It’s true that Trump supporters don’t care about morality, legality, or the truth. But almost half of these American voters do have things they care about very deeply: White Nationalism, the rejection of science, and the end of women’s rights.
At left is another good example of a “straw man fallacy,” one that occurs “when someone misrepresents an opponent’s argument in order to make it easier to attack and refute. The person using the fallacy pretends to be arguing against their opponent’s original position, but instead creates a distorted version of it that is easy to rebuke.”
Those who use the straw man fallacy, like the author of the meme here, are intellectual cowards.
No one, vegan or otherwise, believes that nature is always kind and gentle; we learn the truth on this matter by the time we’re four or five years old.
Vegans refrain from killing animals for food and clothing because they refuse to commit what they deem to be unnecessary cruelty to animals, and for accelerating the environmental degradation of the planet.
As pointed out here, if Trump wins re-election, there will be no voices of reason and civility to prevent him from becoming just one more authoritarian dictator in our already-troubled world.
Of course, that’s what his supporters like best about this scenario: Trump as king, with nothing standing between him and the politics of modern-day Russia, China, Turkey, Hungary, Iran, North Korea and the banana republics of Africa.
As shown here, American women have made great progress over the last century in terms of establishing their basic rights as human beings. One may think, as a consequence, women would be virtually uniform in their disgust with the Republican party as it exists today.
While women actually do favor Kamala Harris, it’s only by a single-digit margin. It would be interesting to know what’s going through the minds of all these female Trump supporters.
It must be that Trump’s policies, based mainly on White Nationalism, are highly appealing.
The cartoon here has many societal implications surrounding the idea that our planet is actually a small island on which everyone is affected by the vast damage we’re doing to our environment.
The truth, however, is a bit different. The world’s poorest people are disproportionately affected by the storms, wildfires, and loss of land mass caused by sea-level rise, not to mention the pollution in our skies and waterways.
Rich people will not become climate refugees, like those whose homelands have become uninhabitable, nor will they suffer from the loss of natural resources.
An example: Southern California is known for its freeways–a total of 650 miles in all. Did you know that people who live within a mile of a freeway have rates of cancer that are several time higher than those who don’t? Guess what: rich people don’t live in these graveyards.
When 2GreenEnergy was launched in 2009, one of its most important claims was the one Pete Buttigieg makes here, i.e., that a nation’s commitment to cleantech is perhaps the single most determining point to its future economic prosperity.
Of course, we can elect a Republican administration that pretends to believe that climate change is a hoax, or, equally stupid, get behind “I believe in U.S. oil from U.S. soil,” but most people understand that decarbonizing our energy and transportation sectors is both necessary to humankind’s survival and vital to U.S. competitiveness in the global marketplace.
When my childhood friends came to learn that I’d become an author of materials of environmental sustainability, they sometimes asked for my opinions on climate change. I explain that because climate change is a science, it’s inappropriate to apply the term “opinion” or “belief” to the subject. We have opinions on things like politics, art, sports figures, justice, literature, and philosophy–but not chemistry, physics, or math.
When someone says that he doesn’t believe in AGW (anthropogenic global warming, aka climate change), all he’s really saying is that he doesn’t understand the science. And that’s fine; there are huge swaths of science that lie far outside my knowledge base. But we need to keep in mind that one of the good things about science, as Neil deGrasse Tyson likes to say, is that “it’s true whether you believe in it or not.”
I had to laugh when I saw this.
“This is not controversial??
I would say that it is controversial if it’s deemed so by those who read it.
Anyone who wishes to see an organized human civilization survive the next 50 years needs to hope that the GOP agenda embodied in Project 2025 loses at the polls on November 5th.
I’m reminded of the cartoon in which a corporate CEO is looking out of his conference room window and sees the entire city and surrounding countryside in flames. He tells his people, “We have to monetize this.”
