One could make an argument that racism makes people stupid, because racism is, at its core, a symptom of intellectual laziness. The racist must ignore massive mountains of facts and shelter the racist ideas from enquiry, since they cannot withstand even cursory examination. It’s plain old dumbass.
The COP26 meetings are over and they turned out exactly as expected. There were some particularly horrifying moments, such as when Nobel Price recipient Barack Obama, who earlier said:
“You wouldn’t always know it, but it [oil production] went up every year I was president,” he said to applause. “That whole, suddenly America’s like the biggest oil producer and the biggest gas – that was me, people.”
… decided to lecture everyone about how bad fossil fuels are. You can’t make this shit up.
As I predicted, the aspirational goal of +1.5C is in the toilet: coal and oil producing countries are talking about “tailing off” new production, meaning “we’re going to keep drilling and digging and we’ll tail it off in a decade or two once it’s no longer our problem because we’re old people and we’re going to slide into our graves and leave you kids holding the bag.” +2.5C is the new aspirational goal and, frankly, I think humanity will blow that one, too.
Blogging is not my “job” but it has forced me to become a dedicated follower of news. There was a time years ago when I read the front page of Google news and the New York Times and thought I was pretty tuned-in to what is going on. Since then I’ve learned not to congratulate myself and to seek, instead, the news that’s not fit to print: The Intercept, Counterpunch, Al Jazeera, and local/topical news. Putting customized search strings in Google news is another good trick – in case you’re wondering how I manage to scavenge up so much horror about the F-35 program: it comes to me automatically.
In my recent post about government’s manifest failure in the face of climate change, GerrardOfTitanServer naturally cropped up and started banging the “Nuclear is our only option” drum. I got so annoyed – he has pulled several comment threads into the weeds in the past – with him that I implied that maybe he could fuck off a little bit.
I regret that. The philosophical ideal would be to not be King Thag of This Blog, and fall back on my authority – which is real as far as bits in this corner of the internet go – I should have had the patience to engage, instead. So, I thought about GerrardOfTitanServer’s arguments for, oh, 5 minutes, and noticed a few gigantic, glaring holes in them. This posting is about that, and I welcome and invite anyone who wants to argue with GerrardOfTitanServer to go ahead.
This can be the GerrardOfTitanServer thread and, note to GerrardOfTitanServer: do not continue to drag other comment threads into endless text-walls of argumentation or I’ll shut you down. You’ve got your thread, now, here you go, this is it.
Anna sent me this:
Fascists in the US government are trying to legislate against teaching truths such as: The US is systemically racist.
Anyone who’s done a fair bit of gaming will recognize the term “victory conditions.” They’re the way a game designer programatically defines what success is. Victory conditions can be simple, e.g.: “eliminate all hostile forces” or complex, “before turn 20, must have a unit under command control occupying any of the hexes between A-14 and A-20, inclusive.” When you do the thing that fulfills the conditions, you are a success.
We are about to be treated to another disgusting show of “richest country in history cries ‘poor’ over politics.”
Lately, the topic has gotten some air. That’s good, because – in my opinion – most people do not adequately understand the tremendous whopper-level lies that governments have told about nuclear weapons. I have raised some of this topic before, but it’s worth hammering on: the stated use of nuclear weapons is as a deterrent, yet none of the countries that might be involved in a nuclear war have nuclear arsenals that are oriented toward a deterrent purpose. If that doesn’t make you wonder, what will?
This is from the January 1908 Journal of the American Medical Association. I stumbled across this reference when I was looking to see whether AMA had supported the eugenics movement, or not.