And bring back New Coke!!! Of all of the recent mostly pointless wingnuttery, the lightbulb fixation has been the most amusing/bemusing.
What makes the lightbulb thing the bestest of current wingnut obsessions is that it's a perfect summation of what makes up the modern wingnut. Should you need to craft a future panic to gin up a bunch of wingnuts, I suggest carefully studying this list, because it's a pretty great blueprint.
1) Bullshit. This is one of the most important aspects. For some reason, they can't get quite as whipped up over something that's true. In some cases, that's beause reality is boring, but clearly that doesn't explain all of it, because even if their claim was true---that the government is banning incandescent light bulbs---that would still be roughly the stupidest thing to get upset about, possibly ever. No, I believe they get more excited over lies than the truth is that believing something that's not true makes them feel like they're in a secret, special club. That other people disagree with them because of our tedious adherence to facts and reality increases their sense of specialness. It also helps feed their sense of victimization. They're oppressed by the facts and all those stupid liberal fascists who insist on them. Because of all this, bullshit is way more interesting to the average wingnut than facts.
2) Pettiness. What's weird is that even if it were true, and the entire country was being forced to move to CFLs for daily use, the rational response would be, "So what?" The wailing from wingnuts on this is that CFLs are "ugly", but what's interesting about this is that they're really not. I have nothing but CFLs in my house, and they work great. You could probably even do some empirical research showing that your ordinary American can't tell the difference between a new incandescent and new CFL. They flicker a bit more when being turned on, and that's it. Small price to pay to reduce our nation's energy usage and forstall global warming, right? But pettiness is where wingnuts find their home. They love turning a molehill into a mountain, because that means that every time they flip on a light, they can burn with rage at the evil liberals who are controlling their lives through light bulbs.
3) Selfishness. They really do find it mildly arousing to say, "Screw the planet, I like my light bulbs the way they are." Sure, they rationalize this by pretending not to believe in global warming, but feigned disbelief is just an extension of the larger selfishness problem.
4) Near-psychotic fear of change. They like the world the way it is, and any change is taken as a personal affront, no matter how inconsequential to their personal comfort.
5) Paranoia. This goes back to pettiness. They love to sweat the small stuff, because it makes the grand conspiracy of liberal fascism they believe in seem omnipresent. This is why wingnuts in the past got so attached to fears about fluoride in the drinking water, and now are crapping their pants over fears of mandatory CFLs. They like to feel that the Illlumnati even have their fingers in how you light a room.
But most importantly of all:
6) It pisses off the liberals. It honestly should. This petty, selfish, idiotic, childish, paranoid behavior should piss off anyone with an ounce of decency. But what's funny is that they've been crying wolf so long that it fails to anger anymore, and instead causes mockery. I mean, they're willing to act like paranoid idiots just to get a rise out of us. Don't they have anything better to do with their time? Get a hobby, like replacing all your incandescent light bulbs with CFLs, and then starting a photoblog showing how nice the light is. But Wingnut America is so committed to the "pissing off the liberals" mentality that they'll try to pretend the peals of laughter aimed in their direction are wails of anger. It's sad, really.
Media Matters has a report on the newest lie machine faux scandal being pumped by Fox News: the claim that the Department of Education is using Sponge Bob Squarepants to tell kids about global warming without telling them that it's "controversial", which is a little like being mad that the school teachers are telling kids that two plus two equals four when some cranks in a basement say it actually equals five. I'm really unsure how you would even introduce the "controversy" to the age group that likes Sponge Bob. How do you convey that there's scientific consensus on an issue, but that there's also a media-manufactured controversy fueled by people who present themselves like experts, but who aren't actually experts? What Fox News is suggesting, of course, is that we don't do that but just instead lie to kids the way they lie to you.
And what's interesting is that this sort of thing might have traction. The underlying assumption here is that parents have a right to have everyone else conspire to keep information from their children that could, once absorbed by the children, make them realize that for all their parents' blather about "family values", they literally care so little for their children's future that they're willing to destroy the planet they leave to their children just so they can air condition buildings to sweater temperatures and drive oversized status symbol cars. And a lot of people buy that assumption! In fact, one of the sacrosanct values of American culture is our belief that children are basically ciphers for parental egos, and parents have an overriding right to feed their kids all sorts of bullshit and even, at times, withhold necessary medical care because they've got some kind of quirky religious or New Age belief that their magic is better for them. I think a lot of people would really get mad if you said that parents actually shouldn't have a right, for instance, to tell their kid whatever political lies they want and then proceed to shield them from facts.
Which isn't to say I'm against the notion that parents should have control over their children. But I construe that as a responsibility, not a right. Children are just people who haven't really had a lot of experience dealing with the negative consequences of poor choices, and so parents are there to force them to make better choices until they grow up and accumulate enough experience that they can start making their own mistakes, and then some time around 30, they finally grow up. But people have taken what should be a responsibility---making your kid do their homework, making them go to the doctor, making them eat their vegetables---and have determined that this level of control is actually a right. A right to shape your child in your own ego-driven image, which we as a country euphemize with terms like "teaching values". But a lot of the time you aren't actually teaching a kid values! A lot of the "values" that get taught are not values at all, as evidenced by Fox News calling parent rights on teaching kids to squander our limited resources on the only planet we've got.
Not sure how to resolve this problem, since we have to give parents power over their children, and power is known to corrupt. But I do somehow think that Facebook encouraging more sonogram pictures with the "Expected: Child" option isn't making things any better.
Newest Bitch Magazine landed on my doorstep the other day, and while most of it is just great as usual, I have to take issue with one half-page article called "Vicious Cycle: The Irresponsible Aesthetic of Bike Chic", by Kati Nolfi. I should have known from the title that I was going to be annoyed. Just the conflation of "irresponsible" with "aesthetic" or "chic" should have set off alarm bells. But man, was this article some grim stuff. The villain? Photo shoots in magazines that show young women riding bikes wearing, brace yourself, fashionable clothes and looking like they may be running simple errands.
