For the Children (Just Not the Poor Ones)

 

The great enthusiasm among our betters for replacing coal and oil with wind and sun is not, perhaps, quite so disinterested as they would have us believe.

“We do it only for the children,” they assure us with the practiced sincerity of men reading from a script, “and for their children after them.” Very noble. Yet the poor, in their coarse way, show little gratitude for these lofty aims. They care nothing for solar arrays that cost a fortune and fail when the sky is overcast; they have small patience with sermons on diversity, inclusion, or the finer points of sexual metamorphosis. Their minds are occupied with more immediate trifles—rent that must be paid, children who must not starve, clothes that must somehow be found, streets that must not become places of casual murder, winters that must not kill.

In Defense of the Un-Cheerful

    

 I have met a certain number of people who regard any expression of negativity as verboten, as a kind of moral leprosy. One critical remark, one honest doubt, and the offender is scorned, even ridiculed-if not patronizingly "helped". They speak of it with the gravity of men defending a sacred principle. To admit difficulty, to name a fault, to utter a plain complaint—these things, in their view, are not merely unpleasant; they are crimes against right thinking itself.