My Favorite Teacher's Failure as Object Lesson on the Importance of Learning History Properly

I can distinctly remember the sense of doom I felt when I drew the topic for my research paper/presentation out of the hat. It was my senior year in high school in my favorite class with my favorite teacher, and what could have been a fun and fascinating project quickly turned into a deepening sense of dread for the hours and hours to come, slogging through a topic I had no interest in.

Mr. O’Brien was my favorite teacher. He taught my 10th grade English class, and he was funny, smart, motivated, and one of the few bright spots in my otherwise wasted three years at the central Minnesota school. I had the benefit, or perhaps misfortune, of having lived in Colorado until then and had a taste of a truly excellent high school, so I knew just how terrible things were. Mr. O’Brien’s class was one of the few things I didn’t hate about Minnesota.

In senior year, he taught Humanities, which was a full year survey of the sum total of human history through art, music, and philosophy. It was thrilling. I can still remember learning about Platonic Forms for the first time, and thinking how odd the entire concept was.

Sometime after winter break, it was time to start work on our big research papers, from which we were also to craft a presentation for the class. The trouble was we couldn’t pick our own topics. Mr. O’Brien put numbers in a hat which was passed around the class. As someone picked a number, they shouted it out and Mr. O’Brien read off the corresponding topic as he wrote it on the blackboard. It was a crazy amalgam of topics from “The Hohenzollerns” to “The Great Wall of China” to “The Battle of Marathon,” none of which we had covered during the year. I sat in suspense and apprehension as the hat was passed to me. I don’t remember what my number was, but I certainly remember the topic: Mary, Queen of Scots.

This was perhaps the first time I had ever heard the name. I didn’t know what to think, but I was a bit worried. Other students were similarly perplexed and concerned. “But what do you want me to write about the Great Wall of China?” someone asked. “Whatever you want,” Mr. O’Brien replied. “What is a Hohenzollern?” a kid named Randy asked. “Go look it up,” was the reply.

I checked out some books and started reading, and it was an incomprehensible mess. All I could find was what seemed to be soap operatic accounts of he said/she said, he betrayed/she betrayed. I didn’t have an iota of context for what was happening or why. So I put it together the best I could, got my ‘A’, and that was that. I walked away knowing just as little as I did before.

What was Mr. O’Brien thinking? It wasn’t until recently that I thought of this episode again, and came upon a theory. I think he was attempting to rectify the terrible lack of classical education we all had. I never took history, even in Colorado; it was all Social Studies, and therefore, basically worthless. It was an endless stream of disconnected facts, rote memorization, and a healthy spattering of multiculturalism. Mr. O’Brien’s Humanities class was designed to give us a taste of what we had been missing all along, and the research papers were just a part of that. But in lobbing contextless topic grenades at us in the hopes of getting us to dig deeper into history, he failed miserably. His assignment violated the hierarchy of knowledge, leaving us flailing away in a pool of sinking concretes (a mess of facts that, rather than helping to form a concept, piles up and sinks out of sight, out of mind.)

I had thought then that the presentation portion was training to help our public speaking skills, and it likely was to some extent. But I suspect that as each topic was designed to get us to dig deeply in one area, the presentations were meant to teach the other students about the topics they didn’t research themselves. Then after the whole exercise was completed, we would theoretically all be richer for it. This also failed miserably.

A few students got juicy topics that were easy to grasp, or to which they already had some context. “The Battle of Verdun,” in comparison, would have been a cakewalk to anyone who had seen an old war movie. The majority of topics were as disconnected from our context of knowledge as was mine, and the other students got as little out of the exercise as I did. As a result, their presentations were as superficial as mine was, and thus no one got anything out of anything.

The tragedy of all of this is that these topics are fascinating, if you have the right contextual knowledge. I applaud and respect Mr. O’Brien for what he did for me in that Humanities class--and even for what he was attempting with the research papers--but in trying to rectify over a decade of mis-education in history by forcing random topics on us with little guidance and almost no historical context, he was hanging us out to dry.

