GOOD MORNING!
(he shouted…)
1 When I wrote today’s early morning post about the Sherwin-Williams controversy, with a “hit the ball into the paint can” promotion going horrible wrong thanks to fake news and lying sports reporters, I wanted to use a famous old cartoon based on a sign that hung in the outfield in old Ebbets Field, where the Brooklyn Dodgers used to play. I couldn’t find it online, perhaps because it was 4 am. I just did, however…
2. For some time, now, as the Left has commenced its nervous breakdown following Trump’s election, I have faced a daily dilemma. The ethics breaches, in civility, in journalism, in politics, have been so over-weighted to one side of the political spectrum that to cover issues based on importance and degree of ethics madness automatically makes Ethics Alarms seem partisan. I resent it, to be honest. The counterbalance is, of course, the President himself, but his brand of unethical conduct hasn’t changed since the campaign, though the Trump-haters never tire of freaking out over the same stuff. For example, after the infamous wrestling tweet about CNN, how nuts can you go when Trump posts a gag video showing him hitting Hillary in the head with a golf ball? Yes, it’s childish, yes, its unpresidential, yes, it shows lack of self-restraint, yes, it’s stupid. But I know and you know, and certainly his haters know, that Trump is childish, unpresidential, lacks self-restraint, and is stupid. I’ve written too much about it already.
He is not, however, getting worse. Democrats, progressives and “the resistance” are getting worse, as they become more desperate in their derangement. I’m seeing things I didn’t believe possible, like serial child abuser Jimmy Kimmel being held up by the news media as the moral center of the Democratic Party. Jimmy Kimmel is nothing. He is a smug high school grad who has never done anything but perform, often disgustingly, as when he was host of the too-vulgar-to-be-believed “Man Show” on Comedy Central.
He’s never run a business; he’s never studied public policy. He’s a comedian whose signature act is egging on parents to make their kids cry and take videos of them. Ah, but he’ll give Hillary Clinton a forum to deliver her shadow UN speech, and pimp for Obamacare, so that makes him a policy expert. Incredible. Incredible, the depths to which progressives have fallen.
An immature, inexperienced, impulsive President, rather than being opposed, as he should be, by a professional, honest, respectable and responsible opposition party, has instead mutated the liberal establishment into as revolting a presence as he is. This is catastrophic for our politics, our culture, and our society, and that’s why Ethics Alarms devotes so much space to it.
3. Ann Althouse has the sharpest hypocrisy detector around, and she nailed horror novelist Stephen King (I like his novels, some of his movies, and he is a big Red Sox fan) for sending this anti-Trump tweet:’
Trump thinks hitting a woman with a golf ball and knocking her down is funny. Myself, I think it indicates a severely fucked-up mind.
She writes in part,
Maybe this is a takes-one-to-know-one situation, but I can barely think of a person who is more implicated in the popularization of the use of images of violence for the casual amusement of the American people….look at Stephen King’s new book (co-written with his son), “Sleeping Beauties,” reviewed here (in The Washington Post):
“Sleeping Beauties” takes place in the little Appalachian town of Dooling, W.Va., which for no apparent reason becomes ground zero of a worldwide gyno-epidemic, known as the Aurora Flu: The moment any woman falls asleep, she’s immediately covered in a sticky white cocoon, like a full-body cotton-candy wrap. What’s worse, terrified family members who break open these cocoons find that their mothers, sisters and daughters have transformed into bloodthirsty killers. “It’s, like, the ultimate P-M-S,” one yahoo says….
President Trump… enjoys some laughing at a woman knocked down by a golf ball, and King enjoys 700 pages of women knocked out of consciousness and bound up by a sticky white substance. How could only one of these things be indicative of a severely fucked-up mind?
Touché.
4. Googling around on the topic of the Left’s abandonment of sanity and reality, I came across Ace Of Spades musing about the same issue from his usual hard right perspective. Unlike me, he thinks the self-immolation of the Left in hate and emotionalism is a good thing.
I’m not an Ace fan, but he understands cognitive dissonance—the single most useful concept I learned in college, by far—as clearly the Democrats and progressives do not. Ace writes in part,
In the old days, if the media pretended to be impartial but then leaned a story to favor their left-liberal buddies, most normal Americans wouldn’t really notice the bias. They’d view the media as trustworthy, and not really all that political (Just Like Me!), and they would buy the bias. These small pushes are more effective than aggressive shoves, because small pushes can be subtle enough to pass undetected, whereas aggressive shoves are obvious and clumsy — and people get their hackles up when they realize the nightly newscast is nothing but a 30 minute political ad. (And people hate political ads.)
