I'm not bothering to link to the fucking NY Times anymore; its mendacious toadying is a net detriment to the well-being of this society, even once you factor in the occasional "good" article you might get out of them. This Twitter thread describing the latest slop-ed piece is more than adequate in chronicling the bad-faith argumentation that comes out of them anymore.
It takes some real balls to lambaste climatologists, who have been presenting empirical data for decades regarding the dangers of climate change. This is the American political system in a nutshell: absolve the rented politicians, and the reality-teevee-addled dupes who keep voting for them, by scapegoating the one group of people who actually showed up and did their fucking jobs. Both-siderism is the crushed fentanyl of gatekeeper journalists, who peddle their agenda behind bullshit "op-ed" pieces and anonymously-sourced bits of hackcess journalism. They have ruined this country just as surely as that turd Mark Burnett has.
That's how you end up with a chief executive who literally admitted just a few days ago to running a fraudulent charity that stole money from veterans, and everyone's already forgotten about it by Veterans' Day, of all things. A competent media ecosystem would ask him and his minions about that non-stop for a month, but they've already given up on it. They don't even try. Instead we get puff-piece profiles of billionaires' concerns about actually having to pay their fucking taxes, or provide a decent standard of living for the peons who shovel their shit every day.
Jamie Dimon should have been guillotined in the middle of Wall Street a decade ago, as a warning to the rest of that vile breed. Hope that clears things up.
I am also tired of hearing calls for "unity" from Democratic candidates. Each and every one of us has stark choices to confront for ourselves, and what we might consider our values. Either we are okay with a demented slapdick who lies about everything having all this responsibility, or we are not. Either we are okay with the very real, impending problem of climate change and its many dispersed effects, or we aren't. Either we're okay with working Americans dying from hoarding their insulin because of profiteering, or we're not. Either we're okay with children fleeing unthinkable levels of poverty and violence being torn from their parents and thrown into cages, being victimized by older children while their mothers are drinking from toilets, and ultimately being trafficked to American families looking for a cheap kid to adopt, or we find that sort of thing, you know, fucking abhorrent.
I have no intention of "coming together" with people in the first half of those descriptors. We all have relatives, friends, coworkers in our lives on that end of the discussion, and we've all made our personal calibrations as to how to deal (or not) with that. But that is a different matter than whether the candidate we end up being allowed to select to lead the country for the next four years has pre-emptively decided on a fool's errand of comity and appeasement with the "fuck your feelings" crowd..
This is a practical matter as well as a moral one. Unless Buttigieg and Biden are making cynical political calculations in preaching their unity gospel, they should head to the nearest neurologist and get checked for dementia, because they clearly have lost all short- and long-term memory.
In 2009, Barack Obama won the most electoral votes since Saint Reagan in 1984, and had both houses of Congress, including a supermajority in the Senate. It took the Republicons, years before Trump would waddle into view, about a month after Obama's inauguration to flat-out declare fuck what the clear majority voted for, we're going to obstruct this president at every opportunity, and create more opportunities to do so. And thanks to their little helper monkeys in the corporate gatekeeper media, that's exactly what they proceeded to do for the next eight years.
But Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg are apparently convinced that, between being nice guys themselves and Republicons secretly wanting to do the "right" thing, they can breach this gap. They are fucking high if they really believe that nonsense. Every day in every way, the GOP has told us, over and over and fucking over again, what they are really all about. Power and money, and the various uses thereof. Republican members of Congress refuse to confront Trump over his corruption not because they fear him, but because he's doing exactly all the things they want done.
This is not an aberration. This is the culmination of the party's efforts for the past five decades, explicitly so. They do not deny or try to hide any of this at all.
It's enormously difficult to figure out how Democrats and media monkeys could possibly be this stupid, to not see what has been in front of all of us all along. I assume it's the old Upton Sinclair line about people not understanding something because their paycheck depends on it.
Again, the Republicons make no effort to hide any of it. And they make no bones about what they're willing to do when they lose. Matt Bevin still hasn't conceded his loss in Kentucky. Republicans in the North Carolina state legislature have been openly joking for weeks about how they're just waiting for the Democrats to leave the legislative chamber so they can push a bunch of stuff through (which they did on September 11th, while Dem legislators were at a fucking 9/11 memorial).
Here in California, there is a petition drive to recall Gavin Newsom from the governor's seat. We all laughed at that shit back in 2003, and look how that worked out. It takes a shamefully low number of signatures to get an initiative on the ballot in this state, considering the huge population. There is nothing so low that these fuckers will not stoop to, and it precedes Trump by a longshot. He's just made it easier for them to mainstream it.
