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It's a shame politicians can't be kept accountable tens of years from now. It would be great that if in 25 years it turns out global warming does indeed cause h

by ako 10mo ago

It's a shame politicians can't be kept accountable tens of years from now. It would be great that if in 25 years it turns out global warming does indeed cause huge problems for humans, we could sue the politicians that took irresponsible risks with the environment. Now they can just focus on short term gains, and ignore all the long term side effects.

iwontberude 10mo ago
https://generalstrikeus.com/ https://generalstrikeus.com/
yoavm 10mo ago
While I agree that the results of these policies are devastating, why blame the politicians? They were voted for, and it's not like they were hiding their agendas.
- azinman2 10mo ago
  Well they kind of are, in that the real perps are not them but folks like the Koch family who fund entire think tanks and counter programming to serve their narrow interests. They give money to the politicians in exchange for this viewpoint. It gets woven into so much of a bubbles fabric that it becomes self-reinforcing.
  - Nasrudith 10mo ago
    Again, if the voters bought it they are responsible for it and not the advocates. There is a reason that nobody named in the Epstein files is running a normalize pedophilia campaign. Because contrary to the rhetoric about money being the end all in politics it doesn't work for everything.
    - thfuran 10mo ago
      So you’re saying that the politicians were just following orders?
    - azinman2 10mo ago
      People as a whole are not experts in every possible area, nor is everyone universally smart. When politics get bought at an entire party level for decades, it’s hard to place blame on those who allow it. Don’t forget that culture wars is used as a wedge such that everything is combined. People don’t get to vote on their issues, they vote on buckets of viewpoints. Fox News literally had a segment on the difference between pedophilia and some other philia whose name I forget.. it was basically saying hey they weren’t 5, they were 14-16! That’s different! Wonder why they’d feel the need to air that viewpoint…
      - tzs 10mo ago
        (I'm including in this replies to both the comment immediately above and your comment two levels up from that) > Well they kind of are, in that the real perps are not them but folks like the Koch family who fund entire think tanks and counter programming to serve their narrow interests. The Kochs also fund Nova on PBS which has produced and continues to produce a large amount of in-depth scientifically accurate reporting about climate change. > People as a whole are not experts in every possible area, nor is everyone universally smart But there are experts and there are smart people who write about what they experts say. Someone doesn't have to be either an expert themself or smart themself to realize that they should try to find what those experts and those smart people think in important areas so they can better choose politicians who will handle policy in those areas correctly. A heck of a lot of voters put in less effort looking into competing claims of rival Presidential candidates than they do to check out the claims of rival manufacturers when they want to buy an air fryer. Yes, the politicians that do bad things should be blamed, but I'm also going to blame the people who voted for them if the politicians said they would do those things and even a little research by the voter would have turned up that those things are bad.
netsharc 10mo ago
"You can't blame us for that, that was President Newsom's 2034 policy! Our climate expert says so, and his credentials is that he's the go-to climate expert that Fox News turns to whenever the libs talk about climate change!"... And the J.D. Vance nominated judge will say "not guilty!"...
schmuckonwheels 10mo ago
[flagged]
- tills13 10mo ago
  Such a shame we were wrong and made the world a better place for nothing. Sounds awful.
- measurablefunc 10mo ago
  The money is fake, the burning of fossil fuels & increase of greenhouse gasses is real regardless of what ideology you subscribe to.
- Teever 10mo ago
  Switching to renewables and mass transit can improve the quality of life for people who live in urban environments because it makes the air they breath cleaner. This is a major reason why developing countries are leapfrogging the west on this sort of stuff. Massive S.E. Asian cities are experiencing tremendous health benefits from the green revolution.
  - schmuckonwheels 10mo ago
    It's mostly built atop problem shifting. For example, Seattle fought to send their compost and build wind farms in eastern Washington - where it was in someone else's backyard. Similar to battery recycling - which might end up being "recycled" by some 8 year old kid in SE Asia with a sledgehammer.
    - Nasrudith 10mo ago
      At worst the same way that performing CPR on a man with a heart attack is problem shifting, or feeding the hungry only makes them hungry again in the future. Wind turbines are not problems. They are opportunities. Notice that thr specious bullshit problems cited with wind turbines go away in rural areas once farmers are the ones making money on them.
