How "Green" is Al Gore

[Guitar Shark]

Gore admits that he can improve a lot when it comes to what he preaches. I still don't see how that diminishes the truth of his message.

[DEMON CUNT]

Originally posted by diamondD
Are you? You never add anything worthwhile to any discussion except how gay you are for BBB.

Quick, post some more gay pics and pictures of shit and make a baby Jesus comment. That's all you seem to bring to the discussion.

You haven't been paying attention.

Except for the gay pics. You can get that stuff for yourself, you know. Don't depend on me for your spank material.

[Big Train]

Originally posted by DEMON CUNT
Yet you offer Lindzen's (now discounted by you) report as part of the argument.

What makes you such an expert at evaluating all the available science?

Or are you simply practicing avoidance?

That the point numbnuts, I'm not, you aren't and neither is Al Gore.

Until there is a provable theory (I'll just keep repeating myself for you) that the experts agree on, we are talking boogeyman stuff.

As for discounted I'm sorry, let me quit my job and work as a researcher fulltime for you. I saw the guy on the Meet the Press and did a quick google to find the article.

Doesn't change a word of what he is saying or what his position in academia is. But feel free to run up that tree if you like.

[DEMON CUNT]

Originally posted by Big Train
Until there is a provable theory (I'll just keep repeating myself for you) that the experts agree on, we are talking boogeyman stuff.

Gosh, yer so smart!

So you need 100% of the scientific community to agree completely on global warming before you can accept it?

When you leave the house do you require an absolute guarantee that you won't be killed or injured?

When you eat at a restaurant do you need proof positive that you won't get sick because someone put shit in your dinner?

How can you be sure that one of your kids won't be abducted, fucked and then killed by some freak?

Are you a religious man?

[matt19]

Keep throwing out religion, you know what would be really funny if baby Jesus was real. What would you say then?

[DEMON CUNT]

Originally posted by matt19
Keep throwing out religion, you know what would be really funny if baby Jesus was real. What would you say then?

Yeah, that would be "funny" as you put it.

I would say "Hi Baby Jesus, nice to meet you!" Then I would gleefully shake his hand since that is the custom in our country.

What would you say if Baby Jesus "was real"?

[matt19]

Im saved.

[DEMON CUNT]

Originally posted by matt19
Im saved.

Of course you are.

[matt19]

O-K im glad we agree on that.

[DEMON CUNT]

Originally posted by matt19
O-K im glad we agree on that.

Best of luck with that.

[Big Train]

Originally posted by DEMON CUNT
Gosh, yer so smart!

So you need 100% of the scientific community to agree completely on global warming before you can accept it?

When you leave the house do you require an absolute guarantee that you won't be killed or injured?

When you eat at a restaurant do you need proof positive that you won't get sick because someone put shit in your dinner?

How can you be sure that one of your kids won't be abducted, fucked and then killed by some freak?

Are you a religious man?

Not particularly, althougth you sound very 16th century there. Just because everyone doesn't agree the world is flat, does it means it's not? If you leave your village tomorrow, are you not worried that you will fall off like the wizards predict?

Sounds retarded right....exactly.

Yes, I do need them to be scientific about it (that is what they do last I checked) and have actual provable theories, not this is the best guess we can come up with.

Just prove it.

Now don't think I'm discounting them completely, all I'm asking them to do is prove it. I'd like CO2 reduced for reasons like breathing and being able to jog in my city without getting sick. That's one issue.

Saying for CERTAIN that the CO2 is causing the earth to warm is another thing entirely. Something I want proven scientifically. They were able to do it for health issues, why can't they do the same for the larger envoirnment?

[Warham]

Al Gore has been doing this lecture for thirty years, each year stating that the Earth is going to be toast in ten years.

You figure it out.

[Nickdfresh]

Originally posted by Big Train
From what I understand, his sci-fi story made him a lot of green...


...Until there is a provable theory (I'll just keep repeating myself for you) that the experts agree on, we are talking boogeyman stuff.

LOL Why do the ignorant still pretend this isn't actual science when 99% of the scientific community substantiates it?

I guess we'll have to laugh at your "hypocrisy" the next time you slam Ford for one of his "inside job" theories.

[Nickdfresh]

Here's kind of a theory why guys like Sweitzer are usually full of shit.