Clearly, this cannot stand. If bikes become chic instead of the province of those who congratulate themselves on sacrificing pleasure, convenience, and good looks for the environment, then what will become of the self-congratulators? Won't they just have to push themselves into further sacrifices to demonstrate moral superiority to the slaves of ballet flat fashion?
If you think I'm kidding, some quotes:
Street fashion bike photos commodify women as frivolous fashion hounds and seem to go out of their way to find helmetless women in pee-toe heels. They don't address the street harassment bikers get and the trouble that bike-inappropriate attire can cause.
I'm just going to pause for a moment to point out that Nolfi, in her eagerness to shame the fashionable perched on bicycles, veered right into victim-blaming. The only way you can believe that showing a woman in a shirt with peep-toe heels on a bicycle is somehow implicated in street harassment is if you blame the victims for what they wear and not the perpetrators for harassment. To be clear, women get harassed in all sorts of clothing, and no one should have her clothes examined for being "inappropriate" in an effort to curtail street harassment.
But the idea that young, thin, and usually white women are emblems of environmentalism and urban savvy is kind of laughable if you look closer at the photos---can these ladies really be expected to rid farther than the nearest coffee roastery in their impractical outfits, and on bikes groaning with handbags and bouquests of fresh cut flowers?
The problem with this criticism isn't that she's demanding more diversity in pictures of commuter bicyclists, even though the list of race-and-body-size words might be a distraction. Diversity is an addition-based approach, where we say that we need more pictures of more people. She just want an elimination of this particular kind of picture, on the grounds that it's not real somehow. Well, first of all, duh. Fashion photography never is completely real, but evocative. But her implication that there's something fucked up about a young, white woman using her bike for short trips and shopping makes no sense at all. When I lived in Austin, my bike was my primary mode of transportation. And yes, it was often used for carrying bags and flowers and I wore street clothes instead of strapping on my spandex and sneakers. That's the point---it's a commuter bike. The idea is that if you want to go to the coffee shop or the grocery store, you take your bike and not the car.
My feeling is that diversity isn't achieved by eliminating but adding. More pictures of more people is the solution, not eliminating the pictures we already have.
It's easy to forget that photos of women in full skirts perched precariously on bikes, sans head protection, in traffic are real, and these images belittle the dangers that bikers enounter and the real aesthetic decisions that cyclists make to mitigate them: rolling up pant legs, tucking in shoelaces and scarf ends, wearing shorts or opaque tights under skirts to avoid flashing, eschweing anything flowing or flared. Sartorial distractions can compromise the freedom and fun of biking, but they're a necessary compromise.
Also, please avoid moving your hips too much. Not everyone is feeling sexy right this minute, and you're a distraction.
Seriously, that's some depressing stuff. While I appreciate that feeling sacrificial and self-righteous can attract some people to healthier choices, I really do think it's limited. Certainly Nolfi's implication---that the only way to promote certain behaviors is to show them as grim and sometimes nightmarishly sad sacrifices made for the salvation of the planet---is going to have extremely limited appeal. I, for instance, had mainly been exposed to the idea that having a commuter bike in the city was serious business and out of the reach of someone who did things like went to clubs or coffee shops, but was solely the province of hippies who don't mind going around wearing nothing but jean shorts and T-shirts with sneakers. It was only after visiting Amsterdam and being exposed to a culture wear, heaven forfend, people use bikes to just get around like you would a car that I started to think that maybe bicycle commuting was for me. Knowing you can wear jeans or a skirt and still ride a bike changed everything. I took my bike to all sorts of places that are just so unserious! I took it to clubs, to the movies, and yes, to the coffee shop. I even....wait for it...used it to transport flowering plants.
The notion that a fashion shoot is going to keep women from tucking their skirts or tying their shoes is frankly insulting, by the way. It doesn't take much practice on the bicyle to learn that a flowing skirt should be tucked up under your butt and flared jean hems should be folded. If you actually hang out by the bike rack at a coffee shop or rock club and watch the hipsters park their bikes, you'll see how swift and practiced they get at hopping off, untucking their pants legs, straightening their skirts, and adjusting their bags before entering the establishment they came to. The notion that portraying bicycling as compatible with fun and fashion is somehow irresponsible implies that because people--especially women---like to look good, they are stupid. I disagree strongly. We should not start from the assumption that women especially are braindead and call that "feminism".
Demanding that pictures of bicycling show it as a serious, fun-free event that is too dangerous for ordinary people with "frivolous" desires doesn't do much except bolster the egos of the few people that this approach suits. The result is that people whose lives incorporate things like looking good and going to coffee shops are going to struggle to see how bicycling could work for them.
Take, for instance, what happened at Good when they challenged the folks that work there to stop driving so much. A number of people swore they would start bike commuting, but no one did. I'm not surprised; to hear some people talk, making the switch requires reworking your life in ways that start to seem unmanageable. If you start from the assumption that bikes are incompatible with running errands or your wardrobe as it currently stands, you won't get on a bike. You'll get up and think, "Well, I can't wear spandex to work, and oh yeah, I have to stop by the store on the way home." Even though fashion shoots with bikes are a bit unrealistic, I think overall the message---that biking can be part of everyday life---is a big plus and should be embraced.
Looks like the wingnuts have taken hold of New Mexico. Here’s the new head of the state’s Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department on Alex Jones’ show, ranting about how environmentalists are just undercover communists conspiring to create false alarm over the environment.
New Mexico is one of the most beautiful states in the country, but the leadership now will happily wipe their asses with it to show the imaginary commies in their minds who’s boss. That’s where we’re at as a country. What’s scary, too, is this sort of thing doesn’t even stick out anymore, since so much Republican leadership is engaged in hysterical rants against imaginary enemies, and spinning conspiracy theories so they don’t have to face reality. What makes this stick out from the herd is that it was done on Alex Jones’ show. I remember, in college, one of the ways we used to get cheap, adolescent laughs was call into Jones’ show and challenge him, just to watch him get even crazier. He was the leader of the black helicopter guys, and, if you can believe it, it’s gotten even uglier and weirder since then. It was always alarming to me how popular Jones was, but I rationalized that a lot of it was folks like me, who found his “nothing I believe in is real!” act to be amusing and, at times, endearing. But who fucking knows? It appears that a lot of people take this shit seriously, seriously enough to elect these folks to offices where they can do real damage.
