American novelist, poet, and essayist Wendell Berry makes an excellent point here about the moral depravity of people who don’t have the courage to stand up against who destroy our natural environment.
Imagine a person coming into your home and proceeding to chop up your furniture with a hatchet. You might say, “I have a sharper ax in the garage, if you’d like to use that,” but you probably wouldn’t.
This reminds me of a conversation between Neil deGrasse Tyson and a televangelist. Tyson was asked, “So we don’t understand dark energy. Couldn’t that be God?”
He replied, “If that’s the way you want to play it, sure. But just remember you’re standing on an island that’s getting smaller with each passing year. A couple hundred years ago, we thought thunder and lightning were God.”
The cartoon here would be a lot funnier if it weren’t sadly http://Profit Is the Only Thing true.
It’s precisely what’s happening in the world around us.
If you don’t have a problem with obscene language, but you do have a sense of humor—and you also have at least a passing interest in what Australia is (not) doing about climate change, you’ll want to watch the video linked above.
Australians have been through some extremely right-wing governments over the past few decades. They expect to continue to sell coal for ‘decades into the future’ and their prime minister doesn’t seem to get this at all.
Americans aren’t too strong in nuanced thinking, i.e., dealing with shades of gray. It is for this reason that the word “socialism” is so terrifying to almost half of the nation.
The United States is the only country in the developed world that doesn’t offer universal healthcare, and one of only a few that doesn’t provide free college education. Yet suggesting that we join the rest of the OEDC makes some people think of Venezuela.
We wonder why we have “news” channels like Fox, Newsmax, and OAN. The answer is that this country contains an enormous market for oversimplified, rightwing BS.
This comes from Canadian environmental activist, campaigner and writer Tzeporah Berman.
It’s illustrative of the anger that many of us feel towards the forces on this planet that are knowingly causing it to degrade, simply for profit.
I was lucky enough to be invited to hear Barack Obama speak at an environmental conference in Las Vegas in 2015. I was amazed to learn how much he knew about the subject, and how disappointed he was that he hadn’t been able to accomplish more during his tenure in office.
He closed by addressing the audience and saying, “It’s you folks, not me, who are out there working every day to make sure this planet will continue to support life on a long-term basis. I’m not the hero of this story. You are.”
There wasn’t a dry eye in the place.
I think the idiom is “glossing over” rather than “glazing over,” but that’s hardly the point.
It is hard to understand why this woman has not been charged with a crime.
Let’s hope that prosecutors are waiting to see precisely what crime the shooter is ultimately convicted of.
Who wants to be on a school board? What was, until recently, a thankless position, is now an extremely awkward place to be.
This is exemplified by the poor sap who had to fire the QAnon believer in the story here, a teacher who told her students that Trump is still president.
However, it doesn’t end with discomfort; it’s sometimes dangerous. School board members are receiving death threats for refusing to comply with parents’ wishes regarding curricula. Welcome to America in 2021.
The answer to the question posed here is that corruption is the standard by which the U.S. Congress operates. It’s really no more complicated than that.
This is part of the reason that the United States has fallen in rank to #15 in the world in terms of freedom. People who are incapable of electing honest leaders are free in an extremely limited sense of the word.
