The Reg is getting cranky

Technocrat

The Reg is getting cranky

isdnip

Thu Jul 03 18:39:27 -0700 2008

(in reply to Is the LCD greener than the CRT? )

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I like The Register and have been reading it daily for the past decade or so, not to mention the competing blog The Inquirer founded by the former owner of The Reg. However, in recent months, it has been devoting a lot of space to silly articles by global-warming skeptics and others opposed to "green" initiatives. Today there was a feature about how wind power wouldn't be useful for the UK, because there are periods when there's no wind anywhere in the UK or nearby Europe (due to big high pressure systems). That was fairly rational, though it tries to lead one to conclude that green power is a bad idea.

The consequences of global warming, not to mention depletion of some fuel supplies, are serious and even depressing. When faced with a bad situation, one option is denial. Simply pretend it ain't so! A second approach, more popular in the US than Europe, is to adopt a religion that believes that the world is coming to an end soon anyway, so we may as well party like it's 1999. These are both irrational but understandable variations on a theme. A third approach is despair; don't do anything and disparage those who try. A fourth is to become an activist to try to fix things. The Reg leans towards the first and third options. Technocrat has more people in the fourth category.

The Reg is getting cranky

Scott Drake

Thu Jul 03 19:55:12 -0700 2008
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Well put. The article (the Reg's) is from the viewpoint of the third option.

Not sure about your speculation about technocrats, though. Seems like many have a libertarian-leaning-towards-survivalism streak. Perhaps a fifth option: survivalist secretly wishing to test their mettle.

(Not me, btw. I fall into the fourth option.)

The Reg is getting cranky

Bhima

Fri Jul 04 00:41:36 -0700 2008
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Where they used to be snarky, informative, topical, and relevant The Register has for a while now been completely full of shit. A while back they suddenly started randomly picking issues to be against and disparaging random people involved or interested in the issues. The last climate related article from The Register we had on Technocrat was a complete unethical farce. Starting with a letter in Nature Magazine, they took a title and a few choice phrases of the abstract and then dredged around and found a newspaper’s website for unrelated climate sounding text and some climate obstructionist kook website for some graphs and mashed them together. Having read the letter in Nature, it was clear that they only used name “Nature Magazine” to falsify some sort of credibility where the article clearly had none.

What’s so disappointing is how many news aggregation / Weblog sites were completely uncritical with their coverage of it (Technocrat included).

As an American citizen the American public’s reaction to environmental, energy & other resource supply, and health care issues has long been a source of frustration to me. However the reaction to warnings of climate change during the Bush Administration exceeds all of my most cynical imaginings. The successful binding of these issues to imagined leftwing, Marxist, American-Hating, liberals is going to have far reaching consequences. Today the news is dominated consequences of the politicizing of science and the glorification of extremist consumer culture and few, if any, people understand that. I wonder how bad it will have to get before most Americans come to the understanding that these issues are importance to all people and that ignoring the problems and going shopping in their giant SUV is hurting themselves just as much as it is hurting everyone else.