I’ve heard this called “soft climate denial”, and unforntuately it’s widespread.

People like Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi say that they believe in climate change. But let’s imagine that we’re roommates and you told me that there’s an out of control wildfire a few miles away and the governor has told us all to evacuate. One roommate says that they don’t belive it and they’re staying. And I say ‘Shame on you for denying this! I firmly believe in the wildfire. It’s urgent that we act now, which is why I’ve ordered travel maps on Amazon so we can begin plotting our evacuation route as soon as they arrive.’

Would you characterize this is accepting the crisis, or being in a state of soft denial?

Do you know what I’d like to see?

Instead of banning them, ban the extraction of profit on producing and selling them. Turn them into an entirely recreational market. I’d love to see the outcome of trying that.

I think his intense commitment to getting Trump elected makes more sense when you consider this article.

His enormous wealth is largely stored in the form of Tesla stock, and that stock has been valued based on the belief that it isn’t a car company, it’s a robotaxi service currently selling the hardware to finance the software development. The value – and his wealth – can persist indefinitely as long as investors continue to accept that premise, no matter how long delayed. But if something tangibly undermines that premise, Musk could conceivably lose the majority of his wealth overnight.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Agency is probably the greatest threat to his wealth. He doesn’t worry about competitors or protestors or Twitter users or advertisers. They’re all just petty nuisances. But the federal regulator over roads… that is his proverbial killer snail. And I think fully capturing the entire federal regulatory state is his strategy to permanently confine that snail.

More than anything else, I think that’s what is motivating his radical embrace of fascism.

DAMN! That’s fucking hilarious.

And also… you know. Sad. But boy: it’s wild how well that aged.

That doesn’t sound at all like the point he was making, but I haven’t read the book so I’ll withhold further opinions.

There’s a lot in there I agree with and a lot I find unconvincing, but the thing that really jumped out to me was this line:

Elites seek to concentrate profits. In our book Why Nations Fail, we compare Bill Gates and Carlos Slim. In the book, we point out that while Gates made his fortune through innovation, Slim did so by forming a telecommunications monopoly thanks to his close relationship with the government. It is an example of the link between monopolies and clientelism that has been seen throughout history in Latin America since colonial times.

I’m sorry, what? Does he not remember Microsoft losing perhaps the most famous successful American antitrust case of the last fifty years?

I don’t think this guy is dumb, but I don’t know how to fully take him seriously when he says something like this in passing.

Yeah, which I think is a real weakness in the reporting.

40k dead is bad, but it’s a rounding error of the total population.

A tenth of the total population dead, a fifth or a quarter of the population subjected to severe permanent disabilities, and nearly the entire population displaced, homeless, and presently starving to death is a clear genocide. They really are trying to exterminate them. It strains my ability to comprehend. In any case, “40,000” does not begin to capture the current scale of what has become a pretty standard, unambiguous genocide.

I mean… Isn’t the elephant in the room that this is not going to happen if Trump wins?

It’s like speculating over whether either candidate might push for am arms embargo against Israel after the election.

I don’t really see any ambiguity here. If Trump wins, Zelensky should probably prepare for a complete end to support from the US, right?

Am I missing anything?

Honestly, that’s the main thing I was thinking.

It sounds like there’s no fundamental disagreement between us. It sounds like the only difference is one of attitude.

I worry sometimes that people express frustration with the state of things as though articulating what people should do might serve as a road map to getting them to do it. But getting people to do it requires understanding why they don’t.

This is true. But it’s incomplete.

We do not have a functioning democracy. Most people feel that. Voting works when there are candidates with voting for, and votes translate into change, but when the system has been hollowed out by money and judicial capture and voting rules designed to prevent actual change, we are in a bind.

Will voting fix this? No, not singularly. So voting doesn’t make a difference? Absolutely not! It’s still one of our most powerful tools, even as weakend as it is!

Vote … and March. Vote… and boycott. Vote… and disrupt. Vote… and organize your neighbors.

We can’t stop voting, but that can’t be our biggest or only tool. And everyone needs to understand this.

I’m not disputing this, I’m just asking for clarity so I can understand key facts. Are there soldiers actively serving in Israel? How many? Since when?

That article didn’t actually provide much clarity. I tried searching for more, and found a bit in this article:

https://theintercept.com/2023/10/27/secret-military-base-israel-gaza-site-512/

The main thing this says is that US military presence in Israel is deliberately ambiguous. For instance, the day after the commemoration in the article you shared, US European Command actually denied that this was a us military base, insisting that it was actually a “living facility”.

I don’t doubt that we have troops there. But historically the army doesn’t seem to acknowledge them. So announcing sending people does seem significant.

