It’s the end of the world

by imothyt

I know you probably want to talk about Arteta’s comments about crosses because that’s what’s going off on my TL on twitter today but can I ask: is anyone else worried about the end of the world or is that just me? hahaha, drama bomb!

I read the other day that we may have past the point where just not using fossil fuels will stop global warming. That’s in large part due to the fact that we are now seeing high temps above the arctic circle which is melting the permafrost, which is releasing methane into the atmosphere and methane is a much more powerful warming agent than carbon.

That’s one worry. I suppose we could see humanity turn this around: install tons of solar panels, use solar energy to capture carbon and methane from the sky? But then that’s my other worry right there. I don’t know if humans are capable of that type of change. And especially not right now, as we are all starting to see the effects of climate change, and instead of agreeing to work together, we seem to be getting greedier and more selfish on a national scale.

More immediately I worry that the USA is on the verge of another “civil” war. That concern was amplified by reading Eduardo Galeano’s history of Latin America where you literally see country after country follow a pattern: heavily armed population, fascist leader elected, society breaks into two bands of leftists and rightists, whenever one leader is elected from either side the other side starts to take to the streets as extrajudicial militias. There are more signs as well: the press is seen as corrupt and complicit by both sides, elections are declared invalid by both sides, police become more militarized, police brutalize the population, riots against police brutality spark more brutality, not less, and then something happens to a military base and it goes off.

In theory, Joe Biden shouldn’t be seen as the type of leftist candidate that would cause massive division in the country but Trump supporters, man, they are ardently anti-Biden. 70 million Americans looked at Trump’s four years in office and wanted 4 more years. That’s really disturbing.

Part of me gets it. Biden is so old and uninspiring. But the other part of me says “yeah, but look at the actual platform, it’s not radical really and it is at least maybe trying to address the issues.” But what I really worry will spark actual fighting is that Biden gets elected, a lot of people think it’s fake, they start protesting (with guns). If this at all gets violent again (you know, like teenagers gunning people down in the streets) then what does Biden do? Trump called in the feds. If Biden calls in the feds I think that’s a powder keg waiting to explode.

And as climate change puts more pressure on poor countries the big issue that Trump ran on – immigration – is going to become even more central to our politics. What we are seeing across the globe is climate driven scarcity, poverty, and violence pushing humans to migrate. Just think of the desperation it must take to put your child on top of a train and send them 1000 miles away in the hands of criminals just for the vague hope that they can have a better life in another country. That’s happening time and again, in all kinds of different countries, on trains, on boats, all around the world.

And then of course, the pandemic.

I have been privileged by my class and race to have the type of job that pays me to stay and work from home. I have done my best to pay that forward by keeping my student employees working and by ordering food from local restaurants and keeping local artists in business by buying their goods (especially this Christmas).

I am also privileged to live in a country which will probably be one of the first to receive the vaccine and again, because of my personal privilege, my daughter and I will probably get the vaccine earlier than most other people on the planet. But that is not the case for most of the folks who have had to spend most of the last 8 months working at restaurants and grocery stores, being exposed to the virus, while also dealing with all of the absolute shit-birds out there who wear their mask half-on/half-off their fucking faces because they are looking for a fight. I’ve seen one of these people virtually every time I’ve gone shopping.

If we can’t even get everyone to agree to wear a face-mask then how are we supposed to agree to take the carbon out of the sky? I guarantee that at least one or two of you reading this right now are really upset that I’m a “mask guy”. I bet you are going to post one of those absurdly discredited studies that “masks don’t work.” Or maybe you’re going to be upset that I’m anti-Trump, that I speak openly about my privilege, or that I’m worried about the “climate hoax”.

But that’s the most worrying thing: these are not political issues. The virus isn’t Democrat or Republican. Climate change doesn’t care if you’re a Tory or whatever the opposition party is in England (do they even have one?). That we have made these political issues is the problem. And not only political issues but we have somehow made them intractable political issues.

