Staring down the culture wars

[Belle]

I wondered whether to post this (listen to me; wondering about posting something!!) because it's now at odds with the 'orthodoxy'. We are living in terrifying times, and this interview sends absolute shivers down my spine. It's difficult to get me frightened; even a recent diagnosis of cancer doesn't terrify me like this does, believe it or not. I'm thinking of my adult children. This will explain why we have disrupters like Trump, reactions like Brexit. A revolution is almost complete in our societies and has been underway for 2 generations. In our country our Coalition and conservative polity is in a shambles and largely because of what is discussed here. "A devastating social problem". Absolutely. Divide and conquer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upBP2UY ... e=youtu.be

Good and decent people think all this ideology is good and going to work in their favour. Wrong.

In recent discussions about political correctness and the suppression of freedom of speech you'll usually hear this question; "well, what is it you want to say that you feel you cannot say now because of PC?". Usually the answer takes some form of tacit equivocation and random mumbling. The answer should be, "do you not hear the kind of question you're asking and does it not smack of the kind of totalitarianism reminiscent of the bolsheviks?".

[jserraglio]

We are living in terrifying times, and this interview sends absolute shivers down my spine. It's difficult to get me frightened; even a recent diagnosis of cancer doesn't terrify me like this does, believe it or not. I'm thinking of my adult children.

New Yorker Oct 22, 2018
Three years ago, when world leaders met in Paris to negotiate a treaty on climate change, one of the sticking points was where to set what might be called the Doomsday Thermometer. For reasons that had to do mostly with politics, rather than with geophysics, industrialized nations wanted to define “dangerous” warming as an average global-temperature increase of two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). But island states, such as the Maldives and Mauritius, along with developing countries like Ethiopia and Cambodia, were resistant. Well before the world warmed by two degrees, their countries would be devastated—some of them underwater. Why should they endorse what amounted to a death sentence?

“We will not sign off on any agreement that represents a certain extinction of our people,” a delegate to the talks from Barbados told Politico. Together with a group of nearly fifty “climate vulnerable” countries, the island nations pressed for a limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). The compromise reached—more Monty Hall than Solomon—was to endorse both figures. The Paris agreement calls for “holding” warming below two degrees, while “pursuing efforts” to limit it to 1.5 degrees.

Last week, the United Nations’ scientific advisory board delivered its assessment of those numbers. The findings of the group, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, were almost universally—and justifiably—described as “dire.” Even 1.5 degrees’ worth of warming, the I.P.C.C. warned, is likely to be disastrous, with consequences that include, but are not limited to, the loss of most of the world’s coral reefs, the displacement of millions of people by sea-level rise, and a decline in global crop yields. Meanwhile, at the current rate of emissions, the world will have run through the so-called carbon budget for 1.5 degrees within the next decade or so. “It’s like a deafening, piercing smoke alarm going off in the kitchen,” Erik Solheim, the executive director of the U.N. Environment Program, told the Washington Post.

But, if a smoke alarm rings in the kitchen and everyone’s watching “Fox & Friends” in the den, does it make a sound? Asked about the report last week, Donald Trump said, “I want to look at who drew it—you know, which group drew it.” The answer seemed to indicate that the President had never heard of the I.P.C.C., a level of cluelessness that, while hardly a surprise, was nevertheless dismaying. The next day, as a devastating hurricane hit Florida—one made that much more destructive by the warming that’s already occurred—the President flew to Pennsylvania to campaign for Lou Barletta, a climate-change-denying Republican congressman running for the Senate.

Though the Administration often seems incapable of systematic action, it has spent the past eighteen months systematically targeting rules aimed at curbing greenhouse-gas emissions. One of these rules, which required greater fuel efficiency for cars and trucks, would have reduced CO2 emissions by an estimated six billion tons over the lifetime of the affected vehicles. In a recent filing intended to justify the rollback, the Administration predicted that, by the end of this century, global temperatures will have risen by almost four degrees Celsius (nearly seven degrees Fahrenheit). In this context, the Administration argued, why would anyone care about a mere six billion tons? Come the apocalypse, it seems, we’ll all want to be driving S.U.V.s.

The Supreme Court, for its part, appears unlikely to challenge the Administration’s baleful reasoning. Last week, it declined to hear an appeal to a lower-court ruling on hydrofluorocarbons, chemicals that are among the most potent greenhouse gases known. The lower court had struck down an Obama-era rule phasing out HFCs, which are used mostly as refrigerants. The author of the lower-court decision was, by the dystopian logic of our times, Brett Kavanaugh.

Even as the I.P.C.C. warned that 1.5 degrees of warming would be calamitous, it also indicated that, for all intents and purposes, such warming has become unavoidable. “There is no documented historical precedent” for the changes needed to prevent it, the group wrote. In addition to transforming the way that electricity is generated and distributed around the world, fundamental changes would be needed in transportation, agriculture, housing, and infrastructure. And much of this would have to be accomplished by the time today’s toddlers hit high school. To have a reasonable chance of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees, the I.P.C.C. said, global CO2 emissions, now running about forty billion tons a year, would need to be halved by 2030 and reduced more or less to zero by 2050. And this would still not be enough. All the scenarios that the I.P.C.C. could come up with to limit warming to 1.5 degrees rely on some kind of “carbon-dioxide removal”: essentially, technologies to suck CO2 out of the air. Such technologies exist, but so far only in the sense that flying cars exist—as expensive-to-produce prototypes. A leaked draft of the report noted that there was a “very high risk” of exceeding 1.5 degrees; although that phrase was removed from the final report, the message is clear.

