Late Nite Deep Thought
Too bad that there is no conservative intelligentsia left in this country. I remember when conservatism used to denote at least a degree of sobriety and if not rationality, at least not aggressive irrationality.
Today is seems that to be a conservative you need to be, not just stupid, but outlandishly and loudly stupid. You can’t be the kind of old school, modest, homespun, stupid guys that would wax philosophical only after they prefaced their remarks with an acknowledgment that, while not “book smart” they had a degree of common sense.
Nope. Now, to be a conservative you have to be loud and stupid. You have to be as aggressively opposed to “book learning” as ever, but you have to be so while loudly claiming expertise on a vast range of subjects.
I mean, how is the merits of energy conservation even a political issue? How can anyone take any effort make the air a bit more clear or the rivers a bit less mercury filled as an affront to their political views?
The only explanation is that they belong to a club which demands that its members practice a loud, strident, pushy, outlandish stupidity from dusk to dawn. It is all they have.
I mean, how is the merits of energy conservation even a political issue? How can anyone take any effort make the air a bit more clear or the rivers a bit less mercury filled as an affront to their political views?
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LMAO!!!! You mean like getting all jiggy with this idiotic liberal BS notion that we are causing the earth to warm and we will solve part of the problem by replacing every traditional light bulb with those MERCURY filled water/land polluting florecent blubs you have rammed down peoples throats?
right, global warming is a liberal issue….
man jason, did you hire that commentor?
Right on cue! Don’t you know that the free market solves everything?
What Jason didn’t understand was the point that the use of energy is a great part of what has lifted us from the squalor of a subsistence existence. There is certainly nothing wrong with conservation, but y’all have been seduced by the faux appearance of being “green,” like former Vice President Gore’s oh-so-vocal concern for the enivronment while he gets rich off of selling carbon emission credits, which do nothing to reduce carbon emissions but simply move money around, and runs a house that uses more juice than a regular neighborhood.
Energy conservation at home is accomplished by being practical: turning off the lights when you leave the room, as an ordinary habit — one which, admittedly, I have utterly failed to instill in my daughters, despite my trying to do so — and not running things like the television and the ‘puter when you aren’t using them. It doesn’t mean sitting in the dark contemplating where your navel would be if only it was light enough to actually see it.
Jason, let me be clear here: I was mocking y’all, mocking the whole notion of a ridiculous Earth Hour.
Now, there are things you support with which I have no problem at all. This site was a big advocate of wind power, and I think that’s fine: wind power is a perfectly reasonable supplement to large coal and oil burning power plants. Conservatives don’t have any objections to reasonable and rational alternative energy sources; we just get amused when our friends on the left go into the Chicken Little the-sky-is-falling-and-we’re-all-doomed mode.
One final point: if you believe that CO2 emissions really are contributing to global warming and that this is something which has to be addressed, you need to support a major expansion of nuclear power generation. Energy isn’t free and it isn’t magic: there will always be costs associated with it. Nuclear power generates radioactive waste, and that has to be contained, but it does not contribute to global warming.
As for the radioactive waste, all of the nuclear power plants in the country generate about 2,000 tons of waste a year. You might think that’s a lot, but due to the high density of the material, that’s about one rail car worth of material, for the whole country, for a year. We can deal with that, safely and effectively, if we’ll just agree to do it and not get all excited when the word “nuclear” is uttered.
If goats were threatened with extinctiom, conservatives would all become environmentalists pretty fast.
I’m glad Dana is here to tell me what I don’t understand.
A1,
Thanks for cutting to the heart of the matter.
UI,
If I had to guess which loud, stupid conservative was going to show up to prove my point I would have guessed Dana.
Gosh, I wonder how ‘progressive’ America will become once the Hispanics take over the country? (look to Mexico to find out the answer) Something tells they’ll be quite resentful against ALL White peoples when that happens (whether they be liberal or conservative), just like the Arab and Africans immigrants who have poured in to Europe by the tens of millions.
Hispanics politically are religious and conservative. If anything people like you should be happy about it…
It seems like the Republicans have become the party of not bothering to do anything since everything is hopeless. And drill, baby, drill!
I, para uno, recepción con la gran satisfacción los nuestros nuevos overlords mexicanos.
Conservatives are working pretty hard to squash some of the best efforts to create a new long-term industry right here in the US, while continuing to advocate for a carbon regime that puts money into the pockets of people who continue to look for ways to hurt us.
In sheer geopolitical terms, depleting the flow of funds from us to them can’t be anything but a win. But while conservatives would like to keep us completely enslaved to the usual carbon fuels, the hydrocarbon producers, are spending a very great deal of money to get ahead on the green energy front. Why? This is where the world — and the money — is headed. And why not bet that American conservatives will win the don’t worry, be happy argument.
Let’s be really clear about what that argument means — it means that Americans are really to give up any technological superiority for this emerging market and will still be willing to buy their energy (even the new tech stuff) from the same people who are working at cross purposes to our own security.
You’d think that conservatives would want to weaken these people, and if the upside accrues entirely to our own economic benefit that it would be a no brainer. Except that what you do get is conservatives — once again — willing to sacrifice the long term interests of the entire county in order to hang on to one more piece of already discredited stupidity.
You’re right Cassandra. Do conservatives just want the status quo for the heck of it?
Not for the heck of it, but because climate change denial as well as slavery to hydrocarbons is a key bit of their ideology. Not because they have any scientific evidence (defined as peer-reviewed data) of the lack of any climate change, and not because there is any data that more drilling will get us cheap and plentiful hydrocarbons here. The ideology exists to foster the don’t worry be happy BS and to support more subsidies to the oil and coal industries.
I’m glad Cassandra figured it out. Conservatives are only interested in helping the oil and coal industries, not the employees of those industries, and terrorists. That really was the sum of Dana’s argument.