The translucent altruism deliberately cultivated by Nader and his organization, including his presidential campaign, for some reason upsets my intuition in the same way that the Osmond's saccharine schmaltz did many years ago. Something just doesn't ring true, but I find it difficult to put my finger on it.

He doesn't exactly tilt at windmills, because many of the consumer and environmental issues raised are significant, but his whole organization's analyses of cause and effect are often flawed. For example, the "problem" with Corvairs which gained him national intention was not truly inherent in the vehicle's design, but in the overinflation of front tires due to stupidity or ignorance. The anti-establishment bias promulgated by Nader and other groups unfortunately focusses on large monolithic targets instead of root causes that are distributed throughout the population. Just to give an example, is it industry's fault for building gas-guzzling SUV's or the consumer's fault for demanding them?

(For some reason, I keep getting the image of a bunch of ex-hippies tooling down the road while planning to protest a polluting steel mill by buying Japanese cars. Of course now they've all got haircuts and brokerage accounts and the flower painted VW Micro-bus is now a Chevy Suburban, but it still trails blue smoke like a stunt plane.)

Yeah, Nader and his cronies have some valid concerns, but something about their approach to resolving complex issues always seems overly simplified, and usually with a consolidated anti-authority bias that borders on being an inverted inferiority complex. Sort of the consumer version of a loose canon: only useful as long as its actually pointed somewhere near an appropriate target.

~S~