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Post by Supercommunist on Nov 13, 2024 23:23:54 GMT 5
Fun fact: Lex Luthor was reimagined as a corrupt corporate executive rather than a mad scientist in the 80's and one of his main inspirations was... Donald Trump (yes, even as a real estate mogul, he already had the mannerisms of a comic book supervillain). This panel is about the only appropriate reaction to last week's election result:  I can't believe that our survival as a civilization largely depends on if Elon Musk, of all people, can convince Mr. Mugshot to keep supporting green technologies, if only so that Mr. X can sell more of his electric cars. Unfortunately, Musk isn't a climate ally. He has stymied the construction of high speed railroads because he wants people to buy his cars. |
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Post by theropod on Nov 13, 2024 23:56:42 GMT 5
The guy clearly never cared for the planet or the climate. He just apparently recognized that building electric cars was a good way to make money, which he was correct about. He doesn’t care one bit about why people buy his cars, as long as they do. But apparently over the last few years he realized that sucking up to some alt right fanatics and fostering a personality cult among that demographic is a lot easier than doing honest work with reasonable people. He has not just tolerated but even heavily encouraged climate change deniers on his platform. In his 2 hour interview with orange Hitler (which, because I seem to have a masochistic streak, I watched), he argued that climate change wasn’t really a pressing concern at all, and that we’d just eventually (over the next few centuries) need to phase out fossil fuels because they would run out at some point anyway and since at too high a CO₂ concentration we would start "getting headaches"(LMAO). Clearly the notion of climate change is not palatable to the people he has decided to cater to, because it entails too much urgency and also a certain moral imperative to actually value the life of poor people, and not just one’s own (being a prospective Tesla customer basically insures that one isn’t poor oneself). The thought of people like Elon and RFK being given high government positions under Trump is actually one of the scarier prospects of this upcoming presidency. As if orange Hitler wasn’t enough, him stacking the government ant the entire public sector full of people who are dangerous all on their own is not a nice thought. TBH while I am sure Elon will do whatever is good for Elon, and that this will probably involve some concessions to the sales of his vehicles, any positive effect this will have on climate policy will not just be accidental, but also negligible. Electric cars are better than combustion cars (contra many German ideologues’ persistent claims, because those people have combustion fetishes), but selling a few more electric cars alone is not enough to make a meaningful contribution. Elon has zero interest in most people, because they are too poor to afford his overbuilt luxury vehicles anyway, and they will keep using dirty combustion cars indefinitely. What they, and the climate, would have really need are investments in a reliable, clean, cheap and efficient public transport infrastructure. Which is something that, as Supercommunist wrote, Elon doesn’t want in the slightest. |
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Post by creature386 on Nov 15, 2024 1:29:30 GMT 5
Trust me, I've seen how far this narcissistic clown radicalized himself on his own platform and I'm certainly not gambling on his better nature or anything. And I'm also aware that we are doomed no matter what as long as the GOP controls all (or any, really) parts of the government. However, it does make a (small) difference if the Anthropocene Mass Extinction Event happens at the upper or at the lower range of your red temperature graph. Project 2025 calls for repealing all climate change related executive orders by Joe Biden, especially the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) which offers renewable energy subsidies of $370 dollars. $12 billion of those went into electric vehicles, including school buses and garbage trucks, and lots of subsidies went into red states where millions of jobs depend on green technologies. Don't get me wrong, the IRA is and was not enough, but how much of it (and the rest of Biden's policies) Trump repeals might make 4 bn tons of emissions worth of difference: ) Again, what Biden did was obviously not enough. However, since we won't have Harris to expand on it, we can only hope that having at least someone with monetary interests in green energies might stop Project 2025's climate insanity from being executed in its entirety. I'm not trying to downplay that we are headed for very, very dark times. Even if they don't repeal everything, they're going to abolish the NOAA and institute global warming denialism as the official ideology across the entire federal government. The Heritage Foundation even wants the US to bully allied nations into burning more fossil fuels because the GOP is that insane. Noam Chomsky knew what he was talking about when he called the Republican Party the most dangerous organization in human history. I need to quote him verbatim here because I couldn't have put it better: 'Has there ever been an organisation in human history that is dedicated, with such commitment, to the destruction of organised human life on Earth?' |
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Post by theropod on Nov 15, 2024 17:54:47 GMT 5
Yes, it’s nothing short of scary. And seeing how he has appointed project 2025 people to cabinet positions already, I guess we’re finally letting go of the false pretenses of having nothing to do with it (how lucky that his voters clearly couldn’t care less about him being a pathological liar…I mean the other candidate had a sort of goofy laugh, that’s way more important!). If he implements even a fraction of the mind-numbingly dystopian shit in that neo-fascist master plan, the results are going to be catastrophic. And this time, there are so much fewer people who could potentially rail him in on any of it. He has a far bigger senate majority this time, and his biggest critics within his own party are no longer around either.
