Cane toads of the air thrive on stupidity  

The SMH has an article on the ugly pustule on the face of modern day media - the conservative radio shock jock - Cane toads of the air thrive on stupidity.

I'm always amazed by how readily we let our buttons be pushed. It's almost as though we want them to manipulate us. As though we like it. "Them", here, obviously includes politicians, advertisers and spin merchants, but the worst offenders, partly because they're the least explicit, are "shock jocks".

They are the cane toads of contemporary culture: ugly, ubiquitous, toxic to most other life forms and adept at using their peculiar behaviour to force change in ours.

It's not so much that they're rude, lowbrow or just plain wrong, although these, too, are often the case. The most destructive effect of the shock-jockariat is the poisoning of the logic-well itself; followed by the incremental death of the argument tree that is root and branch of intelligent civilisation. ...

Take Alan Jones. Though it pains me to say it, he is forcing me to change my mind. Not on climate change, or cycling, or the right to public protest, all of which he opposes, but on censorship.

Foucault argued that unreason died with the enlightenment. But the shock-jock phenomenon proves repeatedly that if you make an argument sufficiently idiotic, the sheer scale of stupidity makes it hard to defeat. It was highlighted for me this week by a letter that argued, as Jones does, that anything so small as 0.04 per cent - the proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere - couldn't possibly matter. "Please let me know," concluded my correspondent, "how anyone could believe that CO2 is responsible for climate change?"

It's like arguing that a virus is too small to give you AIDS. Or that a lethal dose of heroin, at about 0.0007 per cent of your body weight, couldn't possibly kill.

Never mind that applying the same logic to asylum seekers would make you wonder what all the fuss was about (our total asylum applications - 8150 last year, including dependants - being a mere 0.04 per cent of the population.)

These climate-change rants deliberately ignore everything about eco-balance, homeostasis, the greenhouse effect and tipping points we've all been taught since primary school and instead raucously promote a red herring.

Why do politicians tolerate it? Why do we? My theory is this. Most shock jocks, and their audiences, are pretty long in the tooth. Perhaps there's just a certain kind of person who, as the hormones start to recede, needs this pseudo-emotion to feel alive.