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by harmmonica2 hours ago |
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upvoteby leonidasrup2 hours ago|
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Don't underestimate the power of money spend by the U.S. oil,gas,coal industry. For example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_network#Climate_change_an...

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upvoteby throwway1203852 hours ago|
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This might surprise you, but only a minority of eligible voters vote. So while it looks like 50% of people believe this is a good strategy and we should do it based on the percentage of people who voted for Trump, in reality a minority of people in the US believe this is good. The problem is that few of those people vote.

So in all seriousness, if we could get a significant fraction of the young people who are negatively impacted by these policies to actually vote against the people enacting them we could see real change. But if we keep telling them everyone believes in this stuff and your vote doesn't count and so on then nobody will do anything about it until it's too late and we're shooting at or throwing rocks at each other.

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upvoteby JumpCrisscross2 hours ago|
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> if we keep telling them everyone believes in this stuff and your vote doesn't count and so on

I don’t know if you can fix lazy. Turning out new voters basically happens once a generation. The rest tell themselves tales that their vote could never matter, and in doing that, subtly endorse the status quo.

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upvoteby tombert2 hours ago|
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This is kind of why I ultimately find cynicism to be inherently lazy. This is coming from a very cynical (and often lazy) person.

It takes no effort to be cynical, I can tell myself "everything sucks and I shouldn't care because nothing matters anyway" and justify not doing anything I want. I can justify not voting, I can justify not helping someone if I see them struggling on the street, I can justify not even improving myself.

In the last couple years I have been trying my best to override my cynical tendencies because ultimately I think that they are bad for me. I vote in every election I am able to because even if it's infinitesimal, I at least tried to do something to avoid whom I deem bad people getting into office.

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upvoteby JumpCrisscross2 hours ago|
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Agree. And look, being cynical and just minding your own matters is fine. It means the system is working well enough for that person that doing anything isn’t actually worth it. But those people are also electorally—and more broadly, politically—irrelevant. So if you’re trying to do something, betting on them tends to be a losing pitch.
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upvoteby yoyohello131 hours ago|
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I relate to the feeling. I am extremely cynical. I fully believe the world is fucked and we are in for a very turbulent 50-100 years. I still work to improve myself and the world because WTF else are you going to do? At least doing something feels better than doing nothing.
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upvoteby tombert48 minutes ago|
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I've just grown to really respect older people who manage to stay excited and optimistic. It's so much easier to become a cynic, and I think it required effort on their end to try and be a positive person.
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upvoteby forgetfreeman1 hours ago|
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Your comment is extremely reductionist and reverses causality for a large number of voters. Both political parties have multi-decade track records of aggressively supporting pro-corporate political agendas at the expense of their constituency. So in light of literal decades of watching prospects decline regardless of which party is currently in power many voters (correctly) conclude that their vote will not lead to meaningful change.
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upvoteby root_axis2 hours ago|
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> in reality a minority of people in the US believe this is good.

I'm not convinced. The reason why many of these people don't vote is because they don't think Trump is that bad. They probably don't agree with everything, but that's true no matter who is in office.

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upvoteby tokai2 hours ago|
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63.45% voted last time. Thats not a minority.
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upvoteby tasty_freeze2 hours ago|
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I'm always gobsmacked when Trump says things like, "We need to get rid of all the wind turbines! They are killing all the birds! Look at the foot of any tower and you'll see nothing but dead birds!"

Is there a single person who things Trump gives a single damn about the birds? It is obviously just a pretext.

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upvoteby triceratops4 minutes ago|
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True Bird Lovers only care about bird fatalities from windmills. Oil spills, buildings, and cats don't register.
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upvoteby tdb78932 hours ago|
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Wind turbines are also miniscule compared to issues like pollution, land use, windows, and cats. Also you can track migration and turn them off at key times if it's a huge issue (this is part of the motivation for research I'm going to do later as part of my master's dealing with tracking hawk flocks via weather radar).

Wind turbines are an issue but approximately 0% of the 30% decline in US birds since the 1970s

Edit: to be specific to Trump, funding for bird conservation has been an issue under his administrations and he's weakened things like migratory bird treaty act. Obviously he doesn't care about birds and the bird community is very frustrated with him

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upvoteby foobarbecue2 hours ago|
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And whales, don't forget the whales https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/26/trump-whale-...

and the noise causes cancer

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upvoteby harmmonica2 hours ago|
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Never thought about it, but that's a great point and comparison. From quick Google search: 365 million and 988 million birds die every year from window collisions (that's US alone). Windmills/turbines: 140,000 and 679,000. Then if you do per windmill vs. per building obviously the windmills are going to "win," but it's the absolute that would seem to matter in this case.

As you said, that has nothing to do with the actual preference for fossils vs. turbines, but a great point nonetheless.

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upvoteby exceptione1 hours ago|
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  > I know this US government is fully-committed to fossil fuels and about as rabidly anti-renewables as can be,
Don't fall for the political narratives, they are designed to distract you while the theft is taking place. The sponsors of the circus are rabidly cynical and pro-selfish. They are spreading the narratives, not believing in them. There is certainly a few conservatives in power who hold that the earth is only 6000 years old, who see no other option than burning down the town as a way to escape confrontation with progress and emancipation. But this is mainly what kleptocracy looks like.

The narratives work though, that is the sad reality. News anchors and the public are stuck in a loop about "children being forced to change sex, woke, climate hoax, but her e-mails, but Biden, ...", anything but what is happening at the crime scene.

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upvoteby kakacik2 hours ago|
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People voted in repeatedly a visibly primitive person (plus quite a few other things but lets not go there now), then they get primitive behavior.

An honest question - what the heck did you expect? Some sophisticated rational discussions instead of dumb ego tantrums?

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