The degree to which the orange blob has already stacked his future cabinet with unqualified but ideologically vetted sycophants is nauseating. Did he really just put some fox news host in charge of the biggest military in the world? I certainly haven’t thought too fondly of past US defense policy to begin with, but that is on a whole other level. Abolishing NOAA and firing all public employees who intend to not let blind loyalty override how they do their jobs…well, the single most appropriate term I can think of to describe what he wants to do is Gleichschaltung. And when people start breaking out German words to describe what’s going on, you know the situation is very serious. But the man literally said he wished he had generals as loyal to him as Hitler’s (I guess he didn’t know a whole lot about history, but that’s another story). So I really can’t think of an argument against this term.
He is basically trying to make sure that the next time he proposes to nuke a hurricane or inject someone with bleach, there won’t be a single sane person in any federal agency who could stop him.
And somehow, that an actual majority of voters actually did vote for him this time makes it even more depressing. In 2017, he just became president because America isn’t a proper democracy. In 2025, he will become president because a majority of American voters are stupid, evil, or both (no offense to the substantial minority who I am well aware are neither).
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Post by creature386 on Nov 15, 2024 22:32:21 GMT 5
And somehow, that an actual majority of voters actually did vote for him this time makes it even more depressing. In 2017, he just became president because America isn’t a proper democracy. In 2025, he will become president because a majority of American voters are stupid, evil, or both (no offense to the substantial minority who I am well aware are neither). I'm gonna be real, it's not even the fanatical MAGA Trumpists that I'm mad about. Yes, these guys are fascists and they know it, but what really gets my blood boiling are the swing voters and independents, the "normies", if you will, who overwhelmingly voted red. It doesn't matter if I open traditional media or YouTube comments, this hyper-sophisticated "both sides are equally bad" type of political analysis is literally everywhere. I don't get it. It was stupid in 2016 already, but in 2024, it's so stupid that not even I am falling for it (yeah, I legitimately fell for the whole "Trump might destroy the climate, but Hillary would have given us a war with Russia!" nonsense back then). Like, the thousands of media articles speculating about what Harris supposedly did wrong are obviously holding her to far higher standards than her rival. -There's the ones who say she spent too much time with demonizing Trump instead of presenting her own policies. -Then there are the ones who'll admit that she did present policies, but that she focused too much on "irrelevant" topics, like abortion, identity politics, and, wait for it, climate change, instead of the economy. -Then there are the ones who'll admit that she did talk about the economy, but that she didn't have plans and didn't distance herself from Joe Biden's unpopular policies (you know, the policies that gave America the strongest recovery post-Covid of any G7 nation). -Then there are the ones who'll admit that she had economic plans, but that she was "too academic" in her communication or that she didn't explain them in a way that resonates with the anxieties of the "American worker" (who'd rather have a billionaire conman in power than affordable healthcare).
Honestly, are they expecting me buy any of this crap? Are they expecting me to believe that voters who had to google what tariffs are after the election give a damn about economic policies?
I think it's time to accept that the "average Joe" (you know, the kind of person who is neither chronically online, nor fanatically devoted to any political tribe) understands, on a gut level, that voting for a proto-fascist wannabe dictator with enough felony convictions is sorta bad, but that he is still the "lesser evil" compared to having a black woman as President.
That'll be one for the history books. "Ultimately, the 21st century global ecological and democratic crisis couldn't be averted because the Democrats failed to find a slighty-less-old white man after Biden's departure in the last free American election."
(If we still have free elections in the future tho, this is obviously an area where the Dems can improve.)
I made a new thread where we can continue, since this is obviously an interesting topic and our forum is very unlikely to get censored:
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