Letters to the Editor
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Global Warming
To the learned professor and lover of Engish language, Camille.
The word is "moraine" not "murrain"
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Remediation versus prevention
Paglia can have whatever opinions she wants about non-events and non-entities in popular culture, it's a free country and spouting nonsense about trifling issues is not a crime.
However, global warming is not an aesthetic issue - it's a demonstrable phenomenon. An intern could have helped gather some information for Ms Paglia to review in that area, in the event that she was interested.
Honest people can disagree about what to do re: global warming, and I assume that Ms Paglia's story about a local day care center was her way of signaling that she's not opposed to government intervention in remediation of environmental damage. (Neither was Richard Nixon, so she's right up to date).
However, the challenge of global warming - in combination with peak oil risk mitigation and national security considerations - offers as much opportunity for prevention and redirection as it does for remediation. It seems to me that to talk about the majesty of nature and its inherent power is to cop out of thinking seriously about how we are going to interact with our surroundings physical and social.
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Well that's it for me
Camille is a scientific illiterate, that's why she thinks Gore's film is full of manipulation.
Now I have no personal loyalty to Gore, because I saw the way he lied about the Institute of Medicine report in 2000 so he could get an endorsement from Drug Free America. That was really shitty the way he whored hyimself out to that group and told huge lies to win their blessing.
However, he's NOT lying about science this time, so even if he's CAPABLE of lying, nobody's going to prove he is, because this time he really IS supported by science.
Camille is a scientific illiterate. She's always calling for more science in the gender wars, but I don't think she really understands any science herself.
In Sexual Personae she was really mean to women who want to do science. Science is fundamentally anti-social, she wrote, and women are social, so that's why women can't be scientists.
But science is not anti-social. Maybe she was thinking of poetry when she wrote that. You can go off all by yourself and do poetry and do well at it, without being part of a community.
But SCIENCE cannot be done by an individual in isolation. Science is actually social, not anti-social, in that a result discovered one person does not count until that result is reporduced by others in the scientific community.
Science is done by communities. Everything anyone does is checked out and reviewed and verified by everyone else.
So Camille is now coming out against an entire community of highly trained people who are highly trained at reviewing everyone else's results to make sure these same results are reproducible across the community.
Global warming is not just an Al Gore theory. Al Gore in this case is just serving as an celebrity meat puppet so that the entire community of global warming scientists can make their prognostications heard by the public.
Camille is wrong about how science is done, she's wrong about who does science and why, and that's why she is blundering so very badly here.
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paglia is an idiot
paglia is a total idiot & a total phony
she cannot grasp the reality of climate change
she cannot understand the importance of the wilson plame scandal
why does anyone care what she thinks?
it is utterly beyond me
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Now you need to run an article by ME explaining why I think Camille Paglia is a moron
... exactly as many of your readers will give a fuck about that as give a fuck about her opinion on global warming.
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Paglia free subscription?
Really. Do you have one available? I know I can just "not click on it" -- but it's like a car wreck. I have to look.
If her opinions were interesting they might be worth something. But they're not, and she's clearly no expert on a lot of things she "discourses" on. Sad. It's like having celebrities on news shows for opinions and listening just because they're celebrities.
Please. Make available a Paglia free premium version.
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Blink's suggestion
Wow--I would LOVE to have a Paglia-free Premium subscription. Also free of Broadsheet. Then I could feel like my money was supporting the best of Salon, not the worst of it. And then you could find out what your readers REALLY want and don't want.
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Skeptic About Global Warming?
After watching "Planet Earth", it's clear to me that the earth is a constantly evolving life form just as we are who live on it. But Camille Paglia's skepticism with the idea that the planet is warming faster than it should is shocking in light of scientific consensus around the issue. It's hard to believe that the best minds on the planet were all drinking the same spiked Kool-Aid. People have been studying this for decades. Al Gore is at best, a lay messenger to the cause. What I find interesting is that while she questions global warming, she seems to champion government intervention to regulate pollution and other substances affecting our environment. Unless I read her comments entirely incorrectly, it seems to me that you can't have it both ways. She says we are "too small" to affect the planet's natural evolution in any significant way, yet she mourns the possible toxic effects of mercury on a community of children. Which the hell is it? Either we are interacting with the planet or we're not. Either our actions have a measurable effect or they don't. All the data seems to suggest that we are and they do, which makes sense to me. Camille needs to make up her damned mind. Something is out of whack when the grass is still green two days before Christmas and it's as mild as a day in April.
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Itchy planet
If Ms. Paglia doesn't get the reality that human beings and their attendant houses, roads, factories, etc. have changed the planet, maybe she should try flying over LA sometime. Or Google Earth is a pretty good place to start noticing that we're slowly but surely becoming like mange on a dog. The "scabby patches" of our paved, cement cities are clear evidence of this.
When people who have access to media fail to use the bully pulpit for good, they often do evil by omission. Her ambivalence leaves the door open for the Bushies and other corporate greed-monsters to rationalize stuff like drilling in Anwar or removing endangered species from the list so their pals can build more strip malls. Or start a war.