Vaclav Klaus on Climate Change

Fri, 29 Jun 2007 22:22:13 GMT

clipped by: sehric
clipper's remarks: This reaction to the call to act on climate change needs to be understood, in order to properly rebut it. Many see climate change science as a method of industrialized countries placing controls on others, and therefore reject it out right. In actuality, climate change poses more of a threat to people's freedoms than is being realized.

Clip Source: www.ft.com

As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not in communism. This ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning.

The environmentalists ask for immediate political action because they do not believe in the long-term positive impact of economic growth and ignore both the technological progress that future generations will undoubtedly enjoy, and the proven fact that the higher the wealth of society, the higher is the quality of the environment. They are Malthusian pessimists.

Tags: communism, malthusian, perception

Michael Moore in Cuba

Fri, 29 Jun 2007 20:23:21 GMT

clipped by: sehric

Clip Source: www.acsh.org

But then, the climax of his movie is a sequence in which sick Americans (including at least one ostensibly rendered sick by the still-ambiguous effects of fumes at the Trade Center site in New York) are given treatment in communist Cuba -- and Moore, like Bernard Shaw getting the brass-band treatment from Stalin, accepts Cuban assurances that the Americans are being given the same routine, faultlessly egalitarian treatment that any average Cuban citizens would receive (assuming they hadn't been put in mental institutions for opposing Castro or sequestered for having AIDS, of course). So it's probably safe to say that Moore has a much broader mission than just showing us the flaws in our healthcare system. And his broader mission, which seems to be at the very least turning the U.S. into France and ideally, perhaps, into something a bit more like Cuba, gets in the way of what could have been a much humbler but far more effective bit of social satire.

Tags: moore, cuba

Clipmarks | sehric's clips

Vaclav Klaus on Climate Change

Michael Moore in Cuba