…if [an ESPN] host made a snarky aside about Republicans, the viewers would think, “Hey, I like this guy, and he made a funny snarky comment about Republicans. Boy, Republicans really are dicks, aren’t they?”But again, it’s the subtle aside, the pickpocket’s light-fingered touch, that works. Not the pedal-to-the-metal obvious-on-its-face full-spectrum propagandizing.
That pushes people away.
It’s weird. It’s obsessive.
It’s Not Like Me.
People don’t like to feel like they’re being had — and the minute you get clumsy and impatient in your con and let your mark know you’re conning him, he’s not a mark anymore. Now he’s an enemy. I could go on and on, obviously. But you get it. They have decided themselves to no longer wear the mask of Just Like You, but instead to show their true face of Not Like You.
They live in a bubble and the only people they know or listen to are also showing their Not Like You face, so they don’t think this is abnormal. After all, if all of my #SmartSet friends are signalling how intensely, weirdly, obsessively partisan and ideological they are, it must be a good idea, right?
Pro-Tip: No, not if the people you think are the #SmartSet are actually profoundly stupid and currently mentally unstable.
Diversity and Comics — a YouTube critic of Marvel’s descent in nonstop political propaganda — has noted that comic books used to be a fairly “happy” and “mainstream” hobby and diversion. Maybe not entirely mainstream, but mainstream as far as the nerdier edge of mainstream.
But now comic books are — like the media, like ESPN — constantly engaging in weird, Not Like You angry political propaganda for all sorts of weird, fringe obsessions — like pushing grossly obese super-heroes because hey, you’re healthy at any size.
Oh the anger! I used to counsel readers not to show anger when attempting to persuade someone, because you have to match your emotional state to the target’s as the first step in persuasion.
But the left is angry — insanely so — and needs you to know it.
And it’s weird. Not Like Me at all!
They’re alienating their audience — and shedding their audience by the thousands — not just because the audience disagrees with their politics. That’s part of it, sure.
But they’re losing readers because a lot of their audience just doesn’t really think of themselves as one of those Not Like Me intense partisans always nattering on about fringe political issues….The media used to know this — a woman’s magazine would mostly just serve up beauty tips and celebrity interviews, and just slip in the occasional “Republicans are weird” message….But they’ve forgotten. Or, more likely, they’ve just gone so insane they don’t care what actually works as far as propaganda any longer.
They’re now just engaging in primal-screaming public displays of hyperemotional venting — and they don’t care that this is Not Like Me as far as their audience is concerned.
They’re destroying themselves, and sabotaging their own propaganda operations, because they’re just too crazy to think or care about such things any longer.
And I gotta tell you: I love it.
Well, I don’t love it. It’s disastrous. It is also unethical, dangerous and accelerating, and if enough sane, fair, intelligent people grab their friends by their metaphorical shoulders, maybe we can stop it, or at least slow it down.
5. Here is why it is impossible to know what is real and what is propaganda in the climate change debate, thanks to news media bias and incompetence.
Conservative websites are furiously linking to this report from the conservative British tabloid The Telegraph. It begins,
Climate change poses less of an immediate threat to the planet than previously thought because scientists got their modelling wrong, a new study has found. New research by British scientists reveals the world is being polluted and warming up less quickly than 10-year-old forecasts predicted, giving countries more time to get a grip on their carbon output.
An unexpected “revolution” in affordable renewable energy has also contributed to the more positive outlook. Experts now say there is a two-in-three chance of keeping global temperatures within 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels, the ultimate goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement.
Now, my confirmation bias is that this sounds reasonable. I’d like to read the study, but the Telegraph story is mostly behind a paywall. Surely, however, if this is a legitimate study, those findings are big news. I couldn’t find any mainstream news outlet covering it, however, or even acknowledging its existence. However, I did run across this, from two days ago in the Times:
Climate Change Is Complex. We’ve Got Answers to Your Questions.
By JUSTIN GILLIS
We know. Global warming is daunting. So here’s a place to start: 17 often-asked questions with some straightforward answers.