So, yeah, man, I feel pretty down about the world. I don’t think we – humans – are going to pull out of this one. I did hear that there was a new strain of fiction called like hopeful fiction or something. And as soon as I finish this Wenger book I will go grab one (recommendations welcome). Until then, I’m just going to make my bed every day, sweep the floor, and pretend that I don’t feel a deep existential doom every day.

Speaking of, I did every task on my list yesterday. So yay me! I was a little bit perplexed that none of you asked WHY I do each of these things because they all have their logic but anyhoo. I guess try to have a good day.. 🙁

Qq

62 comments

  1. Gee thanks for this little pick me up Tim, after all the Arsenal doom and gloom topics.

    I don’t think another Civil War is in the cards, even the biggest pro Trump rubes
    will surely realize in the end all this election fraud talk is his way to entice donations for his political slush fund , one he can use to pay for his future personal expenses as he sees fit.
    It’s up to $170m and counting.
    I suppose losing elections has its perks after all.

  2. And since we’re talking politics, one silver lining from this election fraud farce might be that no Republican hawks in Congress should ever again be able to advocate a foreign intervention to spread democracy in some “ $hithole” country.

    Clearly as far as democracy is concerned we are one of the $hithole countries.

    1. Beat me to it…
      Turchin is very interesting. The Atlantic article does a mediocre job explaining his thesis (though it highlights the role of counter-elites) I recommend going to the source.

      This is the original nature article:
      https://www.nature.com/articles/463608a

      Turchin elaborates on his theory in several articles for in the lay press.
      https://aeon.co/essays/history-tells-us-where-the-wealth-gap-leads
      https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2016-11-12/blame-rich-overeducated-elites-as-society-frays

      His blog at PeterTurchin.com is also worth reading… especially the entries on The Strange Disappearance of Cooperation in America,
      Indiscriminate Violence (mass shootings) As a Form of Political Violence
      Why Real Wages Stopped Growing

      I doubt that Americans will have a real shooting civil war, but then again if you told me 10 years ago that organized right and left wing militias would clash in the street I would have laughed. As it stands the parallels to the lead up to Spanish Civil War are a bit unnerving. Strange things happen during the collapse of an empire, but I think the US is more likely to get into a war with China than a fratricidal conflict.

    2. Of course, once the permafrost melts, the Arctic from outer space will look a dark muddy colour rather than snowy white. Perfect for absorbing the sun’s heat. A lose/lose scenario.

    1. The bed – because it’s wonderful to crawl into a made bed at the end of a long day
      Smoothie – for the veggies and fruits, so that I get enough fibre
      Sourdough, cats, dogs, chickens – because I have to feed all of the living things I have in the house!
      Reading – because I want to quieten my mind from all of the easy distractions provided by technology
      Laundry – I find that if I don’t do a load every day that I will sometimes accidentally leave a load in the wash, then I will have to re-wash that load (because of the mildew) and that waste makes me angry.
      Dishes – I like to cook and cooking in a clean kitchen is much better than a dirty kitchen
      Apple – The chickens love to eat apple cores. It’s fun to throw an apple core out the window and watch them race to be the first to it
      Sweep/Vacuum – cleaning every day makes cleaning easier
      Four cups of water – helps me poop!
      Japanese – because I think I’m going to Japan next fall (if we get vaccines and they let us in)
      Calisthenics – It’s good for you!

      1. My smoothie is super simple too:

        1 bannener
        1 cup of frozen bloobs
        1 cup of unsweetened soy milk
        1/2 cup of greek yogurt (real strained stuff, not the stuff thickened with carrageenan or whatever)

        I think I’m going to start adding 1/2 a cup of oats.

        I blend that shit all up in my corseri knock off vitamix.

        1. We could never get a blender to last more than two years. Dualit, Waring, KitchenAid. Tried ‘em all. Then a friend who’s a serious cook mentioned Vitamix so I took a look. Fvck me backwards, you need a mortgage for one. It took me a long time to commit but when we got it What.A.Machine!!

