The National Review was founded by Bill Buckley, a very smart man who reached for the loftiest sources to back up his often hideous but invariably elequently stated views. He’s dead now but he outlived the reputation of his magazine by some years and he’ll be walking the earth again before the magazine regains its former glory. Iain Murray, one of a bumper crop of halfwits now writing on the magazine’s collective blog, The Corner, is determined to do his part in keeping the magazine hopelessly stupid by asserting that homeless Americans are consumers of greenhouse gas-producing products at a rate twice that of the world average for individuals.
Sadly, No has the details, or at least all the ones one needs. Murray cites a class project from some MIT undergrads who arrived at their figures by dividing the US government’s global warming activities equally among all US citizens. Homeless persons got tagged with a share of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan along with the rest of the output of the nation’s largest employer and landowner; given that the homeless don’t contribute much in the way of taxes, that hardly seems fair.
Effing homeless. If I’d known they were causing so much global warming, I’d stop giving them my spare quarters!
Of course, 8.5 tons [of carbon dioxide] per homeless person does seem like a figure that’s, well, a teensy bit large. After all, if you live in an average size apartment in California and drive around a mid-size car, you would be emitting 7.22 tons of carbon annually. (Calculate that here). Or perhaps the average homeless guy has a better lifestyle than any of us knew about. The reason that we aren’t seeing a line of Hummers parked in front of the Central Union Mission is apparently because the homeless are smart enough to park their gas-guzzlers several blocks away and then walk to the soup kitchen.
Murray’s point seems to be that even if global warming is a reality, there’s no point in attempting to do something about it because golly, if even American derelicts with no cars or homes, and the accessories that generally accompany those things, are such massive consumers relative to the rest of the world, the possibility of reducing emissions is too slim to matter. Best to experience the apocalypse in spendthrift comfort rather than stinting to no purpose.
We do have to note that homeless people with vehicles, of which there are some, generally park as close to the bread line as possible. Those with Winnebagos are forced to seek parking elsewhere.
i think they should be homed.
I THINK THEY’RE WAISTED
Well, anusha, the skinny ones definitely are but with the fat ones it’s hard to distinguish the waist from the belly.
Are you sure Buckley was all that smart? I don’t believe that people who hold such hideous views are smart at all. Yes, they can string words together smartly, they can sound smart, look smart, act smart, but their moral standards, or lack thereof, belie any facade of knowledge or awareness.
To me, intelligence means emotional insight, intellectual depth, ready acknowledgment of one’s inability to know everything. Book learning doesn’t make you smart; it’s how you apply that learning. No matter how well the Nazi generals operated their Wehrmacht, the fact that they chose the wrong side, the wrong cause and the wrong leader is ample evidence that they weren’t very smart.
So, too, with Buckley: He had to be convinced by Garry Wills that the concept of white supremacy was immoral; he was a big fan of McCarthyism; he was instrumental in Joseph Lieberman’s victory over Lowell Weicker, to the everlasting detriment of American behavior in the Middle East; he was an admirer of Kissinger and Friedman; and he counseled and influenced Reagan and Gingrich in their malevolent politics.
Plus he inhaled cigars. Gave himself emphysema. Now how dumb is that? The only credit for genuine intelligence I’d grant him is that as he aged he seemed to mellow a bit, actually taking one or two supposedly liberal (but in reality rational and thoughtful) positions, eventually coming to admire Martin Luther King, admitting that we’ve lost the Iraq War and saying that neo-conservatives are kind of witless. But by that late date, Buckley had done his damage, which was considerable and lasting in its impact on the nation’s social, political and economic standards, and from which millions of people on the short end of his stick continue to suffer daily.
I love your witty dismissal of the National Review – “He’s dead now but he outlived the reputation of his magazine by some years and he’ll be walking the earth again before the magazine regains its former glory.” But really, that reputation wasn’t much to outlive in the first place; it was purely a product of Buckley’s unearned reputation for intelligence. People are so easily fooled by a good vocabulary, debating skills and a manner of speaking that to them sounds upper-crust and therefore superior, kind of the way Americans are impressed by a British accent even if it’s coming from the mouth of a con-man.
And so in overrating Buckley you overrate his successors; Buckley was the half-wit; Murray et al. are far less than half of a half-wit.
Say there, Montfort, you write pretty well. Ever considered posting on a blog?
I think he was a smart guy, just profoundly blinkered. Not too long ago someone posted video of a Noam Chomsky appearance on Firing Line, and it was apparent that much of the time, Buckley simply didn’t recognize Chomsky’s frames of reference, and I mean “recognize” literally: It wasn’t that Buckley thought Chomsky’s viewpoint was invalid (although that happened too); it was that he simply didn’t see it. But despite a lack of empathy and flexibility, he was a bright guy. So is Dick Cheney, by all accounts. So was Dick Nixon. If they weren’t smart, they wouldn’t be so large a problem.