There is nothing more infuriating, and little that is more dishonest, than a newspaper promising straightforward answers and, by inference, an unbiased perspective, that is really just another piece of slanted propaganda. That’s what this was.
For example, under the question, “How much is the Earth heating up?” Justin tells us, “As of early 2017, the Earth had warmed by roughly 2 degrees Fahrenheit (more than 1 degree Celsius) since 1880, when records began at a global scale.”
- Roughly means what? It means its an approximation.
- . Who believes that scientists had the capacity to accurately measure “the Earth’s” temperature in 1880? 1900? 1930? I’ll tell you who: those who want to believe the most dire climate change predictions, and those who are science dummies. I believe the Earth has been warming, but when advocates pull obvious deceptions like Justin’s fake certainty about what isn’t certain, I stop trusting anything they say. As should you.
Here’s another example: the answer to “Could natural factors be the cause of the warming?” is a smug “Nope.” Then Justin writes, “In theory, they could be.”
Then the answer is “yes,” not “nope.”
Later, Justin’s answer to his question, “Why do people deny the science of climate change?” is “Mostly because of ideology.” I would accept this if it was accompanied by the question, “Why do journalists, elected officials, progressives and environmentalists uncritically accept hyped climate change alarms by people like Al Gore, when they lack the knowledge to critically assess the data?” and the exact same answer.
What follows next are a series of questions that the Times pretends to answer unequivocally, and then equivocates. For example, the question “How much will the seas rise?” is answered,
“The real question is how fast.”
No, the real question is “how much”? In the next paragraph, Justin writes,
The ocean has accelerated and is now rising at a rate of about a foot per century, forcing governments and property owners to spend tens of billions of dollars fighting coastal erosion. But if that rate continued, it would probably be manageable, experts say.
All experts? Some experts? What experts? Do other experts say otherwise? That is not a straightforward statement—you know, what the Times promised—and neither is this:
The risk is that the rate will increase still more. Scientists who study the Earth’s history say waters could rise by a foot per decade in a worst-case scenario, though that looks unlikely.”Many experts believe that even if emissions stopped tomorrow, 15 or 20 feet of sea level rise is already inevitable, enough to flood many cities unless trillions of dollars are spent protecting them. How long it will take is unclear. But if emissions continue apace, the ultimate rise could be 80 or 100 feet.
Wait: I thought the “real question was how fast.” This “answer” is full of doubt about how much as well—“could rise”…”worst-case scenario”…”looks unlikely”…”could be.” Many experts again—how many? Which ones? Who are the dissenters? What do they say?
The Times has given us a perfect microcosm of the climate change deceit: insisting that there is certainty when there obviously is not.
Ethics Alarms 
I lost interest in Stephen King a long time ago. He’s written two interesting books *Carrie* and *The Shining* which are great studies of adolescent and adult madness. But a book featuring a killer car *Christine* and a killer clown *It*? Come on!
Try The Eyes of the Dragon, the only book of his I liked.*
*The only fiction book that is, On Writing is a masterpiece.
See… When I realized that the article was veering into areas where King had done depraved things to his female characters, I immediately thought of the scene in eyes of the dragon where Flagg peeped thought the eyes of a painting to watch the queen while she was bathing, or the five page inner monologue about the difference on whether the naked prostitute in front of Flagg was about to bend over and show him the goods, or squat functionally while depositing his coin under her nightstand.
Damn good book though.
I’m going to listen to the audiobook on my way home from work now, but add to the list: “Flagg killed Queen Sasha by slitting an artery inside her vagina while he was midwifing her second son.”
The best response to Stephen King’s tweet I saw on Twitter was one pointing out the creepy sex scene involving minors in “It.” Having never read the book, I wasn’t even aware that happened. Yech.
Yup….. Menage en sept minor orgy, in fact. Not sure if it was better or worse than how the father of the one female protagonist was deeply implied to be sexually abused by her father. King’s fiction had some fucked up things in it… Which is why he of all people really shouldn’t be musing on the fuck-up-edness of anyone else’s mind.
But never we mind! There’s a Trump tweet to hate!
And there certainly would have been ways for King to criticize the tweet without being hypocritical. But “fucked up mind” wasn’t the way to go, clearly.
