My meaning is perfectly obvious
George Will: "Global Warming Is Socialism By The Back Door"
That is a sentence in the same respect that a randomly generated password is a word. It is word salad with a side of gibberish (vinaigrette gibberish, not the kind with mayonnaise ). That this comes from the consummate 60's tribute act George Will, who's brain was so obviously brined in Safire and Buckley makes the linguistic petit mal all the more gruesome.
When I was growing up in the sixties and seventies, Republicans were science nerds with pocket protectors and buzz cuts. Democrats were were spiritualistic contrarians who always disagreed with "the man" and had a Casteneda paperback in their dirty jeans. Nowadays it's kinda the opposite: Conservatives would embrace the notion that the Earth sits on a turtles back if Liberals told them otherwise. It is Will who is turning scientific method into political beer pong.
I was surprised Real Clear Politics thought this tripe was worthy of of it's bandwidth but they did get me to look, so there. Real Clear Politics has always openly been what FiveTwentyEight.com is becoming: a site managed by logical purists that bends over backwards to not offend the kind of luddites who wouldn't go there anyway. George Will kinda had that thing too while he was at ABC but now that he is a FOXy gentleman he can apparently let his freak flag fly.
GEORGE WILL: Global warming is socialism by the back door. The whole point of global warming is that it's a rationalization for progressives to do what progressives want to do, which is concentrate more and more power in Washington, more and more Washington power in the executive branch, more and more executive branch power in independent czars and agencies to micromanage the lives of the American people -- our shower heads, our toilets, our bathtubs, our garden hoses. Everything becomes involved in the exigencies of rescuing the planet.
Will doesn't dispute the existence of global warming, rather he feels that it abides on some different plane of existence. It is not a fact of Earthly life, but a point on a tangential line drawn out by liberal mathematicians to divert humanity from a carbon-based nirvana. We have cursed them by coming up with a theoretical cassis belli to reengineer society into a giant pussy hugging a gianter tree.
I couldn't resist throwing a rock in the water and posted my opinion in the comments section. Needless to say I didn't get any nods of agreement but one fellow did throw me back a good point:
And how, precisely, do you suppose that the children who took science seriously ("nerds") grew into adults that do not? And did the spiritualistic contrarians find some encoded message inculcating respect for fact-based analysis and remediating their educational deficiencies in the work of Casteneda? What you suggest is prima facie unlikely, and yet you assert it with no evidence whatsoever to answer its counter-intuitiveness.
The answer didn't come quickly to me but it has as I've been writing. Those button downs of 1965 haven't changed in their beliefs but their intellectual flexibility has ossified. It takes a lot of flexibility for a 52 year old man to reject muscle cars and American exceptionalism. It's easier to replace scientific method with convenient rationalization. Jim Demint didn't think to himself in High School "I want things just like they were in 1932, but today he sure as hell wishes it were 1962 in South Carolina again.
Meanwhile quite a few of those hippies did " find some encoded message inculcating respect for fact-based analysis and remediating their educational deficiencies in the work of Casteneda". Those who cannot accept the beliefs of their elders as children will naturally seek to Progress, with Liberal minds that seek the Truth. Steve Jobs comes to mind.
I guess the only moral of my story might be not to look for the secrets of life in the ramblings of an old man stuck in his "Wonder Years".
Instead try reading Carlos Casteneda. With or without 'Shrooms.
Crossposted at Reinventing Your World