Letters to the Editor
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Good job Camille
Anybody who can draw this many vile responses from this readership is doing something right. Your views on the Second Amendment (the DC appeals court finally issues an opinion that makes sense) and the scam that is global warming are spot on. I am still waiting to starve from the new ice age predicted 30 years ago. Now apparently I will starve due to global warming instead. I wish they would make up their mind. They couldn't even predict last year's hurricane season with any accuracy but we are suppose to believe those computer models for 50 years out are a done deal. Like you said, man is too weak to effect climate change. When you consider the very concept of man thinking he can somehow alter the climate of our entire planet it is truly laughable, at best. I think most people on here will actually be disappointed when all the doom and gloom doesn't happen.
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If she made me laugh...
her ill-conceived, overly-confident views of topics like global warming would be worth reading. But I'm not laughing. Not amused. There's no joke. Put my subscription revenue towards something worth reading. The more I think about my money going towards someone writing such b.s. about global warming, the angier I'm getting.
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Take Hugh Greentree
...and reverse his name: it becomes Small Deadbush. Isn't that funny?
In any case, Camille and facts still seem to have a hard time getting in touch. There were certainly no facts in anything Hugh Greenbush had to say. Far from being somehow 'driven further to the right' by 'liberal hatred,' Bush in fact took a hard right turn the minute he got into office. He governed like he had a fifty state mandate and not a narrow and highly disputed victory.
And Democrats for the most part went along with him; they went along with his massive tax breaks for the rich. They went along with his 'no child left behind' program. They went along with his invasion of Iraq. And in turn Bush and Republicans branded Democrats as traitors in the election of 2002. Remember the morphing of Max Cleland into Osama bin Laden?
How could Democrats or liberals have pushed Bush 'further to the right' if Democrats and liberals never really stood up to him until maybe the last year or so?
Furthermore, as far as I know, Bush has never changed his mind on anything; yet another reason to doubt that the nasty liberals somehow pushed the poor man into the arms of the right wing.
But I highly doubt Camille will pay any atention to anything I might have to say, simply because I just don't have the sort of cute phoney authentic 'persona' she seems to get off on. Maybe if I pretended to be a some small town cowboy with a hillbilly accent or some damned thing she might think I had something to say. Unfortunately I happen to be a person, not a cartoon, so I doubt I'll ever be able to convince her of anything.
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Camille Paglia: Geologist in an alternate universe, revisionist historian in this one
A new line of reasoning: I know nothing about a particular subject, but I might have, had I not spent my time on something else. So I am therefore highly qualified to dispense opinion!
Camille is obviously a self-promoting idiot, but she is also a very dishonest revisionist, most notably revising her cheerleading of Bush and the Iraq war. In her newly constructed reality *we* were the ones duped by Bush rather than her!
Some selected quotes:
Especially after 9/11, with its diffuse sense of peril, we should beware of the seductive dream of the strong man or clan who will shield us from harm.
Camille was the one seduced. Why is she warning us again exactly? Camille wrote multiple columns about Bush and his tough cowboy ways while we rolled our eyes.
His hearty, back-slapping persona seemed to promise gritty realism and populist outreach
Promised to Paglia, because she is a gullible hack who bought the Bush BS book, line and sinker. Not only bought it but fed it to us.
But by stupidly making Iraq (ruled by a tattered despot with decaying infrastructure) the theater of war, the Bush administration has exposed American citizens to danger wherever they live, work or travel for decades to come.
Except that at the time the Iraq war started Camille was for it, not opposed to it. Does Camille think we are too stupid to use google and read her own past columns? Apparently.
Tell the big lie. We were the fools who supported the war, we were the fools who saw Bush as a western cowboy 50s icon. Silly us.
And finally this gem.
My problem with Ann Coulter is not the subjects she tackles, which are always substantive, but her carelessness of research and argumentation.
LO fucking L. Pot, kettle, etc.
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Just Grin And Bear It
Camille Paglia's articles are the intellectual equivalent of a spoiled bear rummaging an ill-secured trash bin. On reading one of her columns, I get a visual image of a lot of well-chewed garbage strewn across a parking lot. I find it odd that Salon has chosen to rehabilitate this particular bear.
horklet
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Since bears don't hibernate anymore now that global warming is upon us, Camille will be with us twelve months a year. At least she's smarter than the average bear. Her zoology professor told her so.
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Peak Oil and Global Warming Are Here... Get Used to It.
Ms. Paglia had me until global warming. As I had it explained to me recently by Albert Bates, author of Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook: Recipes for Changing Times, you can't take what we have from the earth and deposit it into the air without serious consequences. Any other supposition defies logic.
So, I hope that Ms. Paglia, along with the editors of the Wall Street Journal, will eat their words about how the market will ultimately prevail, and leave us alone -- at gunpoint -- when those of us who do believe have prepared for the ramifications of global warming, and peak oil, and they have not.
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Wow.
Camille Paglia's sentences are shotgun blasts of poorly chosen adjectives just as her paragraphs are Russian dolls of increasingly stupid ideas, one idiotic idea nested neatly into another bigger, more idiotic idea nested into another bigger, more idiotic idea, and so on and so on.
If this weren't enough, everything she writes is embellished with her now-trademarked narcissistic mini-bombs, dropped here and there throughout.
First: "I have been contemplating the principle of climate change since I was a child." Doubt it!
Second: "My geology professor in college, in fact, asked me to consider geology as a career." Great. You didn't. So why mention it? This is not a job interview; this article is not a resume.
Third: "Virtually all of the major claims about global warming and its causes still remain to be proved." What is particularly interesting about this sentence is how quickly she forgets to go anywhere with it.
Fourth: Something, something, fragility, people will move around, blah blah blah.
Fifth: "I began 'Sexual Personae' (parodying the New Testament) 'In the beginning was nature.' And nature will survive us all. Man is too weak to permanently affect nature, which includes infinitely more than this tiny globe." Here she manages to condescend on at least three levels while also getting some details really wrong. What's especially eye-catching is her unneeded reference to her own book, which is then followed with a Paul Harvey-level platitude about the arrogance of assuming that humans can affect the world around them. Um, we can. And as far as nature going beyond our "tiny globe," well, we aren't talking about man's ability to permanently affect the UNIVERSE. We're talking about man's ability to negatively affect the earth for a long enough period (not necessarily permanently) to fuck up human life on THIS planet.
Sixth: "I voted for Ralph Nader... because I feel that the United States needs a strong Green Party... laughing at Al Gore's lugubrious sentimentality, which was painfully revelatory of his indecisive, self-thwarting character." She begins a paragraph with "I voted for Ralph Nader" and follows with a swipe at Al Gore's "self-thwarting character" without a moment's contemplation of the possible ironies involved. Nader is a man who tried to go from zero to President in five seconds. Yeah, he's a great consumer advocate. But he didn't do his homework. He didn't establish a viable national third party- he just ran for President like the increasingly entitled twit that he is. Also- terrific use of adjectives in this paragraph. And by terrific, I mean clunky and first-semester-ish.
Seventh: "Environmentalism is a noble cause." Followed by a very sad story and no conclusion, after having just pretty much dismissed Al Gore who is our best and most successful champion of environmental issues. If global warming is half the problem that a tremendous percentage of scientists think it is, its going to make sad stories like these, about the callous indifference of polluting companies, seem pedestrian by comparison.
Paglia really outdoes herself here. Its like one of the Russian dolls, at the end, jumps into an infinitely smaller one, thus causing a blackhole and perhaps the collapse of the universe and along with it reality.
In short, WHAT?