If it makes you feel any better, I remind myself that I myself am subject to the same irrationalities and motivated reasoning as anyone else. We’re all just people, and people aren’t logic machines. We’re bundles of impulses and habits that live within whatever stories our minds have to create to make sense of all of this.

In this context, if you’re looking for some kind of remedy, the best I can offer is that instead of trying to bother disputing with myths and superstitions, recognize that anyone who grows out of them usually does so because they find some other way to the same fundamental bedrock notions. Your friend wants to adhere to the rules laid out by the creator. They want to be worthy of Christ’s love.

I think if you were inclined to change their mind – which I’m not recommending – it would be when this comes up to remind him how many people have been seduced into supporting ungodly things thinking they were following God’s will. That’s Satan’s number one tactic. So all we can do is stay humble and listen to our hearts. If seeing kids living in Bethlehem struggling to survive under an oppressive king just as Jesus and his parents did seems wrong, it’s okay to not have a confident stance. Maybe your pastor says it’s God’s plan, but no one – not even the disciples – could ever no God’s plan for sure. You don’t have to have a stance. You can say “God’s will will be done. He does not require my involvement.”

I think you’re arguing a strawman version of my point. I’m not claiming that it’s impossible for them to know something we don’t. I’m just saying that the assumption that there is secret information that makes his actions sensible is not well founded.

There are numerous examples of leaders claiming expertise that wasn’t borne out. And if this were the case, I think it would be reasonable to expect them to at least claim this to be the case.

As it stands, this behavior can be fully explained with the information available to us and Biden’s foreign policy stance. So there is no reason when you see him doing something that can be easily explained by the observation that he has poor judgement and priorities that are wildly different than most Americans to believe that there is a reason outside of the public facts and our existing knowledge of his poor judgement and unpopular priorities.

Do you have more info?

I’d like to refer you to my reply to a similar comment: https://slrpnk.net/post/14228501/11555288

No, you’re very mistaken. Let me explain.

In the past, the US has stationed supporting troops off of Israel, in battleships far away. It’s meant to provide support while keeping things calm.

The reason that putting any soldiers IN Israel is significant is that it means that if Iran tries to kill any Israeli soldiers, they can’t do it without risking killing Americans. And if they kill an American, it is understood that we will retaliate and they will be at war with the United States of America.

That’s the point of sending 100 troops to offer “tech support”. It’s to deliberately create conditions that could start a war. If you ask a general, they’ll claim that it’s just shrewd tactics, because letting Iran know all this means that good judgment will prevent them from attacking Israel. But every war in history is preceded by people making those claims (even when they don’t believe them) before going to war.

This is foreplay. This is how you flirt when you’re a NatSec pervert thinking of going to war against someone.

That’s a shame. For what it’s worth, his position isn’t a mystery to me. I believe that he’s been convinced by his church that unquestioningly supporting Israel’s expansionary goals, regardless of any other moral question is an absolute necessity for anyone who truly loves Jesus and believes strongly in his rebirth and in the promise of everlasting life in heaven.

It is – with all due respect – as crazy as anything you’d hear in a Texas cult bunker. But I’m guessing that it’s real as a wildfire to your friend. It makes me sad to think about.

Wow. Thanks for sharing that.

I see this often, and it’s frequently, consistently not the case.

I understand the sense in this belief, but if you review history over just the last five years you can consistently see this not being true over and over. Going all the way back to the Iraq War: it was obvious at the time that the Bush administration was lying about their claimed evidence that there was an active program creating weapons of mass destruction. And at the time, there was a deafening movement of regular voters who loudly protested that we were absolutely convinced that it was complete and obvious bullshit.

And people like JOE BIDEN loudly expressed exactly what you’re saying: they know things we don’t know. They know what they’re doing.

And they didn’t! They did not have any meaningful information we didn’t have!

Sadly, it’s debatable whether they knew what they were doing. Did they expect it would be such a historic clusterfuck? That it would create decades of worsening outcomes for us? Probably not. But did they know they were making up a fake case for war because they wanted to let off some anger over 9/11 by killing hundreds and hundreds of THOUSANDS uninvolved Muslims, and build some new military bases near oil in the process? Yes. Obviously yes.

And after the fact, the people who claimed that they knew things that we didn’t became president and Secretary of State.

They do not know something we don’t know. They are doing exactly what this looks like. Biden would absolutely go to war with Iran just to serve the cause of Zionism even though he knows that Benjamin Netanyahu is a fascist. That is exactly what this is. There’s not chess logic behind this, you can absolutely know everything you need to if you read newspapers regularly.