David Thomson, Literateur of Disillusion

"Thomson maintains his preeminence by pleasing on two fronts. For literary baby boomers, traditionally suspicious of the movies, he laments the passing of cinema’s glory days. For seekers of inside dope, he exposes the spiritual corruption of the blockbuster industry, submitting to its fall as predestined. In his adopted homeland, the USA, the Englishman Thomson spreads pessimism over our illusions like orange marmalade, and he’s been thanked for it more than any film critic could expect."

Here's another interesting piece about Thomson's fetishistic biography of Nicole Kidman.

Global Warming Cranks

Yesterday, on his radio show, Dennis Prager had on some metereologist from a weather web site, one of whom Prager calls the many experts who disagree with the hoax of human-caused global warming. Toward the end of the hour, Prager casually said that the earth isn't warming, it's cooling, a disproven anti-gw canard.

Later, in the wee hours of Friday, I happened to be reading Denis Dutton's book review of some of Theodor Adorno's writings. Dutton quoted from Adorno's essay about astrology, and these quotes jumped out at me, so perfectly do they limn the mind not just of anti-gw cranks, but of contrarians in general. Dutton writes:

He refers to people who have gone just beyond the naive acceptance of the authority of science, but who don’t know enough, or who have not sufficiently developed “the power of thinking,” that they can replace such acceptance with anything better: “The semi-erudite vaguely wants to understand and is also driven by the narcissistic wish to prove superior to the plain people but he is not in a position to carry through complicated and detached intellectual operations.”