Mandrake, do you realize that fluoridation air conditioning is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist conservative plot we have ever had to face?
Smitty of the Other McCain blog finds Salon blaming air conditioning for those eeeevil center-right voters in the south and southwest. As Smitty writes, “Have You Hated Yourself Over Your Air Conditioning Today?”
If not, Salon can assist, emphasis and formatting mine:
. . .as science writer Stan Cox argues in his new book, “Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World (and Finding New Ways to Get Through the Summer),” the dizzying rise of air conditioning comes at a steep personal and societal price.
- We stay inside longer,
- exercise less, and
- get sick more often — and
- the electricity used to power all that A.C. is helping push the fast-forward button on global warming.
The invention has also changed American politics: Love it or hate it, refrigerated cooling has been a major boon to the Republican Party. The advent of A.C. helped launch the massive Southern and Western population growth that’s transformed our electoral map in the last half century. Cox navigates all of these scientific and social angles with relative ease, providing a clear explanation of how A.C. made the leap from luxury to necessity in the United States and examining how we can learn to manage the addiction before we refrigerate ourselves into the apocalypse.
Scroll over to the punch line of the Salon article, which is a triumph of hairshirt enviro-hypocrisy.
Incidentally, this isn’t the first time that Salon has used their bandwidth, not to mentioned their air conditioned Internet servers to make this argument. Back in 2008, another Salonite wrote, “I blame A/C for the decline of the labor movement and for decimating the Midwest’s population. Mostly, I blame it for the election of George W. Bush.”
But of course you do.
On the other hand, the argument works both ways.The big big government that Salon takes for granted — their 1950s-era Galbraithian fantasy of Washington DC running the entire country out of Miesian office buildings in DC — was itself made possible by the same air conditioning that Salon now decries. As Jonah Goldberg wrote over a decade ago:
In the 18th and 19th centuries a congressman wouldn’t be caught dead in Washington during July. Well, actually, they might be caught dead, because they wore all those clothes and were so fat that they might have died while trying to get out. The British Embassy, for example, moved the entire kit and caboodle to Maine every summer.The idea is: Ban air conditioning in Washington and you would cut the “productivity” of the government by more than a third (say from late May to late September) and return the United States to the limited government the Founders intended. D.C. is still full of members of this school of thought.
Over to you, President Obama!
Seriously though, you get the feeling that if today’s “progressives” had their way, then none of the technology that we take for granted today — the car, airplanes, air conditioning — the Internet that Salon publishes on — would exist today.
Including the technology that was produced by the focused and driven NASA of John F. Kennedy and LBJ’s heyday.
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