What a shame it was that I had no idea who Mary, Queen of Scots was, or why she was even worthy of study. If I had only known about the English Reformation and Henry VIII, and about his establishment of Anglicanism and the later reign of Bloody Mary who set about trying to reclaim England for the Pope, I would have understood Mary, Queen of Scots and her conflict with Elizabeth. The intrigues with Spain and the other powers in Europe would have made sense, and in the wider context of the Reformation on the Continent, the struggles between Protestantism and Catholicism would have made the story that much richer.

Instead, I spent weeks of work in a haze, reading, writing, practicing my presentation, all the while having no idea why anything I was doing had any value at all. I felt somewhat betrayed by Mr. O’Brien back then, since such an arbitrary exercise didn’t fit in with the otherwise logically constructed course. Looking back on it now, I understand what he was trying to accomplish, and why he failed.

Australia Defeats Cap-and-Trade

Robert Tracinski reports that "In a potential preview for America, the Australian Senate has just defeated that country's version of cap-and-trade by a vote of 42-30." Tracinski notes that while most media coverage predictably ignores the real reasons behind the defeat, concentrating on the mining lobby and other causes, he says:

In fact, the bill was defeated because there is now serious disagreement in Australia on the very existence of human-caused global warming. That's the backbone behind the collapse of what was supposed to be bipartisan agreement. As Senator Nick Minchin put it in a blistering speech opposing the bill, "this whole extraordinary scheme, which would do so much damage to Australia, is based on the as yet unproven assertion that anthropogenic emissions of CO2 are the main driver of global warming… The Rudd government arrogantly refuses to acknowledge that there remains a very lively scientific debate about the extent of and the main causes of climate change, with thousands of highly reputable scientists around the world of the view that anthropogenic emissions of CO2 are not and cannot be the main driver of the small degree of global warming that occurred in the last 30 years of the 20th century."

I hope Tracinski is right that this could be a preview for America. But as I discussed this previously,

our own Congress and press would do well to follow in Australia's footsteps. Nancy Pelosi is set to try and ram the Waxman-Markey bill through the House today, and she'll probably succeed. Hopefully enough Senators will show the same intellectual curiosity that Australia's [Senators] did, and defeat their version of the bill. Doubtful, I know.

Happer Testimony on Climate Change

William Happer, distinguished Princeton physics professor and former director of energy research at D.O.E. (apparently fired by Gore for not going along with politicized science), testified before a Senate committee chaired by Barbara Boxer on February 25, 2009. [HT: Doug Reich]

I was very impressed by the quality of his ideas and presentation, debunking the climate science that is being taken as gospel by the administration, and the resulting need to "do something!" to fix it. His arguments are carefully structured, accessible to the scientific layman, and he weaves in historically analogous situations to support his points. I can't recommend it highly enough (though I wish he would have stopped before writing the last two paragraphs.) As an anecdote unequivocally proving the potency of the speech--you only need one data point for proof, right?--I sent it to a friend, who sent it to his girlfriend, who sent it to her father, a retired oceanographer, and he is now afire with new ideas questioning all sorts of old notions.

Here are a few choice quotes, but they don't do the speech justice. I recommend downloading the PDF from this site and printing it out. You'll want a pen handy to underline key points. It's that good.

On Gore and causality:

Al Gore likes to display graphs of temperature and CO2 concentrations over the past million years or so, showing that when CO2 rises, the temperature also rises. Doesn’t this prove that the temperature is driven by CO2? Absolutely not! If you look carefully at these records, you find that first the temperature goes up, and then the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere goes up.

