“If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.”
- David Frum
“If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.”
- David Frum
6 years of age would put me in 1978.
There is a lot I could do from that point onward, that would make $10M look like spare change. Like investing in Apple, or working with Tim Berners-Lee to more effectively launch an Internet that could better resist corporatization and enshittification.
Plus, current climate change has seen a velocity across a mere century that prior events took tens of thousands of years to achieve.
This imparts an “inertia” to our current climate that - even if we stopped on a dime, right now - will lead to conditions that may have most of the planet outside of the polar regions as being uninhabitable year-round due to chaotic weather and lethally high wet bulb temperatures that AC is simply unable to handle.
And if we don’t stop; if we continue on our “business as usual” path for another 10 or 20 or 30 years, said inertia could conceivably push the entire planet over into a full-blown Venus Scenario, wiping all life from the face of the planet.
Warming trails CO2 by 15-20 years. We are now seeing the 1.5℃ of warming of 2003, when Windows XP was released. If we hit CO2 levels that predict 5℃ of warming, humanity has essentially dug its own grave, the planet will (once warming catches up) no longer have any carrying capacity for us to survive in sufficient numbers. If we hit CO2 levels that predict 8-10℃, we run a non-trivial possibility of a tip-over into a Venus Scenario.
Prior events took many tens to hundreds of thousands of years, allowing entire ecosystems to migrate to and from the poles. This allowed the biosphere to “put the brakes on” warming itself because they never stopped being robust sequesters of CO2.
We don’t have that in play, here. Entire ecosystems will die in-place because they simply don’t have the time to migrate. We will see extinctions on a scale never before seen in the geological record. And the very robust biosphere that saved the planet in prior warming events will be commensurately weakened in this one, likely to the point where it cannot effectively sequester sufficient CO2 to stop the warming.
TL;DR: as a species, the likelihood that we are all endlings is uncomfortably high. Humanity may not see the year 2100, and will most likely not see the year 2200.
The idea of climate change violates scripture of all three Abrahamic faiths. So the truly faithful will reject the idea of climate change wherever it is mentioned on ideology alone.
The science of climate change has also been adopted by “the left”, so the political right must stridently oppose its existence it wherever it is mentioned, on principle alone.
That’s a majority of the population, right there, that will openly reject climate change in every way right up until it starves or kills them.
The only thing Austerity does is screw over the working-class person to avoid inconveniencing any member of the Parasite Class with higher taxes.
Anyone implementing Austerity doesn’t give even a single f**k about any Average Joe/Jane, they’re doing this purely to help those with obscene levels of personal wealth avoid paying their fair share of the social contract.
people are still crazy in on Obama being the cause of all our problems
That’s how you know that someone is ideologically contaminated and running completely facts-free: they blame everything on someone who has absolutely no relevance to the situation.
Libertarianism requires its members to engage in due diligence in order to execute their libertarian ideals properly and make the choices that are correct for them.
This, unfortunately, excludes the lower-60% of all Americans, who are so ground down, economically terrorized, and mentally overwhelmed with their daily struggles to survive that they have little to no opportunity to approach any major choice with anything even vaguely in the realm of due diligence. They just don’t have the headspace to do so, and are forced to spend all their available mental efforts on just putting one financial foot in front of the other.
This is why having social support frameworks enforced/provided/funded by the government is so important for so many working-class people - it allows them to put those issues on autopilot, significantly reducing their own cognitive load and allowing them to better process the most important issues in their lives.
Ergo, libertarianism is a wealthy person’s toy. It is something that they can champion, because only they have the economic options and financial freedom to fully and properly engage with it.
Until everyone has vanishingly few catastrophic-level issues on the horizon (like one missed paycheque leading to homelessness, or a sudden illness leading to medical bankruptcy), any attempt to implement libertarianism will only bring mass amounts of misery and destroyed lives to anyone beneath the Parasite Class.
And when you have those kinds of widespread government-provided supports that lift all boats - and not just the megayachts - why bother with libertarianism? We should continue to use what got everyone into that safe state in the first place – socialism.
Remember, the Parasite Class already uses socialism for themselves. It’s called grants and bailouts and subsidies, and allows the Parasite Class to privatize the profits and socialize the losses.
It’s just at a scale that makes it impossible for working-class people to leverage.
Reactive armour needs to be attached to thick armour. If it’s attached to non-armoured things, it will do just as much damage to what it’s attached to as what it reacted to.
Any civilian truck covered with reactive armour is a death trap, and any soldier who knows anything about reactive armour will target these vehicles with the cheapest weapons that will trigger the armour. This is an example of the enemy going out of their way to get killed.
Pick any religion, and you will find violent extremists.
With that said, Sikhs don’t hold a candle to Islam or Christianity when it comes to violent extremists.
When done right, the trash takes itself out. At least this saves the taxpayer some money.
It’s more than just Democrats, it’s society in general.
You can’t enlist the support of an entire gender by telling them that they are the source of all of society’s evils, and that they themselves are fundamentally evil no matter what, that they are all rapists-in-training, that the world would be better off if they were all killed, and that they are no better than vermin. And more importantly: that when they do something objectionable it is misogyny and bigoted and disgusting and (with some things) even illegal, but when women do it, it is a big nothingburger with zero consequences for the woman.
That’s how you alienate them and push them away.
And the alt-right has stepped in with comforting lies.
Is it any wonder that men have turned away from the left? There is absolutely no visible benefit for them there. So they have gone to where they are openly wanted and desired, where they are intentionally made to feel useful and valued… even though they are just pawns in a class war (Parasite Class vs working class), and will only ever be hurt by those they support.