In the many years since then, though, Jones has gone from an out-there kook to the role of a front runner in where the mainstream right is headed. He complains regularly that Glenn Beck steals his act, and he should, since Beck totally steals his act. Which means that we’re probably going to get some intimations that enemies are suffering from demon possession from Beck any day now. (Do Mormons believe that? I have no idea, but I don’t think Beck is constrained by something as simple as the actual teachings of his church.)
Fred Clark is a man of remarkable insight when it comes to the inner workings of the wacky right, since he’s basically made the transition from being in the thick of it to being a sensible person who lives in the real world. He recently wrote a post about anti-choicers, and their fantasy that they’re doing something important and noble and brave, when in fact they’re basically being petty little cowards. I think his thoughts are relevant when discussing the conspiracy theories of anti-environmentalists, as well.
Let’s pretend that our unremarkable lives of quiet desperation are actually epic quests in the service of something meaningful. Let’s pretend our lives are driven by some purpose. Let’s pretend we are engaged in the great moral struggle of our time—that we are opposing some massive and twisted evil. Let’s pretend that this struggle requires courage and commitment and let’s pretend that we possess those things. Let’s pretend that we are all that stands between this country and brutal chaos—that we and we alone are the ones keeping it all together.
Let’s pretend we are not who we actually are. Let’s pretend that our lives are not what they actually are. Let’s pretend.
It’s one of the best and most telling posts I’ve ever read, especially since Fred has lived it from the inside. I think his observations really apply here. Conspiracy theories and fantasies proliferate on the right because the right is basically about stalling progress, and putting up roadblocks to a better world. But saying out loud that you don’t want a better world is intolerable. The ego cannot handle admitting to itself that you oppose feminism and environmentalism because you’re petty, vindictive, or selfish. And so imaginary enemies are created. Fantasies like the ones Fred describes are lived in until reality feels less real than the fantasy. You don’t oppose abortion because you’re a petty person who can’t stand the idea that other people are living their lives without your control or even input. Oh no! You’re like an abolitionist! And you’re not an anti-environmentalist because you’re petty, hostile to change, and don’t want to be bothered to think about how wasteful you’ve been all your life and why that needs to change. You’re fighting a worldwide conspiracy of communism that just happens to involve the vast majority of scientists in the world!
Obviously, there’s liberal fantasists, as well. Anti-vaccination types and 9/11 Truthers come to mind, though it’s well worth pointing out that both subcultures have more than their fair share of right wingers, whereas most right wing conspiracy theory subcultures have few, if any liberals. And these folks have similar motivations—-there’s a truth they can’t handle for some reason (in my experience, they’re highly privileged people who cannot accept the basic reality of bad luck, and bad luck is both the main reason for autism and the Bush administration being poised to take political advantage of 9/11), and so fill in a fantasy where they’re noble, brave people speaking truth to power. But generally speaking, this stuff hasn’t taken off with liberals and I think it’s because we have real problems to deal with, and are familiar with how tedious and un-noble it can feel to grind at these on a day to day basis.
File under one more reason this country has brought its troubles on itself—-a California woman is suing Taco Bell because she says their beef doesn’t have enough beef in it.
[The lawsuit] says Taco Bell’s ground beef is made of such components as water, isolated oat product, wheat oats, soy lecithin, maltodextrin, anti-dusting agent, autolyzed yeast extract, modified corn starch and sodium phosphate, as well as some beef and seasonings.
Wheat oats? Soy lecithin? Oat product?! It seems that if you eat these tacos, especially if some cornmeal sneaks in through the tortilla, you run an alarming chance of having a bowel movement within a month from the scary amounts of fiber your body has absorbed through these poisonous plant products. No wonder she’s so upset. Taco Bell’s products are not destroying the environment fast enough. There’s 70% more room there to create more demand for cheap beef that could help usher in global warming while reducing clean water supplies and arable land available for farming direct to consumer vegetables. And where does this all end? Will fast food joints starting putting actual green vegetables in their food? Horrors.
I’m sorry that America learned today that you learned you actually like the taste of soy products. I know how traumatic that can be. I’ve seen small children, greedily eating a food they claimed to dislike but that has been served to them in disguise, only to be told what it was, which required spitting it out and saying, “Gross!” We, as a nation, are this small child, or at least that’s how it seems from the breathless coverage this scandal has been given in the news. We can’t see ourselves as people who eat soy. It’s gross. No matter how much we like it.
I’m not actually even defending Taco Bell’s alleged ingredients, many of which break the basic rules about telling “food” from “non-food” laid out by the likes of Michael Pollan, Mark Bittman, and Marion Nestle. But the issue that’s driving this is that there isn’t enough beef in the tacos, and no so much that there are all these non-food chemicals in them that are used ostensibly to make the food more appealing. The only real surprise is literally that the tacos don’t come with as much beef and its accompanying saturated fat as assumed. The betrayal runs deep; apparently we hope to be clogging our arteries with haste when we eat there. I’m not sure there’s any way to see this other than as another sign of the decline of a once-great nation.
Plus, it’s not like you can’t add cheese if you’re falling a little short of your saturated fat goals for the day.
What’s fascinating is that in all the alarm over this, there has basically been no discussion over the fact that places like Taco Bell have this disgusting, bad-for-you food, and then they price it so low that it becomes extra appealing, particularly to people who don’t have the privilege of living in a place with better access to healthy food. And that, in turn, contributes to our massive health problems that are killing people and driving up health care costs. Instead, everyone’s just going to be appalled for a day that it’s got a little more vegetable matter than they initially supposed.
