I think about this a lot, doc. Here’s where I’m at now: The Left has no machinery in place for counteracting the money-fueled right. “We” rally when it looks especially grim sometimes, but there’s no large, noisey network of think tanks and public policy institutes that push for more and better public service. The Right, on the other hand… Well, they have the money.
We have the people… Kind of?
Yeah, that is pretty much true. Sadly, there is a lot more money in oppressing people than in setting them free. The Southern plantation owners could’ve told you that.
Obama made some baby steps in this direction. He had an initiative to encourage monitoring tire pressure on your car because it would save millions of gallons of gas and billions of tons of carbon. A simple easy scientific win. Yet he was outright mocked for this basic technocratic idea. He made some attempts to defend it in speeches that were along the lines of “why would you argue with science?” but that line of politicking never went anywhere.
Staking claim to science on the left seems like a no-brainer. It’s the unequivocal reason for every single good thing we have quality-of-life wise. It amazes me that the right has succeeded in undermining it to the point where people tweet against science on devices that only exist because of hundreds of years of said science.
Right there with you. It’s astonishing.
Goes back a very long way, but Reagan really institutionalized it. On the right, campaigning against “the eggheads” is always a winning ticket.
I’ve read that public swimming pools across the South were closed when they had to be desegregated.
Force people to grow up ignorant and it’s easy to get them to hate the people who didn’t.
Ain’t the vaccine they gotta worry about, the disease itself turned glory holes into safe sex.
“Serve cold.”
Give me five years and an adequate budget, and I can guarantee you enough support from small state Senators to repeal Boyle’s Law.
Having done unsedated intubations, I can verify this. The first time I did one in a OR with the patient fully out, I was like “You guys have this way too easy! You need to try my game to appreciate yours!”
I enjoyed reading this book
It’s a little bit contrarian and grates in places, but I liked the basic sentiment that the left could own the concept of “scientific progress” instead of reviling it.
I think massive boondoggles like Apollo can go a long way to make people care about science, and maybe things like that are worth doing for the sake of it, even if they’re “wasteful”. But also – since science is hard to teach – I think just flinging asteroids of cash at STEM education would uncover a ton of kids who were ready to get into science once they had the support.
And the beauty of science education is, it doesn’t matter what political agenda drives it, because right-wing science is the same thing as left-wing science. If you cultivate a scientifically literate, engaged population to feed big tech and aerospace companies, you will also get a generation of scientifically engaged leftists.
This is from 2012, it hasn’t gotten any better since
Just read this piece by Rebecca Solnit…
and this jumped out at me:
Paul Waldman wrote a valuable column in the Washington Post a few years ago, in which he pointed out that this discord is valuable fuel to right-wing operatives: “The assumption is that if Democrats simply choose to deploy this powerful tool of respect, then minds will be changed and votes will follow. This belief, widespread though it may be, is stunningly naive.” He notes that the sense of being disrespected “doesn’t come from the policies advocated by the Democratic Party, and it doesn’t come from the things Democratic politicians say. Where does it come from? An entire industry that’s devoted to convincing white people that liberal elitists look down on them. The right has a gigantic media apparatus that is devoted to convincing people that liberals disrespect them, plus a political party whose leaders all understand that that idea is key to their political project and so join in the chorus at every opportunity.”
And yet some are determined to ignore these facts and insist that RWA followers’ hurt fee-fees are organic and therefore the fault of liberals and progressives and Dems (at least until others demonstrate that they’re full of BS, at which point they slink off to await the next opportunity to spread it). Is it any wonder others give them the side-eye?
I love this. If people (liberals and conservatives alike) were this thick-skinned on both sides of the aisle, I think we’d have a significantly more productive sociopolitical culture.
Bothsides! Bothsides!
[not just a problem with the media, but with bad actors in general]
Then you should consider telling your family to stop whining already. Put on their big girl pants and accept responsibility for their own actions instead of blaming others for making them do bad things because the others say things about what they do.
So literally the opposite of what you where whining about earlier?
You don’t get to call for both sides to have a thicker skin but also call for Liberals to be more sensitive to the lies and bigotry of MAGAs. Either they need to be less sensitive to reality or we need to be more coddling - you can’t claim universal superiority in both cases. It makes you sound like an asshole.
EDIT
And I’ll just add to it now since I didn’t bother replying before - Van Jones had to make up total bullshit to justify his stances, and if that didn’t make his rhetoric hollow enough he offers nothing but platitudes as the solutions to divides that have drawn blood.
please explain how it makes sense to ask “liberals and conservatives alike” to be more thick-skinned on “both sides of the aisle” in response to someone who, quoting franklin roosevelt, makes clear that they have skin as thick as a main battle tank in not only not caring what they say but welcoming their hate.
as it stands, your statement following the passage you quoted is nonsensical and absurd.