I’m OK—You’re a Hypocrite
A little contradiction is good for America..
Jeremy Lott


Do As I Say (Not As I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy, by Peter Schweizer, New York: Doubleday, 258 pages, $22.95

The leftist linguist Noam Chomsky has been a strident opponent of American foreign policy since his days protesting the Vietnam War. More than once he has called the Pentagon “the most hideous institution on this earth.” He has spoken out in favor of the state’s efforts to curb “corporate power” or to break up large estates by severely taxing inheritances. He’s the academic equivalent of a rock star, his ideas promoted by rock bands from Pearl Jam to Bad Religion.

According to Do As I Say (Not As I Do) author and Hoover Institution hand Peter Schweizer, he is also a raging hypocrite. He once told an interviewer for National Public Radio that he didn’t want to discuss “the house, the children, personal life—anything like that.” According to Chomsky, “This is not about a person. It’s about ideas and principles.” Schweizer has a different take. He argues that Chomsky’s life is strikingly inconsistent with his stated ideals, and he marshals copious evidence to back up that claim:

• Chomsky joined the faculty of MIT not as a member of the Linguistics Department but as part of the Research Laboratory of Electronics. Lab professors were blessed with lighter teaching loads, higher salaries, and extensive support staff. The only catch was that their work, reports Schweizer, “was funded entirely by the Pentagon and a few multinational corporations.” The professor saw no problem in railing against the entire defense establishment while he drew a salary from same and conducted research that the generals found useful.

• The MIT mandarin often identifies with the working class and calls himself a socialist, but he acquired one home in Lexington, Massachusetts, valued at $850,000 and another estate in Wellfleet worth at least $1.2 million. The Wellfleet home is smack dab in the middle of a state park, and any further developments are prohibited by law. The radical historian Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States, is one of the few neighbors who could afford to buy in.

• Chomsky is dead set against tax havens and has railed against trusts as tools for the rich to perpetuate structural inequality. And yet, “A few years back he went to Boston’s venerable white-shoe law firm Palmer and Dodge and, with the help of a tax attorney specializing in ‘income-tax planning,’ set up an irrevocable trust to protect his assets against Uncle Sam.” When questioned about this, Chomsky told Schweizer, “I don’t apologize for putting aside money for my children and grandchildren.”

The author replies with what becomes a well worn refrain by the end of the book: that Chomsky “offered no explanation for why he condemns others who are equally proud of their provision for their children and who try to protect their assets from Uncle Sam.”

It’s trite but true: If you go looking for hypocrisy, you’ll usually find it. Moralists and moralizers of every stripe make for particularly plump targets, because they often fail to live up to their creeds. This should not be surprising, but Schweizer often treats liberal hypocrisy as though it is shocking. A little subtlety would have made Schweizer’s argument more appealing, if not more persuasive.

An introductory chapter (“The Do-As-I-Say Liberals”) and a conclusion (“The End of Liberal Hypocrisy”) serve as bookends to 11 character studies of influential left-wing thinkers, activists, and politicians, from “Gloria Steinem: Hopeless Romantic, Dependent Female, Serial Monogamist” to “Ralph Nader: Bourgeois Materialist, Stock Manipulator, and Tyrannical Sweatshop Boss.” Like many prosecutors, Schweizer is willing to take the let’s-see-what-sticks approach, in which a) you shape the facts to play to the jury and b) you lump questionable charges together with more rigorous assertions to bolster the overall case in the minds of impressionable readers.

In the case of the lefty filmmaker Michael Moore, the back cover of the book features the orotund sage from Flint’s pious declaration that “I don’t own a single share of stock.” Below the quote is an official looking financial disclosure form that appears to cast doubt on the statement. Shares in a number of companies are listed, including Eli Lilly and Company, Lucent Technologies, and Boeing. The 50 shares of Halliburton stock are highlighted in yellow, as is the signature of “Michael Moore.” Intended message: Michael Moore is a liar.

Moore may well be lying about his own financial dealings, but this form doesn’t prove that the author of Downsize This! owns a single share of stock as part of his private holdings. The allegedly damning document isn’t a list of Moore’s assets—they’re the assets of a tax-exempt foundation established and maintained by Moore and his wife Kathleen Glynn. As Schweizer explains inside the book, “The foundation allows them to donate funds tax free, make money on their investments, and give the proceeds to any cause they see fit.” In other words, it’s a vehicle to donate money to charitable causes and to roll up that money while it’s idling. What it’s not is money that Moore could use to buy groceries.

