Once again, shameless Republican hypocrisy

The hypocrite and the nominee

This time, blatant Republican double standard hypocrisy relates to Biden's Supreme Court nominee. Given McConnell's lies and hypocrisy about Supreme Court nominations and nominees, one would reasonably think he would keep his mouth shut. One would be wrong. The Washington Post writes in an opinion piece:

It’s a case of the pot calling the kettle dark.

Last week, on the very day President Biden announced his nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) issued a statement expressing his earnest concern that “Judge Jackson was the favored choice of far-left dark-money groups.”

On Tuesday, McConnell repeated on the Senate floor that he is “troubled” by “the intensity of Judge Jackson’s far-left dark-money fan club.”

Even for McConnell, a five-time Olympic gold medalist in hypocrisy, this was special.

There is perhaps no human being more responsible for the tsunami of unlimited, unregulated “dark” money that has corrupted and consumed American politics than Addison Mitchell McConnell III. Nobody worked harder to thwart campaign finance limits and to block the disclosure of contributors’ names. One Nation, the dark-money group McConnell effectively controls with his former chief of staff at the helm, raised more than $172 million in 2020, according to a tax return obtained by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. (emphasis added)

Good old Addison Mitchell McConnell III. He is the Olympic Champion of elite Republican hypocrisy and shamelessness. Of course, it may be the case that McConnell is lying when he says the nominee is the choice of far-left dark-money groups. Maybe the groups he despises and wants to cancel are moderate left or centrist. Is he just trying to cancel the free speech rights of far-left dark-money groups that the Republican Supreme Court unleashed in its 2010 Citizens United decision? Did the Republican Party court intend to unleash only far-right dark-money groups while stifling the far-left?

So many questions about Republicans and their policies and rhetoric. So many Republican lies in response. I am “troubled.”

Putin's war on Ukraine

Putin is an imperialist set on conquering Ukraine. His goal is to install a corrupt, pro-Putin kleptocracy. This is a classic good vs. evil conflict. I see it mostly as concentrated power and wealth fighting against more distributed power and wealth, roughly tyranny vs. democracy. It is sad and deeply discouraging to see this. One can hope that Putin changes his mind and leaves, but that seems increasingly unlikely. 

Much of the death and physical destruction in Ukraine are on Putin's hands. How much? I don't know. How much of a role did corrupt radical right authoritarianism in the US play? Maybe little or none. Maybe more. Putin uses the excuse of NATO expansion as a key propaganda argument. But since NATO was always a defensive pact, it never represented a major invasion threat to the Russia, no matter how many times he lies about it. It never even represented a minor threat. NATO was never intended to invade Russia.

Eastern European countries are unsettled by Putin's imperialism. The New York Times writes:

“Nobody here trusted the Russians before and we certainly don’t trust them now,” said Mieczyslaw Zuk, a former Polish soldier who oversees the once top-secret nuclear site. The bunkers were abandoned by the Soviet military in 1990 as Moscow’s hegemony over East and Central Europe unraveled in what President Putin has described as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”

Now Eastern European countries fear a catastrophe of their own could be in the making, as Mr. Putin seeks to turn back the clock and reclaim Russia’s lost sphere of influence, perilously close to their frontiers. Even leaders in the region who have long supported Mr. Putin are sounding the alarm.

Warnings about Moscow’s intentions, often dismissed until last Thursday’s invasion of Ukraine as “Russophobia” by those without experience of living in proximity to Russia, are now widely accepted as prescient. And while there has been debate about whether efforts to expand NATO into the former Soviet bloc were a provocation to Mr. Putin, his assault on Ukraine has left countries that joined the American-led military alliance convinced they made the right decision.  

Fear that Mr. Putin is capable of just about anything, even using nuclear weapons, is just “common sense,” said Toomas Ilves, a former president of Estonia.

Mr. Ilves announced this week on Twitter that he was “accepting apologies” for all the “patronizing nonsense from Western Europeans” who complained that “we Estonians were paranoid about Russian behavior.”

In a telephone interview, Mr. Ilves said he had not received any apologies yet but was gratified to see Russia’s “shills and useful idiots getting their comeuppance.”

