Letters to the Editor
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No Consensus?
No "universal" consensus on global warming? Geologic interest aside (I likewise have had a bit of college geology), Ms Pagilla needs to consider the 2004 Science Magazine article linked below citing an analysis of 928 abstracts of climate change research reported in various science publications between 1993-2003. It found that 75% supported a consensus view of human causation in global warming, and 25% either took no position or were not sufficiently relevant to the topic. None refuted the view.
Further, every relevant science institution in the US and possibly all in the western world have issued statements affirming the consensus Ms. Pagilla claims doesn't exist.
I for one am becoming increasing unhappy with Ms. Pagillia's recent reappearance on Salon.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1686
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This should be instructive
10:45 AM posting (is that PST?) that Drudge has just linked to this article. Let's see what happens vis a vis the registration policy, shall we?
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The Anna Nicole Smith stuff was terrible
Especially given her previous posturing about how she was so broken up over Smith's death that she had to sit in her room and cry rather than go on TV. Yeah, she sounds real broken up.
Bad comedy mocking someone's dying moments - hilarious!
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Dump Camille
I had thought that about the time Horowitz left Salon that the editors had learned a lesson -- that right-wingers already have far too many megaphones in our culture. But apparently Joan Walsh has the gold-fishlike memory of a "journalist", hence Camille Paglia's encore here.
It is an interesting lesson in context, at least. At one time I thought Paglia was mildly interesting although also mildly irritating. But her way of thinking, the contrarianism of the superannuated adolescent ("Look at me! I am intellectual, and a Republican!") has not worn well. Perhaps that's because that strain is so ubiquitous on the web and among the talking heads of cable. Or perhaps its because the GOP has been pretty much revealed as the RICO contraption it has been at least since the days of Nixon.
To her credit, Paglia seems to understand that Bushism hasn't been a big success. Still she does her part for it by publishing the Jeff-Gannonish letters of her putative readers. I can't help but wonder if these missives are the Penthouse-letter-like product of her own 'imagination.' I also wonder why Salon wastes its good electrons and good name publishing this Freeper garbage.
Today's steaming pile of fart-and-response prompts one more query. Paglia writes, "I agree that liberal hatred of Bush has verged on the irrational and threatens to become counterproductive."
It seems to me that hatred is a wonderfully adaptive response, and entirely rational, when it is directed at those people who genuinely threaten your well-being or that which you hold most dear. George W. Bush is at least the figurehead, and he certainly sets the style for the most shameless, lawless, mendacious, inept, catastrophic (and yet also sanctimonious) administration ever. His gang of sociopathic picknoses has besmirched (or even destroyed) virtually everything admirable about this country, in the process making Americans (not altogether wrongly) hated by countless millions -- or billions. So tell me Salon, tell me Camille Paglia, how much hatred of for this sower of bottomless hatred would be more rational and productive? I don't want to overdo.
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Camille you zany prose stylist you!
Camille Paglia has alway been and adventurous rhetorician, but I love this new gambit. She's obviously written all the "fan mail" herself and then proceeded to answer it! I mean, come one, there is no way that all her interlocutors could just happen to write the same ponderous, meandering, prose as she does. Think about it.
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Good one, Cacambo
'She's obviously written all the "fan mail" herself and then proceeded to answer it! I mean, come one, there is no way that all her interlocutors could just happen to write the same ponderous, meandering, prose as she does. Think about it.'
Most of them seem to have been written by bootlicking fanboys and fangirls, so it's possible they've been slavishly imitating her style for so long you can't tell them from the real thing.
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Paglia isn't a clone
Camille Paglia's comments about the environment will surely be called blasphemous by the left. I subscribe to what Michael Crichton wrote and spoke about several years ago, that the left has taken to environmentalism as they would to religion. You can read his view at his website (www.michaelcrichton.net). The zealots of this new faith are just like any other religion's true believers, if you dare to not believe what they do than you are an infidel. And we know how zealots act when confronted with contradictory evidence, they attack the messenger. So Ms. Paglia, hold on.
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Bryce Anderson
* It amuses me how skeptics always make sure to invoke Lindzen's full name and title, as though a middle initial was a sign of credibility, or as though Alfred P. Sloan -- who merely gave away lots of money -- somehow legitimized his views.
Hoooo boy Bryce -- you know so much about global warming --- how could you know so little about the significance of titles in academic science?
When a professor is awarded an endowed chair, it's not the name of the chair that matters, it's the fact that the university decided to pick that particular professor to sit in it that matters.
Whom do they select for endowed professorships? The professors whose contributions to their field are the biggest and most significant at the time the award is made.
I'm not personally familiar with Lindzen's career history, but in order for him to have been awarded the title you're mocking, he had to have made some very sginificant contributions to meteorology in the past.
You can disagree with Lindzen on global warming, and I agree with you in your disagreement.
But when you mock his title, then you're demonstrating your own ignorance about academic science.
And that only makes you look stupid, not him.
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To dfm1981
Like Paglia, you ignore the science behind the global warming debate (citing an author of fantasy novels doesn't cut it) and choose instead to launch some half-witted critique of the Left. Feel free to criticize the left all you want, but global warming is happening, regardless of anyone's politics.