I’m sure most of the U.S. was energized by what Teddy Roosevelt said here 120 years ago, but it seems that this “ship has sailed.” Current-day American capitalists are completely uninterested in the quality of the average person’s life.
Yet is it possible the 2024 presidential election will represent a turning point in this regard? Indeed it is.
The meme here reminds us that Trump’s choice of Vance as his running mate was absolutely bizarre. Did the Republican ticket really need more hate and stupidity?
The Trump phenomenon can be explained as the “perfect storm” in which an ignorant and angry U.S. electorate came across a demagogue whose lies they found irresistible. Also supported by billionaires, Trump was swept into power, where, over a period of four years, he told his adoring fan base more than 30,000 documented false statements.
The Trump supporters who bought the Big Lie “reasoned” that Biden couldn’t have gotten anywhere near 81 million votes, because he didn’t have rallies. The truth, of course, is that the typical Democrat has an extremely limited appetite for going into an arena and screaming praises for our prospective leaders and political beliefs.
Having said all this, it’s certainly not a bad thing that Harris and Walz are attracting large crowds.
There are several reasons that climate change is proving to be such a difficult challenge for our civilization to overcome.
One of them is nationalism/tribalism. There are 200+ sovereign nations on this small blue planet, whose citizens feel very little affinity for those in other countries. This means limited cooperation among nations that desperately need to come together to develop and share relevant technology.
Another is the influence of Big Oil with its rapacious greed and corruptive influence over our lawmaking processes. All this is made worse by the fact that they have allies among some of the most ignorant people on Earth. We Americans live with tens of millions of hateful morons, like the truck owner here.
It depends on who you are.
If you’re extremely wealthy and hoping for an additional tax break, then of course you can save with Trump–at the expense of governmental programs that improve the lives of the common American, educate our children, and stem the collapse of the environment.
Now, what about the owner of this cheap little car? Sorry. You’ll be facing wage stagnation, the demise of our democracy, and a steady stream of lies and criminality from the White House.
Neuroscientist/atheist/author Sam Harris says, and I paraphrase, that what perturbs him the most about religion is that one person suffering a delusion is thought to be mentally ill, but hundreds of millions of people with delusions are simply considered to be religious.
Re: Shell Oil, Mother Jones reports:
Shell’s profits have climbed to $14 billion for the first half of 2024 after its decision to focus on fossil fuels over low-carbon energy delivered stronger than expected earnings for a second consecutive quarter.
Europe’s biggest oil and gas company rewarded its shareholders with a further $3.5 billion in share buybacks after reporting adjusted earnings of $6.3 billion in the three months to the end of June.
The latest results, which have taken the company’s total profits for the first half of the year to $14 billion and its share buybacks to $7 billion, have angered climate campaigners as Shell continues to grow its global gas business and pull back on investment in low-carbon energy.
At least these people are being honest. They openly admit that they’re destroying the planet in order to make huge profits.
That’s a hell of a lot more than ExxonMobil can say with their enormous PR campaigns designed to convince us that they’re transitioning to hydrogen, biofuels, our whatever their latest round of bullshit is focused on.
As suggested in the photo above, this whole situation would evaporate the moment that Big Oil had to pay even a tiny portion of the costs that our civilization is suffering in terms of environmental damage.
Most of us would agree that Trump and his support base are “weird,” in the sense that everything these people stand for: the pathological hatred of immigrants, the rejection of science, the peeling back of human rights, etc., represent giant steps backward into the Dark Ages.
Most people would say that it’s a weird direction to be taken by a large segment of American society. Yet the word doesn’t begin to capture the essence of what we are encountering here.
To call a person or a group “weird” means little else than that they don’t conform to our cultural norms. I may say that my neighbor is weird because he comes outside in his underwear, or that a certain religious cult has weird beliefs.
But what we have here is better described as evil than weird. Did any of the survivors of Hitler or Stalin describe their tormentors as “weird?”
Is this the best we can do to describe pure Trumpism? Is it proper to say that an attempt to overthrow the United States government is weird?
Come November we will have the answer to a very important question: What percentage of “56-year-old gun-owning country folks” think like this guy?
My guess: it’s not huge, but it’s big enough to get the job done.
