If the next four years in U.S. politics is simply a reprise of Trump’s first presidency with its petty corruption, its profound indifference to the well-being of the common American, and our nation’s humiliation on the world stage, we can all count ourselves lucky.
Most of us fear that Trump, now a lame duck with nothing to lose, will leave office in 2029 having:
• Transformed American democracy into an oligarchy of multibillionaires.
• Shielded himself from the rule of law, quashing all attempts to prosecute him for the crimes he committed in his attempt to overthrow of our government following his loss in the 2020 election.
• Consolidated power into the executive branch, upsetting the balance of powers that was put in place at the founding of our republic nearly 250 years ago.
• Eviscerated the Justice Department such that it’s impotent to hold the oligarchy accountable for its crimes. This, of course, is the defining characteristic of the most despicable regimes on Earth, i.e., that their leaders are above the law.
• Completed the job of of destroying the U.S. educational system, rendering our country incapable of critical thinking.
• Withdrawn the world’s largest economy from any effort to adapt to / mitigate climate change and other forms of environmental degradation.
Could it possibly be as bad as our well-founded nightmares? Maybe we’ll get off easy. Who knows?
There are so many tragic aspects to life in today’s United States that it’s hard to name them all.
For my money, one of the saddest elements to the American zeitgeist is its glorification of ignorance.
Up until recently, if you wanted to know what science believes about anthropology, climate change, or particle physics, you asked a scientist in the relevant discipline, who not only has a college degree, but normally a ton of education on top of that.
Now, you ask a congressional Republican, preferably, an evangelical Christian.
To the author of the meme here (if it’s an actual human being, vs. a Russian bot): to the best of my knowledge, the only actual major “scientific fraud” in world history was “Piltdown Man.” In 1912, a pseudo-anthropologist attempted to fool the scientific community into believing he had discovered the “missing link” between apes and humans.
Now, are there examples of instances when the science of the day turned out to be incorrect?
Of course, and new instances of this surface every day.
Think of how little when scientists believed 200 years ago is still intact today. Perhaps most obviously, Newtonian mechanics has fallen to relativity and quantum physics, but there are hundreds of other paradigm shifts in health and medicine, psychology, cellular biology, chemistry, and particle physics.
Contrary to what conspiracy theorists want you to believe, science is not a set of facts; it’s a methodology whereby we come to learn more about ourselves and the world around us.
Are there other methods by which we “learn?” Sure. Some uneducated guy goes on YouTube and becomes convinced that our consumption of fossil fuels is not causing the temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans to rise. I would argue that this conduct is inferior to the scientific method.
Renewable Energy
Trump’s Only Real Talents: Attracting Attention and Controlling Morally Weak People
Trump is not an idiot. His IQ may not be too high, but he’s smart enough to know how to conduct himself in his lifelong quest to amass more wealth and power at the expense of everyone else on Earth.
Trump’s Only Real Talents: Attracting Attention and Controlling Morally Weak People
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