As IF Times

link Book Review: Last Exit to Utopia – WSJ.com#mod=todays_us_opinion

Not really an ‘as if’ article, but interesting from the perspective of it’s validity. It’s always been a puzzle to me that there is such a contingent of people willing to embrace the characters who represent the views of totalitarian regimes. There are idiots who wear Che shirts and Fidel hats etc etc which can only be explained away by either ignorance or willful stupidity. At this time, I’ve yet to see any great Mao fan clubs but I suspect that’s only because he didn’t sport a beard.

This is akin to turkeys embracing ax manufacturers and wearing Kitchen Aid T shirts. It must be hard wired into humans to need to be told what to do and it’s corollary, the need to tell people what to do. There must be some basic primal urge that compels people to willingly fall in line with whatever preposterous personality manages to capture the limelight.

How can this be? What is the point of education when you can’t even convince people that mass murderers are not a sympathetic lot? Anyone who has been to university is familiar with the now classic psychology studies by Philip Zimbardo in which people are asked to dial up varying levels of pain on another subject only because someone ‘in authority’ told them to. Amazingly, he found that the majority of subjects did what they were told.

The flip side of this phenomenon is ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ as in the case of Patti Hearst in which victims (originally) eventually became sympathetic to their captors.

What does this have anything to do with anything? Well this is the long winded way of pointing out the absurdities of events in the news. For those of you paying attention, there are rabid debates going on now regarding issues such as delivery of health care, of the effects of climate change, of news bias and so on.

Pay attention to some of the champions of the various issues. They are mad. And I don’t mean mad as in the ‘you sat on my glasses’ mad, I mean insane. Somehow though, they develop a following.

Exhibit A: ‘Filmmaker’ Michael Moore espouses the virtues of Cuba’s health care system in a recent film, waxing on how efficient it is. Do thinking people actually believe this? In a country where your status is measured by the volume of beans in the pantry, does he really believe that health care is efficient and plentiful?

Exhibit B: Nobel laureate Al Gore, inventor of the Internet has been pushing his vision of apocalypse to an ever swelling audience. His view of science has been pushed by politicians no more able to differentiate between a test tube and and a pie chart but will collectively decide for their constituents how to piss away billions and billions (i’ve lost track of how many) of dollars in saving the planet. And people believe them. Like the turkeys above, they put on their Kitchen Aid t-shirts.

You would be wrong to think I blame Al Gore. I resent him because I didn’t think of this first and made all the money he’s making. No, I blame the machinery behind this growing and now more apparent fraud. Anyone who’s ever seen this guy on TV knows that he has no more intelligence than a 7 iron. If he came to your door selling snake oil, you’d be yelling over your shoulder, ‘Honey, let Rover off the leash’. You’ve never seen this guy debate his issues in any meaningful way. Typically, an over the top presentation is made, supported with wild statistics and projections and the gullible audience laps it up and carries him out on their shoulders. Free t-shirts at the door.

It’s all comical except the tragic parts. Firstly, the elected representatives make their constituents spend THEIR money in support of this farcical vision. The other sad part is that entire industries are being created to capitalize on this quixotic pursuit and as part of their drive, they support the gospel through earnest pleadings in the media. It’s for the children. Meanwhile, as per a previous posting, we can see that global warming can be fixed by handing out a few hundred million condoms and judicious use of the words, ‘not tonight dear’.