[lbo-talk] mythbusting: a thankless task

James Heartfield Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Tue Sep 4 12:16:41 PDT 2007


Sympathy for myth-busting is generally restricted to those who bust your opponent's myths, whereas anyone who attacks your own tends to be a big irritation.

I remember when blaming the Serbs for the civil war in the former Yugoslavia was pretty much universal on the left, and nobody wanted to hear that atrocities were committed on all sides. Similarly, no-one on the left wanted to hear that genetically modified foods represented no special danger to the food chain, or that there was no danger of an AIDS epidemic in the heterosexual population in the West, or that the violence in Rwanda was triggered by a US-backed invasion by a Tutsi-dominated force, or that evidence of the famine in Somalia had been overstated, or that both Europe and America were experiencing *re-* not *de-* forestation, or that the aid-dictated limits on DDT in Africa were accelerating malarial deaths, or that Hurricane Katrina was unrelated to global warming, or that parents and teachers were being jailed on false allegations of abuse, or that the entire science of climate change is based on a computer-modelled extrapolation from a measured increase in temperatures of less than one degree.



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