You mean Flagg blackmailed the midwife into doing it.
Yes! Sorry. And it wasn’t a painting, it was a mounted, stuffed head. I haven’t read Eyes Of The Dragon since highschool.
… and it was not a woman, it was a cow…
just kidding
His short stories and novelettes are uniformly good—hence the fact that two of his best movies were based on them “Shawshank Redemption” and “Stand By Me.”
Misery is excellent, as is Mr. Mercedes. Pet Semetary is a terrifying book; so is Salem’s Lot. I agree that Christine was stupid, and It was way, waaaaay too long, with a terrible ending. it was still scary, however: did you read it? It’s not really about a killer clown, you know.
The concept of The Langoliers made one terrific mini-series. I never looked at dawn the same way again.
Wayne may I suggest you give Christine (the movie) another try. It’s a Carpenter film & has the best line for our times…
“You can’t polish a turd.”
I wonder if *Christine* was inspired by the tv sitcom “My Mother the Car”? I think that I watched the movie on tv and got bored with it about halfway through. Never seen “It” so I will have to take Jack’s word about it being really scary.
It sounds good bur clowns suck
I think the human nature expressed in Needful Things might be a good case study for whats going on today.
#5 Climate change arguments are written just like wacko conspiracy theories but yet the climate change theorists are supposed to be believed and anyone that doesn’t believe them are nuts and conspiracy theorists are to be shunned as wackos. Makes perfect sense.
1. Old baseball joke: a guy hit a long fly on a foggy day and collected a suit, a pair of shoes, dinner out for a week, and three canned hams.
Climate change seems to have a lot of misinformation on both sides. From what I can tell, there are three basic questions:
1. Is the climate getting warmer? The answer seems to be unequivocally yes. I am not aware of much anyone, on either side of this debate, that question that. This is also a really easy question to answer… just look at temperature trends.
2. Are humans responsible for some portion of this warming? This one is a little more contentions, but again seems to be at least.. partially yes. There seems to be some amount of human cause to this warming. But we don’t really know how much of it is attributable. Again, there are not too many people who disagree with this either.
3. What can we do about it? This is the contentious issue. This is the non-scientific question. This is the political question. Do we make a carbon tax? Will that help? No one knows. Do we ban people from driving? No one knows. Do we kill every third child who is born?
The problem here is that one faction is acting like no one agrees on any of those points (straw-man) , then goes on to debunk people who question #3 by saying they are crazy because #1 is obviously true. It does not follow, but they don’t care, they just want to make people look crazy for having valid objections to proposed economic and political solutions that are not well thought out or shown to be efficacious.
I’m not sure it is a strawman, Rusty. I have seen people on this blog cast doubt on #1 and #2 just in the past week. Many people do not believe the reported temperature trends are accurate. This includes Republican congressmen, one of whom brought in a snowball to Congress to prove the earth wasn’t warming at all.
Quotes? (That aren’t of commenters using “global warming” as short hand for “man-made global warming”, which is a conversational convention now)
Glenn Logan: “You didn’t ask me, but I’d say that global warming may be happening, and in fact, I think it is. What I am unsure about is whether or not it’s antrhopogenic…Having said all that, it is certainly possible (but not a fact) that mankind is affecting the climate.”
Other Bill: “Chris: Is the climate warming? Maybe. But back in the ‘fifties and early ‘sixties, the concern was global cooling.”
I think it’s fair to interpret both of these as “casting doubt on” 1. The earth is warming and 2. Humans are responsible for some portion of it.
So two quotes? One of which actually indicates belief that the planet is warming, even while maintaining an openness to being convinced otherwise…
Ok. So, I’m not certain that rises to the statistical level to undermine Rusty’s accurate observation that Man-Made Climate Change religionists DO use people’s acceptance that #1 is true to call them crazy for not accepting #3 as true.
Rusty said that he wasn’t aware ” of much anyone, on either side of this debate, that questions” whether the climate is warming. I would consider both of those comments as questioning that position. But of course you know there are more. And you’d previously ruled out all the comments saying “climate change is a hoax,” on the grounds that you think those comments don’t mean “the earth might not be warming at all,” even though many times it means exactly that. I would bet money that this is slickwilly’s position, for instance.
It’s really aggravating when you ask my to jump through these hoops for you, then deny that I’ve done so.
