Pragmatic politics focused on the public interest for those uncomfortable with America's two-party system and its way of doing politics. Considering the interface of politics with psychology, cognitive biology, social behavior, morality and history.
Etiquette
DP Etiquette
First rule: Don't be a jackass. Most people are good.
Other rules: Do not attack or insult people you disagree with. Engage with facts, logic and beliefs. Out of respect for others, please provide some sources for the facts and truths you rely on if you are asked for that. If emotion is getting out of hand, get it back in hand. To limit dehumanizing people, don't call people or whole groups of people disrespectful names, e.g., stupid, dumb or liar. Insulting people is counterproductive to rational discussion. Insult makes people angry and defensive. All points of view are welcome, right, center, left and elsewhere. Just disagree, but don't be belligerent or reject inconvenient facts, truths or defensible reasoning.
I’ve often thought that maybe one thing that can bring
people closer together is a shared working experience and a striving toward
common goals.Since we’d have to start
somewhere (here in the U.S.), I had previously advocated for some kind of mandatory community
service; say 1-year of paid service after high school.That would be one way to force an interface between our melting pot of cultural/societal differences.Anyway…
Though this pandemic sure wouldn’t be my “challenge of
choice” as a way to bring us together, that same kind of shared cultural comradely
seems to be happening now.No time for
xenophobia or homophobia.Let’s just “get
the job done” and hopefully learn something (a lot!) from it.
This led me to wonder, what kind of “good” is coming out of
this very “bad” situation?I can think
of two things at the moment:
-Communities working together (this has a whole subset of
activities)
-Future pandemic preparedness (this has a whole subset of
activities)
The top 10 percent consumes 20 times more energy than the bottom 10 percent.
Commenters often complain that the root of our problem is overpopulation, and we keep responding with data from a 2015 Oxfam report that concluded that 10 percent of the world's population is responsible for 50 percent of total lifestyle carbon emissions.
Now a new study confirms it, finding "extreme disparity in the use of energy among richer and poorer people - both within countries and between them." Much of the inequality is due to transportation; researchers found that the top ten percent of consumers used 187 times as much vehicle fuel energy as the bottom ten percent, mostly on cars and holidays. According to the study's lead author, Yannick Oswald, quoted in a University of Leeds press release,
Transport-related consumption categories are among the least equal. Without reducing the energy demand of these services, either through frequent-flyer levies, promoting public transport and limiting private vehicle use, or alternative technology such as electric vehicles, the study suggests that as incomes and wealth improve, our fossil fuel consumption in transport will skyrocket.
It's all about the cars and planes; the rich may be heating bigger houses, but that 10 percent only consumes a third of the heating fuels. The study was written before the current crisis which might change a few things, but "the authors warn that without reductions in consumption and significant policy interventions, by 2050 energy footprints could double from what they were in 2011, even if energy efficiency improves." The authors do have some recommendations:
Different categories require different forms of action: energy-intensive consumption, such as flying and driving, which mostly occurs at high-incomes, could be regulated through energy taxes, for instance, while the energy footprint of heating and electricity can be reduced by massive-scale public investment programmes in housing retrofit.
The report is pretty blunt, which is why the BBC provocatively titled their story, Climate change: The rich are to blame, international study finds. It quotes another Professor who says "this study tells relatively wealthy people like us what we don’t want to hear."
The problem with the BBC's title is the definition of "rich". Many tend to think of it as the one percent. But the study talks about the top ten percent. That's almost all of us in developed countries, almost anyone who has a car or takes a vacation or owns a home. Professor Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre gets this:
The climate issue is framed by us high emitters – the politicians, business people, journalists, academics. When we say there’s no appetite for higher taxes on flying, we mean WE don’t want to fly less. The same is true about our cars and the size our homes. We have convinced ourselves that our lives are normal, yet the numbers tell a very different story.
Basically, if you look at the OXFAM data, the rich aren't different from you and me, the rich ARE you and me. The really rich are off the scale, but the average American is still emitting more than 15 tonnes of CO2 per capita, and that's from our cars and our vacations and our single-family houses. Of course, at over 50 tonnes, the top ten percent of Americans (those who, according to Investopedia, earn more than $118,400) are looking awfully tasty. https://www.treehugger.com/economics/are-rich-responsible-climate-change.html
It's a nice day and we walk on Saturdays and Sundays. We walked the neighborhood today because we haven't done that in a while and our regular walking places are closed to the public.
