popular after-work destination for laborers and professionals alike, and some of the game’s most celebrated players come from decidedly humble origins.
Last Saturday marked the beginning of the 2023 World Snooker Championship, a grueling 17-day competition currently being held at the historic Crucible Theatre in Sheffield. With an insistence on decorum, professionalism, and tradition, players and referees dress in formal attire, and ticket-holders watch the action in an unusually intimate setting, sitting mere feet from the tables in the notoriously cramped venue. This makes for an electric atmosphere as the tournament culminates in a best-of-35-frame final. Nobody flukes their way to this championship – merit, talent, and endurance produce a definitive and worthy winner.
This year’s tournament was disrupted during opening round play when two deranged individuals leapt from the stands to vandalize the snooker tables in protest. One was tackled by a referee before any damage was done, but the other managed to climb onto a table and release an unknown orange powder all over its surface, halting play for the evening. The two are members of Just Stop Oil, a radical environmental group convinced that the planet is on the cusp of an irreversible calamity. It has been responsible for a series of cultural disruptions, demanding the UK immediately cease all fossil fuel development. (The country accounts for a mere 1.1% of global carbon emissions.) An incensed Nigel Farage had this to say after the incident (emphasis added throughout):
“These people will stop at absolutely nothing to stop all normal life from going ahead, and we’ve got to think very hard about how we deal with this. Are we going to allow this small, slightly crazed minority, are we going to allow them to disrupt every aspect of our national life and our sporting life? I don’t know we can afford to. I think we are going to get much, much tougher.
In some cases, I can’t blame them, really. You see, they’ve been told from primary school all the way through that because of people driving 4x4s in Chelsea, the world is about to end. We have spread – among some of these young people – climate hysteria without any sense of balance whatsoever.”
We concur. The fallout of the indoctrination that has been spread throughout our media and educational system for years is that most of our youth take climate alarmism as an axiom, assume straightforward solutions exist, and blame all refusal to implement needed policy changes on a conspiracy of corruption.
For every Just Stop Oil protestor defacing a cherished cultural touchstone, there are thousands (millions?) more young adults in agreement with the movement’s definition of the solution: that we can run our entire economy on nothing more than renewable energy with little or no sacrifice to the current standard of living. Readers who follow us on Twitter will be familiar with our standard response to such ignorance.
You first.
Alas, pithy responses on dying social media platforms will only do so much, and while most sober thinkers have quietly assumed our political leaders will eventually pull us back from the energy brink, the time for such nonchalant intellectual buck-passing is quickly dwindling. What might “You first” look like? Let’s dig into a proposal for a decidedly overdue experiment to highlight the three Green Cons™ driving the delusion. Consider this the battle plan for deprogramming our youth.