Unpleasantly warm swims

In a pundit roundup on Daily Kos Chitown Kev included a few quotes about climate change. Alan Halaly and Alex Harris of the Miami Herald wrote:

Waters off the state’s southeastern coast are running about three and a half degrees higher than normal in Fahrenheit, with waters in the Florida Keys up a stunning seven degrees above average. That’s significant historically and hot enough that even people not in the business of monitoring marine temperatures are beginning to notice, with some visitors commenting about unpleasantly warm swims on social media. But the potential impacts are far more wide-reaching — soaring numbers can have dire consequences for state waterways battling algae blooms, coral bleaching and fish kills. It also may add powerful fuel to tropical systems that pass through coastal waters during hurricane season.

Jia Tolentino of The New Yorker wrote, adding lots of details between what I include here:

It may be impossible to seriously consider the reality of climate change for longer than ninety seconds without feeling depressed, angry, guilty, grief-stricken, or simply insane. The earth has warmed about 2.3 degrees Fahrenheit since pre-industrial times, and the damage is irreparable. ... Should we change the subject before we get too despondent? ... In a 2021 survey of Gen Z-ers, fifty-six per cent agreed that “humanity is doomed.” And the worse things get, the less we seem to talk about it: in 2016, almost seventy per cent of one survey’s respondents told researchers that they rarely or never discuss climate change with friends or family, an increase from around sixty per cent in 2008.

That contrasts annoyingly with this by Mike Magner of Roll Call:

At least four of the fiscal 2024 House Appropriations bills released so far propose to rescind some funding included in the IRA, including a big chunk of a $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund established at the EPA. The rescissions, targeted at the administration’s landmark effort to spend nearly $370 billion to address climate change, have drawn the ire of environmentalists. Republicans have defended them as part of their no-holds-barred campaign to reduce federal spending.

Yup, balancing the federal budget is more important that keeping the planet from boiling. And, yeah, that’s obviously just reasons, part of their effort to make life more miserable for anyone who isn’t rich. Well, they’re also annoyed that Biden got a big win out of the IRA. Nathalie Tocci of The Guardian discussed green backlash across Europe, several groups that fret that stringent climate regulations are making whatever they do financially unviable. Down in the comments Denise Oliver Velez posted cartoons. Clay Jones tweeted one from 2020 as he criticized the Washington Post and McClatchy newspapers for firing their Pulitzer-winning opinion cartoonists. That 2020 cartoon, author not shown, shows two people approaching a corner from opposite sides. One has a sign saying, “We’re all in it together!” and the other, with a scowl on his face has a sign saying, “They’re all in it together!” Kos of Kos discussed how much the MAGA crowd is a cult built around one person. I’ll let you read most of it, like the nasty guy themed wedding, for yourself. Though at the end:

And now the latest culty talking point, embraced by Trump himself: Joe Biden supporters aren’t real because we haven’t built a cult around him.

An example is a tweet that says, “81 million votes….. and I’ve never seen a pro Biden hat, shirt, or flag in my life.” To that Kos replied:

I was one of those 81 million voters, and I wouldn’t wear or fly a Biden hat, shirt, or flag outside of specific campaign contexts: a campaign rally, at the Democratic convention, going door to door, near Election Day, things like that. But those are all purposeful political events designed to rally support and get out the vote. I wouldn’t wear any of that gear or fly a flag as part of my identity, out of devotion to an individual. That’s weird and creepy and normal people don’t do that. Only cults do.

Mark Sumner of Kos wrote a lament for Twitter. It isn’t gone – yet. But it’s going. For more than a decade a journalist would always have at least one browser tab open to Twitter. The site “represented a concentration of news sources, journalists, and analysts that has never existed elsewhere on the internet.” This was where one got raw footage of events as they happened. Analysts would explain. Experts would break a subject down into manageable pieces. Even though I wasn’t “on” Twitter I read and shared here threads that explained Russian culture, described what our own government was really doing, discussed racism, gave insights into autism, and much more. Yes, there were a lot of reasons to hate Twitter – the trolls being the biggest one. But Twitter required users to be succinct to fit in the character limits. It also had moderation, it’s most expensive component. That required thousands of people to swat down calls of violence and harm. That moderation helped define community. The news community, a small fraction of a percent of a half billion users, helped make and shape news. It had an energy not available anywhere else. Then Elon Musk started killing it. There are lot of efforts to be the next Twitter. Mastodon is too cumbersome. Spoutable and CounterSocial haven’t captured communities to draw in others. The BlueSky team is slow-walking the growth, so applicants are sent to a months-long purgatory and it doesn’t allow posting video. And just announced is the Instagram related Threads. It has a built-in audience. But, like Facebook, there is an aversion to “politics and hard news” a desire to keep strong control over how news is presented. It would rather deal in beauty tips and celebrity gossip. So what will replace Twitter? Maybe nothing.

Twitter will die. Social media will move on. And no one place will own that always-open tab spot for every journalist. But anyway, Elon can mutter to himself about how well he owned those libs. Hope it was worth it.

I’m sure the rich, and Musk is clearly in that category, are delighted to get rid of a source of news they don’t control. They’ve been killing off newspapers so we can’t find out about what their bought members of congress and legislators are doing. And now they’re killing off a source of news driven by the people investigating what they’re doing. Spending $44 billion to do that is to them a bargain.