Thus, it is tempting, following the Trump Administration’s lead, to simply give up. But, as Edgar puts it in “King Lear,” the “worst is not, so long as we can say, ‘This is the worst.’ ” Perhaps the most important takeaway from the report is that every extra half a degree is world-altering. According to the I.P.C.C., between 1.5 degrees and two degrees of warming, the rate of crop loss doubles. So does the decline in marine fisheries, while exposure to extreme heat waves almost triples. As always, it’s the poor who are apt to suffer most. Friederike Otto, the acting director of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute, recently told the Web site Carbon Brief that “half a degree of additional warming makes a huge difference. For people who are already marginalised, this can be an existential difference.”

Meanwhile, two and a half degrees, three degrees, or even, per the Trump Administration, four degrees of warming are all realistic possibilities. Indeed, based on recent trends, the last figure seems the most likely. Globally, emissions rose last year, and they’re expected to rise still further this year. This disaster is going to be as bad—as very, very bad—as we make it.

This article appears in the print edition of the October 22, 2018, issue, with the headline “Global Warning.”

Elizabeth Kolbert has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1999. She won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction for “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History.”

[Belle]

Frankly I'm much more frightened by the authoritarian and repressive radicalization taking place in universities and spreading through the institutions as described in that interview with the brave academic. We know where all this leads from the horrors of the 20th century - and it killed far, far more people than climate change. And it will continue to do so, especially when people become convinced that what's happening is actually good for them!!! It's called Stockholm Syndrome.

Two of my sons are at the butt end of this radicalization and anti-male crusade; both are separated and punished by the courts for having the temerity to be male - not being allowed to see their children, subjected to apprehended violence orders (when I think how one son's two boys are both gentle as lambs and polite beyond belief) and in one case our son is paying the mortgage so that his wife can be in the house with her new love!! A note on the kitchen table saying he wasn't wanted any more after 13 years of marriage precipitated all this and the entire system is stacked against my sons. One has shelled out nearly $100K and 4 years later no closer to divorce from his nutcase wife. Men are pariahs now and their estranged male children are extremely vulnerable. No wonder we have teenage suicide in epidemic proportions in this country. My son is holed up in a flat, sans furniture and with a camping stretcher for a bed. He doesn't want to air pump to "you go, girl" and neither do I!!

Women are using the system for their own selfish agendas (well, who'd have thought?), all of it enabled by a vicious system which thinks men have had it too good for too long. Yes, I'm angry and I hope those feminists responsible for this outrage are prepared to take up guns, boots and uniforms in the next war so that they can protect their new-found rights -just as men did for centuries. (And I have plenty more similar stories about the experiences of men going through divorce and tales of despair from their mothers and fathers.) The thought of tens of thousands of those soldiers being slaughtered on Omaha, Juno and Sword beach and over the skies of Europe when they were only exercising their white privilege is absolutely sickening beyond belief.

So please, spare me the concerns about climate change. I'm afraid that from where I'm sitting that's the least of the problems for 50% of the Australian population. We are all experiencing the pointy end of unchecked radicalization. Once upon a time satire and humour was capable of destroying these social cancers but, of course, that's not allowed now - for obvious reasons. (They'd have to run it through a committee first and then it would be found 'inappropriate'!)

One of our most respected political commentators has made this observation today:

This new sense that personal identity and virtue beliefs must be honoured within politics is changing the West. Politics has become about the self, not just about policy. It is more subjective, more emotional, less susceptible to reason.

[lennygoran]

Two of my sons are at the butt end of this radicalization and anti-male crusade; both are separated and punished by the courts for having the temerity to be male - not being allowed to see their children, subjected to apprehended violence orders (when I think how one son's two boys are both gentle as lambs and polite beyond belief) and in one case our son is paying the mortgage so that his wife can be in the house with her new love!!

Belle a friend sent me this review of an opera production that incorporates the me-too movement into Verdi's Rigoletto--I won't be going to this! Regards, Len

[alan c. davis]

Don't worry Belle. When the revolution comes and I seize power, the tumbrils will be going dayand night, loaded with P.C.ers and the like.... Just look at what poor Geoffrey Rush is going through at the moment, a career destroyed over little more than a joke. I for one refuse to bow to this rubbish.

[Belle]

Two of my sons are at the butt end of this radicalization and anti-male crusade; both are separated and punished by the courts for having the temerity to be male - not being allowed to see their children, subjected to apprehended violence orders (when I think how one son's two boys are both gentle as lambs and polite beyond belief) and in one case our son is paying the mortgage so that his wife can be in the house with her new love!!

Belle a friend sent me this review of an opera production that incorporates the me-too movement into Verdi's Rigoletto--I won't be going to this! Regards, Len

Good man, Len!!

[Belle]

Don't worry Belle. When the revolution comes and I seize power, the tumbrils will be going dayand night, loaded with P.C.ers and the like.... Just look at what poor Geoffrey Rush is going through at the moment, a career destroyed over little more than a joke. I for one refuse to bow to this rubbish.

I've just come from my next door neighbour's house and she has told me her son has had an apprehended violence order issued against him by his mentally unstable wife. Chaos reigns in our family court system!!!!!

Geoffrey Rush put on a world-class performance in court yesterday!! He has the majority of Australians in his corner. He probably had a crush on his beautiful co-star (easy enough to happen) and the ball began rolling from there and we don't know where it will stop rolling.

[lennygoran]

Belle a friend sent me this review of an opera production that incorporates the me-too movement into Verdi's Rigoletto--I won't be going to this! Regards, Len

Good man, Len!!

Belle don't get me wrong though-I'm not opposed to the me-too movement-I just don't want it to come up when I'm going to see Rigoletto! Regards, Len

[Belle]

Ergo, you don't want 'regietheater'!!