“It’s really aggravating when you ask my to jump through these hoops for you, then deny that I’ve done so.”
No, I just find it interesting the mole hills you latch on to in order to take umbrage with pretty fair and accurate comments.
Oh, good lord. I didn’t “take umbrage” to Rusty’s comment. I thought he was wrong about a major point of his comment, and explained why. I do not believe it was accurate to call the claim that many conservatives question whether the climate is warming and whether mankind is responsible a “strawman,” and I’ve demonstrated why I do not believe that is fair. I believe Glenn and OB’s comments are pretty typical and representative of the conservatives on this site.
But no, I don’t take umbrage to Rusty’s comment. I do take umbrage to yours, though.
Why is it important if human activity has affected climate? If the seas are going to boil “naturally” and we can stop that, are we just going to do nothing? If human activity has in fact interrupted a new ice age, are we going to stop emissions and just start moving south? It seems like the three points should be: is climate changing, if so, is it a bad thing, and if so, what should we do about it?
It is important because if there is a casual relationship between some behavior and human activity, then we can possibly do something to alter that type of activity, but if they are just going to boil naturally, there is not much we can change in our behavior to alter that.
Okay. Say it was 1937, and you’re FDR. Is that what you’d say to your weather people: “if they are going to boil naturally, there is not much we can change in our behavior to alter that?”
You are misunderstanding what I am saying.
If it is a natural thing, say the sun was getting hotter, it does not make sense to change your behavior. You will not make the sun cooler by cutting carbon emissions. If it is partially caused by man made factors, then you could do something to change those factors.
I should add…
If it is partially caused by man made factors, then you could do something to change those factors — but that does not mean we *should*
It should be obvious that cooling the sun is not the only option. Under this scenario, FOR gets a letter from Einstein in two years, saying that we can unlock the power of the atom. Ten years later, there are jet engines and cloud seeding, ten years later space travel and satellites. Under your three points, none of these are relevant to chipping away at the problem, because it’s been slotted as a natural problem.
We have an exact analog to this issue, the certainly 100% natural threat posed by nearby asteroids. Nobody has suggested that its being a natural cause precludes an effort to stop things from hitting us, and progress is being made with technology that didn’t exist when they started working on it 30 years or more ago.
You are a very confusing person.
I never even suggested that we cannot change something that is naturally occurring. What I said was, cutting carbon emissions will not do anything about the sun getting warmer. That was an example, to illustrate a point, not an all encompassing pronouncement.
There could be any number of reasons that the earth is getting warmer. If the bulk of that is a cyclical process that we have no control over, then changing the way we get electricity, or what fuels we use to make cars work will have little effect. If the bulk of that is because of some behaviors that our society is exhibiting, then there are things that we could do to impact that change.
It is pointless, however, to go around making all kinds of political and economic changes, causing great disruption, millions of deaths and sentencing to poorest 5 billion people on this planet to a life a misery, when we have no idea if those changes will be effective or even advisable.
I took LoSonnambulo’s comment to mean that even if climate change is entirely natural, we could try preventing it with technology and great effort if we considered the consequences of climate change unacceptable.
Yes, that’s about two-thirds of it. The other third is that by distinguishing it from other threats by a requirement that it be man-made, we cut it off from other threats we’re dealing with and hinder our ability to learn from one field to the other.
I largely agree with your framing of the issue, but want to point out that point 1 is really two issues. 1a) Is the climate getting warmer and 1b) will it continue to get warmer and if so how much.
As you say, 1a is generally easy to show, although even here there is reason to doubt the temperature series data used. I don’t think those questions tip the answer from ‘there has been warming’ into ‘there has not’, but I certainly think the magnitude of the temperature increase is overstated.
The real tricky part comes from the second portion, will it continue and if so how much. Answers to this question are basically ideology at this point. There are generally two modes our climate system can be in, stable or unstable. The stable mode can be imagined as a ball in a valley, push it up in either direction and it will eventually settle back into it’s starting position. The unstable mode is like a ball on a hill, push it in either direction slightly and it ends up far away from it’s starting position. No one knows which mode our climate system is actually in. It’s reasonable on some level to prepare for the worst and assume we are in an unstable system. On the other hand, the last climate epoch prior to humans, the Pleistocene Epoch, lasted for 2.6 million years before an ice age ended it, and here it’s important to note that even an ice age eventually lead back to stable climate conditions on par with prior epochs. So, my priors are that our climate system is more likely in that stable mode, but again there is no factual answer to this question.
