The Conservative Croods (or The Crude Conservatives)

One of the more interesting and critical  reviews of The Croods out there is one (warning: the review has profanity) claiming that the movie promotes children taking an uncritical view of risk while basically adding nothing new to the plot of Hotel Transylvania.  Makes some good points and I recommend this review as a good starting point for thinking about the film, but I think there is a lot more to it.

If, as Anders argues, the humor is more ham-handed, the emotional moments are still very moving.  Croods is a very emotive film.  The jokes might be old, but the feelings are genuine.  In a dramatic sense, the film is a moderate success.

Anders gets ridiculously close to the mark, but thinks "[i]t's all a metaphor for how you're smothering your kids with your over-parenting."  Not quite.  It is true that both Hotel Transylvania and The Croods both involve an overprotective father watching his influence over his daughter get compromised by the appearance of a young man.  (Umm... Little Mermaid, anyone?) But in Hotel Transylvania the young man wins everyone over with his innocuous fun-loving nature, not by displacing the father as an authority figure.  It's not the case that he "teaches them to start unquestioningly accepting anything new and different" as Anders rightly notes about the counterpart in Croods.

Is this where Eep starts singing "Part of Your World"?

So, while there is a similar constellation of relationships, the message of the films are fundamentally very different.  Where in Transylvania the father's resistance to change is born of an emotional wound that needs healing through the formation of new relationships, Grug's resistance to change comes from his misplaced faith in the past.  He's too crood/crude to realize that the world has changed.  If this is sounding a little like the outdatedness of religious platitudes, the obsolescence of the U.S. Consitution, or the old fuddiduddiness of family values, you are starting to get the picture.

Anders gets the central issue in her cross-hairs in an almost tangential paragraph:

And there's a vaguely woolly liberal sentiment embedded in all this — Grug's "father knows best" ideology is presented as ultra-conservative and backward-looking, while Guy represents progress and innovation. The whole Crood family goes from thinking that the patriarchal Grug is right about everything to viewing him as sort of a sad holdout from an earlier time. And Eep, the feisty daughter, is sort of vaguely liberated by casting off her father's authority. So yay for liberal propaganda, I guess?

Yay, indeed.  Go, home team.  This is exactly what the movie is about.  It's not "vaguely woolly" at all. And if that wasn't enough, what circumstance make it obvious that Grug's ideology is obsolete?  Impending global environmental changes.  There's nothing like an impending environmental apocalypse to get you to let go of the past.  "You know, they didn't have modern technology and global warming/cooling/change when the Constitution was written..."

The stories of the past are also specifically discounted.  Early in the movie, Grug tells a story of a sad little bear who finds disaster because he abandons the safety of living in "routine, darkness, and terror."   A simultaneous appeal to liberal stereotypes of both conservatism and Judaeo-Christian (but not Muslim!) religion.  

Now these things occurred as examples to keep us from setting our hearts on evil things as they did. . . . These things happened to them as examples and were written down as warnings for us . . .  

Dan Savage, a man that our President has promoted as a voice to children around the country, openly derides the religious heritage of both Testaments of the Christian canon: both the Judaeo-Christian Tanakh and the early Christian writings.  They are both repugnant to him and he uses his pulpit to reach our young with his passionate message of hope of freedom from evil religion.

And Croods has a message of hope.  Father comes around.  Much as the Comte de Reynaud does in Chocolat:

Narrator:  The Comte de Reynaud was a student of history, and therefore a patient man. He trusted the wisdom of generations past.  Like his ancestors, he watched over the little village and led by his own example: hard work, modesty, self-discipline.

Comte:  I have completed the 18th Century. 

Madame Clairmont: Your letter to the editor, Monsieur le Comte ... this paragraph about family and tradition, it's... it's beautiful.

In Chocolat, the Comte's misplaced honor for the past will inspire xenophobia, racism, arson, and attempted murder (prescient of the current anti-Tea Party propaganda).  Once the Comte realizes how hate and fear and exclusion is at the core of his tradition-based way of life, he starts being open to the winds of change transforming his little community into a refuge of joy.  So, yay for liberal propaganda, I guess.

Global Hoaxing

Can anyone name the most profitable scam in human history? No, not Ponzi schemes- even at best those never cross the billion dollar mark (unless you count Social Security). Not extended service plans- although Squaretrade is reported to pull in over $13B a year. At this point a liberal would smugly inform us that religion is the greatest scam of all. And that's ironic since they came up with the only con that's poised to cross the trillion dollar mark: Global Warming.