          There’s nothing a Vitamix can’t handle. Mixing concrete? A doddle. Disposing of bodies? Piece of cake. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

          PS: I haven’t used it to dispose of a body BTW. Usually bury them in the kitchen garden 😉

  5. Tim, I have three recommendations for you.

    The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
    I rarely read fiction more than twice but this one I’ve read thrice,. Tim, this is a good read for anyone searching for purpose and to establish a vision for living life. It’s a relatively short read and full of wisdom that we can all learn from:
    “When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.”

    Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien
    The musician and Canadian in me found this especially resonating and inspiring. A lovingly told tale about two Chinese classical musicians and the ones they love attempting to live through and survive the horrific events in Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which lasted 20 years from 1966 through 1976, and the Tiananmen Square demonstration and the subsequent massacre of protesters in 1989. It is an homage to the human spirit — and music.
    “People aren’t made to float through the air. Unless we know the weight of our bodies, unless we feel the force of gravity, we’ll forget what we are, we’ll lose ourselves without even noticing.”

    Finally because you and I both have daughters and because we both enjoy science fiction and fantasy,
    The Light at the Bottom of the World by London Shah
    This one is unique in having a British Muslim protagonist, a submarine races in the future where London is completely underwater, a Good Dad who has been mysteriously arrested, and some weird, next level conspiracy stuff. It’s volume one of two, so nothing is wrapped up neatly here yet, but the theme of hope is woven throughout. Leyla is a heroine who is thrilling to follow, because of her indefatigable determination and relentless spirit.
    “I believe that any dad who raises his child to believe the world is full of magic, and that there always hopes no matter what, truly deserves for her to rescue him one day when he needs it.”

    3. Thanks. Just bought the London Shah book on Kindle. Will read with interest, particularly as I live by the river.

  6. Yeah – I feel the doom and gloom. What worries me is we are settling into these 2 camps very comfortably. Even my kids disparage anything that’s not in their extremely priveleged, woke view of the world. If you think the level of discourse is bad on Twitter, add in the lack of filter that teens/tweens have and you get what Tic Toc is like, IMO. Trump has been way more divisive than I could have possibly believed – and I expected it to be bad. It’s now a divide that will span generations.
    On a personal note, getting a positive Covid test yesterday has not improved my mood. I’m feeling ok – just flu-ey – but it’s just raging here in LA. No idea how or why I got it. I’ve been diligent about the mask wearing and avoiding any crowds, especially indoors. Stay home if you possible can, people!

    1. 2020 truly sucks, LA.
      Best wishes for a no drama, asymptomatic course which is over quickly and has no long hauler effects. No relegation for you! You’ll be Top 4 before you it.

    2. I think I mentioned a while back that I tested positive for COVID, and was symptomatic. For me, I experienced a dry cough (that wasn’t troublesome, but made it difficult to speak without catching), a major loss of energy (all I wanted to do was lie on the couch and watch YouTube), a slight persistent fever, and the total but temporary loss of taste and smell. Honestly, it wasn’t terrible, and I hope you also have mild symptoms, but I also recognize it affects everyone differently. Took me 10 days to feel recovered.

      1. I appreciate the encouraging words. My symptoms are similar Bun. I just have to ride it out. My only worry is my 84 year old mother joined me and my immediate family for Thanksgiving dinner. She got tested yesterday and we will have results tomorrow. Fingers crossed.

  7. I think what makes it much worse for me is that the current divide of Trump vs. Never Trump is not about politics but about decency and civilized, respectful discourse.

    If it was “just” about pro-life vs. pro-choice, zero gun control vs 2nd Amendment reform, small govt./less regulation vs. big govt. more regulation, lower taxes vs. taxation for social needs, etc., then have at it.

    This is about choosing decency over sleaze, the country over personal gain, speaking truth to power vs craven and cowardly enablement, honesty over mendacity. Although all of that is part of the world of politics, it isn’t policy or politics at all.

    Disgusting! Sad!

    Good luck my southern cousins and neighbors. We up here may be nothing to write home about but for you guys, it’s going to be a long way back.