I’m usually not one to argue semantics anymore—-in fact, I really have come around to hating nit-picking semantic quarrels that people get into that end up distracting from the real issues. Not that I think semantics are always irrelevant! Misleading terms like “pro-life” can and do alter the battle dramatically, and should be replaced with more accurate terms like “anti-choice”. When the wrong term can lead to genuine misunderstanding, I think it’s important to say something. Which is why I want to nit pick this one little thing that Bill Wolff said on “Rachel Maddow” in an otherwise excellent and informative segment:
The one little thing is the word “believe”, as in “people who ‘believe’ in global warming”. I would like, if at all possible, to declare a moratorium on using the word “believe” to describe what people do in relationship to scientifically sound theories backed up by oodles of evidence. I’d prefer the word “accept”, which more accurately conveys what’s going on. Something is true, full stop. If it’s true, then people either accept it or deny it. But they don’t “believe” in it, which is a word we tend to use more to describe people’s relationships to untrue or at least unprovable things, or to values.
Here are some examples of what I’m talking about:
*My beloved grandmother is dead. When I get the news, my shoulders fold and I start crying. Am I accepting her death or believing in her death?
*I’m debating with someone on whether or not abortion should be legal. Do I accept or believe that abortion should be legal?
*Someone giving me directions says to turn left at the light and then the location is on my right. Do I accept these directions, or do I believe them?
*Do small children accept Santa Claus or believe in Santa Claus?
I could go on all day, but you get the idea. “Believe” spikes the sentence to suggest the thing that is believed or not believed is really up for debate by reality-based people. Global warming is not, nor is the theory of evolution—-these things are simply true. Since they’re true, you either accept the science or you deny it. Deny is the word we use when someone refuses to agree with the facts. So, say my boyfriend dumps me and I refuse to accept that it’s over. I am in denial. Global warming denialists are just that, in denial.
It’s true that there are many cases where “accept” and “believe” are interchangable. I’m not denying that. (See what I did there?) But I think in a situation like the one we’re dealing with now, where huge percentages of the public simply refuse to accept reality, then we can’t afford to use ambiguous language that allows for people to think their denial is more justifiable than it really is. For laymen like myself and most Americans, the distance between global warming theory and fact is so thin as to be irrelevant; it’s basically a fact. We either accept or deny reality. And we should use language that reflects this.
Via Media Matters comes one of those stories that really drives home how much you have to, if you’re a modern conservative, completely switch off your brain so that no evidence or reason ever penetrates. And just in time for the holiday season, too! Here is the story that kicked off the stupid-fest:
Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, invoked the ancient jaguar goddess Ixchel in her opening statement to delegates gathered in Cancun, Mexico, noting that Ixchel was not only goddess of the moon, but also “the goddess of reason, creativity and weaving. May she inspire you—because today, you are gathered in Cancun to weave together the elements of a solid response to climate change, using both reason and creativity as your tools.”
When you’re pushing a myth, there’s no more appropriate entity to pray to than a mythical goddess.
Seventeen words, three lies—-two direct lies, one implied. That’s not a wingnut record, but a nice contender in terms of packing bullshit into minimal space. Well-played, Powers! Let’s take these lies one at a time.
1) Global warming is a “myth”. This one is kind of awesome, because it’s an exact reversal of the truth. The conspiracy theory that would have you believe the vast majority of the world’s scientists have colluded to falsify data and create an elaborate lie about global warming is hard enough to believe just on the organizational level, but the assumption that their motivation was to steal your penis-substitute SUV makes it even better. I would actually say that it’s harder to believe that this could happen than there’s a moon goddess of reason, and I’m a pretty hardcore atheist. But as Christian apologists are always whining, you can’t prove a negative—-there could be a teapot in space, an invisible dragon in my kitchen, and a Mayan moon goddess. But you can disprove the assertion that global warming is a myth, due to the overwhelming amount of that stuff that we in the field of knowing how to use our brains call “evidence”.
2) Christiana Figueres and her “moonbat” coalition actually intend to pray to Ixchel. If you can read, you’ll see the problem with this assertion. Figueres said, at least according to this report, that you should be inspired by Ixchel. This is what those of us in the field on knowing-how-to-read call an “allusion”: “Allusions are often indirect or brief references to well-known characters or events….. Allusions are often used to summarize broad, complex ideas or emotions in one quick, powerful image.” Allusions to mythological figures are a common rhetorical flourish. If Figueres, for instance, was Greek, she could have made a similar speech asking her audience to be inspired by the ancient Greek goddess of reason, Athena. This likely wouldn’t have created nearly as much snickering on the right, however, because Athena has a long history of being referred to in European literature. Once you get the white people literary allusion blessing, I guess you’re not as funny any more. So extra points deducted for using racism to bolster your non-argument.
3) That Ixchel is a myth, but Jesus is totally real. This isn’t stated, but implied in the context of a wingnut landscape that involves lots of screeching about the “War on Christmas”. (Malkin is a consistent warrior on behalf of the belief that someone is trying to steal Christmas from her.) The amount of proof that a god was born to a human virgin, sacrificed his life to save all of mankind from paying for a woman who ate an apple, and rose three days after dying is equal to the amount of proof that a moon goddess gave birth to 13 sons, two of whom created heaven and earth. Which is to say, there is no proof of either. Apply reason and logic to both stories, and they are equal. Except that the former is more obviously misogynist in its summary, so I suppose some wingnuts would see that as “proof”, but by actual logic standards, it’s not.
I would generally caution people who are so gung-ho about believing in Jeebus to carefully consider if they want to even acknowledge, much less deny, other beliefs. The realization that other people believe something you’ve always believed wasn’t true—-whether it’s that a moon goddess blesses childbirth or that heaven involves virgin-boinking—-is often the first step to looking at your own beliefs with a critical eye. Skepticism about other supernatural claims puts more people on the path to atheism than any other factor, I’d guess. For people invested in keeping believers believing, the smartest stance is to pretend no one has ever actually had a belief other than yours.
