Pierre Poilievre, candidate for leadership of Canada’s Conservative Party, just sent his followers an email on the hypocrisy of German Formula One driver Sebastian Vettel who, upon arriving at our Grand Prix, denounced Alberta’s oil sands as a crime. Vettel is sponsored by Aramco, a Saudi oil company subject to environmental guidelines far less onerous, far less “ethical” than those imposed upon all of Canada’s energy sector. In addition, Poilievre points out, Formula One events produce approximately 256 tonnes of carbon emissions per year!
Prompted by Poilievre’s email, I have just discovered that both Rex Murphy and Laurie Goldstein, two rational “conservative” journalists whose opinions are always worthy of respect, have also called out Vettel for his hypocrisy. But while I am appalled at the behavior of privileged simpletons such as he and indeed thousands of others such as Leonardo DiCaprio who produce carbon footprints far greater than that of the average citizen while sanctimoniously pleading with the latter to behave more responsibly, what is truly distressing is the gullibility of politicians such as Trudeau and Biden who do the very same, pursuing policies which stifle oil production within their own countries to the benefit of foreign polluters, while then blaming those they have consciously oppressed for failing to produce adequate amounts of energy.
The politics of the Left is systemically irrational. I keep seeing admissions from those who consider themselves “moderate progressives” that there is in fact a lunatic fringe on the Left which they deplore, but the Neo-Marxist paradigm that informs their world-view is fundamentally demented, marginalizing human intelligence, merit and effort by simplistically reducing all of history to matters of oppression. In my last blog I mentioned Jonathan Haidt’s rejection of Intuition as the basis of Human Morality, the real world repercussions of that notion being an explosion of self-indulgence that he now finds repulsive. While I don’t believe he yet sees himself as a “conservative,” his epistemological shift leaves little space between his perspective and mine which I have always maintained ought not to be confined to the “right” because it is absolutely of the Rational Center. In the same way while Bill Maher’s constant mockery of the “woke” Left does not necessarily make him an admirer of Donald Trump, it does mean he sees things from more or less the same perspective as do I, a perspective from which the “progressive” West’s inclination to vilify its own well-monitored energy sector to the benefit of foreign interests who don’t seem to give a damn about the environment, is quite literally a form of insanity. My not very subtle point is that that insanity is not confined merely to a fringe element of the sanctimonious Left, but is actually the mindset of the politicians and cultural icons presently in control of the narrative of our predictably dysfunctional world.