Everybody knows at least one. A friend or family member who forwards you ridiculous emails, generally about one world government or Obama taking your guns away- he’s not, btw- or posts equally stupid crap on Facebook that makes you, by association in public, appear to be in solidarity with whatever nonsense their fevered brains cook up between World Nut Daily and Fox “News”. You can delete the emails or turn off their wall in Facebook, but still it leaks through. You can attempt to reply, but the true believers will never be convinced by mere facts, not when “FREEDOM!” or “LIBERTY!” is at stake- and they eventually make every argument boil down to that. For example, Michelle Obama wants to take away your breadsticks, don’t ya know? Probably the first step in the Obama plan of having us eat Soylent Green. You can go on and on, but I have to keep my blood pressure low, so I won’t.
But one of the most infuriating biases you run up against is the conservative manta that global warming or climate change is all a big hoax meant not to save the planet from its most meddlesome inhabitants, but rather a cunningly devised scheme to ban capitalism. Not that capitalism doesn’t deserve it, in a way- eat any shrimp from the Gulf recently? But any mention of cap and trade, or increasing car mileage standards gets the Hannity’s and the Cato Institute in a uproar, and they go on for hours about “evil liberals” and their “environmental activism” that is ruining life here in “…the greatest, best country God has ever given man on the face of the earth.” Now, I recycle and drive a hybrid, so apparently I too want to ban capitalism, by their fractured logic. Funny, I thought I did it to actually reduce my impact on the world. Gosh, I’ve been duped by those evil treehuggers!
Earlier in the week a friend posted this:
with “The picture says it all…” atop it. Now, the gist of the picture is that anytime large amounts of “liberals” get together, they trash the place. You heard the same charge after protesters filled the Wisconsin capital, and it was equally erroneous. The picture above, near as I can tell, is the aftermath of Occupy Oakland, after the police fired upon non-violent protesters with rubber bullets and tear gas. When you’re running for your life, you don’t have time to take down your tent. The police did that for you, after the park was cleared, by flattening the protesters personal property in a “search for contraband”. So much for the “picture says it all”- as long as the image can be used for propaganda, it will.
Well here’s an image that Sean Hannity won’t like:
That’s Miami. See, to some Floridians, climate change isn’t a myth, its actually happening in their front yards:
“Kipness says he never saw such flooding until a decade ago, but now sees it up to twice a day during the fall, when tides are especially high. He says he’s watched the undersides of $100,000 cars get rusted away by salt water.
This happens, many experts say, because of rising sea levels attributed to the melting of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. We can expect to see more of the same across South Florida in the coming years, as a warming climate accelerates the faraway melting. Researchers are just now beginning to grapple with what this will mean for the inner workings of the city.”
Cable news was all over the “climategate” myth, all smug and self-righteous that they had vindication of a hoax. But when Richard Muller, a former “skeptic” on climate change published “The Case Against Global-Warming Skepticism” in the Wall Street Journal, the Daily Show found that the 24 hours a day cable news organizations could only devote 27 seconds to the piece. Doesn’t matter the damage they did trumpeting disinformation, just so long as their rhetoric continued. Who cares about the facts? In an age where human beings are undoubtedly the most educated they have ever been, we still have to suffer from religious extremists “debating” evolution, or quoting fairy tales from a book of mythology to deny gay rights. Facts are open to bidding- and the Murdoch’s of the world, they have deep pockets. Maybe when the underside of their Mercedes gets rusted from saltwater in South Beach, they’ll come around.
Of course, then it’s most likely too late.