But Powers did write more than one sentence in his post, so the stupidity doesn’t stop there! While this statement fails on the test of packing as many lies as he can into minimal space, I liked it for just general dickwaddery.
Here’s an image of Ixchel found on a Wikipedia page. If Helen Thomas and Code Pink had a love child…
That’s some top-notch argumentation there! Powers doesn’t find that this ancient drawing of a goddess makes his dick hard, therefore neener neener neener. That Ixchel is no looker! She’s nothing like the Virgin Mary.
Now there’s a fine piece of ass—-she could almost be a Fox News anchor, if she just submitted to the bleach bottle. Either way, Powers would totally stick it to her. What other proof do you need? Powers and his penis’s reaction to religious art is far better evidence in the argument over whether global warming is real than all those stupid scientists and their dumb numbers and measurements.
And, in one of my favorite wingnut tics, Powers basically contradicts his already silly argument:
In any case, it looks as if Ixchel is smiling on the Cancun Summit attendees:
Let’s see how this works. Global warming isn’t real because there’s a moon goddess that Powers totally wouldn’t stick it to, which means that liberals are ugly and sexless. But global warming also isn’t real because people who accept the evidence have fun at parties, which you, the embittered wingnuts, are jealous of because that’s certainly not the life you’re living. Liberals are evil because they’re no fun/too fun. And that makes global warming not real. If he’s only have called the attendees hipsters, I think we would have had a real contender for the contest of what wingnut post best exemplifies using button-pushing on an audience of embittered assholes with insecurity complexes over actual reason.
I have some more observations from this New Yorker article about the brothers Koch and the immense, scary influence they have on the political system. A lot of stuff in here isn’t that surprising if you’re paying close attention—-the self-aggrandizing to distract from the immorality of libertarianism, the astroturfing, the racist history, the obscene amounts of money spent to manipulate the political system, the delusional rhetoric about global warming. But even I was surprised to read about the display at the Smithsonian.
The David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins, at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, is a multimedia exploration of the theory that mankind evolved in response to climate change. At the main entrance, viewers are confronted with a giant graph charting the Earth’s temperature over the past ten million years, which notes that it is far cooler now than it was ten thousand years ago. Overhead, the text reads, “HUMANS EVOLVED IN RESPONSE TO A CHANGING WORLD.” The message, as amplified by the exhibit’s Web site, is that “key human adaptations evolved in response to environmental instability.” Only at the end of the exhibit, under the headline “OUR SURVIVAL CHALLENGE,” is it noted that levels of carbon dioxide are higher now than they have ever been, and that they are projected to increase dramatically in the next century. No cause is given for this development; no mention is made of any possible role played by fossil fuels. The exhibit makes it seem part of a natural continuum. The accompanying text says, “During the period in which humans evolved, Earth’s temperature and the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere fluctuated together.” An interactive game in the exhibit suggests that humans will continue to adapt to climate change in the future. People may build “underground cities,” developing “short, compact bodies” or “curved spines,” so that “moving around in tight spaces will be no problem.”
This is part of an overarching strategy of replacing actual science with pseudo-science. What’s interesting to me is the “having it both ways” aspect of this—-the Koches fund all sorts of global warming denialism, but then also hedge their bets by suggesting that global warming isn’t so bad. This is far from the only example.
David Koch told New York that he was unconvinced that global warming has been caused by human activity. Even if it has been, he said, the heating of the planet will be beneficial, resulting in longer growing seasons in the Northern Hemisphere. “The Earth will be able to support enormously more people because far greater land area will be available to produce food,” he said.
This is, of course, pure nonsense. Growing food is about factors coming together, and heat is just one of them—-it’s also sunshine and fertility. Increasing desertification of some parts of the planet will not have a corresponding effect of giving northern climates more sunshine, even if they do get warmer in the aggregate. The overwhelming evidence shows that rising temperatures will likely lead to mass starvation. Also, there’s no certainty that humans will always adapt. We can, you know, die off. It happens. Ask the dinosaurs.
But what all this points to is a very serious problem for libertarianism, whether Christian or secular. As I noted earlier, libertarianism tends to spring up when you start to believe human beings exist to serve systems and institutions, and not vice versa. But our system of government was laid out explicitly on the grounds that institutions serve human beings—-basically, the founders were backed by a humanist philosophy. If you disagree, let me point you to the Declaration of Independence.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,
Republican gubernatorial candidate Dan Maes is warning voters that Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper’s policies, particularly his efforts to boost bike riding, are “converting Denver into a United Nations community.”
“This is all very well-disguised, but it will be exposed,” Maes told about 50 supporters who showed up at a campaign rally last week in Centennial.
Maes said in a later interview that he once thought the mayor’s efforts to promote cycling and other environmental initiatives were harmless and well-meaning. Now he realizes “that’s exactly the attitude they want you to have.”
Yep, the argument is that programs that look like they’re about reducing emissions and reducing dependence on fossil fuels—-as well as getting people to be healthier by getting more exercise—-are in fact a liberal plot to have the UN take over our cities. Apparently, starting with those out West, because what you want when you’re plotting a takeover of a country is to go after cities that are well-armed and spread out. Though I suppose the paranoid right wingers could just say that’s why they have to take over the cities by stealthy hippyness, because warfare isn’t gonna get it done.
There’s some jibber-jabber paranoid explanation for why bike programs are secret UN plots to destroy America.
Maes said in a later interview that he was referring to Denver’s membership in the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, an international association that promotes sustainable development and has attracted the membership of more than 1,200 communities, 600 of which are in the United States.
Whatever the bullshit explanation is basically irrelevant, of course. The point is to stoke resentment against bicyclists, and then transfer that resentment to the Democrats. Bicyclists and pedestrians are easy hate objects, because they make car-dependent people feel insecure, especially if those car-dependent people are using their car even in situations where they know they could walk it or bike it. If you doubt this, I highly recommend actually getting a bike and trying to commute with it—-even if you can’t go to work, try going to the store or to nearby occasions with it—-and you’ll find that there are lot of mindlessly angry drivers out there who take your bicycle as an affront to their manhood or something. Yes, even if you obey every traffic law and are scrupulous about staying out of the way (which I was when I lived where I biked everywhere—-now I just walk).
