There’s a video making the rounds that’s causing a considerable stink around the interwebs, enough that it even got a segment on the Glen Beck show where it fit seamlessly into the vast left-wing conspiracy. The teeth-gnashing and angst about this video may not be quite comprehensible to those of a left wing bent, I’m sure most just look at this video called “the Story of Stuff” and see just an innocuous environmental video about how we’re damaging the planet. The problem is, there’s a bit more to it than that. There are rather unsubtle political assertions going on all throughout the video that have no relationship to the environment, and unfortunately for an educational video, no relationship to facts. One of the more egregious examples is how the narrative is stressed to breaking so the narrator can give a factually inaccurate aside on how the U.S. spends half its tax dollars on the military, which is only true if you take the intellectually dishonest route of saying things like Medicare and Social Security are not government expenditures of tax money.
The sad thing is, when you lie to a kid (and yeah, some of the assertions in this film are pretty much the moral and factual equivalent of lies) you discredit yourself. Once the kids seeing this film come across a credible source that says the U.S. has had a pretty constant area of forestation since the early 20th century, and that area is considerably more than 4% of the original, they’re likely to shitcan the entire argument, including the valid points about consumerism. By that point, it ain’t going to do much good to explain “no we meant only 4% of the original old-growth forest is still untouched.” That rationale is good for campaign ads, not so much educational videos.
Also, it might have been a little more honest to mention that the happy little government asked the evil fat corporations to dip the pillows the fire retardant neurotoxin. After all, fire retardant neurotoxins cost money, and we know that the evil fat corporations would let your head burn if they could make a buck, right? Come on, can’t your strawmen be consistently malevolent?
Anyway, here are the original video weaved in with some rebuttal. Not on board will all the rebuttals, but it does a good job of highlighting all the places where there are arguable assertions.