    Here everybody has a neighbor
    Everybody has a friend
    Everybody has a reason to begin again

    My father said “Son, we’re lucky in this town,
    It’s a beautiful place to be born.
    It just wraps its arms around you,
    Nobody crowds you and nobody goes it alone”

    “Your flag flyin’ over the courthouse
    Means certain things are set in stone.
    Who we are, what we’ll do and what we won’t”

    It’s gonna be a long walk home
    Hey pretty darling, don’t wait up for me
    It’s gonna be a long walk home
    Hey pretty darling, don’t wait up for me
    Gonna be a long walk home”
    – Bruce Springsteen

    1. “This is about choosing decency over sleaze, the country over personal gain, speaking truth to power vs craven and cowardly enablement, honesty over mendacity. Although all of that is part of the world of politics, it isn’t policy or politics at all.

      Disgusting! Sad!”

      I’m not saying this to rile you up at all but I want you to look at these statements and ask yourself: would this look out of place as a Trump Tweet? Besides the complex grammar in the paragraph, I don’t think so. To me, therein lies the problem. Both sides are slinging the same mud back and forth between each other. Them: BAD. Us: GOOD. That’s toxic. The higher we climb on our pulpits to condemn others, the worse we ultimately make the problem. Trump voters are your neighbors. They are human beings. They care about most of the same things you do. You have more in common with them than you’d like to admit. You probably have one in your immediate family. What we need now is unity. It’s time to focus on what we have in common and not what we don’t, and it has to start somewhere. So why not with you? Why not with us? Human beings will respond to kindness with kindness and to condemnation with condemnation. It’s simple.

      1. Doc, I was making fun of Trump in using disgusting sad! That’s lifted straight from hundreds of his tweets! LoL.

        Of course Trump supporters aren’t aliens from another planet (are we really sure about that?)and I did have American family members that voted for him 4 years ago. But they made a terrible choice, and if they continue to make the same choice, I’ll be the first nto admit I have no capacity to understand or empathize with that choice.

        1. I think 1 nil hit the n(a)il on the head. Trump and the GOP have weaponized debate, and the Dems and liberals sometimes take it on the chin, sometimes push back. But it would be unfair to equate the two. Republicans are aggrieved that Obama is a Kenyan Muslim, that Biden is a socialist, that the clintons run a child sex slave ring, that rape accusations are usually lies, that racism doesn’t really happen. Dems and liberals are aggrieved that companies pollute the world, the wealthy exploit the poor, white privilege costs black and brown lives, some men terrorize women and don’t get stopped or punished, etc. When trump steps in to defend one side (white nationalists, religious zealots, corporate hijakers of the economy), or to simply name call or lie, and others push back, there is only one side of the equation to blame.

          Trump and his ilk divide. Just because dems are part of a divided society doesn’t mean we can say dems participate in a meaningful way in that divisiveness.

          Ie yes Obama is a divisive figure — some think he’s great, some think he’s a secret Muslim terrorist. But its not because he did anything that he’s “divisive”. Trump however is divisive because of his actions.

        2. Brilliant essay, thanks for sharing Pandemrix.
          I’d never quite appreciated just how embedded political tribalism is and just how difficult it is to be genuinely tolerant of your actual outgroup(s). Makes me worry like Tim.

      3. I dunno about that, Doc.

        I can’t think of much at all that I share in common with Rudy, Sydney Powell, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Stephen Miller, or anyone who accepts their pablum as fact…

  8. There’s really no such thing as the end of the world. Or, the world has already ended several times in several different ways. Think: the bubonic plague. The dinosaur killing asteroid. The emergence of plants. All of these events pushed the reset button on the existing ecosystem and the world that followed was never the same. The Rennaissance. Mammals. Oxygen. This planet has been through a lot and though everything may change, one thing is for sure: it will go on, with or without us. See, nature is not nice, or kind, or our mother in any sense other than that we feed off of it by participating in the grand game. The game operates on strict rules: Physics. Death. Reproduction. These laws are here whether we want them or not and they are immutable. Yet, in each tragic cataclysm is also the seed of rebirth and renewal. Just as a flood destroys fields, yet fertilizes them, so the plague wiped out much of Europe’s population only to pave the way to great wealth for those that remained. Just as an entire Class of animals was stricken from Earth, so it allowed mammalian life to flourish. One epoch’s tragedy is another’s blessing. So it has always been.