Wingnuts have a lot of tactics: lying, screeching, saying racist things and then taking umbrage when you point out that they’re racist, fantasizing out loud about “second amendment remedies”. But getting someone fired is by far their favorite tactic, bar none. It accomplishes so much, if you’re successful! It reinforces the idea that you’re above criticism (gearing you up for the next time someone is targeted for harassment for having the nerve to criticize you), is scares would-be critics into silence, and above all, it fucks someone’s life up tremendously. Actual “second amendment remedies” are dangerous and get you thrown in jail. Getting someone fired, however, is something you can do without any repercussions for yourself. It’s the perfect strategy for the cowardly sadist, and therefore the favorite of wingnuts.
So naturally, someone who approaches science with such passion and accuracy cannot actually hold a job as a scientist. Or, that’s the position of the flying monkeys, who have decided to start a harassment campaign against Abraham’s employer, the University of St. Thomas. They’ve been flooding the president’s email box. They do like the logic of torture, those wingnuts! “Give us what we want and the pain will go away. You do want the pain to go away, don’t you? Here’s another round of emails making it impossible for you to go about your daily business. Just hand us the professor, and the pain will stop.” (There was also an attempt at extorting money!)
Of course, targeting academia is a much different game than targeting politicians and mainstream media outlets, who love giving in to bullies like it was ice cream that gives you orgasms. The University’s response to a bunch of charlatans calling for the head of a professor because he had the nerve to be right was exactly what it should be:
We received your email response to our June 25, 2010 letter. The University of St Thomas respects your right to disagree with Professor Abraham, just as the University respects Professor Abraham’s right to disagree with you. What we object to are your personal attacks against Father Dease, and Professor Abraham, your inflammatory language, and your decision to disparage Professor Abraham, Father Dease and The University of St Thomas.
Please be advised that neither we nor the University of St Thomas will communicate with you any further about your decision to sully the University of St. Thomas, Professor Abraham, and others rather than to focus on the scholarly differences between you and Professor Abraham.
Signed: Phyllis Karasov, Moore Costellow and Hart, P.L.L.P.
I wish that the politicians who caved on the ACORN thing or the Washington Post that caved on the Dave Weigel thing would take notes—-when you’re being inundated with bullshit, remember that it’s bullshit. Bullshit doesn’t stop being bullshit because it’s loud bullshit. Bullshit doesn’t stop being bullshit because a lot of people want to believe it. Bullshit certainly doesn’t stop being bullshit because bullshit supporters, realizing they’re full of shit, revert to bullying to get their way because they can’t win on the facts. And every time you give in to bullshit, you embolden the purveyors of bullshit. You may think you’re getting the flying monkeys off you by giving in, but all you’ve done is show them that their tactics work, and next time they want something from you, they’re going to come about you with twice the number of flying monkeys. That’s how it works. Look what happened with James O’Keefe. Did he take his bullshit victory over ACORN and go home satisfied? Hell no! Being able to get Congress and the mainstream media to play along with his bullshit made him think he was The Man, and the result was that he started picking bigger fish to fry with his usual tactics of lying and being smug. You don’t get rid of them by giving them what they want.
Of course, my main concern now is that I’m seeing climate scientists starting to get the kind of targeting that you see against abortion providers. As much as I’d like to believe that standing firm against bullies is enough to scare them off, I know that’s not true. The level of obsession that global warming denialists have is downright scary, and I hope that the FBI and other law enforcement are at least monitoring the situation, because I really do fear it’s in line after abortion and general anti-federal government sentiment in terms of attracting the unhinged right wing elements.
I worry that this interview with author Stan Cox about his bookLosing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World (and Finding New Ways to Get Through the Summer) might not get through to people. And the reason is that Cox drifts a little too far into the sanctimonious zone about air conditioning, talking about how he never, ever uses it if he’s in control, and focusing his energies on talking about people who’ve given up on air conditioning, even when they live in super hot climates. And doing that thing people do, where they drift off into refusing to admit there could ever be any value to the thing they’re trying to get people to give up, like how he gets into scientifically iffy territory of suggesting that people would have fewer allergies if they didn’t use A/C and got out more. (I suspect the rise in allergic people compared to the past has more to do with the fact that we can keep them alive now, whereas in the past they would have died from the flu or tuberculosis at a young age.) When it comes to environmentalism, there’s a real danger in taking an absolutist position, which is that people will tune you out completely, since they find that impossible.
Which is too bad, because on the whole, Cox is right. Air conditioning is one of the great environmental disasters of our time. It’s way overused, and to make it worse, it allowed people to build bigger houses and public buildings on the grounds that they could cool them off pretty easily, and it discouraged the use of more energy efficient ways to cool off your home. It’s created cultural acclimation of the sort where people will never accept anything less than air conditioning, even when opening a window would actually be just as good. Believe me, I know. This has been the ongoing war of my adult life. I grew up in the Southwest—-interestingly, my family’s migration there has a lot to do with the problem of allergies and the attempts to avoid them rather than die of respiratory illness—-and out there, they don’t really use the same kind of air conditioning that you see in many places. (Though that’s changing rapidly—-air conditioning is such a status symbol that it’s being installed even where it’s not necessary.) We had evaporation cooling in most homes, which isn’t something that works as well in more humid environments. Subsequently, when I moved to Austin and started to have to live with for-real air conditioning, I hated it. I still hate it. I like cooling off in the A/C, due to being human, and I’ll run it rather than sit around sweating. But I’ve always been one of those people who waits until the last possible minute to flick it on, and then I sigh sadly, because I don’t look forward to having all the natural humidity in the air and my nostrils sucked out. As you can imagine, the vast majority of people I encounter disagree strongly with this strategy. I can have some effect on choosing windows and fans over A/C, but the compromise position always falls short of my “wait until there’s no other possible way to get the temperature below 90” strategy that I employed when I lived alone.
