Praise be to the Internet gods, Clean Cut Kid is back up again. We here at SDP sorely missed it. Apart from a few hundred apparently loyal readers, no one else pays any attention to us. Chad the Righteously Indignant takes time to make me feel valuable, so I will return the favor. Since Chad obviously regards his opinions as articles of faith, which only sinners can doubt, I will treat his post in the manner of a Medieval gloss. The offset lines are mine, the italics, his. He is responding to my post here.
What would a morning of posting at CCK be without pointing out the wackiness that goes on over at the Thune/Heppler/Lauck/VanBeek blog?
Chad's first line suggests the degree of confidence he has in his own writing. Before he dares to approach me, he has first to suggest that there is a diabolical influence operating behind the scenes at SDP. Thus the faithful are warned in advance that everything I say is devil's writ.
Professor Ken Blanchard of Northern State University -- political scientist -- thinks he knows more about the global warming problem than the overwhelming consensus of the entire scientific community.
Chad Shulte, political hack, is an odd person to be speaking for the "entire scientific community," since so far as I know, he is not a scientist in any sense of the word. If I can't challenge "scientific consensus" on the grounds of my professional training, surely he can't object. So Chad is contradicting himself. I am in fact an enormous admirer of modern science, and I know enough about it to know that it doesn't respect the authority of consensus, among scientists or anyone else.
Moreover, Chad seems blissfully unaware of the distinction between scientific and political questions. The likely effect of greenhouse emissions on global temperatures is of the former sort; whether to ratify the Kyoto treaty belongs to the latter. Since Chad has graciously (or more likely accidentally) conceded my authority on the latter field, he can hardly complain that I write about it. It's no surprise that Chad missed this. If you want to find out what CCK is saying, don't ask the folks at CCK. They are usually the last to know.
What is even more amazing is that the Aberdeen American News -- newspaper prints his stuff as if he has some kind of authority on the subject.
In these United States, citizens are allowed to have opinions on any topic they choose to think about. Newspapers are also allowed to print those opinions regardless of how offensive they may be to our moral and intellectuals betters at such venues as CCK. What steps the U.S. government takes on global warming will be decided on not by any groups of scientists, however large and unanimous, but by Congress and ultimately by the American people. Like any citizen, I am free to listen to both sides on this question, form my own opinions, and express them.
Maybe this is a bad idea, as Chad obviously believes. Maybe the Clean Cut Klan should have to clear any articles before they see print in newspapers. But until the revolution, the CCK politburo can't keep me off the net or out of the newspapers.
Blanchard's reasoning on the issue? It's not something we can solve in the immediate future, so let's not worry about it. Of course that reasoning wouldn't stop him from digging holes in the ground in Alaska and not pumping oil for at least 10 years.
This is the closest thing to an argument that Chad himself can come up with. He gets my position half right. We can't in fact do anything about global warming in the short term. That may be an inconvenient truth, but it obviously is the truth, for reasons that Robert Samuelson states. When Samuelson and I write about this issue, we bother to articulate our arguments and present evidence.
Consider the following: 1) the nations that ratified the Kyoto treaty have, almost all of them, failed to live up to its terms; 2) if the treaty had been really honored by all the parties including the U.S., it would have slowed down global warming by a mere six years (if the calculations of the treaty backers are accurate); 3) the treaty would have cost a cool $150 billion a year, for no appreciable cooling. From these facts I infer what the various nations are trying to do now is hopeless. Maybe there are other, better proposals; but so far the global warming crowd doesn't seems to be advertising them because they have too much political capital invested in Kyoto. By the way, my view that global warming cannot be halted is back up by Professor Kenneth Miller, who led a Rutgers study in sea level rise. No doubt Chad would purge him from the list of people allowed to express their opinions.
Samuelson points out some more inconvenient truths. With the projected growth in world populations, and the rising standard of living in India and China, to name only the big two, energy use is going to go up dramatically. No government in the developed or developing world is going to strangle its economic growth in order to meet greenhouse targets. That just isn't going to happen, no matter how dearly we want it to.
I do not think, however, that we need not worry about global warming. I think it should be carefully monitored, and I would support research in any technologies (like nuclear power) that might one day make a real difference in greenhouse emissions. That's part of what I would spend that $150 billion on. I'd spend the rest on providing clean water and other benefits to those peoples who do not yet enjoy them. Chad is free to disagree with this. Unlike him, I would not object to seeing objections to my view in print.
Of course that reasoning wouldn't stop him from digging holes in the ground in Alaska and not pumping oil for at least 10 years.
This sentence, incoherent as it stands, is in fact a sterling example of Chad's reasoning. It has almost nothing to do with the question at hand. I take it that for the sake of global warming, Chad doesn't want the United States to exploit a cheap source of energy. If that is the Democratic position, I wish it were more widely known. But Chad also has this odd idea that because it would take ten years to begin pumping oil out of ANWR, it makes no sense to begin now. That is not the dumbest argument I have ever heard. It probably does make the top twenty dumb ideas. If getting that oil is a good idea, then we have to start sometime. Ten years up the road, when the demand for oil is much greater than now, we may be very glad we did.
The idiocy at the political science department at Northern has now surpassed the world records set by Steve Sibson and Bob Ellis.
I don't read Siby or Ellis much (only on account of lack of time), so I don't know who should feel more insulted. Occasionally, very occasionally, CCK posts include facts and arguments. I once hoped that we and CCK could engage in conversation about these questions. But the truth of the matter is that they don't know how to engage in civilized argument. Chad cares deeply. He can't imagine that any person could disagree with him on the issues he cares about without being an idiot, or a scoundrel, or both. He thinks that such dissidents should not be allowed to teach at universities or write columns in a newspaper. He has become a left-wing Archie Bunker, intolerant, bombastic, and invincibly ignorant.
When I first came to Northern, I was the only conservative in the social science division. But such men as Jerry Rosonke, and Bob Web, and Walter King in history, however much they may have disagreed with me on many issues, were scrupulously respectful of my right to speak my mind. I think the same is true of my sociologist colleagues now, and especially of Jim Seeber whom I converse with often. What has happened to the political left that it now falls so short of the standard that these men set?
Update: mollym64, left-wing Archie Bunker in residence at the American News Discussion Forum, republished Chad's post, with comments. Molly is another person who wants to see offensive voices silenced.
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