    We are a bloated planet and a bloated nation. We cannot defy the laws of nature much longer. We cannot just keep growing in mutual prosperity. Destruction is as much a part of life on this planet as growth and nurturing. They are intertwined, inseparable halves of a whole that creates life. We have created an ecosystem where natural forces and even diseases are unable to control the spread of humanity. We have made laws against violence and created global coalitions in opposition to war. With all of these measures, we seek to defy the inevitable outcome of our existence here, and further distort the balance of the great cycle of life. When more people are born than those that die, there will be smaller and smaller amounts of everything, for everyone. Jobs, scholarships, spouses. Prosperity requires opportunity. Opportunity requires less competition. It’s a simple equation. There are too many of us, and there is no solution to that. Nature’s way of taking care of a population boom is simple: allow it to exhaust all natural resources, wait for the population to crash, and rebuild. We keep trying to outstrip this inevitable fate. We are hurtling into a future of selfish aggrandizement of our own making, and it’s doomed to fail. And yet, what else can we do?

    1. I honestly couldn’t disagree with you more. It’s true that without a series of cataclysmic extinctions, we wouldn’t be here. And it’s true that, if left unchecked, animal populations can consume their way to collapse. But it’s not true to say that that is our inevitable fate – that’s nihilist nonsense. We have something no T-rex, trilobite or arctic fox could even dream of: science. The fact that we can have this discussion at all is because humans have spent hundreds of years peeling back the laws of the universe. That means, for the first time in the Earth’s history, we can see our cataclysm coming, and we get to have a choice. It also means our species might be the rarest thing in all creation. I understand feeling despair and I understand feeling resignation, but quite honestly, pretending this is inevitable, or in any way a positive, is frankly craven. If you are part of the population that understands what is going on: stand up and do something about it.

      Do not go gently into that long night,
      Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

        1. I’m aware of the Fermi paradox, yes. There are other potential solutions, though. The Universe might only recently have reached the conditions needed for life (high metallicity planets, low rate of nearby gamma ray bursts etc.) – we could be one of the first generation of such planets. Life could be abundant in the universe, but technology still be very rare (evolution is something of a random walk, so it’s hard to say a postiori how likely it was for a human-like species would to appear on Earth at all, and for it to get through the stone age and then go on to thrive. We know it happened, but it might have been the equivalent of winning a cosmic lottery). Intelligent species that do thrive might also have learned to be so energy efficient that they just don’t broadcast that much waste EM radiation so there’s no noise to detect. Finally, even there have been intelligent neighbours who are now extinct, that doesn’t mean they didn’t survive a good chunk of time first. 100k years is nothing in a cosmic timeframe, so lets not give up after just 20k 🙂

          What I think the silence of the cosmos tells us is that Earth is special, and this moment is special. Now we need to live up to the times we find ourselves in.

          1. i also think that looking at the sheer abundance of this planet, the perfect goldilocks situation that we find ourselves in to give rise to intelligent life, and then concluding anything other than how lucky and precious this is seems really sad.

          2. Wow that last para is everything. I just posted a comment to Tim about kitchen blenders and here you’ve elegantly summed up the paradox of life and taking things for granted in such a beautiful way.

    2. Doc, WTF?

      The neo-Malthusian view that there are too many people and we need to die off is not only scientifically, mathematically wrong but – sorry – in the end, fundamentally immoral. Your view not only excuses but necessitates the immiseration, suffering and death of billions, mostly (conveniently) in other countries. And you dress it up with all this yin-yang mysticism as though it’s the deserved, ordained fate of these helpless billions to be wiped out, and then shrug and wash your hands.

      There’s a history to this kind of talk, and it has always led in the past to catastrophic ideas like eugenics, population control, and social darwinism.

