Pure tribalism. Climate change mitigation is liberal, therefore they do the opposite. It used to be the Republicans in power were basically normal, if particularly craven, people who did your 1, 2, and 3 to keep their power. Now the Republicans in power are true believers. There's no distinction with that part of their base.
I can't get behind the paywall atm, but I see "Blackrock" in the URL. Blackrock is one of those huge companies with shares of many others, that's been doing some shareholder activism about climate change, right? Istm if the corporate world comes around to climate change being a massive threat to their bottom line, and exerts their money and influence accordingly, that's an existential threat to the Republican Party. Keeping them in line with the "God wants us to get rich burning all the fuel he gave us" culture is helping themselves.
Someone keeps calling me for a survey asking about Blackrock and if I'm aware of their views on climate change and if I've seen ads mentioning those views. You've succeeded where Facebook ads failed.
Reaction is about power in the same way the liberalism is about fixing things. Lying and hypocrisy are positive goods; having rules creates and arena where you can flout the rules.
4 is right.
Reaction is about personal dominion over facts and standards. The facts say one thing? Doesn't matter! Decency creates requirements? Too bad!
Reaction means never having to say you're sorry. Ever. For anything. You are free from any external standard, but the only way to prove it is by failing to meet those standards again and again.
I don't want to get all New Atheist here, but the affinity of evangelicals for the libertine Trump is no mystery at all. It's all about the bullshit.
In addition to 1: they're also not interested in governing. It would be one kind of disaster if the answer were "no, not that way, but we can accomplish other goals." But the idea of governance seems to be a) stymie anything the Dems want to do b) regain power c) sit around with their thumbs up their asses while fundraising.
Reminds me of the shift in position of Southern slavers from independence to the civil war. At independence slavery is this embarrassing thing that the King totally forced on us and we totally want to fix, honest, only cash is a bit tight this month, maybe later? By the civil war it's common to see advocates for slavery as a moral force, the more the better.
This is flirting with the analogy ban, isn't it.
I'm not sure I buy that given the Declaration of Independence complaining that the king was stirring up slave revolts against them.
7: Another variation on this theme came up earlier today.
Over the years, historians have been divided on the "slave power" thesis. Some have dismissed it, pointing to the lurid conspiracism of its most fringe proponents. Others have held it at arms length, treating it as an instance of the paranoid style in American politics. And still others have tried to steer a middle course of affirming the big picture while challenging the details.
The slaveholding South may not have been as politically unified as charged, but the institutions of American democracy were slanted toward slaveholders, who really did capture the state for their own ends. As much as possible, they used the power of the federal government to further their interests and stymie opposition, with the help of a like-minded majority on the Supreme Court that did not hesitate to act on their behalf.
What must be understood is that the institutions that enabled this subversion of self-government are still with us, a practically indissoluble part of our constitutional order. To say that it is possible for a narrow faction of ideologues to weaponize the counter-majoritarian features of our system against the "republican principle" is, basically, to describe the current state of our democracy. It is, in other words, to state the crisis.
(Wish I could write that well on a deadline.)
Josh Marshall has also noted the parallel to the "affirmative good" theory of slavery.
I'm currently reading Battle Cry of Freedom, and the early chapters have a lot that's eerily familiar about the polarization and dysfunction of American political institutions. Right now I'm at the point in the 1850s where pro-slavery activists try to conquer Nicaragua.
They didn't even think to ask Iran for arms.
Standing athwart history shouting "Stop".
Okay okay, Kotsko finally posted the ultimate poll: "Americans: would you rather live under Republican single-party rule for the rest of your life or as a colony of China?" I don't know if this indicates an urgent desire to count the tankies among his followers or if it's just idle curiosity.
Key points:
- Resistance is stipulated to be futile either way. This will be the rest of your life. Presumably you can make it arbitrarily short, perhaps by resisting, but either way the nightmare will only end in death.
- This is "a colony of China," i.e. the geographical U.S. as ruled from Beijing? There are a lot of different ways this colonization could go -- some better, some worse -- but again, the state of affairs will be lifelong, whatever it is. (In this respect it's kind of an apples-to-oranges comparison, because to imagine the single-party GOP rule, you just have to award all existing positions to Republicans and modify the Constitution a little bit. That's much easier to imagine parsimoniously.)
- No idea which option would give me a longer life!
- I can't choose. It seems very tempting to conclude that China is the "right" choice, but I just can't do it. I'm even literally studying Chinese right now and I can't do it.
I've heard the tonality makes it very difficult.
Wasn't that similar to the man in the high castle? Japan not China for the western US, but Nazis for the east half which is basically the Republican Party if they had complete control. And generally the west coast was portrayed as somewhat more tolerable.
If they were not an entire continent and an ocean away, I'd be far more worried about China than Republicans.