There is a delay between a temperature increase and a CO2 increase of about 800 years. This casts serious doubt on CO2 as a climate driver because of the fundamental concept of causality. A cause must precede its effect. For example, I hear my furnace go on in the morning about six o’clock, and by about 7 o’clock, I notice that my house is now so warm that I have too many covers on my bed. It is time to get up. It would never occur to me to assume that the furnace started burning gas at 6 o’clock because the house got warm at 7 o’clock.

On the corruption of language, and thus of concepts:

I keep hearing about the “pollutant CO2,” or about “poisoning the atmosphere” with CO2, or about minimizing our “carbon footprint.” This brings to mind another Orwellian pronouncement that is worth pondering: “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” CO2 is not a pollutant and it is not a poison and we should not corrupt the English language by depriving “pollutant” and “poison” of their original meaning.

On the folly of trying to claim there is some "ideal" concentration of CO2 that we must go back to:

I remember being forced to read Voltaire’s novel, Candide, when I was young. You recall that Dr. Pangloss repeatedly assured young Candide that he was living in “the best of all possible worlds,” presumably also with the best of all CO2 concentrations. That we are (or were) living at the best of all CO2 concentrations seems to be a tacit assumption of the IPCC executive summaries for policy makers.

But one of my favorite parts comes early in the speech where he talks of the futility of past efforts to to change the climate by wishing.

The climate has changed many times in the past with no help by mankind. Recall that the Romans grew grapes in Britain around the year 100, and Viking settlers prospered on small farms in Greenland for several centuries during the Medieval Climate Optimum around 1100. People have had an urge to control the climate throughout history so I suppose it is no surprise that we are at it again today. For example, in June of 1644, the Bishop of Geneva led a flock of believers to the face of a glacier that was advancing “by over a musket shot” every day. The glacier would soon destroy a village. The Bishop and his flock prayed over the glacier, and it is said to have stopped. The poor Vikings had long since abandoned Greenland where the advancing glaciers and cooling climate proved much less susceptible to prayer. Sometimes the obsession for control of the climate got a bit out of hand, as in the Aztec state, where the local scientific/religious establishment of the year 1500 had long since announced that the debate was over and that at least 20,000 human sacrifices a year were needed to keep the sun moving, the rain falling, and to stop climate change. [bold added]

Although the Bishop of Geneva's praying obviously worked -- wait... what was that about causality? -- the thought of someone praying in front of a glacier to make it stop made me chuckle. Then today, a friend sent me a link to some National Geographic photos of Indonesian cultures living near volcanoes. He was fascinated by the first photo, which is truly breathtaking. But I was amazed at seeing these human beings, living on earth, today, praying to volcano gods. The last photo was perhaps the most striking, taken along with its caption:
This man is praying to stop mud, just like the Bishop prayed to stop the glacier, and the Aztecs sacrificed thousands to their gods. Now the environmentalists and their friends in power are looking to march the economy, and therefore all of us, up to the top of the temple to sacrifice us to their climate god via Cap and Trade. Rather than appealing directly to faith, these last claim to fly the flag of science, all the while persecuting those who disagree with their hysterical claims as if this were an auto da fe.

If you're at all interested in this issue and would like some good points to bring up when you hear the typical "Denier!" assertions, or if you know someone on the fence who might be just active minded enough to listen to reason, you'll want to read this testimony and pass it on.

Tax Withholding is the Threat Here?

In the WSJ today, Charles Murray comes out strongly, forcefully, against taxes. Wait, I mean against tax withholding. But first, he sets the stage, listing the dire threat he sees:

America is supposed to be a democracy in which we're all in it together. Part of that ethos, which has been so essential to the country in times of crisis, is a common understanding that we all pay a share of the costs. Taxes are an essential ingredient in the civic glue that binds us together.

Our democracy is corrupted when some voters think that they won't have to pay for the benefits their representatives offer them. It is corrupted when some voters see themselves as victims of exploitation by their fellow citizens.

