Saturday, June 17, 2023

Some great weekend reading: from weird conservatives to CHOP to moths to Orcas


Here's some of the good stuff I've been reading lately: 

At Oliver Willis Explains, Willis writes Conservatives Aren't Like Normal Americans But The Media Won't Admit That: The Right Is Weird:
...The reality, when you take even the quickest look at a host of issues in public polling, is that conservatives generally exist in a version of the world very different from the one inhabited by a majority of normal Americans. It’s not that America is really some radical socialist left paradise, but generally speaking there is a broad consensus of understanding along the spectrum of center-left moderation to progressive viewpoints, and then off to the side are the frankly bizarre views of conservatives....
If the mainstream press was being honest with its viewers and readers, they would operate on the premise that the Republican Party is amplifying fringe, weird, beliefs that are aberrations from normal thought. A party captured by outliers, spouting bizarre language and crazed slogans. Basically a movement of weirdos from city hall meetings being represented by one of America’s two major parties.
What compounds this problem is that in its effort to insist that “both sides” are in the pocket of identically extremist ideologies, the press accepts the premise that Democrats are under similar capture.
But this is absolutely false.
...As any leftist and even some liberals will tell you to their dismay, the Democratic Party is about as normal as it gets.
The mainstream press avoids telling the truth about this disparity in large part because the right is very good at giving them grief for doing so. A journalist who admits that the conservative movement stands in a fringe universe of its own making, away from the moderate-to-liberal consensus, risks inviting a torrent of harassing emails and phone calls...This doesn’t serve the public well. It gives people a distorted view of what is really going on and it misinforms millions of voters...
The press should accurately reflect the reality of this country. Conservatism holds fringe beliefs, from opposition to equal LGBTQ rights, opposition to immigration reform, opposition to gun safety regulations, opposition to increased taxation on the wealthy and more spending on social programs, and on and on. The right’s support for crooked politicians like Trump also sets them apart from the consensus, who has backed candidates like Biden, Obama and Hillary Clinton.
On topic after topic its normal Americans over here and weird conservatism over there. The coverage should reflect this, at least if honesty truly mattered.
At The Globe and Mail, Gary Mason compares Canada's willingness to sacrifice 85 years ago in a war against Nazi Germany, comparted to our unwillingness today to confront climate change, in Many Canadians Don't Know The First Thing About Real Sacrifice
...We are now confronted with the greatest moral crisis of our time, the gravest-ever threat to our existence. But you wouldn’t know it listening to the debate in the House of Commons....
Firefighters are pouring in from around the world to help us get control of the blazes ripping across the country and the Conservatives want to talk about getting rid of planned carbon tax hikes. This is what passes as sombre, serious-minded leadership on behalf of Canada’s Official Opposition.
It is beyond dismaying. And it is the same head-in-the-sand approach to the climate crisis that the leaders of Alberta and Saskatchewan are taking. They don’t want to talk about sacrifice. That’s an ugly word to them. This is about here and now and the votes they are looking for. Who cares what the world might look like five or 10 years from now? Who cares about doing our part to tame the climate monster? That’s India’s problem. Or China’s. Or America’s.
Hate on Justin Trudeau and the Liberals all you want, but at least they are trying to do something. Yes, they have missed climate targets but the carbon tax they’ve introduced is real; they are almost certainly taking a big political hit for it as well. The easier avenue would be the one the federal Conservatives and their most unserious Leader, Pierre Poilievre, want to take – and that is to do nothing.
It is enraging.
But they are taking the position for a reason; it sells to the Conservative base. There are millions of Canadians who are not interested in making any sacrifice in the name of climate change, either, because it would bring a certain hardship they don’t want to contemplate.
There were millions who didn’t want to fight in the Second World War. But thank goodness there were millions who did, many of whom paid the ultimate price.
We now need to find the same measure of unselfishness to defeat the greatest enemy this generation has ever faced.
And here is a great tweet thread from Sandy Garossino about this column -- she remembers the Conservative denialism. Check out all the tweets in this thread: At Bug-eyed and Shameless, Justin Ling says when we are arguing with conservatives, anti-vaxxers, etc, maybe we need to adopt a strategy to Concede The Point
...If you have ever met someone dead-set against vaccines, convinced that climate change is caused by sun spots, or adamant that thermite took down the twin towers, you know what this looks like. Their reasoning is not devoid of reasoning or evidence. Far from it. Their side is replete with studies, blogs, photographs, interviews, grainy security footage, and so on. And they have a quiver full of arrows to explain why it is the official narrative that is, in fact, lacking evidentiary or scientific rigor. In this context, there is some evidence to suggest that giving some people new evidence for a particular theory makes them more likely to reject that theory.
For Chris [a vaccine-denier] the fact that the vaccines were released as quickly as they were — with symbiotic support from government, industry, the media — proves that they were never tested as well as they ought to have been. It’s proof that they were abandoning the principles they were supposed to be governed by. Physician, heal thyself, he says.
He’s wrong, of course. But how can you tell him that?
...People get exhausted being told that they are wrong. People enjoy finding areas where they can get consensus.
Sometimes it can be hard to look past these surface-level ideologies long enough to bother trying to engage with the underlying causes.
At Read Max, for a little bit of humour, Max Read sets up a parody scenario titled The Coming Pro-Smoking Discourse: Predicting A Future for Takes:
...We believe, based on structural analysis of political/affective affinities and vibes, the potential pro-smoking coalition to consist of three pillars:
1. The loose grouping of contrarian intellectuals and anti-woke elites sometimes known as The Intellectual Dark Web;
2. Cool downtown art and scene kids; and
3. “Trad” health and lifestyle influencers.
What do these three groups have in common? A contempt for mainstream elite liberalism, and, more specifically, a contempt for public-health policy. Despite their differences, these factions already formed loose bonds of allegiance and began to overlap during the COVID-19 pandemic, largely around their shared contempt for various public-health measures; now that organized anti-COVID campaigns have all but ended, anti-smoking policy and rhetoric provides an attractive new oppositional target.
...This is a prediction based on our assessment of current trends in the discourse. The high-alpha nature of committed, political “smoking is actually good” arguments, combined with existing coalitions for developing annoyance at people with public-health masters degrees into ideological position, is likely to create a solid pro-smoking bloc, especially as we enter summer and face down a fertile period for stupid discourse.
Remember during the 2020 Floyd protests, there was a disparate group of people who took over a few square blocks in downtown Seattle and thought they could create a different kind of community? They called it the Capitol Hill Organized Protest, or CHOP. Here's the story of what happened to them: The Fall of CHOP 
The notion of Black Lives Matter brought together these people, who neither wanted nor asked for leadership, and thrust them into a situation that was long out of control before any of them managed to reign it in. 
Moving on, here are some good stories.

Here's a tribute to  Team Hoyt

This is an amazing story, and don't you let anybody ever tell you that improving technology in our society can't be life-changing:
What an excellent article:
In response to this tweet, people are posting cool photos of moths they have seen: Finally, for any academics reading my blog:

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