alternative hippopotamus

progressive cyberdadaism from our nation’s capital

July 10, 2007

An Inconvenient Hack

by AltHippo @ 10:16 am. Filed under Uncategorized

Jonah Goldberg is an inconvenient hack. That’s something I was clear on years ago. My only question: is he hacky because he’s an industry shill, or is he hacky because he was just born that way?

I notice that he has a particularly doughy op-ed in today’s LA Times. He goes through the list of standard talking points of why it was wrong for Al Gore, and his gang of entergreeners to put on Live Earth last weekend. I liked this bit in particular:

Gore talks about the dysfunction of political discourse today. But when it comes to global warming, he and his acolytes insist that the time for debate is over. In other words, Gore’s ideal discourse would involve only discussion about how best to follow through on his prescriptions.

But such high-minded objections sail over the chief source of Live Earth’s lameness. The acts were mostly fine. But the outrage and passion felt so prepackaged you half-expected Ludacris (who rapped about the evils of SUVs) to say “this moral outrage is brought to you by GE’s ‘Ecomagination.’ ” Indeed, one could say that Live Earth is proof that global warming has jumped the shark, except for the fact that the phrase “jumped the shark” has jumped the shark.

I just like the idea of a scientific theory “jumping the shark.” That’s funny. Science, as a kind of fashion statement. Like, at one point in time all the cool kids were doing Maxwell’s Equations, but now they’re just too lame to bother with. The Pythagorean theorem? Now way, dude. That’s so pre-Hilbert space.

You may not be surprised that the principle resistance to global warming as a theory comes from the oil companies. You may not be aware that Big Oil and Big Tobacco had teamed up to battle both the notion of global warming as well as second-hand smoke. There’s a good piece on On the Media, that’s definitely worth a listen:

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