Second point here, and I have seen this brought up exactly once, the models used for climate science can never be accurate. That is not hyperbole, and it’s not just my opinion, it’s mathematically provable. They can never be accurate for the same reason we will never have accurate weather forecasts for 2 weeks out. The mathematical formulas that describe our climate system and weather patterns are provably unsolvable differential equations. I want to take a moment here and provide definitions and a hypothetical. When I say the formulas describe weather, I mean they are an exact mathematical description to the physical process going on in the Earth’s atmosphere. The reason we can’t predict weather, or our climate, is because if all the inputs to the model were know with exact precision, which of course will never happen, they could be fed into the formulas that exactly describe our weather/climate, and we would still not get an answer because the math is provably unsolvable. In fact, the minority of differential equations have solutions, those that describe fluid dynamics are almost all unsolvable. This entire field of math is devoted to finding ways to better approximate the answers to these equations, with the margins being accuracy and computing power. So as this field of math progresses, and our computers get more powerful, we can get better and longer range hurricane forecasts for example, but they will never be exact. We can push it from 2 day warnings to 4 day warnings, but never 3 week warnings. Likewise with climate, maybe we can get to 5 year predictions, or 10 year, but I would doubt any 50 or 100 year prediction because the math is just too unstable, and that’s without bringing measurement error into play.
So yeah, the planet has warmed in the past. Will it continue and if so how much? I have no idea, and neither do the scientists. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, the basic science is settled on what that does, but how it interacts with our climate system is far from settled. Does it push us from a stable climate system to an unstable system? If so, where are the inflection points? What are the error bars on your measurements? What about on your models? How many of your model runs showed the climate cooling? Where those included in the final estimates, or did you restrict model outcomes that only showed warming? Point is, I generally can’t even get into the political considerations that you rightly highlight in point 3 because I can’t get further than the science showing what has already happened. I simply know too much math to believe their predictions about the future.
Here is a link to my view of climate change argument. It’s way too long to post on Ethics Alarms again. Enjoy.
https://ethicsalarms.com/2017/09/13/morning-ethics-warm-up-91317-mansplaining-more-climate-change-hype-and-shut-up-and-sing-stevie/#comment-467984
1) Yes the Climate is Changing
2) We have *no* definitive proof as to the level of impact Human conduct has, whether it is negligible, minimal, or impactful.
Let’s boil this down to some simple categories:
1) Humans ARE a primary source of the change in climate change.
a) Is this ACTUALLY a problem, given the entire Earth’s history of climate extremes? Possibly: but only insomuch as our ability to adapt to it. More southerly arable land will become less arable and more northerly tundra land will become arable. What we’ll see is a general population shift towards the Poles. This can impact foreign and domestic policy. But *gradually*.
b) Do we have any reasonable assurances that the *costs* of changing our lifestyles actually outweigh the *benefits*. Freakonomics did a great analysis of this. The summary: “Even the moral argument is not without critique. With just a 1% real annual rate of growth, global per capita income rises from about $12,000 today to $77,000 by 2200. Even if climate change damages shrink the economy by 13% by 2200, as some have suggested, our distant descendants will be five times richer on average than we are. Are we to sacrifice our relatively modest wealth so they might be six-times richer that us?”
2) Humans ARE NOT a *primary* source of the change in climate change.
a) Then why the hell are we fussing over “fixing” the environment. We ought to be expending our energies anticipating the demographic and population impacts of people *moving* to accommodate changing environments.
b) Why, if we think that Humans change the climate Negatively, would we think that trying to change the climate “back” to some romanticized “normal”, when we aren’t the actual drivers of climate change, hope at all to be positive change. It would seem to me that if the climate is going to change via massive and natural forces, that mankind can only hope to make things “worse” if we already believe it is our change that IS making things worse.
“As revolting?” One could be forgiven for reading your blog, and concluding you should replace “as” with “more.”
In other words, the Left have become what they purport to loathe, at least in a general sense — unethical, evil, racist, one-sided and so biased they couldn’t find a nominal notion of fairness with a map and GPS while being led by the hand all the way.
