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:
Advertisement. . .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.
Thank you, sir!
Ed, you by far have the snarkiest, bestest sense of humor. Sometimes when I read your articles, I’m like, “Holy crap! He got by with saying that? YES!”
I hope all of the vaunted ‘progressives’ learn to take it up the ass ‘green-style’ with the branch of the really rough barked tree of reality. Check-mate with a side of worthless carbon-credits. heh™
To quote George Will, “You can chart the decline of our republic from the day the Capital was air-conditioned.”
Of course, as Don Surber will point out, 85% of that air-conditioning is powered not by clean green energy, but by coal that is mined in West Virginia.
Being a native of Atlanta, I can testify that air-conditioning and interstate highways have been the ruination of the South, enabling the influx of Rust Belt refugees who never could have withstood summers in pre-A/C Dixie. Nowadays, the city motto of Atlanta is, “Will the last sumbitch leaving Cleveland please turn out the lights?”
Every advancement ever made lines the express lane to our ruination, according to the tortured logic of the Salonistas and their ilk.
Air conditioning led to greater productivity and quality of life for us dreadful human beings — planet killers, all — couldn’t we just die off with the sweltering dignity of abandoned French grandparents while our betters savor their lengthy vacations?
GE is already on the case. They produce the worst air conditioners that, while being more or less efficient, sound like a tornado has invaded your bedroom when you turn them on. I had to dump my 1 year old $600 GE air conditioner and buy one made in Texas (Friedrich) just to get to sleep at night.
I intend to buy another one and store it for when this one dies in 10 years – because I’m sure the congress critters will mandate the extinction of effective air conditioning within the next decade.
Need I point out that Salon was only able to post that article on the web and people are only able to read that article on the web because of air conditioning?
Air conditioning makes the internet possible. Every server room, every server farm has to be climate controlled (air conditioned) to counter the prodigious amounts of heat computer equipment gives off. No air conditioning and the servers soon overheat and shut off (if they don’t burnout first). The typical server rooms is designed with an elevated false floor allowing air coniditioning to be directly vented up into the equipment cabinet. It’s cold in those rooms and under that floor; I happen to install server eqipment. I wear sweaters and sweatshirts to work even in summer.
If Salon was truly truly sincere about the dreaded menace of air conditioning, they would immediately shut down their servers and cease their web operations (not to mention strip out the air conditioning in their offices) and call for the immediate banning of computer networking. Good luck with that, Salon.
On the economy, I recently commented…
To Obama, the economy truly is moving in the right direction; all those tech jobs that have been lost were the wrong kind of jobs.
What’s the point of being King of the World if mere peons like us can wear business suits, work in air-conditioned offices, and operate computers better than he does?
When he promised “shovel ready”, he meant that literally.
I think Salon continues that line of thinking and probably feels that the wrong people are enjoying something (in this case, air conditioning) that should be exclusive to the elite (them, in case you needed reminding).
I wonder if Salon still thinks of the rest of us as “the masses”?
That would be all too typical of arrogant snots who want to run our lives because we obviously are too damned stupid to do so ourselves.
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Air conditioning’s most pernicious unforeseen consequence may have been enabling politicians to keep on making mischief inside the beltway when they should have been home listening to their constituents.
Agreed! Let’s push for a ban on AC in DC!!
Also, it used to be that working in DC meant you would almost certainly get malaria. There’s a reason why that land was available, and Virginia and Maryland were willing to cede it. That had to knock down “productivity” even more.
So he’s comfy at 84F in, presumably, a dry climate subset: would he feel the same at a New York dock warehouse with 98% humidity?
Well, maybe. While I am uncomfortably warm at over 78F here in Rhode Island (basiclly a small horseshoe-shaped bit of land surrounding a deepwater bay), one of my sisters complains of cold at that temperature. OTOH, I was comfy at 107F in Las Vegas, as long as I was in shade.
As to it being responsible for a change in which party is in the majority, major Bronx Cheer. Where is the influx from? Northeasterners – you know, New York, Massachusetts, and all those other Republican-dominated States? And “Rust Belt” like Detroit and Chicago – more Republican strongholds…
I suppose we could all live in caves, natural or man-made: go down a bit, and tenp is a steady 72F or thereabouts.