magnet
4018
Biden, Harris, Sanders, and Warren were also elected in states that were equally blue. Maybe more. After all, you guys elected Pataki and Giuliani not that long ago.
Yeah, remember back when Michael Moore was warning her to pay more attention to the Midwest? And remember how we all worried that she would ignore his good advice?
Oh wait, that’s not what happened. Every single person here thought Moore was ridiculous. So did almost every other Democrat.
Hillary’s “failure” is that she could not predict the same thing that nearly everybody else could not predict. That’s not really a failure, it just means that she wasn’t omniscient.
Sadly, I’m pretty sure we’re fucked on this point. Humans do not excel at long-term planning, especially voters and politicians.
magnet
4021
Of course we don’t have to rely on family members. We also don’t have to rely on people from Illinois. But that doesn’t mean we should exclude them.
They should have the character to decline to run. If they don’t have that character, that is its own problem.
It’s just an opinion, you know? It has no force of law and never will.
This is really a great quote from the Warren campaign.
“It looks like we’re trying to solve a lot of different problems, but we’re only trying to solve one problem,” said Jon Donenberg, who is now the policy director for Warren’s presidential campaign. “It’s the rigged system; it’s the corrupt government and economy that only benefits those at the top. Every solution flows from that.”
Let say you believe the most lmportant thing we can do is to take some dramatic concrete steps to combat climate change like rejoining Paris agreement, instituting a carbon tax, reinstating CAFE standards, an other Obama era EPA standards, encouraging more investment in renewals. Do you think is easier to get 60 votes in the Senate for these specific proposal or the new Green Deal, which is combination climate change, and income inequality, and jobs program?
If we don’t stop the fascism now, by the time that 3c hits we won’t have a planet worth saving.
As grave an issue as the decline of democracy is, it pales compared to the endangered habitability of the planet. The only logical argument by which the former may be prioritized above the latter, is if the execution of climate change mitigation itself depends on democracy. That may or may not be true (in the U.S. it seems to be, but not all authoritarians are necessarily as dumb as ours, e.g. China). Evidently in the States they are inextricably linked, so, conveniently, to an American, advocating for one means advocating for the other.
But this is all by the way: we will grouse and parse and quibble, and CO2 will keep doing what CO2 does. To borrow a phrase from the designer of the Titanic, “it is a mathematical certainty.” I have lost patience with the “sensible, centrist, reasonable” approach to climate change, because it had 30 years to do its thing, and that left us where we are now. Either a sea-change happens in our politics, or we are almost literally cooked.
Democracies are really bad at collective action, both internally and working amongst themselves. IMO it’s far more likely that being told rather than being educated is what’s in the end going to have to happen.
The thing is, you can’t get 60 votes for either one. Maybe you can get 51, if the Dems take the Senate and you’re willing to change the rules. But if that happens, you can get an actual climate change action agenda passed, not some conservative / moderate handwaving symbolism that won’t actually help. In which case the Green New Deal or something like it — real change on switching to renewables and an economic plan to deal with displaced workers and mitigate the impact etc — is a far better thing to do.
And humans are really bad at doing things now where they know there will be a problem down the road, but it’s not here yet.
As I’ve said elsewhere, climate change is somewhat akin to eating healthy and exercising in your 20s and 30s, or saving for retirement. We theoretically know we’re going to be fucked in 20-30 years if we don’t do it, but it’s not here yet, and I want to eat that fast food now/buy a nicer car now.
magnet
4033
People do save for retirement, though. Maybe not as much as they should, but I don’t believe most people start their retirement with the thought, “Well, now I’m fucked.”
That seems like a bit of tautology to me, unless you are assuming people just retire automatically at a certain age irrespective of their financial status. How many more would be retiring if their earlier investment was stronger?
People generally don’t really save enough for retirement, but that’s a different problem, i.e. a lack of funds rather than a lack of motivation. But I don’t see why that matters anyway, because saving for retirement is a personal action, not a collective action. There’s virtually nothing an individual can do to fight climate change. It’s a collective action problem, and democracies do seem to be bad at collective action to avert far-away disasters.
Matt_W
4037
Retirement savings aren’t generally available to cover the kinds of emergencies that article is talking about. Hard to know if it’s quantifying anything but people’s rainy day fund. Also worth notable that about 70% of Americans live in households making <$50k per year. Lack of savings might just be due to lack of income.
