ArcaMax

PARIS — That’s it, I’m starting a new human rights movement: the Cryophilic Freedom Front. Because rampant discrimination across Europe against cryophilic people — defined as those who are physically incapable of tolerating extreme heat — has no place in polite European society. Yet not only does the establishment turn a blind eye to this toxicity, but it actively encourages it through its own policy and rhetoric.

I’ve just landed back in Paris and am surrounded by people who look like they’ve spent the last several days with their fingers stuck in a live power outlet as a record heatwave reaching above 40 degrees Celsius (104°F) finally subsides. No one enjoys this, and most suffer from it, yet far too many feel compelled to endure it because European society pressures them to do so.

There’s zero accommodation for any diversity of thermal tolerance. The law in some countries like France prohibit even your own home from serving as your safe space, with the overwhelming regulations and time delays required to install the most effective air-cooling units under the pretext that part of them may be visible from outside.

To find a safe space, you apparently have to work for the European Commission in Brussels, in a position high-ranking enough to warrant your floor’s air conditioning being left on. One of the staffers called it “feudalism,” referring to the social system of medieval Europe consisting of rulers and serfs. Great look for the seat of European democracy.

I’ve personally learned to give Paris a wide berth at the end of June every year. The challenge of trying to escape the anti-cold bigotry propagated by European establishment elites is too much to bear without completely leaving the country. I’m back now, but I’m already giving considerable thought to where I’ll be traveling if the mercury overwhelms my two portable air conditioners. Their existence had to be vigorously defended from a mob of angry Boomers in my building who insisted that my cryodiverse needs were entirely their business and randomly showed up at my door or cornered me in the lobby to harass me over it.

The costs for European thermal refugees seeking to flee to unaffected parts of the continent are astronomical. Despite low-cost flights to places like Finland or Norway, hotel prices are prohibitive in the summertime. Moscow seems like a good option, with summer temperatures that rarely get above 25°C (77°F). There’s the minor detail of Ukrainian drones occasionally bombing the city nowadays, but at least Russians have cryofreedom — unlike Europeans.

None of this would even be necessary though if far too many Europeans didn’t feel compelled to denounce their neighbors as immoral heathens who require things like thermal comfort and not fainting on the metro or in their local gym. But heaven forbid that even a single person in that same gym complain that they’re cold while scrolling on their phone on the bench press machine. The minute they do, everyone in the entire cardio zone has to suffer from the heat being cranked up.

Like all bigots, they’re painfully uneducated. Their reasons for their views are various. They include the belief that air conditioning is bad for you because it’s “artificial” and can make you sick or give you a sore neck — unlike a draft created by the wind that’s “natural.” Or that you can suffer “thermal shock” if the temperature difference is too great between inside and outside — but only in the summer and not when they blast the heat all winter. They also lecture you about how bad your air conditioning is for the environment, despite it running on electricity which, in France, comes from decarbonized nuclear power so plentiful that it’s one of the world’s top net exporters of it. Unlike their more polluting but beloved gas heating that they refuse to abandon.

Almost all of this backward thinking comes from establishment propaganda focused on reducing the use of Europe’s limited natural resources — a situation that they’ve managed over the years by voluntarily reducing their own access and abundance to those resources even further. Or by banking on the sun and wind to power their economies — a situation that’s resulted in Germany powering back up its coal plants while the government tries to convince Germans that air conditioners only really end up making rooms hotter by creating a negative pressure vacuum that sucks in more hot air. Apparently, if you feel cool in an air-conditioned environment, the gaslighting German government says that you’re imagining it.

The French Minister of Ecological Transition and Biodiversity, Monique Barbut, flipped out on French TV. “I’m horrified by those who tell me that you just need to put air conditioning everywhere,” because that won’t stop climate change.

Nor have all your efforts so far, apparently, since by your own admission things just keep getting worse. Why is top polluter China being spared from headline-level heatwaves?

The notion that air conditioning would render society too comfortable to promote their useless climate agenda is the toxic attitude driving the left’s obsession with air-conditioning policing.

Meanwhile, the debate around any potentially allowable tolerance for cryothermic people is strictly limited to the most extreme cases. They’re willing to entertain the idea that perhaps hospital patients shouldn’t be forced to endure searing heat, but many still feel that public transit workers shouldn’t be included — despite at least one passing out and plowing his bus into a tree near Paris since the temperature inside was equivalent to being in a sauna about a mile from the sun.

Any action seems to be little more than lip service. The French government has been collecting a day’s salary from French workers every year since the heatwave of 2003 that killed senior citizens in care homes to outfit them with air conditioning. Where did that money go if we’re still getting news stories about them living in infernos?

Air conditioning isn’t ideological. It’s just a tool. One that’s non-negotiable for the thermally diverse. The Cryophilic Freedom Front is a movement that welcomes everyone, even thermophilic allies. Because thermic choice is a basic human right, and Europe needs to get its head out of both its behind and the Stone Age.