Oil Billionaire: Wind Turbines Are Ugly

Oil refineries are gorgeous.

Yes, because oil refineries and oil spills are the epitome of aesthetic perfection. I mean, who doesn't feel inspired watching machines that rape the environment and fill our skies with poisonous dark gases, all so that a bunch of greedy douchebags can make gigantic profits while enslaving the rest of the world? And how about oil spills that suffocate marine life for hundreds of miles at a time? Yep, that's exactly the kind of inspirational picture I look for to get me out of bed every morning...

This makes me want to vomit...

However, and to be fair, it would be a mistake to attempt to invalidate someone's position by pointing to the fact that they are big fat douchy hypocrites. The hypocrisy goes to the credibility of the person, not to the truth of his statements. I personally don't find wind turbines ugly, but if this is an aesthetic judgment, I'm willing to grant Harold Hamm the benefit of the doubt and just take him at his word that he finds them ugly (even while I actually think that there can be objective standards of taste that render some things aesthetically superior to others, but that's a topic for another day).

But while my first reaction is to notice the hypocrisy and just hate the guy, this kind of situation is not an isolated event. If you've watched some of the clips we've featured from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, for instance, you will no doubt have noticed that some of the funniest (and most enraging) reports by its correspondents have to do with people who engage in some massive double standards while being completely oblivious to the fact, even when it's subtly (and not-so-subtly) pointed out to them. So if we want to actually do something about these problems, instead of only hating these jerks, we might want to engage in some kind of systematic study of the mental processes at work (probably things like confirmation bias, conflicts of interest, the self-serving bias, the Dunning-Kruger effect, etc.) and come up with empirically-based solutions to overcome the problem.

In the meantime, go ahead and hate this asshole: