To exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth

Kos of Daily Kos has been writing daily Anti-vaxx Chronicles in which a person who is highly outspoken against the COVID vaccines dies of COVID. He gets the stories from a subreddit of Reddit. I may have shared one of these stories. I stopped reading them because they’re pretty much all the same. Kos documents how loudly the person was adamant about the vaccine on social media, then documents their death. Yesterday, Kos took a break from that (though those stories will be back) to start a series of stories from the Parler Watch subreddit of Reddit. Parler is, of course, a far right media platform used to plan the Capitol attack. Reddit goes to Parler and Kos goes to Reddit so you and I don’t have to yet still get a bit of the story. Today’s chapter (and I probably won’t share more) is about the insurrectionist fantasies of a conservative vs. liberal civil war. The fantasy is that several liberal bastions – Chicago, Detroit, Atlanta, then Washington DC – would fall rather quickly to the conservative forces. Kos responded with laughter. Did the fantasist consider who in Chicago owns the guns?

I do wish they’d settle on a narrative: Are liberals violent and dangerous, driven by antifa and BLM, or are liberals weak and cowardly? Because if they’re really worried about antifa and BLM, then oh boy, best of luck, y’all!

Kos also discussed several other aspects of logistics that weren’t taken into account. However, he does say a Second Civil War would be catastrophic to the nation. Kos concluded:

They don’t want a war. No one wins in any civil war. We already had one here which pitted the industrialized, technologically advanced, populated side of America versus the rural agrarian side. It didn’t go so well. What these zealots really want is a genocide. And that’s the real terror in this. These are domestic terrorists. And like all terrorists, it only takes one to create mass carnage.

Even as we might laugh at these war fantasies the situation is still serious, as Ben Franklin tweeted in a thread:

Our opposition does not have the power to suppress a fully mobilized democracy movement. They just don’t have the numbers. This is why media and social media warfare is so important - it keeps people clueless, confused, waiting on a savior, totally demobilized. The primary tools used to stop a fully mobilized democracy is 1) convincing people that the situation is not serious 2) saying it's a serious situation but convincing people that the institutions have it under control 3) funneling political activity exclusively into voting. ... Has winning the White House and congress led to a meaningful change in law enforcement? Do you believe the GOP is going to honor unfavorable election results? Do you think they intend to allow fair and free elections to begin with? They are moving this outside traditional norms. So what, you may ask, can we possibly do? We are not the first country or democracy to face an authoritarian movement, a coup attempt. What you see in so many countries around the world is a mass civic mobilization in response. And sometimes - they beat the authoritarians.

Alas, Franklin didn’t discuss who is (or should be) leading us to mobilize to save our democracy. As one who has receive many solicitations for my help to get out the vote for this race or that, I’m sure Democrats won’t be leading this mobilization. So who? Garry Kasparov tweeted this back in 2016, then a couple months ago put it back in his Twitter feed, where it hid in my browser tabs for a while:

The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.

A couple weeks ago Ian Reifowitz of Kos sang the praises of bureaucrats who defied the nasty guy. These defiant workers included those at the US Census who worked to make the data as accurate as possible, that minority people were properly counted, while defying political interference. There was also General Mike Milley, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who quietly called his counterpart in Beijing that the Capitol attack would not include shooting off nuclear weapons in China’s direction. White House Counsel Don McGahn was ordered by the nasty guy to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller. McGahn refused and quit. Career scientists at NOAA had limited success in blocking directives supporting climate change denial. There are, of course, many others. Leah McElrath tweeted a thread:

Being an activist is a thankless task. No one likes you if you’re doing it right. The non-activists of your own people on whose behalf you’re acting will not like you. Read that again. Take it in. Then years later, they’ll rewrite history and pretend they too were activists. Activism makes people uncomfortable. Activism aims to create change. People don’t like discomfort, and people fear change—EVEN OPPRESSED PEOPLE. Everyone criticizes the work of activists when it’s happening because it makes them uncomfortable and fearful. Do it anyway. My words are not about a specific movement now but about the future: We are in a dark time headed into greater darkness. We have to be prepared to be our own light. We have to be ready to do what is right without guarantee of success in our lifetimes. And we will not be thanked.

McElrath was responding to a thread by Dan Canon:

Hi, I was one of the lawyers who won Obergefell at SCOTUS and litigated the Kim Davis case in Kentucky. Back when Trump was elected, I said same-sex couples didn't have to be worried about their marriages. I was wrong. ... The unwillingness of SCOTUS to do anything about SB8 sent a clear signal to red-state legislatures: 'do whatever you want, the courts won't stop you.' TX GOP heard that message loud and clear. Look for this in all other red states too, certainly by next session if not before.

Canon then linked to an article exploring the idea in more detail. Then he suggests that if you live in a red state maybe it is time to move. Kerry Eleveld of Kos reported Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, who has been obstructing Biden’s Build Back Better bill, said she would refuse to support a bill that raises taxes on corporations and multimillionaires. That means there is room to consider a billionaire tax. This is a tax proposed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren during her 2020 presidential race. Sen. Ron Wyden, chair of the Senate Finance Committee, is now taking up the idea. The version being discussed now is a tax on the increase in the value of assets, even if the assets are not sold. The thresholds are set (at the moment) so that it would affect only 700 people in the country. Most Democrats are for it, likely even Manchin and Sinema. Those not in favor are concerned about how to figure out how much wealth a person has and how much that wealth increased in the last year (of course they’re going to cheat – tax them anyway). Mark Sumner of Kos discussed that climate change might hurt Republicans (and Sen. Manchin) and their fossil fuel donors in the place that matters most – their wallet. There have already been reports, even a few this week, on how the climate crisis is affecting and will affect things. There is the extreme weather and the cost of recovering from them, the hit to marginalized communities, and the likely appearance of climate refugees within the US (and many millions more around the globe). All these disasters prompt a reconsideration of how things are valued. The taint of fossil fuel stocks may become more widely acknowledged, causing a drop in stock prices. The sharply dropping cost of electricity from renewables plus the increased use of electric cars means prices for oil and natural gas could drop quickly. It’s already happened to coal. Sumner wrote:

The whole fossil fuel sector could see much of its value erased as demand for those fuels crashes and investors take flight. Considering the size and value currently assigned to some of these companies, such a shift could not just spell doom for the fossil fuel corporations, but leave state governments, retirement funds, and individual investors holding the (suddenly empty) bag. Homes in areas dedicated to coal mining or oil and gas drilling could become worthless. So could massive refineries, giant port facilities, and thousands of miles of pipeline.

Will we embrace the change and properly manage the switch away from fossil fuels, including helping all the people affected by the change? Or will we try to drag out the death of fossil fuels?