Because that's the other thing Democratic politicians need to get past -- this idiotic Anne Frank teleology that people are basically good. Some are, some aren't, and the ones that aren't don't worry about playing by the rules, and are more than willing to rent themselves out to the highest bidder. This idea that indecent people are suddenly going to grow a conscience, like a vestigial tail or something, is just so far beyond stupid, I'm not sure there's a word for it in the English language.
So I don't know what the fuck Diamond Joe and Mayor Pete are thinking when they spout nonsense like we need to get back to working together or whatever pablum they cynically think will win over some imaginary sliver of "swing" voters, who are clearly the dumbest motherfuckers alive.
Refer to the very brief list of terrible things above, and try to imagine the sort of halfwit who thinks there's some sort of middle ground to be had on those things. What if we kept those refugee kids in cages, but didn't let them get raped and didn't illegally give them to strangers? Like that maybe, is that what passes for compromise and unity? Could it possibly be more productive to motivate non-voters to vote, instead of debasing yourselves in a futile gesture to nasty morons?
Bringing it all back to climate change, and what we can hope to do about it politically, this ongoing political and media dynamic is simply not conducive to getting anything constructive done in that (or any other) area. And it has nothing to do with how scientists have presented their findings, or the many legitimate reasons why they tended not to be sufficiently "alarmist" about the situation. Even their moderate, empirically-backed and peer-reviewed claims were immediately shut down or ignored by the fossil fuel companies and the politicians they own.
(And by the way, I have already given you the template of actions that, collectively taken, would have real impact on climate change and the companies causing it: eat less meat; drive smaller and smarter; have fewer children; consume less; buy local food as much as possible. Just about anyone can make most or all of these changes, and would in fact save money in doing so. But like vaccinations, it requires a critical mass of people to do it, or it won't work. And right now, even the majority of people who are aware of climate change seem to require government action to get anything done. And that's simply not correct. The challenge is in overcoming the average person's base Homer Simpson instinct of wanting someone else to do everything for them.)
And the fact of the matter is that, no matter how much it would cost to invest in mitigating or preventing further damage from issues related to climate change, it will cost more to do nothing. More lives. More money. That's just a fact, and you don't need to spend years comparing a bunch of permafrost core samples to know that, to observe all the symptoms going on and understand the connection.
So what, pray tell, would have gone differently if enough climatologists had gone up to DC and sat before this or that House subcommittee and testified under oath that yeaaahhhhh, about that global warming, if anything we're understating the case, it's really bad and we're really fucked and it's gonna all happen sooner than we think? Mister Slop-Ed can't rightly say, you know, because he was talking straight out of his asshole in the first place.
But he was allowed to talk out of his asshole in the New York Times. And that's the fucking problem.
It takes some real balls to lambaste climatologists, who have been presenting empirical data for decades regarding the dangers of climate change. This is the American political system in a nutshell: absolve the rented politicians, and the reality-teevee-addled dupes who keep voting for them, by scapegoating the one group of people who actually showed up and did their fucking jobs. Both-siderism is the crushed fentanyl of gatekeeper journalists, who peddle their agenda behind bullshit "op-ed" pieces and anonymously-sourced bits of hackcess journalism. They have ruined this country just as surely as that turd Mark Burnett has.
That's how you end up with a chief executive who literally admitted just a few days ago to running a fraudulent charity that stole money from veterans, and everyone's already forgotten about it by Veterans' Day, of all things. A competent media ecosystem would ask him and his minions about that non-stop for a month, but they've already given up on it. They don't even try. Instead we get puff-piece profiles of billionaires' concerns about actually having to pay their fucking taxes, or provide a decent standard of living for the peons who shovel their shit every day.
Jamie Dimon should have been guillotined in the middle of Wall Street a decade ago, as a warning to the rest of that vile breed. Hope that clears things up.
I am also tired of hearing calls for "unity" from Democratic candidates. Each and every one of us has stark choices to confront for ourselves, and what we might consider our values. Either we are okay with a demented slapdick who lies about everything having all this responsibility, or we are not. Either we are okay with the very real, impending problem of climate change and its many dispersed effects, or we aren't. Either we're okay with working Americans dying from hoarding their insulin because of profiteering, or we're not. Either we're okay with children fleeing unthinkable levels of poverty and violence being torn from their parents and thrown into cages, being victimized by older children while their mothers are drinking from toilets, and ultimately being trafficked to American families looking for a cheap kid to adopt, or we find that sort of thing, you know, fucking abhorrent.
I have no intention of "coming together" with people in the first half of those descriptors. We all have relatives, friends, coworkers in our lives on that end of the discussion, and we've all made our personal calibrations as to how to deal (or not) with that. But that is a different matter than whether the candidate we end up being allowed to select to lead the country for the next four years has pre-emptively decided on a fool's errand of comity and appeasement with the "fuck your feelings" crowd..
