OK, so I finally watched the Penn & Teller Bullshit! show on
uncycling, and I remain unconvinced. P&T used a very short, vague
list of supporters to represent their cause, and I had to do some
extra searching to find out who they were and what they represented.
Here is the cast of characters that I tracked down:
Daniel K. Benjamin is a senior fellow at Property and Environment
Research Center (PERC), a conservative libertarian think tank which
publishes policy papers and press releases to further their agenda.
This guy's statement was used through most of the show. His "ground
breaking paper" was not a peer reviewed scientific paper, rather it
was a policy paper out of the Hoover Institute titled Political
Environmentalism. The Hoover Institute, a conservative libertarian
think tank which publishes policy papers and press releases to
further their agenda, is funded in part by Exxon Mobil, ARCO, Ford,
General Motors, and Proctor and Gamble.
Angela Logomasini works for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a
conservative libertarian think tank which publishes policy papers and
press releases to further their agenda. They are infamous for
arguing, sometimes in paid commercials, that global warming is not a
problem, second hand smoke is not a problem, and recycling is a
problem. This is not surprising since much of their funding comes
from Amoco, Coca-Cola, Ford, Philip Morris, Pfizer, and Texaco.
John Tierney was not named in the show, but for some reason Penn
spent a long time quoting one of his opinion pieces from the New York
Times, where Tierney had a short stint as an op-ed writer. The quote
that Penn took from Tierney's 1996 article went like this: "Recycling
may be the most wasteful activity in modern America: a waste of time
and money, a waste of human and natural resources." The entire
article can be found here:
<http://www.williams.edu/HistSci/curriculum/101/garbage.html>.
Needless to say, it's a ten-year old opinion piece, and doesn't carry
as much weight for me as it must have for P&T. Incidentally, the
article, titled "Recycling is Garbage," broke the New York Times
Magazine's hate mail record, according to Wikipedia. A series of
rebuttals to some of the article's claims can be found here:
<http://www.environmentaldefense.org/documents/611_ACF17F.htm#summary>.
If I were to take a wild guess, I'd say Penn & Teller (or at least
Penn) are conservative libertarians interested in furthering their
agenda. While I've got no problem with that, I don't think Bullshit
performs quite the thorough research it pretends to. Like they say,
"Everybody got a gree-gree," and P&T do too, in spades, and they're
promoting theirs quite effectively. They tell people to do their
homework, yet their own incomplete homework has a selective bias -
the same kind of selective bias I've heard Penn rail against on his
radio show. That smacks of hypocrisy and trickery. (They are tricky
guys. I love their magic shows. BTW, Penn Jillette is also a research
fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank which
publishes policy papers and press releases to further their agenda.)
In general, I like Penn & Teller. They are funny and brash. And I
happen to agree - possibly holding onto some gree-grees of my own
here - with a lot of their skeptical viewpoints against some very
popular gree-grees (gods, ufos, ghosts, etc.). When it first began
airing, I hoped their show would advocate and advance critical
thinking, but after watching a few episodes I now consider BS to be
"for entertainment purposes only," and even as entertainment, it's
kind of mediocre compared to other P&T products. The incessant
cussing doesn't bother me so much, but when Penn calls a guy an
asshole just for having a different viewpoint and working for a cause
he believes in, whew. Even if the cause _is_ bogus, insulting the guy
kind of distracts me from P&T's arguments a bit, and it detracts from
the arguments themselves. Not that I'm going to start believing in
ufos or the Boy Scouts (two other issues that BS took to task), but I
won't be able to get my answers from Penn & Teller's show. I'll do my
own research elsewhere, thanks.
:-j