If intelligence is measured by:
* Adaptability to a new environment or to changes in the current environment, I’d say Buckley, Cheney and Nixon failed the test; the problems they caused people arose from their dull-witted refusal to change.
* Capacity for knowledge and the ability to acquire it, of those three only Buckley showed an iota of capacity for learning (and only an iota). Clever and crafty are his defining characteristics, and those don’t require intelligence as I define it,; the other two were also clever and crafty but not able to learn anything new at all.
* Capacity for reason and abstract thought, Buckley was capable of the latter, and maybe that’s all, given his faulty reasoning, and still he lacked that fundamental human quality called empathy, without which there would be no human civilization at all; the other two…please!
* Ability to comprehend relationships, as in cause and effect maybe, and this:that :: that:this, then all three of these mouth-breathing knucklewalkers had only the most rudimentary ability, as in “duh…money good, buy food and Lexus, I deserve it; no money bad, no food, take bus, their own fault; white people good, God’s favorite, rule world; not white bad, spawn of Satan, not rule world…duh…”
* Ability to evaluate and judge, then having blinders on by definition excludes them, since they couldn’t even see any evidence that would pierce their cognitive dissonance, ignorance, avarice, selfishness, or failures of character, let alone evaluate or judge that evidence. Which is why, as far as Buckley was concerned, Chomsky was a brother from another planet.
* Capacity for original and productive thought, then all three are disqualified, since all they did was hold on to the regressive ethics, fear of change, romance of power, and wanton amorality that has characterized all narrow-minded people throughout the ages. None of these three pinheads (thus the narrow minds) ever had a thought that every self-respecting fascist, emperor, dictator, and troglodyte since prehistory hadn’t already had, which thoughts can pretty much be reduced to “l’etat c’est moi.”
Naw … Cheney, at least, recognized and seized a moment allowing for a breathtaking devaluation of the constitution, defenestration of Congress and enhancement of the executive branch, things he had sought for three decades. In a lot of respects, the problems he has caused are exactly the outcome he wanted. Iraq hasn’t gone the way he hoped it would, but that’s secondary to the creation of the sort of US government he wanted. I think the reduction of his accomplishments to that reactionary formula obscures the danger of them. Singularly unattractive to the likes of you and me, but smart nevertheless. Certainly smarter than those in nominal opposition to him.
Still disagree. Not smart. Accomplishments are not necessarily evidence of intelligence. Clever, opportunistic, mercenary, venal, yes. No different than any monarchist reactionary or fascist general or capitalist whore looking for ways to overthrow a democracy, the bane of their existence. I’m not at all dismissing his accomplishments – I see them for the mortal wound to the republic they will surely become if not reversed, and reversed quickly. Still: Fascism stupid, democracy not nearly as stupid by order of magnitude; ergo Cheney stupid.
History and evolution inevitably prove my point. Humans have survived through the millennia because their empathy protects them; empathy is an evolved survival mechanism, an intelligent response to danger, whether on an individual, family or social level. Ergo, those who lack empathy – otherwise known as sociopaths – are the antithesis of intelligent. It doesn’t require great intelligence to take advantage of an empath – empaths (the vast majority of humans) are sitting ducks for sociopaths (a lethal minority), not because sociopaths are intelligent but because they lack sufficient intelligence to understand the vital importance of the key survival trait known as empathy; all they see is an easy mark, trusting adherents to the Golden Rule. Sociopaths are rendered stupid by their inability to think in anything but the short term – the long view, one that extends beyond the next week or their careers or lifetimes, is unattainable to them.
This is how people like Dick “fuck you” Cheney and Donald “stuff happens” Rumsfeld and Richard “I am not a thief” Nixon can, with no evidence of conscience – and with people like William F. “General Franco is an authentic national hero” Buckley providing their philosophical rationale and cheering them on – order the deaths of tens of thousands of their rather defenseless fellow human beings for unjust causes that have nothing to do with the health of the nation and everything to do with the allure of power and wealth and a visceral antipathy toward egalitarianism.
And, despite great reservoirs of cleverness and deception, in the end they always fail, even if they don’t live long enough to see everything they’ve done to exploit the perceived weakness of empathy fail as well. The evidence of Cheney’s sociopathy is legion, and Nixon’s as well; Buckley was only slightly less sociopathic, yet he fed and countenanced the destructiveness of others, and by doing so proved his own deficit of intelligence.
Tyranny always falls, and falls hard, even after accomplishing great destruction and imposing unimaginable misery over time spans long or short, because tyrants are inherently, and by definition, dumb.