The San Diego airport is almost deserted - it was so strange and quiet
A WWII era Navy training ship, USS Recruit, at the end of the Nimitz walking bridge
This morning when the radio alarm fired up at 6 am as usual, I listened to stories of Californians who lived on the edge before losing jobs and/or getting evicted from their homes. The state passed a law to block evictions, but it came too late for at least some people. The stories included details of how these people work one, two or three jobs to just barely break even, or for a few, start to put a few dollars in savings. One woman who worked three jobs had accumulated $2,000 in savings. She lost all three jobs due to the coronavirus pandemic and statewide social lockdown here in California. After the $2,000 is gone, she will run out of food and stop paying rent for lack of income. The other stories were equally heart breaking.
This wasn't their fault. They were working hard and trying their best. They were deceived and betrayed by incompetent federal level leadership.
A discussion I posed here on March 17, Coronavirus Update 3: We Still Fly Blind, But at Least Trump Seems to be Awake Now, noted that it was on March 16, 2020 that our president appeared to finally take the coronavirus pandemic seriously for the first time. By then, it was too late to proactively respond to the virus. America finally started reacting in serious ways.
As one commenter noted in the discussion here yesterday, Some Personal Thoughts on Various Things, the president fired the head of the US pandemic response team in 2018. She was fired one day after publicly stating that the US was unprepared for a pandemic. In the 5 minute segment below, commentator Fareed Zakaria describes the general level of incompetence of the federal pandemic response. Zakaria mentions the firing of the head of the US pandemic response team.
It is undeniable that Trump fired the head of the US pandemic response unit after she publicly said the US was unprepared for a pandemic. That firing directly reflects Trump’s belief that telling the public inconvenient truths is disloyal and will result in firing the offender. In terms of federal governance, Trump values deceit and blind loyalty far more than he values truth or service to the public interest. There is no other plausible way to see this other than as staggering incompetence by a vindictive, chronic liar president and the team of incompetent enablers he has surrounded himself with.
But to be fair, the president recently trotted a real scientist or two out to speak to the public about the situation based on science and reality instead of self-serving, boastful rhetoric that was previously mostly lies and deceit, e.g., 'this is Obama's fault’, 'we’ve done the best job ever’, etc.
Yesterday’s discussion mentioned that some members of congress from both corrupt parties sold some or most of their stock holding before the stock market crashed in February. They had been warned in secret by the CIA that the coronavirus pandemic would lead to severe economic consequences. The reaction of these fine pillars of the community and members of the US congress? Sell their stock but don't warn the public about what's coming. Again, self-interest trumps the public interest in the now defunct but still corrupt relic called America’s two-party, pay-to-play political system.
One can see why many Americans are not only walking away from both parties. Some are also seriously questioning the merit, or lack thereof, of for-profit capitalism, for-profit governance, a grossly overpriced for-profit health care system, and even democracy itself. Is that reassessment of our situation unfair or unwarranted? I don’t think so.
Also worth noting is the fact that some places such as South Korea were able to deal with the pandemic without the massive economic and social pain and loss that America is going to experience. It if fair to believe that had the federal response been proactive and competent from the beginning, American could have been spared much or most of the pain and loss that is to come.
Apportioning blame
Who, if anyone is to blame? What portion of blame should they get? What is fair and reasonable? Is it counterproductive or stupid to even think about apportioning blame now while the disaster in still unfolding?
One way to analyze this: In my opinion, the president (1) bears much blame for the failures here. His administration (2) is also partly responsible for being unable to make the president see reality for what it was before it was too late. People should not be left off the hook just because they were hired to be lickspittle yes people unwilling to speak truth to a power who refuses to accept or even hear truth. People who voted for the president in 2016 and still support him (3) cannot be ignored and share some blame. That said but group 3 can be forgiven for not knowing that the president would wind up firing all the competence around him and replacing that with licksptittles. I sure didn’t see that coming in 2016. And what about people who opposed the president from the start and still oppose him (4), e.g., people like me? Group 4 includes some who put corrupt, spineless Trump Party enablers in congress. Congress (5) is not without blame here either. Neither is the hyper-expensive, for-profit US health system (6). Neither is the for-profit US business sector(7). Neither is the heavily tax-sheltered and subsidized American religious sector (8). Neither is everyone else not in groups 1-8, and that includes non-voters (9). Here is blame could be apportioned among those nine groups:
