Not Very Bright
From a piece in The New York Times by Penelope Green on hoarding incandescent bulbs:
For years, Glenn Beck, among other conservative pundits and personalities, has proclaimed the death of the incandescent light bulb as a casualty of the “nanny state” (never mind that the light bulb legislation is a Bush-era act)...
I fail to see the contradiction.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:23 AM
2 Comments:
They buried the lede: hoarding is stupid because nobody is banning incandescent bulbs, just forcing manufacturers to make SOME of them more energy efficient.
Agree with your conclusion too, LAGuy.
I predict that historians, a hundred years from now, will divide the Old Left from the New Left with a single test: do they put human beings first?
The Old Left, including its watered-down versions like FDR-era liberals, focused on human beings. Whether or not you think their economic views were right, their goal was to help out the poor, which always meant the poor human beings. Look at the lyrics of "Roll On, Columbia" by Woody Guthrie, which praises the New Deal's building of dams, and chopping down trees, in the Northwest. To Guthrie and all his Old Left comrades, this is good, because human beings receive houses and electricity and food from the projects.
The miniature fluorescent bulb would have been promptly banned by the Old Left. It poses such a danger that the EPA says that if you drop one on your carpet and it breaks, you must evacuate the room for four hours because the mercury-laden fumes pose a danger to human beings. And yet the New Left is aggressively promoting these bulbs and even has chosen to put miniscule and unclear warnings on the packaging.
The Old Left (correctly) pushed for warning labels and sometimes even banned products that could harm human beings. The New Left, however, prefers a product that harms human beings (mini-fluorescent bulbs) to one that harms the environment (incandescent bulbs).
Another sign of the NL mindset is Secretary of State Clinton saying that we are willing to overlook China's human rights violations if they help us fight global warming.
No matter which side you agree with, there is a massive division between the OL and the NL on the most fundamental of all politics questions: who are your constituents? This is the issue that separated National Socialists from international Communists, and this is the issue that separates the Old Left from the New Left. The Old Left's constituency was the human race. The New Left... not so much.
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