We generally ignore content in the New York Post because no one really takes tabloids seriously anyway, but a recent piece by columnist Miranda Devine is just so disgusting it warrants being addressed. It uses the tragic deaths from Boeing 737 planes to argue that Greta Thunberg’s “climate ideology can have fatal consequences.”
First, who’s Miranda Devine, and does she have any particular expertise on planes? Not exactly. Rather, as her Wikipedia page demonstrates, she’s better known for her controversial conservative commentary, from anti-LGBT attacks, to blaming women on welfare for domestic violence men commit, to propagating white supremacy conspiracy theories, to defending disgraced Cardinal George Pell, who was convicted of sexually abusing two choirboys. She has also referred to Trump’s use of an ethnic slur against Senator Warren as “brilliant” and attacked transgendered children--attacks that were not only morally rephrensible, but also found to be factually incorrect.
And on the “not just evil but also wrong” front, she’s a long-time climate denier who once wrote something described as “what could be the dumbest thing ever written by a Murdoch employee on climate change.” Devine recently attacked Greta Thunberg with the standard paradox that Thunberg is being exploited, adding that she has the “words and demeanor… of a totalitarian dictator.” Devine also referred to Greta’s viral stare-down of Trump, looking like she “would like to strangle the president with her bare hands,” as “not a healthy emotion for a 16-year-old.”
Putting aside whether or not it’s healthy for young women to experience negative emotions towards the serial and admitted sexual harasser intent on lighting the planet on fire, let’s look at Devine’s latest column. She writes that while “no one has said it explicitly yet,” concerns like Greta’s about climate change “[appear] to have been a significant factor in the disastrous safety failures of the Boeing 737 MAX aircraft.”
Devine’s argument is that airlines are trying to reduce emissions by making planes more efficient, and that’s why the 737 MAX had bigger engines which needed to be moved to a new position on the plane, which caused the problems that Boeing addressed with “an imperfect software bandage”.
To be clear, it was that software, which Devine acknowledges was imperfect, that caused the crashes.
But apparently, it wasn’t Boeing’s fault that they used a “flawed retrofit design” of a 50 year old plane body instead of building a new type as experts have pointed out, but instead the “relentless” “pressure on Boeing to deliver climate outcomes” that is to blame.
Now, one might point to the fact that Boeing’s competitors are under the exact same pressure as evidence that it’s clearly quite possible to reduce emissions without resorting to a lethally “imperfect software bandage”.
But why blame a corporate giant for rushing a faulty product to market back in 2012, when you can blame a 16 year old girl’s concern about climate change in 2019?
Maybe the fact that Devine’s argument implies Greta travelled back in time seven years to force Boeing to use a flawed software fix to a hardware problem is why “no one has said it explicitly yet.”
Because when you need a hot take so stupid no one else will say it, turn to Murdoch media.
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