By both standards, American democracy is in trouble. [all emphasis mine]

OK, Charles, I got it. We're all in this together, bound by the happy glue of taxes, but we're in danger if some people feel one way about them and another group feels another way. And the key source of the conflict is not how much we're all paying, why we're forced to pay it, or whether the government has a right to take our money at all, but that payroll taxes and withholding hides from us the true weight of our dutiful burden. Observe:

For once, we face a problem with a solution that costs nothing. Most families who pay little or no personal income taxes are paying Social Security and Medicare taxes. All we need to do is make an accounting change, no longer pretending that payroll taxes are sequestered in trust funds.

Fold payroll taxes into the personal tax code, adjusting the rules so that everyone still pays the same total, but the tax bill shows up on the 1040. Doing so will tell everyone the truth: Their payroll taxes are being used to pay whatever bills the federal government brings upon itself, among which are the costs of Social Security and Medicare.

The finishing touch is to make sure that people understand how much they are paying, which is presently obscured by withholding at the workplace. End withholding, and require everybody to do what millions of Americans already do: write checks for estimated taxes four times a year. ...

End the payroll tax, end withholding, and these corrosive misapprehensions go away. We will once again be a democracy in which we're all in it together, we all know that we're all paying a share, and we are all aware how much that share is. [bold added]

I have to hand it to him. He's taken up a whole column in a very good newspaper writing urgently about a non-problem, proposing a non-solution. What's he really getting at with all of this? He mentioned "corrosive misapprehensions" and the poor feeling like the rich aren't paying their share while the rich feel like victims... all of these feelings are threatening our democracy!

While it's clear that his typical view of democracy is bad in itself--he seems to say that anything the government does is OK as long as a majority votes for it, and the only concern is that the voting is "honest" and runs smoothly--and that he pays no heed to individual rights or the fact that our country is a republic, the subtext of his whole piece is more instructive. The key to understanding this is to see that his essential worry is group polarization. I've had occassion to refer to the following quote from Ayn Rand a lot lately. People like Murray and Cass Sunstein keep returning to this idea, raising it as a vague threat to civil society, and holding Ayn Rand's points in mind is essential to being able to detect what they're really trying to do:

An anti-concept is an unnecessary and rationally unusable term designed to replace and obliterate some legitimate concept. The use of anti-concepts gives the listeners a sense of approximate understanding. But in the realm of cognition, nothing is as bad as the approximate . . . .

One of today’s fashionable anti-concepts is “polarization.” Its meaning is not very clear, except that it is something bad—undesirable, socially destructive, evil—something that would split the country into irreconcilable camps and conflicts. It is used mainly in political issues and serves as a kind of “argument from intimidation”: it replaces a discussion of the merits (the truth or falsehood) of a given idea by the menacing accusation that such an idea would “polarize” the country—which is supposed to make one’s opponents retreat, protesting that they didn’t mean it. Mean—what? . . .

It is doubtful—even in the midst of today’s intellectual decadence—that one could get away with declaring explicitly: “Let us abolish all debate on fundamental principles!” (though some men have tried it). If, however, one declares; “Don’t let us polarize,” and suggests a vague image of warring camps ready to fight (with no mention of the fight’s object), one has a chance to silence the mentally weary. The use of “polarization” as a pejorative term means: the suppression of fundamental principles. Such is the pattern of the function of anti-concepts. [Ayn Rand Letter, italics in original]

Go back and read Murray's piece with this in mind, and his evasiveness will jump out at you. There is no there there. As I said earlier, it's a non-solution proposed for a non-problem, with some "we're all in this together" collectivism thrown in for good measure.

I wonder, and perhaps commenters could weigh in: What is the point of his piece? Is he trying to distract people from real issues? Is the root of his non-argument "Why can't we all get along?" Or is he really so deluded as to think that he's promoting actual ideas?


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Update: Thanks for the link, Billy.

Papal Reign, Papal Reign

While listening again to the recorded lectures from Scott Powell's European history course on the way into work this morning, I heard something that made me burst into song and then into laughter.