Granted, Moore does derive some indirect benefits from his bread and circuses routine. Schweizer studied the Fahrenheit 9/11 documentarian’s charitable contributions and found a few interesting patterns. Apparently, Moore is indeed flinty, as in cheap. He routinely gives away just enough of the foundation’s funds to satisfy the IRS’s requirements to maintain its charitable status. Publicly, he likes to brag about the foundation’s support for first-time filmmakers, women’s shelters, soup kitchens, and similar causes. But the actual grants tend to be either mad money for friends or donations to organizations that advance Moore’s interests.

In 2000 Moore gave $4,500 to the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York and $1,000 to the Ann Arbor Film Festival. Both held events to promote his anti-gun documentary Bowling for Columbine. In 2002 he gave $25,000 to the American Library Association, a donation that Schweizer labels “particularly interesting given that Moore credits ALA members with getting HarperCollins to reconsider a decision to cancel his anti-Bush screed Stupid White Men after 9/11.” Sometimes philanthropy can be very good for business.

Schweizer huffs that Moore’s “hypocrisy runs so deep and the contradictions are so glaring that they border on the pathological.” Here’s a working-class Man from Flint who actually lives on a large estate on Michigan’s Torch Lake and owns a penthouse in New York; a noisy advocate of affirmative action whose own hiring practices are bleached white; a populist down-home Midwesterner who makes millions providing Europeans and America’s coastal elites with fuel for their anti-hick instincts. There’s plenty of material for Schweizer. He doesn’t need to add any exaggerated claims about Moore’s assets.

Schweizer claims throughout the book that while accusations of hypocrisy are routinely leveled at conservatives, liberals tend to get a free pass. One can only wonder, Has the man ever listened to talk radio? Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, and hundreds of other right-wing squawkers all over the dial long ago incorporated criticism of liberal hypocrisy into their normal routines. Hypocrisy accusations are a staple not just of left-wing rhetoric but on the right as well. Turn on Fox News and listen to Fred Barnes or Bill O’Reilly damn those inconsistent liberals. A Google search at the end of last October for the joined terms “liberal” and “hypocrisy” produced 2,570,000 results.

There is a practical reason why conservatives have picked up the “you’re a hypocrite” hammer: If your opponent is defending his integrity instead of his ideas, you’re winning the debate. If Noam Chomsky has to spend time and resources reconciling his paychecks with his politics, those are time and resources that he can’t expend attacking the Iraq War. If Ralph Nader has to square his consumer activism and his stock portfolio, then he might not be able to have the next Corvair recalled.

But it used to be a common conservative belief that you could work within a system and still speak out against elements of the system. Logically, one could live in a rent-controlled apartment but still oppose rent control (as did the hard-core libertarian Murray Rothbard). This was the basic rationale for right-wing political activism—the golden mean between the Scylla of pietism and the Charybdis of more violent, revolutionary impulses. That the right would now criticize the left for the same approach is troubling.

Indeed, many conservatives, from Benjamin Disraeli to William F. Buckley Jr., have professed an appreciation for the moderating influence of hypocrisy. It’s the homage that vice pays to virtue, they would explain, quoting the 17th-century French noble Francois de La Rochefoucauld. There’s certainly a case to be made that liberal hypocrisy helps to restrain some fairly troublesome impulses by turning would-be revolutionaries into poseurs, clowns, and petty manipulators.

Teddy Kennedy may call for more government controls but, as Schweizer accidentally suggests, the desire not to harm his own clan’s extensive holdings has limited the damage. And when Ralph Nader calls for the abolition of the Taft-Hartley Act or rages against our “corporate paymasters,” he’s not making serious policy proposals. He’s playing a part while leaving his large stock portfolio relatively untrammeled. This sort of hypocrisy we can live with.


Jeremy Lott is the author of In Defense of Hypocrisy (forthcoming from Nelson current).

Link

[Nickdfresh]

Originally posted by Warham
Al Gore has been doing this lecture for thirty years, each year stating that the Earth is going to be toast in ten years.

You figure it out.

Do you have his exact quote from that part of his lecture? I haven't seen the film yet, I'll wait 'til it's on DVD or somethin'....