Posted On: Friday - December 20th 2019 8:23PM MST
In Topics: Global Climate Stupidity Media Stupidity Geography
Long term readers of the Peak Stupidity blog will know that we are not enamored with the current era National Geographic. That's not the whole Cambrian era, mind you, and not even the entire epoch we're in, it's just the last coupla' decades in which the formerly great National Geographic Society publication has turned to something resembling fossilized shit. Yeah, we have issues with these issues.
We picked up a copy early in the Peak Stupidity age and reported on "National Geographic, no more girly pics of the natives ..... Then, we had a more serious two part series on "Nat-Geo and the once great Royal Scientific Societies" --- Part 1 and Part 2. I haven't seen a reason to subscribe or even pick up that magazine in years, but I had a long wait in a waiting room, so ...
The issue shown above is from 1998. My perusal of it a few days back has strengthened my case that this magazine used to be OK. There was not a single one of the main articles that mentioned Global Climate DisruptionTM. I don't think you'd see an issue like that today. No matter where in the world these people go, they see CO2 doom on the horizon and blame everything going wrong on that poor innocuous trace gas.
As far as that subject goes, apparently there had been a recent article on it, as a number of letters to the editor mentioned it. At least one of them mentioned how fair and balanced the article had been.
The article on Catherine the Great of Russia (you may need to enlarge the image to make out the titles) did have a feminist slant to it, but seemed otherwise pretty fair. On the Greenland Sharks, well, what could be so controversial? (I still say we ought to eat them all.) Oh, yeah, nowadays, whatever animals you read about are doomed, doomed, I tells ya'!
Then there was the article on Romania that I read most of. Nope, there were no Global Climate DisruptionTM worries, but yes, there was some PC. A bunch of pictures featured the Gypsies, called "Roma" in Europe because they may have originated in Romania. The thing is, just like everywhere else in Europe, these people don't even try to fit in and are not well liked. I'm not sure the real Romanians would agree with the Gypsies being included in an article about their country, without a big asterisk and some nasty remarks.
Oh, yeah, none of the letters to the editor railed about the need for more women, people of colors, or those of different orientations in the fields of Paleontology, Russian history, or Marine Biology. It was a different, saner time, you understand ... a different epoch, if I may ...
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