Silly Little Country

Fish in a Barrel

The best magic show I ever saw was one by Penn and Teller in Toronto many years ago, and the real pleasure in it was their exposure of our vulnerabilities, making sure the audience knew how they had been fooled.

Lately they appear on a cable TV show, "Bullshit!", which has quite good episodes exposing exactly what the title says in a variety of areas.

On the other hand, I was a bit worried when I heard they had decided to take on global warming. They are very strong libertarians, and so I feared a lot of denialist hype. In the end, the show is well worth watching - though it is largely ad hominem against the rather feeble-minded homines who tend to be out there marching and protesting.

Still, at least one line stands out, and it is part of their main point that environmentalism is the place the socialists have had to go with their main political point utterly discredited:

We're not going to say there are no good arguments for socialism, but the environment isn't one of them.

Anyone who has seen Eastern Europe will understood this. (Which is an entertaining side point - one of the many silly films I have tried to watch is the pseudo-documentary "The Corporation", to which I stopped paying attention when they showed mass smokestacks and attributed this to corporate law. I did keep watching and the intellectual quality did not improve - the emotional quality shows in the IMDB score at the link above.)

I love the Dihydrogen monoxide section - it is a cheap shot but the real point is that cheap shots work here. As do several others. But the ultimate question should be why do the major media passively report such stupid protests and not try the Dihydrogen monoxide sting?

The answer is lack of any intellectual rigor at all, of course.

Watch the video - it is fun.

Penn and Teller - Bullshit! - Environmental Hysteria

posted by Alan Adamson @ 5:31 PM