Because of all this, I think that a much better strategy for dramatically reducing A/C use is to avoid the cold turkey arguments, and start talking about how to remake our culture so A/C is a last, not first, ditch effort. From my war on A/C, I’d say that in many places, you could cut it by 70% with a few small adjustments to our cultural expectations of what temperature a room should be, and by getting people to consider taking many steps to cool off before resorting to the A/C, such as wearing fewer clothes at home, opening windows, using fans, building in places where there’s shade, drawing curtains, shutting doors to rooms you’re not using instead of air conditioning the whole house, etc.* Right now, for instance, I’m looking into buying some boxer shorts to wear around the house instead of the pajama pants I usually wear. That will buy me at least an hour or two more a day where I don’t resort to the A/C. I do think there’s value to pointing out the physical discomforts of A/C, but this process is going to take a lot of hand-holding. The belief that every place should have A/C on at full blast has just become so ingrained, as only someone who gets super cold and uncomfortable in full blast A/C (ahem) can really tell you.
I know, I know, it seems like a dumb question. But there are actually some bros who care about all this namby pamby enviro crap. Do they have a point, or are they just faking it to get some tail? You ask, the Patriarchy answers in Ask the Patriarchy:
Oh man, the BP oil spill has got to be hard on wingnuts. On one hand, the spill visibly Pisses Off Liberals, and usually in Wingnutville, anything that pisses off liberals is automatically assumed to be a good thing. But they’re not completely stupid. They know this oil spill is unpopular in the way that kicking puppies is unpopular, and this is an election year. Celebrating an event that pisses off liberals is all well and good, but not if it loses you mid-term elections. Let’s not forget that Louisiana is a swing state.
Initially, they were on message, trying to pin this on Obama and reap the rewards at the ballot box. But as this disaster drags on, their inability to quash the knee-jerk need to defend or adore anything—-including a giant gusher of oil under the Gulf of Mexico—-that pisses off liberals is taking over. And of course, the fact that Big Oil pumps so much money into Republican coffers sweetens the deal for them, as well as an ideological unwillingness to admit that bad things could ever happen in pursuit of profit.
So far, it hasn’t worked out so well. The strategy that worries me the most is the “act of god” strategy, where wingnuts try to redefine the spill as “natural disaster”. This has the potential to work on the public, because it takes a commonly understood definition—-natural disasters are when nature wreaks havoc on humans—-and simply reverses the subject and object, so that “natural disaster” is when humans wreak havoc on nature. It’s the functional equivalent of saying black is white and up is down, but sadly, this sort of sleight of hand can work very well on the public that’s too overworked and unwilling to engage in critical thinking to see what they did there.
Less effective has been the need to defend BP against any whiff of government intervention to keep them from taking a giant crap on the public, collecting their profits, and going home. This has been a fascinating exercise, because it really drives home how much free market capitalism where profits are private but risks are public has become a religion for the right, which makes big corporations their gods. The shaking anger and hurt expresses at Obama for trying to squeeze anything out of BP to compensate for what they’ve done to the Gulf Coast resembles nothing more than a godbag freaking out on someone who has uttered a blasphemy.
BP is the Holy Father, apparently, and you can’t insult them no matter what they do.
But even this strategy doesn’t have the emotional satisfaction they require. Because it still doesn’t really get you to the point where you’re actively celebrating the thing that pisses liberals off at its most basic level, which is that giant gusher of oil under the Gulf. It’s a big, greasy liberal-upsetting stain. Every time a few more thousand barrels of oil come out, liberals get even more upset. Some of them have even admitted tearing up seeing the damage. It’s everything wingnuts could want—-sad liberals, angry liberals, crying liberals. Oh, that desire to drive the knife in even deeper must be so strong!
There’s something deeply unsettling about the pressure on the news media to find upbeat angles when covering the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Since when do grown-ups refuse to believe that it’s possible that there’s no good news? We’re all quite aware that shitstorms of the worst sort are possible, and yet here you have journalists straining all credibility with reassurances that things can’t possibly be as bad as they actually are. For instance, the reality-based angle of this story about the edibility of seafood from the Gulf of Mexico is closer to Atrios’s take than what the AP reporter actually put in the story. The AP reporter passes on assurances that Gulf seafood is safe because they have people sniffing it. Atrios points out that it’s reasonable to be skeptical that sniffing for oil will really cut it, since there’s also dispersants in the water that might not pass the “sniffing for oil” test . I’ll also point out that it’s not just what’s sitting on the seafood that’s an issue. Even though shrimp come to the table with their heads missing, I assure you they once had them, and they used them to take in nutrients that are in the water, and that means there’s a strong chance they’ve been eating both oil and dispersants.
The free market humping that goes on in this article is also inexcusable.
Smith said no oily seafood will ever make it to market.
“You’re going to smell it, you’re going to see it. It would be almost impossible for it to make it to market,” he said.
Fishermen say they can’t sell a tainted product anyway, whether it is inspected or not.
Look, there’s a gushing oil well under the sea right now, and we’ve been asked to believe that the corporate entities that caused it are the best people for fixing it, and they’ve failed epically. The message to trust the invisible hand of the free market to create safe, clean, profitable solutions to all our problems isn’t something that the public is willing to buy right now. The government officials swearing that seafood is clean aren’t even trying to minimize how invested they are in downplaying the extent of this situation. If they were smart, they’d be issuing statements about how they’re working with the fisherman whose economic futures are ruined to help them build their inevitable lawsuits against BP, instead of issuing statements about how the seafood is safe, something that BP will probably use in its defense during those inevitable lawsuits.
