June 14, 2005

He Shoots; He Scores!
Everett

Annatar, I would have to agree that this debate is running out of steam. We're starting to reach the point where we'll only be arguing past one another. So, I think this will be my last post along this line for now.

Quickly on golbal warming. When you talk about man making things 100 times worse with respect to climate change, Annatar, I can only assume that you are referring to the so-called hockey stick graph that showed a relatively slow growth in temperatures followed by a ridiculously steep spike over the past 30 years. Fair enough. The problem is that the graph has been shown to about as flawed as the intelligence on WMD in Iraq. Basically, the authors of the study made various statistical assumptions and adjustments that made the earlier portions of the curve far too mooth and thus badly exagerrated the jump in temperatures.

Also, ice core samples are not consistent over wide geographical areas. For instance CO2 readings in pre-industrial Antarctic ice
(circa 1890) are too high to be consistent with the man-made global warming hypothesis. Even straight ground temperature readings are not consistent over large areas. Indeed there are major urban centers around the world which should be getting warmer faster because of their concentration of people and energy use that have actually seen temperatures drop over the past 30+ years. Antarctica (as opposed to the Antarctic Peninsula) is getting colder, and the amount of ice there is increasing. In the final analysis, the evidence that global warming is occurring, let alone man-made is not there.

As far as your assertion that my anti-French positions are racist, I think we may have to agree to disagree on that point. Your assertion that my postition is racist depends on a stolen base that rests on a false choice. Either I can be opposed to the French position on a single issue, or I am opposed to all things French. The nation of France exists as a political entity, and as such she has certain political objectives. France has in large part set her political objectives in opposition to the interests of the United States. Hence, as a supporter of the interests of the United States, I am opposed to the political objectives of the nation of France. In that sense and that sense only am I anti-French. The term goes no further than that.

That is not to say that I approve of France's domestic political and economic policies. However, my opinions regarding this are based on the fact that many of their political and economic policies as well as current cultural trends are manifestly bad for France and could well spell its downfall as a nation. If I were truly anti-French in the sense you indicate, I would be very supportive of the continuation of France's unsustainable welfare state and its cratering birth rates. I would have nothing but praise for the radical secularization of French society that has led to the creation of the stagnant society that France has unfortunately become. As it is, I think these conditions doom France to a slow downward spiral into extinction until it either vanishes or becomes overrun by Muslims, and I would rejoice to see France turn away from this and embrace the virtues that made it one of history's great civilizations.

What is it about Rush Limbaugh? On the one hand, he is regarded as highly intelligent and articualte. On the other hand, he is regarded as a demagogue who has only dragged public discourse into the gutter. Who's right? Ultimately, both sides are. Rush articualtes the conservative position very well, better than anyone else on the radio. He constructs arguments and backs them up with facts, and his reasoning is generally sound. However, he suffers from the same problem that plagues every political talk radio announcer, right and left: He relies on caricatures of his opponents to dismiss their arguments. The reason liberals come across as complete morons on his show is that he takes the most extreme examples of liberal idiocy and uses them as representative examples of liberal thought. Granted, part of the reason he is able to do this to such great effect is that liberals tend to make it easy for him. The same is true Ann Coulter. Of course, they're both better than the left's favorite polemicist, Michael Moore.