Moonbat redux

There was a very funny joke told by the slightly weird American comedian Emo Philips a dozen or so years ago. He was talking about his German girlfriend, and how she loved being in New York. What she loved best, he said, were those New York bagels, she couldn’t get enough of them. “And you just can’t find them anywhere in Germany,” she added, to which Philips replied: “Well, whose fault is that?”

Another slightly weird comedian, The Guardian’s George Monbiot, provided the opportunity for precisely the same punchline in his column this week. At the start of what was, I have to admit, a very well written and cogently argued support of nuclear power, with which his readers will have largely disagreed, he wrote, with a certain recently acquired weariness: “You think you’re discussing technologies, and you quickly discover that you’re discussing belief systems.”   

Yep, George — and whose fault is that? It is nigh on impossible to have a rational and pragmatic discussion about technology, largely as a consequence of the “Green movement” (within which George still considers himself fashionably located) and its doctrinaire opposition to all manner of things — nuclear power included, as George is now finding out. And its doctrinaire insistence — a paradox, in a way — that we are all irrevocably doomed no matter what we do. And there’s the problem; you can’t call yourself part of a movement and then start whining when it becomes proscriptive of your beliefs: that’s what “movements” do. I ought to point out that the anti-Green lobby has become equally doctrinaire of late, so the entire debate has long since left its scientific basis and become simply a forum for the exchange of allegations and insults.