Last week, Obama administration officials admitted that the Deepwater Horizon blowout is the worst oil disaster in American history, exceeding the Exxon Valdez spill, as they estimated that the gusher had spewed between 15 and 40 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Around the same time, however, Rep. Don Young (R-AK) declared that the oil pumping into the Gulf is “not an environmental disaster”:
Young said: “This is not an environmental disaster, and I will say that again and again because it is a national phenomena. Oil has seeped into this ocean for centuries, will continue to do it. During World War II there was over 10 million barrels of oil spilt from ships, and no natural catastrophe. … We will lose some birds, we will lose some fixed sealife, but overall it will recover.”
The reason I suspected it was just a matter of time is that this is one of Rush Limbaugh’s favorite truisms, that environmentalists are full of shit because they know that, given enough time, the planet will right itself. It’ll outlive us, even! It’s one of the right wing’s all-time favorite ways to co-opt progressive language—-accusations that we’re victimizing and condescending by suggesting that policies aimed at preserving or encouraging good things are a good idea. In this case, the “victim” of liberal condescension is the planet itself. By not wanting people to spew pollution all over it, destroy ecosystems, or heat it up to the point where large parts of it become unlivable, we’re apparently condescending to the planet, insulting its ability to recover from the injuries conservatives gallantly want to give it.
As arguments go, it’s pretty stupid, though it’s hard to say if it reaches the level of “the free market is socialism if it doesn’t break for me!” But while the surface argument is asinine, this argument is actually more clever than it might initially seem. Don’t think about the surface argument—-think about the assumption bundled inside it. Think about whose interests are quietly left out when a conservative argues with a liberal about the planet as a living entity that will recover after we’re all gone. Oh yeah, the people who rely on the ecosystem.
By trotting out this argument, what Limbaugh and his parrots are saying is this, “Those environmentalists are sure goofy! The only reason they care about the planet is because they have some sort of weird affection for squawking birds and dirt. They probably sleep in trees and commune with the goddess. But hey, let’s play along and tell them that their cute little obsession with nature—-which has nothing to do with real life—-is plain adorable. But that they don’t need to worry about their worship object, since it’ll be here long after we’re gone. Think long term, dirt worshippers!”
This is what’s also underlying their arguments about how volcanoes emit CO2 and oil leaks all on its own. They’re trying to get their audience to believe that environmentalists aren’t concerned about practical issues, but that we just have an irrational hatred of any human activity that influences the planet. So if volcanoes—-part of our worship object—-do it, it can’t be wrong, right?
But while there may be a few goober heads that fit the stereotype they’re trotting out, the reality is that environmentalists aren’t actually working from an arbitrary moral system, where everything our god the planet does is right and everything humans do is wrong. For one thing, a lot of us aren’t fundamentalist Christians, and so we don’t buy the argument that humans are somehow separate from nature in the first place. We’re probably the first to compare human beings to volcanoes and hurricanes—-of nature, but able to wreak incredible amounts of death and destruction in no time flat.
It’s the death and destruction we’re worried about more than some esoteric conception of the Earth as a living entity. If you actually listen to environmentalists, you’ll see that they’re not only concerned about pragmatic destruction, but the reason they worry so much about it is that we have to live on this planet, and we need a clean environment to do that. A lot of us have no doubt that the planet will eventually recover long after we’re gone—-but that’s the eventuality we’re working on staving off. We don’t want humanity to be long gone, but if you fuck up our planet badly enough, it’s entirely possible that it will be one day.
That everything will even out on its own the Gulf of Mexico decades or centuries or whatever from now is all good and well, but that’s not much use to the people whose livelihood depends on the flora and fauna that exists there now and is in very real danger of not being there in the future. In general, the conservative enthusiasm for discounting our symbiotic relationship with nature alarms me. Where do they think food comes from, if not the ground? What the hell do they think we breathe, if not the air? And as a gusher of oil fills the Gulf of Mexico and conservatives run around implying that concerns about water pollution stem strictly from tree-hugging planet worship, I have to ask—-what do they think we’re going to have to drink, if not the water? (Yes, I get that we don’t drink sea water, but the larger point is that water pollution is a problem because DUH, we need water to live, both in terms of drinking and the way that the oceans that cover most of our planet contribute to the ecosystem we need to survive.) Do they fucking even eat shrimp?
These aren’t idle questions. Whenever I hear some wingnut going off on dippy environmentalists, I’m forced to conclude that they think that food is pulled out of the vacuum of space, since they’ve discounted the water, air, and land as sources of human sustenance worth preserving.
Newest 
File under one more reason this country has brought its troubles on itself—-
I have some more observations from 
Wingnuts have a lot of tactics: lying, screeching, saying racist things and then taking umbrage when you point out that they’re racist, fantasizing out loud about “second amendment remedies”. But getting someone fired is by far their favorite tactic, bar none. It accomplishes so much, if you’re successful! It reinforces the idea that you’re above criticism (gearing you up for the next time someone is targeted for harassment for having the nerve to criticize you), is scares would-be critics into silence, and above all, it fucks someone’s life up tremendously. Actual “second amendment remedies” are dangerous and get you thrown in jail. Getting someone fired, however, is something you can do without any repercussions for yourself. It’s the perfect strategy for the cowardly sadist, and therefore the favorite of wingnuts. 
I worry that this interview 
Oh man, the BP oil spill has got to be hard on wingnuts. On one hand, the spill visibly Pisses Off Liberals, and usually in Wingnutville, anything that pisses off liberals is automatically assumed to be a good thing. But they’re not completely stupid. They know this oil spill is unpopular in the way that kicking puppies is unpopular, and this is an election year. Celebrating an event that pisses off liberals is all well and good, but not if it loses you mid-term elections. Let’s not forget that Louisiana is a swing state. 
There’s something deeply unsettling about the pressure on the news media to find upbeat angles when covering the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Since when do grown-ups refuse to believe that it’s possible that there’s no good news? We’re all quite aware that shitstorms of the worst sort are possible, and yet here you have journalists straining all credibility with reassurances that things can’t possibly be as bad as they actually are. For instance, the reality-based angle of