There is no doubt that SUVs are politically incorrect. Extreme environmentalists even set fire to them in car dealerships at times. To me, however, they are like red wine. You like it or you don't. It may be good for you or it may not. Either way it's a matter of individual choice. And the same "war" over the correctness of SUVs goes on in Australia and the UK as well as in the USA. From the following Australian news report, however, the anti-SUV forces seem to have gained a propaganda advantage at the moment. Excerpt:
"The apparent victory of the giant four-wheel-drive in the urban jungle has prompted much road outrage, but now a profile of city off-roader owners confirms many prejudices, revealing them as aggressive, obese people who dislike gays and Aborigines [blacks]. And that's just the men.
The Australia Institute study found women who own luxury 4WDs were markedly different from the 40-to-50-year-old blokes: They're younger, wealthier and, while they worry about weight (their own), they couldn't care less about conspicuous consumption. "People say, what about the environment?" declared Mosman mother of three, Chris Rooney, who drove a Range Rover for years but has swapped to a BMW X5. "For me, my children's safety is more important."
The study investigated demographic and attitudinal characteristics of 4WD owners using data Roy Morgan Research collected from more than 24,000 people between October 2003 and September 2004. It found 66 per cent of men who owned large 4WDs were obese, compared with 57 per cent of the population overall."
Source
We report, you decide! For the record, I drive a tiny Japanese car.
The Left has its Saints too
The best-known Leftist saint is of course the murderous Che Guevara. You can read in detail what a great guy he was here. And then there is Mahatma Gandhi. There was a great debunking piece about him published in Commentary some decades ago. See "The Gandhi nobody knows".
So among the 'secular' and allegedly rationalist Left, there seems to be a strange superstitious desire to canonise various leaders, especially of reformist movements (including Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela) as the equivalent of saints. And DON'T click either of those links unless you want a mite of disillusionment.
At least the Catholic Church has the decency to insist that any saint-to-be is dead five years before they are canonised . Somehow today the old saw about "the saint and the sinner living in the one man" is overlooked (as is Oscar Wilde's quip on the same subject: "Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future")
It's interesting that when you criticise these saints, the true believers get very upset and often quite emotional. The assumption is that because you don't genuflect before King or Mandela or Gandhi you must be a segregationist or racist or a war-monger!
