Edward Snowden is a Show-Off…And Al Gore is Fat!

There are interesting parallels between the liberal disgruntlement with Edward Snowden (typified by  Melissa Harris-Perry’s anti-Snowden screed on MSNBC) and the right’s beatdown of Al Gore’s physique and carbon footprint on the global warming issue.

The argument seems to be, unless the bearer of unwelcome tidings can demonstrate 100% plaster sainthood to his or her most dyspeptic critics, the message is not worth heeding.

Or, in a somewhat more generous framing, if somebody is trying to tell us about behavior that is immoral and short-sighted, the messenger must meet our personal standards of rectitude in order to be taken seriously.

Maybe, if someone threatens to discredit a worldview, they have to offer—and exemplify—something better.  More pointedly, if you are going to discredit my worldview, you are going to have to prove to me that you are better than me.

I can see how global warming presented a challenge to the conservative worldview that had to be beaten back by any means necessary, including disparaging Al Gore.

After all, if it was accepted that unrestrained human activity could ruin the planet,  that was a pretty striking indictment of god and the free market and made a pretty good case for running the global show through science and government intervention instead.

As for Edward Snowden, I don’t quite get it.

Maybe if it was accepted that unrestrained US government activity could ruin the planet,  that was a pretty striking indictment of neo-liberalism and globalization and made a pretty good case for running the global show through a class-based adversarial critique of global and national elites instead.

Or maybe Edward Snowden simply revealed some whacked-out surveillance shit that everybody should be happy to know about.

I’ll leave that question for the philosophers.

While I’m going Andy Rooney on the blogosphere, I am also struck that I have not seen any discussions of the interesting parallels between the collusion of the Egyptian military, deep state, and business and popular opponents of Morsi to foment a coup through a manufactured economic and political crisis…

…and the infamous Venezuelan toilet paper shortage.

The Venezuelan TP shortage always had a whiff of opposition/US psyops to me: an economic/market glitch that would humiliate and discredit the Madero regime in its relationship with the people of Venezuela in the most fundamental (yes, I said, fundamental), intimate, and potentially infuriating issue of all: the pressing, inescapable need to get crap off one’s ass.

How about it, American media.  Care to expose some neoliberal skullduggery against a disliked regime before the coup happens?...or is it too difficult to confront (cue fiendish laugh)………..an inconvenient truth?

The Maldives are perhaps not the best Global Warming Poster Child

The textbook image of the threat from global warming and rising sea levels is the precarious city/island of Male, capital of the Maldives island nation in the Indian Ocean.



Despite the dazzling images of its tourist resorts, the Maldives is not an unspoiled Eden with underwater cabinet meetings.

As a  fascinating photoessay by Francesco Zizola on the Maldives revealed to me, the Malidives is in many ways an artificial human construct.  The capital city, Male, is one of the most densely populated cities in the world.

In a quest for lebensraum, the island was expanded by filling in the surrounding sea floor to the encircling coral atoll and beyond.  A 3.5 meter high, six kilometer sea wall was constructed with Japanese aid to protect the island (mostly 1 meter above sea level).  Another atoll a few miles away, Hulhumale, was filled in to a height of 2 meters above sea level to serve as a new home if Male becomes unviable.

The least edifying piece of geoengineering in the Maldives is Thilafushi Island.  Zizola writes:

Thilafushi island, also known as a rubbish island, was originally a vast lagoon. It was reclaimed in 1992 using waste as the filling material to solve Male's unmanageable refuse problem. Few Bengali immigrants work at the waste disposal centre in Thilafushi. Their job basically consists of indicating to the numerous dump trucks where to unload the waste. They then incinerate part of the waste or bury the majority of it in landfill sites. No recycling is carried out and hazardous wastes are not sorted from common rubbish.

Maldives Live reports that 330 tons of rubbish make it to Thilafushi each day, some generated by the thousands of tourists visiting the Maldives, the rest coming from Male.

There are many good reasons for a concerted global effort to mitigate global warming.  However, enabling the Maldives to continue its high population density/atoll-filling/trash-dumping/tourism-based lifestyle one meter above sea level is perhaps not one of them.