Wednesday, June 14, 2006

ManBearPig vs. "Cars"

Jonah Goldberg wonders why Al Gore isn't attacking Pixar's "Cars":

The No. 1 movie in America today is a fun, family-friendly romp of a cartoon about sending Jews to the gas chamber.

Just kidding.

It’s actually the movie Cars by Pixar. But according to some people, there’s not much difference. Indeed, the No. 1 movie in the hearts of liberals and environmentalists is An Inconvenient Truth, starring Al Gore, a man who believes that the threat posed by the internal combustion engine is not only the gravest peril mankind faces, but that defeating it is a moral imperative equal to stopping the Holocaust.

[snip]

Al Gore and his confreres argue time and again that Americans must change their habits and culture to avoid the ecological holocaust. Chief among these changes is for Americans to give up their addiction to driving, or driving “unnecessarily.” Surely a film that teaches young children to love cars is a great moral crime given the supposed moral stakes. Similarly, why isn’t Gore — or anybody else in the Democratic party — denouncing NASCAR? If global warming is the moral equivalent of the Holocaust, aren’t NASCAR races the moral equivalent of corporate-sponsored, televised neo-Nazi rallies? NASCAR creates greenhouse gasses for pure entertainment. Millions of people drive to these races, poisoning the atmosphere, to watch grown men poison the atmosphere even more. Where is the condemnation?

I know I’ll hear from all sorts of angry readers for taking Gore’s position to the extreme. But this has it backwards. I’m merely taking Gore’s extreme position seriously. We have lots of debates over the factual soundness of environmental extremism but nearly none on the moral soundness of environmental extremism. Once you compare a problem to the Holocaust — even remotely — you’ve lost your moral wiggle room.
Go read it all and see what the real inconvenient truths are.

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