    - locknitpicker 10mo ago
dguest 10mo ago
But punishing ex-presidents is what happens in banana republics! We wouldn't want to become one of those! As long as we never hold leaders accountable I'm sure we'll be safe from that fate.
- Bengalilol 10mo ago
  Who is speaking of 'presidents' ?
- emeril 10mo ago
  are we any better than banana republics at this point though?
russdill 10mo ago
[flagged]
- rootbear 10mo ago
  I am a boomer and I absolutely give a "flying fink". Stop stereotyping my generation. The group I worked in at NASA Goddard did visualizations of climate data. I heard directly from climate scientists what was going on in the world and it terrified me. When I heard about what's being done to NCAR I nearly cried. I have no children but I have told all my friends' kids how sorry I am that we're leaving them a mess to clean up. How's that for a "flying fink"?
  - tzs 10mo ago
    (This is meant to be a reply to the post one up from this but it is dead) The Boomer vote was almost evenly split between Trump and Harris. 50% Trump 49% Harris. Look to other generations for the main blame for Trump.
g-b-r 10mo ago
I've been thinking for a while that the only fix democracy needs is accountability for everything the politicians do and say (in public). If you think of any (societal) issue you care about, there's a good chance it would get solved with that tiny change
- noobermin 10mo ago
  Man, it's almost as if trump wasn't elected before! I guess an election doesn't count as being held to account in public.
  - g-b-r 10mo ago
    Not being elected again is a ridiculously mild punishment, and it turns out that you can avoid even that if you lie well enough. Not to mention its absence in a president's second term...
- BLKNSLVR 10mo ago
  > tiny The specificity required of legislation to enact such a thing would be ridiculously un-tiny. But, yes, it should be done, it should exist, it is the right thing to do, it is worth the effort.
  - g-b-r 10mo ago
    I think a prohibition to lie to the public would already be incredibly impactful (if it had no statute of limitations and adequate punishments). A delicate issue I see is how to handle personal matters that the public don't need to know. Anyhow, you might think that it's hard to know when someone is really lying vs just being uninformed, but in truth in the long term most lies become apparent; while you couldn't prevent every single lie, you'd reduce them enormously, in my opinion; even in countries where the president doesn't lie almost constantly.
    - sgnelson 10mo ago
      The common "poltiical scientist" answer to this sort of conundrum/question would be to state: "They're called elections." But, how's that's going for us recently...
therobots927 10mo ago
Oh they absolutely could be held accountable if enough people woke up. That’s a stretch though even for my active imagination.
- baby 10mo ago
  I don't understand why we don't have more protests in the country. If this was happening in France we would have protests every day
  - deleted 10mo ago
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  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
- leptons 10mo ago
  whoa...whoa... hold on there, did you say "woke"? Sorry but they're going to outlaw being "woke", so they have to shut down all the institutions that spread "wokeness" first, and that includes any and all providing climate data. Once they eradicate "wokeness" from the government, then they can just declare something or someone "woke" and then get punitive with them. Or at least that's one way I think it could play out given the actions being taken.
websiteapi 10mo ago
this doesn't really make any sense. in this scenario what's the hedge then?
crooked-v 10mo ago
A good start for actually holding people accountable in the US would be prosecuting the entire chain of command responsible for blowing up unarmed South American boats and then murdering the survivors. That one's concrete, proven to have happened, and illegal under multiple standards of law, so if we can't at least make that happen anything else is unlikely.
pjc50 10mo ago
> it's a shame politicians can't be kept accountable tens of years from now. Donald Trump is 79. He can only be held accountable in the afterlife, if there is one.
baby 10mo ago
I really think we need to change the system to create some sort of accountability here. I think a number of people in the current government need to go prison.
caseysoftware 10mo ago
> It's a shame politicians can't be kept accountable tens of years from now. It would be great that if in 25 years it turns out global warming does indeed cause huge problems for humans, we could sue the politicians that took irresponsible risks with the environment. Now they can just focus on short term gains, and ignore all the long term side effects. This is a super interesting perspective.. but instead of only looking to the future, could we apply this to the past? aka Were there predictions about global warming in 2015, 2000, or earlier that drove policy that ended up being incorrect?
bamboozled 10mo ago
If we just let the psychopaths win, it will be too late in 15 years, arguably it’s too late now.