In re: ACE
With respect, Jack, this tactic has not worked for you. Your stories about Facebook prove it.
It’s not your fault, I know. You have done yeoman’s work trying to get the freak-outs under control, to ask those engaging in them to ponder the abject insanity of their positions — to virtually no discernible avail. It’s easier for them just to unfollow you, or quit coming to your blog, or label you a conservative racist homophobic bigot.
I hate to agree with Ace, but he’s right. When your enemy (and whether you or I like it or not, the left has become the enemy of almost everything we collectively hold dear) is busily (and angrily) destroying himself, the right thing to do is get out of the way both to avoid damage and to reap the benefits of said destruction. They aren’t listening, Jack. At all. At some point, throwing up your hands is … ethical.
In re: Climate change
They learned this technique from Vox and their “explainer” pieces, I reckon. This one reads just like one of those. Funny how liberals decry “mansplaining” and then do it all the time, especially people like Vox and the Times with their certitude that is indistinguishable from a born-again Christian’s conviction about the requirements to get to Heaven, all about a system so complex no right-minded scientist believes we have a handle on it.
I wonder if it ever occurred to them that science doesn’t work that way. Apparently, not so much.
With respect, Jack, this tactic has not worked for you.
I don’t give up that easily…
I would also add that when it comes to the golden rule, it rarely matters what someone does. You should still try to do the right thing.
Like the constitution, the Golden Rule is not a suicide pact.
And that is very good. I imagine there are at least some – perhaps a lot of – other people out there who are in the position I was in two years ago: more or less moderate, not really paying attention to what was going, and trusting that everything would work out because, you know, the TV tells me so. It was a painful awakening for me and I was bouncing around lost for over a year trying to find someone – ANYONE – that was not a partisan hack who could rationally explain all the stuff I had missed in the last decade or so and reassure me that all of journalistic bias I was seeing was actually real and not “okay” as all of my dear liberal friends keep saying. “Everyone is a little bit bias, Shana. Whats the big deal? You are acting kind of crazy. OMG. Are you racist?” And yet those same friends would not dare watch Fox News because the spinners and liars and conspiracy theories over there are somehow “not okay.”
ARRRRRRRRRRRRGH!!!!!!!!!!
ARRRRRRRRRRRRRGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I’m definitely one of your blogs biggest fans Jack. Don’t stop the good work.
Love the cartoon. Isn’t it funny we can laugh about a Jewish tailor with absolute impunity? The chances of being called a racist or a bigot by a lefty for doing so is absolutely zero. Just one of the reasons the left has made “bigot” and “racist” absolutely meaningless terms.
I didn’t realize he was supposed to be Jewish until I read your comment. I thought it was funny regardless, that the guy didn’t want to have to fulfill the promise. In retrospect, it’s obvious that it’s based on a stereotype, but it seems to work without it just fine.
Stereotypes exist AND they’re funny.
The chances of casting aspersions on Jewish culture resulting in an infantile response like burning down neighbhorhoods and taking heads off of non-believers is also absolutely zero.
Clearly, you’re a racist and a bigot, Tex. Hah!
Tex is using a measurement of temperature to describe the coolness of the Jewish culture.
I wonder how JImmy Kimmel is supposed to have any more credibility than, say, Christopher C. Morton?
http://connect.cleveland.com/user/christopher_morton/index.html
I suspect the foundations were set years before Trump was elected. Below is your quote.
“The strategy of division began in 2008, and I flagged it then: opposition to Obama was linked to racism. (John Lewis called John McCain the equivalent of George Wallace.) This continued and intensified throughout the past 8 years. Democratic officials, White House surrogates, prominent Democratic leaders and celebrities, as well as journalists, especially MSNBC, returned to it again and again. Obama could have stopped it, but he didn’t, because it was politically beneficial. Most of the dirty work was done by the Justice Department, through Eric Holder, who pursued racially divisive positions and prosecutions, with the head of the Civil Rights division, Thomas Perez, pursuing a policy that held that only whites were capable of civil rights violations. The Tea Party, which was a product of Obama’s divisive approach, was tarred as racist from the start, by Lewis among others, as Obama stood by. When Obama personalized the Trayvon Martin episode, identifying with the victim despite the fact that racial motives were never shown in the episode, it exacerbated the racial division. Holder used Sharpton as an ally and an adviser, and Sharpton is regarded in the white community as an anti-white race-baiting demagogue, because he is. Holder, and later Lynch allied in the Martin, Ferguson and Freddie Gray episodes with the victims and against police, signalling that the episodes were racist in motivation (no actual evidence in any of them). The long-running cynical twist of representing voter ID laws into black voter suppression measures, and the administration line that the SCOTUS ruling correctly finding that Federal meddling with state laws could continue to be justified by 1964 data regarding racist state policies almost 50 years after they were set was pure due process and yet Obama allowed his party to tell the public that the Civil Rights law had been “gutted.” (The solution, if Obama cared, was to make a deal with Congress to update the law, but that would have required him to make compromises and negotiate, which he neither could do or would stoop to.)
