Lost

It's been a while since conservative movie site Big Hollywood did anything that sustained my attention. They've mainly been splitting their time defending Carrie Prejean for making a controversial right wing statement and condemning Megan Fox for making a controversial left wing statement. I've complained before about the fact that it only took a few months for them to become a major yawnfest but, occasionally, they do get a bit of the old spark back and it seems like no one is sparkier than S.T. Karnick.

Karnick was last profiled here when he expressed his view that the CBS show The Eleventh Hour was the most awesomely conservativiest ever. Unfortunately for Karnick, the show has since been canceled due to liberally biased television ratings. Now that Eleventh Hour can no longer be a stepping stone toward conservative ascendancy, Karnick has focused on another mediocre entertainment product headed toward financial failure, Land of the Lost.

Did you think that Land of the Lost was a below-average comedic vehicle for Will Farrell's manic shouting? Shows what you know. Turns out it's actually a damning indictment of people who listen to those uppity, full-of-themselves scientists who try to fool people with their fancy-pants "evidence" into rejecting the conservative view of the world.

Moreover, there is actually a very good, important, and timely thought in Land of the Lost. In a very amusing way, the film satirizes the current-day perversion of science in which claims of consensus are used as a blunt instrument to shout down opposing ideas.

In the movie, Will Farrell's character develops a theory that he claims will allow him to travel through time and space to another dimension. The problem was that he couldn't prove it which led to a brutally skeptical interview with Matt Lauer (playing himself) and a loss of status due partly to his theories and partly due to his childish antics (like attacking Lauer on live television).

Lauer’s reaction perfectly represents the media’s reaction toward, say, those who claim that the scientific evidence shows that anthropogenic global warming is not occurring and the current temperature trends of the earth show the very opposite of a crisis. Instead of actually engaging the scientific evidence, the media whores simply claim that all reputable scientists agree that there’s a crisis requiring the absolute destruction of Americans’ civil and economic liberties, and that anyone who disagrees with that premise is the equivalent of a Holocaust denier.

And so we see how seriously the views of S.T. Karnick should be taken. As many global warming deniers do, he blames the premise on an international cabal of scientists seeking to use environmental regulation to impose some sort of one-world government on the planet and destroy, "Americans' civil and economic liberties." I'm not sure which liberties he's talking about. Economic liberties went bye bye after the previous administration allowed money lenders to run naked and crazy through the streets and conservatives still argue that the only way to preserve our freedom is to allow the government to do warrantless wiretapping.

Karnick goes on for several paragraphs bitching about society's greatest enemy, that being Scientific Consensus. Scientific Consensus is seen by him as something liberals use to make conservatives look stupid. He proves his point by making stuff up, like saying that the United Nations' International Panel on Climate Change report was written by politicians and not scientists. I guess he means politicians like this guy, or maybe this gentleman or maybe this Australian fellow. He doesn't present any evidence for this other than climate denial platitudes he reads on right wing websites other than a link to a report that's been thoroughly debunked.

And he got all that from Land of the Lost. Seriously, excellent indication that your life has not gone well is when you are taking life lessons from Land of the Fucking Lost. This is another example of a conservative like Karnick who can't stand the fact that real life keeps proving his core beliefs to be wrong so he looks for a comforting alternative to reality. In his mind, he has gone back in time and shot red matter at the Earth in order to start up a new, alternate timeline* in which global warming is a sinister conspiracy undone by the brave work of one S.T. Karnick. A grateful world gets Angelina Jolie, Kate Beckinsale and Scarlett Johannson to fight in Thunderdome** to see who gets the right to screw him first as a reward.

This is the second time that S.T. Karnick has held up a work of fiction as a fine example of conservative values only to have it fail shortly afterward. I'm really hoping he thinks that Transformers 2 has a hidden lesson about tax cuts increasing revenues so that he can give it one of his patented tongue baths and have it go down in flames too.

*Notice how I pick better movies than Karnick does for my analogies.

**Did it again.