      And you’re not even making sense in places. More people does not mean smaller amounts of everything for everyone. There is not a finite amount of food, work or money to go around. Fewer spouses? How would that even work?

      And you are literally arguing that we should have more disease, violence and war?

      I like you Doc, I’m sorry to be so critical but I don’t think this is worthy of you.

      Yes, there is the biological concept of carrying capacity. But the math says that the planet absolutely can support this number of humans in mutual prosperity. We are not deer or cattle that overgraze. We are thinking animals, so when working out the carrying capacity for people, you have to consider economic organisation, distribution of wealth, technological change and our underlying social and political institutions. Carrying capacity for humans is as much a socio-economic concept as a biophysical one.

      Yes of course we are on an unsustainable path, but the whole point is that we don’t have to be, if we change from economies that focus on growth and GDP (the stupidest measure of value) to economies that focus on different measures of value such as sustainability and wellbeing.

      That “if” is not a pipe dream, it’s already happening in countries around the world, and in international institutions (e.g. the UN, World Bank and IMF) it’s becoming more and more accepted as the organising principle for economic activity. The US and the UK (among others) lag far behind as usual, and there is a long way to go, but that is no excuse for fatalism.

      For a dose of optimism:
      Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics: https://youtu.be/Ziw-wK03TSw (6 mins)

      1. Haha Greg, I won’t take it personally. I don’t expect anyone to agree with me. The only difference between us Is you have more faith in human ingenuity to keep pace with our consumption of Earths resources. Only time will tell who is right.

  9. Really well expressed, doc. The fundamental truth is that we ARE nature, and any separation is a human construct. Will this particular expression of the natural world (us) cause another rebirth through destruction now, in the next 25-to-50 years, or will nature through humankind, temporarily avoid rebirth through a more long and winding road (yes, I love Paul)?

    1. Maybe a super virus will kill 1/3 of the global population. Maybe 1/3 of the world will go gay. Maybe we engineer a “fertility fix” and spread it in the water supply, like in Dan Brown’s Inferno. Maybe we continue to argue about bathrooms and privilege and masks until we become infertile from constant stress. Nature always finds a way.

      I don’t know and honestly I’m not bothered by it. I try to control what I can control and be contented in that very small sphere.

    2. Nature boils down to a handful of physics equations – you can fit them all on one bit of paper. And yes, we are very much part of it, and yes, our extinction is inevitable, but the only hard limit is the heat-death of the universe, an event so far ahead in time that it is essentially infinite from our perspective. Even our local limit, the Sun expanding into a red giant, is about a billion years away. And it’s not true to say there is no material distinction between ourselves and other animal species. Nothing else can conceive of and understand the future in the way that we do. Other animals lack the neurological wiring needed to look ahead much further than one winter if they are lucky. Our capacity to predict and plan for the (along with the opposable thumbs, natch) made us great hunter gatherers and let us build our civilisation. As a consequence, it’s also threatened the planet’s entire ecosystem. But finally, it’s given us the tools and knowledge needed to get through this crisis and preserve our planet in a steady state. If, of course, we can listen to the folks with the answers.

  10. Well, I don’t think the world is in dire straits relative to the pandemic or the US political situation. The vaccine results seem pretty good, so I think by late summer next year we might be back to semi-normal here in the US and other first world countries.
    And I don’t think we’re immediately headed to a facist dictatorship or a civil war. But I do fear that the US political system isn’t well set up to deal with the social media world or the partisanship we have now. So things aren’t going to get a lot better very quickly on that front.
    The global warming thing is different. I do think we have the possibility to address that. But it’s going to take a lot of effort and coordination as a global society. And things are likely to get worse before better. It makes me sad, the legacy we’re leaving to our descendants. But it’s not the end of the world.

    On the other hand, Giroud scored 4 today against a real team, Sevilla, not some Europa minnow. Argh. I’m happy for him, but didn’t need that reminder.

      1. Ah, Giroud! I might crawl over to the Chelsea training ground in Cobham on my hands and knees and beg him to come back. All is forgiven. God I miss him.