All the divisiveness flowed through Obama’s hyper-partisan rhetoric. He blamed Republicans for all the nations ills well into his second term, and in foreign countries disavowed past policies to an unprecedented extent, part of his refusal, lately on display again in farewell interviews, to accept accountability for failure. Meanwhile, Obama’s position on illegal immigration sought ethnic division, justifying Hispanic lawbreaking while, again, accusing critics of bias. His approach to seeking rapid acceptance of gay marriage was to have the Justice Department attack religious organizations and individuals that had relied on moral edicts for centuries (religions) or their whole lives (individuals.) This led to aggressive legal measures against private businesses on the cusp of public accommodation status, but also quasi-expressive, like bakeries, dress shops and photographers, but also against religious organizations, like the Little Sisters of the poor.
On the gender front, Obama pit women against men deliberately, allowing his renomination convention to promote a false “war against women” because Obamacare opponents believed that forcing insurance policies to pay for personal birth control was excessive, but mostly because it was a usefully divisive message. That it was cynical is proven for me by allowing Bill Clinton, of all people, to be the star speaker. Obama allowed his Education department to encourage an anti-MALE gebder war on campus, with the infamous “Dear Colleague” letter, threatening schools if they didn’t punish male students without evidence “beyond a reasonable doubt.” He allowed his party and surrogates to represent criticism of Hillary Clinton’s conduct as based on gender, which is personally insulting, in my case.Obama endorsed “Occupy Wall Street,” encouraging class division, a particularly dishonest act since the 1% was the most successful segment of society under his administration. He endorsed, and allowed his party to endorse, Black Lives Matter, even as the organization rejects the findings of the Justice Department in the Mike Brown and Trayvon Martin deaths. He has helped to turn black communities against police, resulting in murders, increased crime rates, and police deaths. In his rhetoric against guns, another nakedly political effort, Obama slurred gun owners and those who believe strongly in gun ownership rights as being complicity is the deaths of children, demonizing large segments of the nation, particularly in rural areas,
That’s just a summary, and off the top of my head. Black against white, poor against middle class, middle class against wealthy, rural against urban, liberal against conservative, religious against gays, blacks against police, women against men, female students against male students. Obama allowed these divisions to be exacerbated, participated in their expansion, and benefited by then politically. Then denied, as always, accountability.”
I nominate this a COTD
There’s no topping Stephen King diagnosing someone with a “f—ed up mind” for hypocrisy. His own complete depravity is not only well documented, it’s how he makes a living.
I think I’ve thought of an exact equivalent: Donald Trump telling Stephen King that he should lay off Twitter because it’s unprofessional.
HA! Good one.
Heh. Beauty.
Gad: regarding #5, or, the way of thinking it criticizes, I saw a headline either early today or yesterday that suggested the BIG earthquakes in Mexico were triggered by the SMALLER quakes in Norteamericano Territory.
Oh, what a thrill it would be, to see another headline suggesting that the recent migrations into Europe from the Middle East and Africa have added so much more weight upon subterranean European geological formations (“plates”) that, just like Anthropogenic Global Warming, human activity may be responsible for the recent increased disturbances and possible impending catastrophic eruption of the Campi Flegrei supervolcano in the vicinity of Naples, Italy.
We must remind ourselves that it has not been disproved that the migration of masses of humanity into the middle North American latitudes (the was-US) in recent times may be responsible for those SMALLER earthquakes that have triggered those LARGER earthquakes in Mexico.
Have you read this headline?
https://www.yahoo.com/news/jimmy-kimmel-isn-apos-t-051642962.html