A scenario like Hong Kong between 1997 and 2017 seems not too terrible. Choosing between Hong Kong today and Texas today, though, I kinda think I'd take the odds in Texas. This really is a weird thought experiment, but I suppose it is making me feel intensely grateful for what I have.
(no shade on any commenters in Texas, you people are awesome)
I guess my first thought was "Tibet."
Reading Heebie's OP (can't read FTFNYT), I immediately thought of "smart guns". Remember those? A gun that can't be fired without being in some proximity to a device that the legal owner can unlock, to enable the gun. the NRA came down like a ton of bricks on the company that was developing those guns, and for good reason: once smart guns are available, the NRA is afraid the Feds will make them mandatory. Can't have that now, can we?
https://techcrunch.com/2016/04/30/why-the-nra-hates-smart-guns/
I won't go as far as Heebie: they [the polluters and fossil fuel companies] aren't actively trying to speed up climate change. They simply like things as they are, and the last thing they can countenance, is *anybody* trying to change things -- because if those people make progress, then they also might be called-upon, compelled, to make progress.
Can't have that now, can we?
It depends on whether China has adopted 'the cruelty is the point' as an operating principle. Some colonialisms are like that.
Come on people, China right now is really really really bad. The way they treat their colonies is especially bad, like full on genocide bad.
Republicans would make things as bad as Turkey or Hungary, but that's about it.
15. Performative polling answers FTW. ("I'd rather die than ...")
17. In The Man in the High Castle (the book, not the TV show) the Japanese are shown as being pretty bad. Just for starters, they enslaved all the Chinese people (at least in their part of the US). The Nazis are much worse, of course.
I mean, to "2022 TX/FL vs 2022 Xinjiang/Tibet" the answer is beyond obvious, but "US as a colony of China" is so underdefined as to be incomprehensible. Worst-case scenarios for both cases vs best-case scenarios for both cases might allow you to choose? I think it's so fascinatingly stupid.
I feel like it's not widely appreciated just how dramatically things in China have taken a turn for the worse under Xi.
What makes the poll worthwhile imo is the possibility that the Chinese people overthrow Xi, which is surely greater than the possibility that we do anything effective about the Republicans
Phrasing it as "ruled by Trump (and his hand-picked successors) vs ruled by Xi (and his hand-picked successors)" might get people's minds moving in a different direction, but who knows? I didn't cast a vote but it looked like the tankies were overwhelming the replies.
32 is impressively dark.
On the other hand, since the OP is about climate change, I think there's a chance that Xi's desire to be a world-historically-memorable Chinese emperor in the old tradition might actually lead to his taking much more decisive action on climate change than anyone in the US government will ever do.
I ascribe a lot of seemingly too-petty destruction to preventing any imaginable alternatives, at any scale. Throwing little self-governed countries "against the wall" periodically, zoning out missing middle housing, Washington state senate voting to make it impossible for Seattle to tax itself for Seattle transit. Also the magic guns.
(I am too much SFFnified to be able to refer to "smart guns". They're either going to smart off or outsmart us or both.)
I want a smart gun that counts the shots in German.
So over 85% of the respondents chose "colony of China" over GOP. I don't know why this is so funny to me.
What more world-historical action could you take on climate change than genocide in the US?
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Pelosi's husband pulled over for a DUI in Napa. He couldn't have hired a car to pick him up? Come on. Unforced error.
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Would I rather be oppressed by an external enemy or an internal enemy? I think I might prefer external.
I bet a lot of people get DUIs in Napa. The local tourist industry is highly focused on getting people loaded.
The thing about Napa is that it turns out they make much, much better wine than upstate New York.
That's why it's not very classy to get picked up outside of the Mogen David winery.
41: for sure. But they have so much god damn money, he could hire a driver for the evening. He's 82. Probably shouldn't be driving at night anyway.
Maybe he had a date and didn't want her to think he was too old?
Would I rather be oppressed by an external enemy or an internal enemy? I think I might prefer external.
I don't know which is easier to overthrow, but feels to me like betrayal + oppression is worse than just oppression.
Why choose? With Republican dominance there's a decent chance the Russia faction wins it all.
Would I rather be oppressed by an external enemy or an internal enemy? I think I might prefer external.
Guess who is just about to have her platinum jubilee and would really appreciate an unexpected present.
Looks again like I am indeed going to be the one running for that upper legislature seat. I just caught a massive break today, because the one Republican who could win the seat just declared he's running for congress instead. He's likely to lose to the Dem incumbent, but setting himself up to run for governor next round, when the current gov runs for president.
Thanks. Planning to announce next week. Still working on getting the infrastructure set up and being delayed by stalled paperwork.
I just wanted to sneak in an appreciation for 49.