Western Europeans who once scoffed at his dark view of Russia, he added, “have suddenly become East Europeans” in their fearful attitudes. “This past week marks the end of a 30-year-long error that we can all come together and sing kumbaya.”

Apparently, Putin could not hide the fact that he is attacking Ukraine from his own people any longer:

A War the Kremlin Tried to Disguise Becomes a Hard Reality for Russians

Moscow posted a death toll [498 dead Russians] from its attack on Ukraine for the first time, and Russians who long avoided politics are now grappling with the fact that their country is fighting a deadly conflict.

On Feb. 23, Razil Malikov, a tank driver in the Russian Army, called his family and said he would be home soon; his unit’s military drills in Crimea were just about wrapping up.

The next morning, Russia invaded Ukraine, and Mr. Malikov hasn’t been heard from since. On Monday, Ukraine published a video of a captured soldier in his unit, apologizing for taking part in the invasion.

“He had no idea they could send him to Ukraine,” Mr. Malikov’s brother, Rashid Allaberganov, said in a phone interview from the south-central Russian region of Bashkortostan. “Everyone is in a state of shock.”

The reality of war is dawning across Russia.  

Russians who long avoided engaging with politics are now realizing that their country is fighting a deadly conflict, even as the Kremlin gets ever more aggressive in trying to shape the narrative. Its slow-motion crackdown on freedoms has become a whirlwind of repression of late, as the last vestiges of a free press faced extinction. 

 

Background: Russian military vehicle on fire

Foreground: a dead soldier

Police in Moscow arresting an anti-war protester

See? It really is a war of tyranny vs. democracy. It is the same war that China and other dictatorships are waging against the US and other democracies.

Your thoughts? Is it good vs. evil, or something else?

Hypothetical questions…

Fighting for the principles of freedom and democracy sounds noble in theory. But how about in fact?

Ukraine is experiencing this reality right now: Defending the principles of a democracy.  Many are willingly laying down their lives to defend their country, in the name of precious freedom. 

Shifting gears now to America/the U.S., and its love of freedom and democracy.  Right now, it is said that <1% of the US population volunteers for military service, a pretty large chunk of which includes minority races and less fortunate members of America’s opulent society. It’s true, some may see the military as their only viable choice for advancement in life (with technical training and/or paid education, which can lead to future job opportunities, etc).

 

Hypothetical Questions:

Though we so-called “know” it’s probably not possible, what if America came under attack, like Ukraine is now?

Question 1: How willing would people of military age in the U.S. be to sign up to fight?  Please rate along the spectrum of Very Willing to Not Willing at All.  Defend your answer. I.e., why?

Question 2: If you personally are of military age, would you be patriotic/freedom loving enough to sign up to help?  If it depends on something, what would that something(s) be?  Explain.

Thank you for posting. 

Some climate scientists get angry: A a supernova of stupid or not?

The New York Times writes:

Evidence on global warming is piling up. Nations aren’t acting. Some researchers are asking what difference more reports will make.

“We’ve had 26 Conference of the Parties meetings, for heaven’s sake,” he said, referring to the United Nations global warming summits. More scientific reports, another set of charts. “I mean, seriously, what difference is that going to make?”

It was this frustration that led Dr. Glavovic, 61, a professor at Massey University in New Zealand, and two colleagues to send a jolt recently through the normally cautious, rarefied world of environmental research. In an academic journal, they called on climate scientists to stage a mass walkout, to stop their research until nations take action on global warming.

Predictably, many researchers balked, calling the idea wrongheaded or worse — “a supernova of stupid,” as one put it on Twitter. But the article gets at questions that plenty of climate scientists have asked themselves lately: Is what we’re doing with our lives really making a difference? How can we get elected officials to act on the threats that we’ve so clearly identified? Do we become activists? Would we sacrifice our credibility as academics, our cool composure, by doing so?

For scientists of many kinds, the coronavirus pandemic has fueled the sense that scientific experts and political authorities are uneasy allies at best, that distrust and misinformation have weakened society’s capacity to work toward complex collective goals.

These thoughts were percolating as Dr. Glavovic worked alongside nearly 270 other experts on the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations body that assesses climate research. The new report, all 3,675 pages of it, was issued on Monday and concludes that global warming is outpacing our ability to cope.  