This is a practical matter as well as a moral one. Unless Buttigieg and Biden are making cynical political calculations in preaching their unity gospel, they should head to the nearest neurologist and get checked for dementia, because they clearly have lost all short- and long-term memory.
In 2009, Barack Obama won the most electoral votes since Saint Reagan in 1984, and had both houses of Congress, including a supermajority in the Senate. It took the Republicons, years before Trump would waddle into view, about a month after Obama's inauguration to flat-out declare fuck what the clear majority voted for, we're going to obstruct this president at every opportunity, and create more opportunities to do so. And thanks to their little helper monkeys in the corporate gatekeeper media, that's exactly what they proceeded to do for the next eight years.
But Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg are apparently convinced that, between being nice guys themselves and Republicons secretly wanting to do the "right" thing, they can breach this gap. They are fucking high if they really believe that nonsense. Every day in every way, the GOP has told us, over and over and fucking over again, what they are really all about. Power and money, and the various uses thereof. Republican members of Congress refuse to confront Trump over his corruption not because they fear him, but because he's doing exactly all the things they want done.
This is not an aberration. This is the culmination of the party's efforts for the past five decades, explicitly so. They do not deny or try to hide any of this at all.
It's enormously difficult to figure out how Democrats and media monkeys could possibly be this stupid, to not see what has been in front of all of us all along. I assume it's the old Upton Sinclair line about people not understanding something because their paycheck depends on it.
Again, the Republicons make no effort to hide any of it. And they make no bones about what they're willing to do when they lose. Matt Bevin still hasn't conceded his loss in Kentucky. Republicans in the North Carolina state legislature have been openly joking for weeks about how they're just waiting for the Democrats to leave the legislative chamber so they can push a bunch of stuff through (which they did on September 11th, while Dem legislators were at a fucking 9/11 memorial).
Here in California, there is a petition drive to recall Gavin Newsom from the governor's seat. We all laughed at that shit back in 2003, and look how that worked out. It takes a shamefully low number of signatures to get an initiative on the ballot in this state, considering the huge population. There is nothing so low that these fuckers will not stoop to, and it precedes Trump by a longshot. He's just made it easier for them to mainstream it.
Because that's the other thing Democratic politicians need to get past -- this idiotic Anne Frank teleology that people are basically good. Some are, some aren't, and the ones that aren't don't worry about playing by the rules, and are more than willing to rent themselves out to the highest bidder. This idea that indecent people are suddenly going to grow a conscience, like a vestigial tail or something, is just so far beyond stupid, I'm not sure there's a word for it in the English language.
So I don't know what the fuck Diamond Joe and Mayor Pete are thinking when they spout nonsense like we need to get back to working together or whatever pablum they cynically think will win over some imaginary sliver of "swing" voters, who are clearly the dumbest motherfuckers alive.
Refer to the very brief list of terrible things above, and try to imagine the sort of halfwit who thinks there's some sort of middle ground to be had on those things. What if we kept those refugee kids in cages, but didn't let them get raped and didn't illegally give them to strangers? Like that maybe, is that what passes for compromise and unity? Could it possibly be more productive to motivate non-voters to vote, instead of debasing yourselves in a futile gesture to nasty morons?
Bringing it all back to climate change, and what we can hope to do about it politically, this ongoing political and media dynamic is simply not conducive to getting anything constructive done in that (or any other) area. And it has nothing to do with how scientists have presented their findings, or the many legitimate reasons why they tended not to be sufficiently "alarmist" about the situation. Even their moderate, empirically-backed and peer-reviewed claims were immediately shut down or ignored by the fossil fuel companies and the politicians they own.
(And by the way, I have already given you the template of actions that, collectively taken, would have real impact on climate change and the companies causing it: eat less meat; drive smaller and smarter; have fewer children; consume less; buy local food as much as possible. Just about anyone can make most or all of these changes, and would in fact save money in doing so. But like vaccinations, it requires a critical mass of people to do it, or it won't work. And right now, even the majority of people who are aware of climate change seem to require government action to get anything done. And that's simply not correct. The challenge is in overcoming the average person's base Homer Simpson instinct of wanting someone else to do everything for them.)
And the fact of the matter is that, no matter how much it would cost to invest in mitigating or preventing further damage from issues related to climate change, it will cost more to do nothing. More lives. More money. That's just a fact, and you don't need to spend years comparing a bunch of permafrost core samples to know that, to observe all the symptoms going on and understand the connection.
So what, pray tell, would have gone differently if enough climatologists had gone up to DC and sat before this or that House subcommittee and testified under oath that yeaaahhhhh, about that global warming, if anything we're understating the case, it's really bad and we're really fucked and it's gonna all happen sooner than we think? Mister Slop-Ed can't rightly say, you know, because he was talking straight out of his asshole in the first place.
But he was allowed to talk out of his asshole in the New York Times. And that's the fucking problem.
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