Thursday, July 20, 2023

It's too damn hot!

At Garbage Day, Ryan Broderick writes: The New Culture War Issue Will Literally Just Be Ignoring How Hot It Is 
I suppose it shouldn’t shock me that right-wing influencers are acting like extreme heat isn’t actually that extreme. It’s sort of the entire philosophy behind climate change denial. 
But I guess I just assumed that if the weather became extreme enough, at the very least, we could all agree that it was, in fact, extreme. 
 About three years ago, Atlantic writer Charlie Warzel tweeted something that has always stuck with me. In regards to the then still-emerging coronavirus outbreak, Warzel wrote, “The coronavirus scenario I can’t stop thinking about is the one where we simply get used to all the dying. There’s a national precedent: America’s response to gun violence.” He was, of course, right about that. 
But I think he inadvertently summed up America’s national response to pretty much every large-scale systemic crisis we’re bound to face going forward. The weather’s going to keep getting worse and the right-wing media ecosystem will downplay or outright deny it, and, more often than not, they’ll find ways to tie the acknowledgement of it to definitions of masculinity. 
And just like the folks who thought they could ride out the pandemic without a vaccine or masks because they were tough, only to end up on ventilators, so too will a lot of folks get hurt trying to man up and ignore the rising temperatures. 
And here we go:

3 comments:

Cap said...

I don't know why the GOP wants to block the president's power to declare a climate emergency. Trudeau declared one a couple of years ago, but isn't acting like his bed's on fire. Somehow, our climate emergency doesn't prevent the feds from shoveling good money after bad into TMX and various other oil industry subsidy scams, like carbon capture and storage.

Anonymous said...

Reminds me of when a hurricane was about to hit Florida and the MAGA's favorite radio troll Rush Limbaugh on his show claimed it was all fake news and hurricanes were liberal scare tactics before he got himself out of Florida where he lived before the hurricane hit. The same person who said smoking doesn't cause lung cancer while smirking into a camera and puffing on a cigar before dying of stage 4 lung cancer.

mr perfect

Cathie from Canada said...

Yes, and the thousands who died of Covid because they were told they didn't need to bother with vaccinations.