In 1294, during a period of crisis in the papacy, Pope Boniface VIII came to power after the abdication of Celestine V. He later had Celestine imprisoned, and began clashing with the very powerful king of France, Phillip IV.

So where is the funny in all of this? Scott said, as he was describing this,

His actions cast a cloud over his papal reign.

Of course, at this, I started singing

I never meant to cause you any sorrow
I never meant to cause you any pain
I only wanted to one time see you laughing
I only wanted to see you laughing in the papal reign

Papal reign papal reign
Papal reign papal reign
Papal reign papal reign

Talk of popes always puts me on the edge of laughter anyway because it is such an absurd institution. And for those playing at home, Phillip IV eventually had Boniface kidnapped, then installed his own pope who up and moved the papal seat to Avignon in France. (Châteauneuf-du-Pape, anyone? It's delicious.) And later there were antipopes and anti-antipopes. Hilarious. Do you think if you got the pope and antipope together in the same room, the universe would collapse in on itself?


Update:
Well in advance of Christmas, a special collector's edition of the movie is being made available. Here is the promo of the DVD cover:

Boaz: Calling for Limited Government is Not Racist

I read this execrable NYT op-ed by Paul Krugman today and just didn't have the stamina to tackle it; sometimes it's just too much, ya know? Luckily, David Boaz at CATO did. He starts off nailing the fundamental issue:

Some people on the left can’t see any excuse for opposition to collectivism except racism. (Which is, of course, as Ayn Rand said, “the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.”) [link in original]

Then he quotes someone who calls the Obama/Joker poster racist because it uses the "urban" makeup from the Heath Ledger version instead of the "urbane" makeup of Jack Nicholson's version, saying it plays on racial fears. WHAT?! "Urban" Joker makeup? Boaz appropriately says such a view is "ridiculous."

He uses as an example some criticism of a 1999 book by Cass Sunstein called The Cost of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes, making the parenthetical aside, "(and you wonder why Obama chose him?)." The quoted author, Tom Palmer, portrays Sunstein's style of argument perfectly:

[I]mmediately after gallantly conceding that ‘‘Many critics of the regulatory-welfare state are in perfectly good faith’’ they turn around to tar all critics of the welfare state with the charge of racism: "...There are many possible answers, but inherited biases — including racial prejudice, conscious and unconscious — probably play a role. Indeed, the claim that the only real liberties are the rights of property and contract can sometimes verge on a form of white separatism."

And in the closing paragraphs Boaz states the case clearly:

The classical liberal ideas of individualism, individual rights, property rights, “negative liberties,” and limited government date back hundreds, even thousands, of years. They find their roots in the Greek and Hebrew conceptions of the higher law, the Scholastic thinkers, the Levellers’ ideas of self-ownership and natural rights, the political theory of John Locke, the economic analysis of Adam Smith, and the political institutions of the American Founding. To suggest that the case for freedom and limited government — or the application of that theory to contemporary proposals for the expansion of government — must be attributable to racism is uncharitable, ahistorical, thoughtless, and indeed contemptible.

It cannot be the case that every parody of a president who happens to be black is racist. [bold added, links dropped]

And finally, he notes some significant cracks in the dike:

The good news for advocates of limited government is that our opponents are displaying a striking lack of confidence in the actual arguments for their proposals. If they thought they could win a debate on nationalizing health care, or running trillion-dollar deficits, they wouldn’t need to reach for such smears. [bold added]

Definitely read his whole article, The Boys Who Cried “Racist”.

Hiroshima as Rorschach Test

Required reading in high school twenty years ago was the book Hiroshima by John Hersey. I remember being appalled at the graphic scenes of death and destruction. And because I also grew up in the era where actual teaching of history was replaced by social studies, I had very little context for evaluating whether dropping the atomic bombs was justified or not. I had seen enough old movies to know we had fought the bad guys for the right reasons, and I even knew that the assertion was that Truman dropped the bombs to prevent more American deaths from an invasion of Japan, but Hiroshima was very compelling--not enough so to convince me to condemn the bombing as immoral, but most of my classmates did. It wasn't until years later that I went back to the topic and sorted it all out.