Each I.P.C.C. assessment is a huge, multiyear effort by researchers and representatives from 195 governments. Every line, every chart, is fine-tuned to ensure it is backed by evidence. The hours are long; the work is unpaid. The panel, which shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, has given global climate talks a crucial grounding in scientific fact. But its reports deliberately do not prescribe policies for governments to enact. They just lay out the options.

They are all the same: Climate science denier tactics, just like 

tobacco industry tactics, just like chemical industry tactics, 

just like Christian nationalist tactics, just like Republican Party tactics

What they and others like them all have in common is ruthless use of dark free speech to (i) attack inconvenient knowledge, (ii) attack the messengers trying to warn about inconvenient knowledge, and (iii) sow confusion and doubt about inconvenient knowledge. When big money and power is involved, lies, deceit, unwarranted doubt, slander and social division works every time as far as I can recall. 

Early on, climate science deniers vehemently disputed the science, arguing that (i) climate change was not real, (ii) climate scientists were a cabal of communists and Democrats hell-bent on enslaving Americans and destroying our economy, and (iii) the science was not persuasive and too uncertain. Talking points (ii) and (iii) are still popular with Republican elites and climate science deniers. They have successfully delayed taking action against climate change. 

In American politics it is ~25 times harder (my estimate) to get something done than it is to block it and do nothing. Unifying and building is hard and difficult. Dividing and destroying is easy, and for the elites at the top ~0.1%, incredibly power and wealth accumulating. That's just the way our political system was set up.

For decades, cigarette companies successfully (i) fooled tens of millions of Americans into a false belief that cigarettes did not cause cancer, and (ii) stopped government from taking serious action in defense of the public interest.

For decades and continuing today, oil and chemical companies successfully (i) fooled tens of millions of Americans into a false belief that plastic would be recycled, and (ii) stopped government from taking serious action in defense of the public interest, including an increasingly plastics-polluted environment. Today those same companies continue to block government action on climate change by quietly funding disinformation. These people are expert at sowing doubt, confusion and divisive false beliefs. 

For decades, Christian nationalists and the Republican Party have adapted and used the same tactics to deceive tens of millions of Americans into believing all kinds of divisive lies, slanders and crackpottery in their lust for power and wealth for the elites at the top. They have applied the full weight of their propaganda efforts to denigrate and neuter climate change as an important issue. This comes at the expense of, e.g., democracy, truth, the public interest and the rest of us. 

That is not to say that the tactics of deceit, division, doubt, slander and etc., are new. Those tactics have been in use for centuries.

Climate scientists: Consider their situation and weakness

The NYT correctly articulates the immense weakness of honest people honestly trying to inform and warn: Would we sacrifice our credibility as academics, our cool composure, by doing so? That is the key question. If climate scientists become activists, they would lose even more credibility in the face of a vast barrage of anti-environmentalist deceit, lies and slanders that target their activism. The scientists would be smeared as mendacious, self-serving political partisans and traitors. 

Climate scientists cannot be activists without losing their credibility. But by God, oil and chemical companies, other polluters and Republican ideologue extremists can be activists and they claim 100% credibility, even when they are lying through their teeth. See the major power asymmetry here between unifying and building vs. dividing and destroying (polluting for profit)? 

Once again, Republican hypocrisy and double standards are front and center. Polluters could not care less because there is so damn much money to be made.

Right now the Republican Party is dead set against taking climate change seriously in terms of government action. If anything, they may be open to the private sector and unregulated markets doing whatever they want, including polluting even more. The do-nothing Republican anti-climate science attitude is made crystal clear in the only statement about climate in a recent Republican policy document: 

The weather is always changing. We take climate change seriously, but not hysterically. We will not adopt nutty policies that harm our economy or our jobs.

That is all that corrupt Republican ideologues are willing to say. That's it.

Republican elites are obviously not serious about climate change. In their open contempt of climate science and climate scientists, Republican elites do not even bother to distinguish between weather and climate. The issue is at best a silly joke for them, but far more likely a threat to the profit interest of some of their major financial donors (oil and chemical companies, etc.) and their own government-hating dogma.