by ako 10mo ago

iwontberude 10mo ago

https://generalstrikeus.com/ https://generalstrikeus.com/

yoavm 10mo ago

While I agree that the results of these policies are devastating, why blame the politicians? They were voted for, and it's not like they were hiding their agendas.

azinman2 10mo ago
Well they kind of are, in that the real perps are not them but folks like the Koch family who fund entire think tanks and counter programming to serve their narrow interests. They give money to the politicians in exchange for this viewpoint. It gets woven into so much of a bubbles fabric that it becomes self-reinforcing.
- Nasrudith 10mo ago
  Again, if the voters bought it they are responsible for it and not the advocates. There is a reason that nobody named in the Epstein files is running a normalize pedophilia campaign. Because contrary to the rhetoric about money being the end all in politics it doesn't work for everything.
  - thfuran 10mo ago
    So you’re saying that the politicians were just following orders?
  - azinman2 10mo ago
    People as a whole are not experts in every possible area, nor is everyone universally smart. When politics get bought at an entire party level for decades, it’s hard to place blame on those who allow it. Don’t forget that culture wars is used as a wedge such that everything is combined. People don’t get to vote on their issues, they vote on buckets of viewpoints. Fox News literally had a segment on the difference between pedophilia and some other philia whose name I forget.. it was basically saying hey they weren’t 5, they were 14-16! That’s different! Wonder why they’d feel the need to air that viewpoint…
    - tzs 10mo ago
      (I'm including in this replies to both the comment immediately above and your comment two levels up from that) > Well they kind of are, in that the real perps are not them but folks like the Koch family who fund entire think tanks and counter programming to serve their narrow interests. The Kochs also fund Nova on PBS which has produced and continues to produce a large amount of in-depth scientifically accurate reporting about climate change. > People as a whole are not experts in every possible area, nor is everyone universally smart But there are experts and there are smart people who write about what they experts say. Someone doesn't have to be either an expert themself or smart themself to realize that they should try to find what those experts and those smart people think in important areas so they can better choose politicians who will handle policy in those areas correctly. A heck of a lot of voters put in less effort looking into competing claims of rival Presidential candidates than they do to check out the claims of rival manufacturers when they want to buy an air fryer. Yes, the politicians that do bad things should be blamed, but I'm also going to blame the people who voted for them if the politicians said they would do those things and even a little research by the voter would have turned up that those things are bad.

netsharc 10mo ago

"You can't blame us for that, that was President Newsom's 2034 policy! Our climate expert says so, and his credentials is that he's the go-to climate expert that Fox News turns to whenever the libs talk about climate change!"... And the J.D. Vance nominated judge will say "not guilty!"...

schmuckonwheels 10mo ago

[flagged]

tills13 10mo ago
Such a shame we were wrong and made the world a better place for nothing. Sounds awful.
measurablefunc 10mo ago
The money is fake, the burning of fossil fuels & increase of greenhouse gasses is real regardless of what ideology you subscribe to.
Teever 10mo ago
Switching to renewables and mass transit can improve the quality of life for people who live in urban environments because it makes the air they breath cleaner. This is a major reason why developing countries are leapfrogging the west on this sort of stuff. Massive S.E. Asian cities are experiencing tremendous health benefits from the green revolution.
- schmuckonwheels 10mo ago
  It's mostly built atop problem shifting. For example, Seattle fought to send their compost and build wind farms in eastern Washington - where it was in someone else's backyard. Similar to battery recycling - which might end up being "recycled" by some 8 year old kid in SE Asia with a sledgehammer.
  - Nasrudith 10mo ago
    At worst the same way that performing CPR on a man with a heart attack is problem shifting, or feeding the hungry only makes them hungry again in the future. Wind turbines are not problems. They are opportunities. Notice that thr specious bullshit problems cited with wind turbines go away in rural areas once farmers are the ones making money on them.
  - locknitpicker 10mo ago

dguest 10mo ago

But punishing ex-presidents is what happens in banana republics! We wouldn't want to become one of those! As long as we never hold leaders accountable I'm sure we'll be safe from that fate.