Warren Kozak writes in today's Wall St. Journal that on this, the 64th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, the historical event "has become a Rorschach test for Americans. We see the same pictures and we hear the same facts. But based on how we view our country, our government, and the world, we interpret these facts in very different ways."

While attempting to present a balanced argument, contrasting both sides of the debate, he clearly thinks that the risks of an invasion to American lives and the calculation that dropping the bomb would force a surrender were more than sufficient justification for the action. It's worth reading his whole argument.

But if the topic interests you and you're curious about the details of the war with Japan, how America's actions were rationally self-interested and thus some of the most moral in the history of war, and how Japan came to be one of the freest, richest countries on Earth mere decades after near total devastation, run, don't walk, to The Objective Standard and buy the article "Gifts from Heaven": The Meaning of the American Victory over Japan, 1945, by John Lewis. From the free bit you can see on the web:

The victory over Japan remains America’s greatest foreign policy success. Today, we take for granted a peaceful, productive, mutually beneficial relationship with the Japanese people. But this friendship was earned with blood, struggle, and an unrepentant drive to victory. The beneficent occupation of Japan—during which not one American was killed in hostile military action—and the corresponding billions in American aid were entirely post-surrender phenomena. Prior to their surrender, the Japanese could expect nothing but death from the Americans.

If there is one historical event that every American should study, beyond the American Revolution and the Civil War, it is America’s victory over Japan in World War II. Even more than the victory in Europe in the same war—in which we divided Germany with the Soviets—the victory over Japan remains the cardinal example of a complete, unambiguous, and fundamentally unshared American military victory.

Recruiting Government Informants

It seems that the White House is now looking for Soviet-style informants to report on their neighbors if they hear anything negative about government plans for health care. Here is a blog post from whitehouse.gov:

TUESDAY, AUGUST 4TH, 2009 AT 6:55 AM
Facts Are Stubborn Things
Posted by Macon Phillips

Opponents of health insurance reform may find the truth a little inconvenient, but as our second president famously said, "facts are stubborn things."

Scary chain emails and videos are starting to percolate on the internet, breathlessly claiming, for example, to "uncover" the truth about the President’s health insurance reform positions.

In this video, Linda Douglass, the communications director for the White House’s Health Reform Office, addresses one example that makes it look like the President intends to "eliminate" private coverage, when the reality couldn’t be further from the truth.

For the record, the President has consistently said that if you like your insurance plan, your doctor, or both, you will be able to keep them. He has even proposed eight consumer protections relating specifically to the health insurance industry.

There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov. [underlining in original, bold added]

I hear that people are sending protest emails to this address, so my guess is that it will be shut down soon.

As crazy as this all seems, this fear of rumors is exactly the kind of thing that Obama and Cass Sunstein hold as a basic guiding premise. Sunstein has been fighting "extremism" and rumor for well over a decade by making vague statements or even writing entire books insinuating that such things are a dire threat to "deliberative democracy."

In Sunstein's book, Why Groups Go To Extremes, he presents the following non-arguments and insinuations about the Internet and extremism, a line of pseudo-reasoning that applies just as well to his fear of rumors (p. 15-16):

Many people have expressed concern about processes of social influence on the mass media and the Internet. ...

If certain people are deliberating with many like-minded others, views will not be reinforced but instead shifted to more extreme points. This cannot be said to be bad by itself—perhaps the increased extremism is good—but it is certainly troublesome if diverse social groups are led, through predictable mechanisms, toward increasingly opposing and ever more extreme views. [emphasis added]

When is "increased extremism" good, in his view? He cites the abolitionist movement as a prime example. When is it... troublesome? Perhaps when people criticize the government's attempt to nationalize the health care market?