  11. Completely random, but currently listening to “And Justice For All,” an album I haven’t really revisited in many years, and…it strikes me: this is the 90’s version of Creedence Clearwater Revival, i.e., ‘Nam was bad. (AMIRITE?)

      1. As the headbanger in me says, “it kicks f$&kin’ ASS, dude. Rock on”. If Metallica never did anything other than AJFA and Master of Puppets, those two seminal records would more than enough to cement their greatness.

        Have you heard the remastered version from a couple of years ago? There are no words.

        1. No, I haven’t. Where can I listen to them?

          And completely agree with your view on AJFA and MOP!

  12. We are getting a vaccine a year after the start of the pandemic. In the meantime, wearing masks PROPERLY covering the default Origen and glasses the fortunate wear have let us live unaffected until now. The other advantage of wearing masks is there is a downturn of the other deadly disease like TB which is common in Asia.
    In fact if all were to move out wearing masks properly the scourge , might have been contained / managed by now, of course if everyone also scrubbed hands on coming home.

  14. Thanks for the post Tim. I am not quite as downcast about the future of human kind and about the USA as you are but I certainly understand why your pessimism. Hopefully the Covid vaccines will work and that will at least remove one of the current problems from the list.

  15. To Doc on Tim’s comment reading like Trump tweet, Not even close. He’d need to name call, and probably reference someone’s body part. And he’d need to lie. Where is the lie?

    Ah, the false equivalency thing.

    Trump is uniquely bad. The sheer volume of lies, the current attempt to subvert democracy, the financial crimes, the effortless immorality… I could go on.

    Folks who try to equidistance out-of-this-world corruption (literal corruption, institutional corruption and corruption of the soul) can’t really see the danger in front of them. And that in itself is the real danger to the republic… the normalisation of the deeply abnormal.

    So here’s a small nugget… by the time Trump departs the White House on January 21st, the Biden family will not have set foot in the place since the election. Obama, through gritted teeth, showed him around the place within a day or two of Hillary’s losing. As did his predecessors far back as we can remember. None of them , since it became to norm, fought tooth and nail to hide their taxes.

    Trump has been so successful in shattering norms, that an innocuous tweet on 7am can be compared to the torrents of sh1t that he regularly spews.

    It’s not the end of the world, but some things we’ve held dear have changed forever. And at some point, we’re going to miss the normal, and regret it.

    1. And I’ve had it with anguished pieces in NYT trying to understand poor, misunderstood Trump supporters. Daddy is coming home drunk every night and bare-knuckling mom bloody in front of the kids. She divorces him. Who in their right mind is going to try to try to persuade her to stay with him?

      1. I get your frustration, Claude, but there’s no denying the fact that almost half of America wanted Trump and that some of his supporters are zealots… So I think if we’re going to try in our own way to make this place a healthier one, politically, it does pay to try to understand what makes both sides tick. Dialogue is the answer, in my opinion, but, regardless, what’s clear is that ignoring each other or yelling on top of each other isn’t working. The reason the physically abuse husband analogy doesn’t work is that none of us have a choice, really, about whether to be together. We must find ways of living together peaceably.

        1. Bun, that sounds very logical and all that but here’s a small caveat, Trump and half of his supporters believe the last Democratic President was illegitimate and the next one will be as well.
          Try having a dialogue with that. Where do you start?

    2. I was responding to 1Nil’s comment which it turns out had a degree of embedded satire that went over my head. Nevertheless, my points stand. The answer is being nicer to people you don’t have to like.

  17. On the carrying capacity debate both Doc and Greg make valid points but the truth is likely to be somewhere in between. Technology will continue to increase food production and limit death rates but resource depletion must be taken into account. Estimates of long-term carrying capacity of planet earth for humans typically vary between 1 and 4 billion. We are currently over 8 billion, so in the future there will almost certainly be fewer humans on the planet. I guess we’ll see whether it happens suddenly through a Malthusian type correction (war, famine, pestilence) or gradually…

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