Earlier this year the World Economic Forum's "Davos Report" called for extorting- sorry, I should say extracting $14T from various countries to "help fight Global Warming."

Let's go through some history:

First, we got told that these scientists had computer models that predicted dire things- all the coasts underwater from the melted ice caps (although that prediction did lead to the movie Waterworld, so I guess we can't claim Global Warming didn't cause some human suffering). A dramatic increase in hurricanes, tornadoes, and lightning. Possibly even earthquakes and volcanoes!

"Oh, my!" We all said. And then it occurred to someone to ask "if your computer models are so great, why can't you accurately predict what the weather will be like tomorrow?!"

"Uh, well," the Climate Change Hoaxers stammered, "there's a very good reason for that but you wouldn't understand that because you're not a scientist. See, only fully-funded climatologists can understand this stuff. Speaking of which, we know Global Warming to be a fact because 97% of all scientists agree.  We have a consensus.

About a billion people (roughly one-sixth of the Earth's population) have already brought up the point that science isn't a popularity contest where scientists vote on which theory becomes the Prom King.  It's not a Trident commercial ("...four out of five dentists surveyed recommend Global Warming to their patients who seem dumb...").  Supposedly what makes Science so superior to Religion is the strict adherence to measurable, repeatable observations.  Hard data.  You know, actual facts.  So the whole consensus nonsense is a non-starter right out of the gate.  It's just as ridiculous as saying "we can't tell you the weather tomorrow but we can tell you the climate fifty years from now."

But, as long as they brought it up, it turns out the "97% consensus" is a complete fraud anyway.

"But, but, but, the UN says Global Warming is real! They won a Nobel Prize for it!"
Man, that had to be the proudest moment in Al Gore's life. He flew on his private jet to Stockholm, spewing more carbon than a million Priuses in a year, to receive a Nobel Prize for his contributions to the very scam that paid for the private jet to begin with!

But still the people kept turning away from THE TRUTH. They kept listening to the people pointing out the really inconvenient truths, like the fact that the Earth's climate varies all by itself. That the planet had warm periods and ice ages long before the industrial age. That the temperature of the Earth may have something to do with that oft-forgotten orb at the center of our Solar system, the Sun. And so the Hoaxers found the one piece of irrefutable evidence on which they could rest their whole case: THE ARCTIC ICE IS MELTING!!!

They had pictures from NASA! They had pictures of polar bears swimming and (according to the Hoaxers) feeling really sad about it! The Northwest Passage would be completely free of ice by 2013! God help us all if there are ships north of Canada. That would be worse than dogs and cats living together!

The climate change skeptics (pejoratively dubbed "Deniers" by the Hoaxers) patiently pointed out that the temperature's only gone up 0.8degC in the last fifty years- and none at all in the last fifteen. They tried explaining that the ice melts every summer and polar bears actually enjoy swimming. They even produced evidence that the Antarctic ice sheet is thicker than ever. But none of that mattered. Because the Arctic ice is almost gone! Irrefutable proof of Global Warming.

Here's the problem in two pictures from NASA:

Yep, the Arctic ice sheet has grown by 60% in one year. The very year the last of the ice was predicted to have melted.

Hilariously, the captains of fourteen yachts and one cruise ship believed the Hoaxer's lies about the "Northwest Passage" and are now firmly stuck in the ice.

It's tough to say which is more embarrassing: The Arctic ice that spontaneously grew back or the over-the-top Hurricane Doom 2013 predictions handed out by climatologists a few months before the quietest start to the Atlantic hurricane season in decades.

Yes, I am aware that the generally accepted term for these people is Global Warming Alarmists. I don't think that quite fits, though. An alarmist is a Chicken Little, someone who runs in circles and screams hysterically about some genuinely perceived threat. These are people who are making trillions of dollars off of something they know to be a lie.

How do I know they know it's a lie? It doesn't take a genius to realize that if Al Gore really believed in Global Warming he'd get rid of the private jet and start bicycling places. Anyone remember in 2007 when he got busted for having a house that consumed twenty times the electricity of the average home? It shamed him into retrofitting his home with Green Technology... which made his power bills increase by 10%. He claims his actual consumption doesn't matter because he purchases carbon offsets... the very thing he himself sells to make billions of dollars.

So please, stop calling them "alarmists."  It doesn't accurately reflect the fact that these people aren't just falsely claiming the sky is falling, they're enriching themselves in the process.  Hoaxers is what they are.  And now that their last shred of evidence, the vanishing Arctic Ice, has magically re-appeared hoaxers is what we can all see them for.