Former Ohio governor John Kasich said today that Trump cannot possibly win the presidency in 2024, because “There is no way on Earth that normal people will vote for him.”
He corrected himself, however, adding, “I shouldn’t say ‘normal’ people because I don’t want to imply that his supporters are abnormal. Let’s say ‘There is no way on Earth that traditional Republicans will vote for him.'”
Anthropologist/primatologist Jane Goodall is optimistic about the outcome of our civilization, despite the hole we’ve dug for ourselves vis-a-vis environmental collapse.
As shown here, she bases a great deal of her hope on the devotion that young people have when it comes to protecting our ecosystems.
My own personal hope is that her observations are valid, and that she’s correct in her assessment here.
Before you buy the hat, it may be a good idea to take into consideration the scope of the felonies Trump committed. From here, it looks like a minimum of fraud, election tampering, obstruction of justice, theft of classified documents, and seditious conspiracy.
Now, if you’re OK on standing with that, go ahead. Buy the hat and wear it wherever you go, so the rest of us know exactly who you are as a human being.
Mid-20th Century sci-fi author Robert Heinlein was a counter-culture hero with his novel Stranger in a Strange Land, which spoke to a generation that was already in the midst of challenging our most stupid and harmful social conventions.
As much as I loved the book, and to the degree that I revered Heinlein himself, what he said here doesn’t ring true.
I would say that humanity is indifferent, rather than resentful, to efforts to serve it. In general, we, as a species, don’t have the intelligence to understand what’s helpful or harmful.
Our capacity to grok what we’re doing to our environment stands out here. The common American believes that efforts to prevent the collapse of our ecosystems come at the cost of a robust economy, where the precise opposite is correct.
Here’s a reminder that many Americans tend to think of socialism in black and white terms; they fail to realize that there are dozens of extremely valuable services that every one of us receives from government (see below).
Of course, ignorance like this is not uniformly distributed around the country. Arkansas ranks 47th in education in the United States, so it should come as no surprise that their thinking on this subject is not particularly nuanced.
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All Americans receive a bounty of valuable services that are paid for by their tax dollars:
Infrastructure, police, fire fighting, criminal justice, national defense, public education, labor laws, auto and food safety standards, air traffic control, TSA, libraries, emergency medical care, environmental regulation, social security, Medicare, the National Archives, national parks, bank regulations and deposit insurance, copyright and patent laws, federal dams to provide electrical power, flood control, the Weather Service, the Federal Housing Authority, consulates and embassies, FEMA, veterans affairs, public water systems, monitoring of all international cargo, NASA, border protection, and the National Institutes of Health.
The Nazis banned books that caused people to realize that perhaps fascism might not be such a good thing.
Interesting how this seems to be repeating here and now in the United States. The state of Florida, for example, seems anxious to prevent its people from having certain thoughts.
I’m struggling to think of a single regime in world history where banning books worked out in the favor of human decency and freedom.