Bengalilol 10mo ago
Who is speaking of 'presidents' ?
emeril 10mo ago
are we any better than banana republics at this point though?

russdill 10mo ago

[flagged]

rootbear 10mo ago
I am a boomer and I absolutely give a "flying fink". Stop stereotyping my generation. The group I worked in at NASA Goddard did visualizations of climate data. I heard directly from climate scientists what was going on in the world and it terrified me. When I heard about what's being done to NCAR I nearly cried. I have no children but I have told all my friends' kids how sorry I am that we're leaving them a mess to clean up. How's that for a "flying fink"?
- tzs 10mo ago
  (This is meant to be a reply to the post one up from this but it is dead) The Boomer vote was almost evenly split between Trump and Harris. 50% Trump 49% Harris. Look to other generations for the main blame for Trump.

g-b-r 10mo ago

I've been thinking for a while that the only fix democracy needs is accountability for everything the politicians do and say (in public). If you think of any (societal) issue you care about, there's a good chance it would get solved with that tiny change

noobermin 10mo ago
Man, it's almost as if trump wasn't elected before! I guess an election doesn't count as being held to account in public.
- g-b-r 10mo ago
  Not being elected again is a ridiculously mild punishment, and it turns out that you can avoid even that if you lie well enough. Not to mention its absence in a president's second term...
BLKNSLVR 10mo ago
> tiny The specificity required of legislation to enact such a thing would be ridiculously un-tiny. But, yes, it should be done, it should exist, it is the right thing to do, it is worth the effort.
- g-b-r 10mo ago
  I think a prohibition to lie to the public would already be incredibly impactful (if it had no statute of limitations and adequate punishments). A delicate issue I see is how to handle personal matters that the public don't need to know. Anyhow, you might think that it's hard to know when someone is really lying vs just being uninformed, but in truth in the long term most lies become apparent; while you couldn't prevent every single lie, you'd reduce them enormously, in my opinion; even in countries where the president doesn't lie almost constantly.
  - sgnelson 10mo ago
    The common "poltiical scientist" answer to this sort of conundrum/question would be to state: "They're called elections." But, how's that's going for us recently...

therobots927 10mo ago

Oh they absolutely could be held accountable if enough people woke up. That’s a stretch though even for my active imagination.

baby 10mo ago
I don't understand why we don't have more protests in the country. If this was happening in France we would have protests every day
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
leptons 10mo ago
whoa...whoa... hold on there, did you say "woke"? Sorry but they're going to outlaw being "woke", so they have to shut down all the institutions that spread "wokeness" first, and that includes any and all providing climate data. Once they eradicate "wokeness" from the government, then they can just declare something or someone "woke" and then get punitive with them. Or at least that's one way I think it could play out given the actions being taken.

websiteapi 10mo ago

this doesn't really make any sense. in this scenario what's the hedge then?

crooked-v 10mo ago

A good start for actually holding people accountable in the US would be prosecuting the entire chain of command responsible for blowing up unarmed South American boats and then murdering the survivors. That one's concrete, proven to have happened, and illegal under multiple standards of law, so if we can't at least make that happen anything else is unlikely.

pjc50 10mo ago

> it's a shame politicians can't be kept accountable tens of years from now. Donald Trump is 79. He can only be held accountable in the afterlife, if there is one.

baby 10mo ago

I really think we need to change the system to create some sort of accountability here. I think a number of people in the current government need to go prison.

caseysoftware 10mo ago

> It's a shame politicians can't be kept accountable tens of years from now. It would be great that if in 25 years it turns out global warming does indeed cause huge problems for humans, we could sue the politicians that took irresponsible risks with the environment. Now they can just focus on short term gains, and ignore all the long term side effects. This is a super interesting perspective.. but instead of only looking to the future, could we apply this to the past? aka Were there predictions about global warming in 2015, 2000, or earlier that drove policy that ended up being incorrect?

bamboozled 10mo ago

If we just let the psychopaths win, it will be too late in 15 years, arguably it’s too late now.