I shouldn't be surprised by anything that comes out of the Obama administration, but I honestly didn't expect that they would ask citizens to rat each other out to the secret police. As Myrhaf has said,

Once again, Obama’s radical ideology puts him at odds with reality. It’s uncanny how he gets everything exactly wrong. Barack Obama is Bizarro #1 from the Silver Age Superman comics. Bizarros live on Htrae instead of Earth and get everything backward. They do the opposite of what rational humans would do. [bold added]

It's hard to do, but if you'd like to predict the next absurd move the administration will make, try to think of what should be done, then flip it upside down in the most irrational way you possibly can, and then assume that whatever you come up with will still pale in comparison to what actually happens. Just don't write down or speak any of your predictions, because nosy neighbors good citizens might be listening.

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Update:

Gus Van Horn has a good commentary on this issue, and also addresses Obama's fascination with rumor, but from a more fundamental angle. He quotes Ayn Rand on the nature of second-handers and ties that back to Obama's views and goals:

They have no concern for facts, ideas, work. They're concerned only with people. They don't ask: "Is this true?" They ask: "Is this what others think is true?" Not to judge, but to repeat. Not to do, but to give the impression of doing. Not creation, but show. Not ability, but friendship. Not merit, but pull.

Does that last paragraph not sound familiar? And does it not almost perfectly characterize the form which Obama hopes political "debate" will take? Obama does not really have a self, and he hates those of us who do. [emphasis in original, links dropped]

The concern with rumors, "extreme" views, and the anti-concept of polarization can be understood through the lens of second-handedness. "Is this what others think is true?" is the only question worth asking to them.

By the way, it is fascinating to read Ayn Rand's characterization of "polarization" from the early 1970's because it perfectly describes nearly everything that Cass Sunstein has written in the past 10 years.

One of today’s fashionable anti-concepts is “polarization.” Its meaning is not very clear, except that it is something bad—undesirable, socially destructive, evil—something that would split the country into irreconcilable camps and conflicts. It is used mainly in political issues and serves as a kind of “argument from intimidation”: it replaces a discussion of the merits (the truth or falsehood) of a given idea by the menacing accusation that such an idea would “polarize” the country—which is supposed to make one’s opponents retreat, protesting that they didn’t mean it. Mean—what?

An Environmentalist's Hero

The Sunday Denver Post tells of a 41-year old man who hiked into the Rocky Mountains to starve because he "hated the materialism and greed that, in his view, prevented people from connecting with nature. And he was frustrated that he could not change that." [HT: Ari]

So, in a story that has dark parallels to the book and film "Into the Wild," this philosophical former Denver disc jockey and Silverton coffee-shop owner, went into the wilderness of western Colorado last summer to think through this quandary — or to die.

"He couldn't figure out how to make people change so they were not so caught up in money and cars and big houses and all that," said his sister, Jovanka Mersman, of Colorado Springs. "He ultimately ended up checking out."

What a brave environmental hero, right? Our evil natures are killing the planet, so unless he could come up with a solution, the only alternative was a slow, painful suicide. It is truly tragic that he didn't live long enough to read Doug Reich's "Corpses for Change" proposal. That would have been right up his alley.

He kept a "meticulously updated" journal, but sadly, it appears that we will never learn about his innermost hallucinations thoughts. It "was soaked by the 20 feet or so of snow that had entombed his body through the winter. The few decipherable words gave no clue to his thoughts."

One can only imagine what insane ramblings this journal contained. Surely, however, it would have been reprinted millions of times and been on Oprah's bestseller list.

What this guy did to himself reminds me of that terrible film, The Happening, except that instead of some mysterious substance that causes people to commit suicide for the sake of the planet, it was the toxic, literally death worshiping, ideas of environmentalism itself that drove this guy crazy.