The Boomtown That Shouldn’t Exist
3rd December 2017
Politico is a rock-solid Voice of the Crust, so the amount of what Scott Adams calls ‘cognitive dissonance’ exhibited in this article should come as no surprise.
Cape Coral may be the best place to gauge the future of the dream—and to see whether Florida has any hope of overcoming its zany developmental, political and environmental history—because Cape Coral is the ultimate microcosm of Florida. It’s literally a peninsula jutting off the peninsula, the least natural, worst-planned, craziest-growing piece of an unnatural, badly planned, crazy-growing state. Man has sculpted it into an almost comically artificial landscape, with a Seven Islands section featuring seven perfectly rectangular islands and an Eight Lakes neighborhood featuring eight perfectly square lakes. And while much of Florida now yo-yos between routine droughts and routine floods, Cape Coral’s fluctuations are particularly wild. This spring, the city faced a water shortage so dire that its fire department feared it couldn’t rely on its hydrants, yet this summer, the city endured a record-breaking flood. And that “50-year rain event” came two weeks before Irma, which was also supposedly a 50-year event.v
Note the distinguishing characteristics of proglodyte dogma: ‘least natural’ (natural good, artificial bad), worst-planned (planned good, unplanned bad), ‘craziest-growing’ (growth is somehow crazy). Statists just can’t comprehend how a people working together without some overall plan by an overarching public authority can somehow come together and make it all work.
As climate change has ushered in a new era of higher seas and deadlier storms, pre-written obituaries keep appearing in magazines like the New Yorker and Rolling Stone, portraying southern Florida as the next Atlantis. As Irma approached, I wrote my own requiem in this magazine, portraying South Florida as an unsustainable paradise. But life does go on.
Note what Scott Adams calls ‘magical thinking’: the ‘new era of higher seas and deadlier storms’ have been ushered in by ‘climate change’, even though there is absolutely no concrete evidence that seas are higher or storms are deadlier or even that ‘climate change’ has anything to do with either. But proglodytes see it when they believe it. (If it’s in the New Yorker and Rolling Stone, then it HAS to be true!)