In the US Republican primary debate, moderators ask for a show of hands of how many candidates believe in human-caused climate change. Not a single candidate raises their hand.
It’s honestly like someone comes up to you and tells you that you have to win class president for the local kindergarten.
You’d love to talk about stuff like human rights or healthcare but you know that if you want to win the election you need to promise them longer naps and candy every Monday.
What most people don't know is that decades later, he went to a lot of work to try to undo the damage he caused and advocate for civil rights. The problem was, the damage had been done a lot of it. Very real people have had their lives injured. He egged on voters into bigotry longer than they needed to be.
I can't help but feel that the last 10 years or so, we've been watching the same thing. All of this is going to age like milk. Future (and even current) generations suffering (or who will soon suffer) the effects of the climate crisis, are going to universally find moments like tonight universally outrageous.
History won't be written by baby Boomers. It's going to be written by the gen alpha kids who will be the adults when we're old and gone.
I can’t help but feel that the last 10 years or so
This climate denialism has been going on much longer than that. For as long as there's been profit in damaging the environment, there's denialism about that damage. In many ways our whole capitalistic western culture is and has always been environmental denialism ... it's the cultural air we've been breathing since we were all born.
And yes ... completely agree with you ... our, and our parents' generation are going to age like fine milk ... we're going to look toddlers that had technology and the ability to great things right in our hands but instead shat our pants and broke everything we touched because of stupidity we had not yet grown out of, because a better parent should not have given us this technology yet until we'd grown up more.
My personal take on this is that all the generations of modernity will be lumped together in this way as the period in which humanity's reach truly exceeded its grasp. Modern warfare, Fascism, Nuclear weapons, modern capitalism, the internet and mass-(dis-)information. Collectively, we'll look pretty foolish and dumb when looking back, like a people that didn't know how to actually think about what we were doing collectively.
It'll also be interesting to think about our cultural thinking process struggled to keep up with our technological progress. The comical image I have in my mind is a toddler quickly going from grabbing a swallowable piece of Lego, to a knife, to an electric saw to a lightsaber before the babysitter realises that they really need to intervene. And so that toddler will grow up without a left foot always wondering how in the hell the world let them have a lightsaber as a 2 year old.
Direct climate change has been a past couple of decades issue, but damaging nature for profit has existed for as long as we have had the tools to do so.
I wonder if they have any sense of how history will judge them and if it hunts them at night. They are probably to mutch involved in their daily power struggles but I would like to think that their time of reflection will come. Not every politician can be such an ignorant narcist like the orange clown, right?
I find it to be outrageous now, no need for future generations looking back to fulfill that prophecy. What's most outrageous is that I'm pretty sure they all know the truth, it's just politically unfashionable for them to admit it.
To be fair, Desantis immediately interrupted and said they weren’t going to raise their hands “like children”. No candidate would raise their hand after a comment like that. All their specific answers were certainly not climate friendly, but they are at least a little bit more nuanced than the title implies
That definitely still demonstrates a ride or die mentality. If one sleaseball can sway the room in such a way where than budging against it would lead to ridicule, that still shows the sort of internal pressure there is to tow the party line no matter what