Selections from the Carnival

If you do not peruse the weekly Carnival of the Vanities, just let me say: you ought. For those two of you not aware, the Carnival of the Vanities (as opposed to, say, the Carnival of Recipies) is a weekly collection of blog posts from the recent past deemed noteworthy by their authors (and sometimes nominated by their readers.) It's published every Wednesday, and on a different blog each week. I've hosted it here myself once. I generally try to write at least a couple of posts a month that I feel qualify.

The CotV has been running now for 118 consecutive weeks, and this week it was run by Ravenwood's Universe. There were two posts I found particularly interesting, given my personal tastes as regards this blog. The first was Classical Values's Urgent warnings -- from SCIENCE! - an analysis of the idea that "guns cause crime." If that's true merely based on the prevalence of guns in criminal violence he says, doesn't that argue that "race causes crime"? Or "maleness causes crime"? And with a greater degree of association?

(And no, I'm not sucking up to Classical Values because he linked to me, though I appreciate that. He makes good points, and makes them well.)

The second post I find of interest is Revealed Truth's "Ecoloons" Doesn't Quite Cut It, a discussion of the Environmentalist movement. Ed Mick writes that the environmentalist movement is just another collectivist power-grab, and the reason the piece grabbed me is that he asked about the environmentalist movement precisely the same question I asked last week in On Guillotines and Gibbets:

Do you think it can really be mere coincidence that leftism and environmental lunacy are inevitably linked hand in hand? That such as Mikhail Gorbachev wind up running outfits like "Green Cross International?" That the dramatic diminution of property rights is at the core of almost every Green prescription for ridding us of their bogeymen?

No, not when the evidence is so abundantly clear that not only are they peddling falsehoods, but that they KNOW they are doing it. Ask yourself; given what we know about how wrong they've been, why do they persist? Crichton says its because Environmentalism is a religion - a matter of faith, not science. I think he's right with respect to some, but naively wrong with respect to most. Unless you believe Communism is a religion.

My question was the same, but from only a slightly different angle:

If it is so blindingly obvious to many of us that the ideologies behind, for example, gun control and welfare are so fundamentally flawed, why are these ideologies not dead? Not only are they not dead, in many ways, still flourishing? Why is the demonstrably erroneous ideology of the Left still advanced by people who just want to keep turning up the power, with the resultant escalation of failure?

He just added "environmentalism" to gun control and welfare as another flawed, failed ideology. His conclusion, that it's just another form of communism, is correct, but I think he glosses over the fact that it is communism (or its little brother socialism) that is the underlying religious faith. But it's a good piece.