Barely civil on a savage planet. Final thoughts in the age of annihilation . . . in Earth's sixth mass extinction. Acceptance discretionary — Participation mandatory
Hypocrisy used to have a bad odor. When someone was accused of being a hypocrite they would either deny they were or try somehow to free themselves of any justification for being called a hypocrite.
However that seems no longer to be the case, at least with people in the public eye. Some people staunchly support and defend one set of principles or practices, then oppose them and deny their truth or validity when that is more convenient. Classic hypocrisy. You would think everyone would know that. Know what hypocrisy is, recognize it when they see it, and at the very least try to hide their own hypocrisy if and when it crops up.
Three questions . . .
One, what is it that makes hypocrisy such an undesirable characteristic in a person?
Being now in numbering mode and all, I would have to say there are three qualities that give hypocrisy its badness:
1. Hypocrisy is unfair.
Fairness ranks pretty high on my scale of desirable qualities and hypocrisy is nothing if not the epitome of not-fairness, of being unfair. To use a sports example: the height of hypocrisy, and therefore unfairness, would be a sporting event where there was one set of rules for the home team, and another set of tougher rules for the opponent. No good American would accept that, so why is hypocrisy so broadly engaged and accepted these days?
“Playing by the rules” has become a common mantra. We want everyone to play by the rules, and we want the same set of rules for everyone. Basically that means no fair rigging the rules to suit your agenda. We don’t like cheaters, and we don’t like hypocrites because hypocrisy is a form of cheating.
2. Hypocrisy is dishonest.
How can you trust someone who thinks it is okay to be unfair? If a hypocrite can take opposing positions on one issue, there is no telling when they will do it again. When the only reliable aspect of a person’s value system is that he will assuredly act in his own interests despite how bad the behavior is for someone else, that person is surely an undesirable. Undesirable as a friend, undesirable as a mate, undesirable as an employee or employer, and so on. Liars don’t make good anythings in the Western canon of human value.
3. Hypocrisy is insulting.
No matter the good values or qualities of a hypocrite, none of them can be counted on. If a person can hold opposing values on one subject, they can do it with others. That makes everything they say potentially duplicitous and devoid of logical reason. Their story varies from one audience to the next, from one situation to the next. Such treatment is an insult. There are more than enough insults to life on this planet without having to put up with hypocrites.
So, yeah, hypocrisy is a bad characteristic in a human being. More negatives could be generated but for me these three are enough to put hypocrisy clearly in the undesirable column.
Two, what’s going on in the hypocrite’s mind?
Does the hypocrite know what hypocrisy is?
The answer to this question depends, for the most part, on education. Some of the most egregious hypocrisy I’ve witnessed in the last decade or so has been perpetrated by Republican politicians. Most of them have been through the educational system, many with advanced or professional degrees, and must surely know the fundamental dictates of logic. They certainly must know what hypocrisy is. On the other hand there are the woefully under-educated classes in America who probably slept through the class on hypocrisy. They probably know not what they do when they hypocrasize.New word. Neologism, if you please. You first saw it here. These are the people who, when accused of being hypocritical, probably respond with something like, “I can criticize whatever I want. This’s a free country!”
Does he know when he is being a hypocrite?
Is he aware of his hypocrisy? Formal logic is one of those categories of knowledge that is very hard to come by. I taught argumentation and debate at both the undergraduate and graduate level and I all-too-infrequently sensed that very many of the students were getting it. That might have been because of limitation in my teaching skills, but there is no doubt that in general students don’t enjoy, and certainly few grasp, the fundamentals of formal logic.
To avoid hypocrisy requires the tools of logic. One of the key ingredients is the syllogism. Syllogistic reasoning is deductive and involved in something like this (sort of): All human being are mammals. Mervin is a human being. Therefore Mervin is a mammal. Pretty simple stuff, and true. If you are reading this, take it from me, you are a mammal. Okay, if this statement jimmied your jammer, you are a clever devil and indeed onto something. Nothing in my example syllogism said anything about reading. We would need another premise or two to get to that. But you know it is true. If you don’t…were you one of my students?
If there is self-awareness, is the hypocrisy a strategy?
Not being aware of their hypocrisy, or that hypocrisy destroys credibility among those who are aware of it and despise it, is likely existent only among people with less education. Those more educated are likely to know what they are doing. That is, they know they are talking out of both sides of their mouth. Thus it must be a strategy.
At this point I am relying primarily on logic and reason; I have no empirical evidence about who does and who does not understand hypocrisy, nor can I speak with any scientific authority on what self-aware hypocrites are up to. I can only guess. But of course my guess is predicated upon nearly a lifetime of observing, studying and experimenting with human beings’ beliefs, attitudes and behavior at the highest formal research levels.
If you don’t have any idea what I mean by this, then it would not help you to know. So here’s my guess, and it breaks down into two parts:
Part 1. Human beings have an almost infinite ability to delude themselves.
It never ceases to amaze me just how completely some people can blind themselves to inconvenient facts. They can “fail” to see their hypocrisy relative to two opposing positions they hold, although they may be singularly astute when it comes to detecting hypocrisy in others.
Case in point. I was once part of a faculty that included one of the world’s foremost authorities on human communication and also an authority on scientific research methods. God help any of his graduate students who did not adhere rigorously to scientifically demonstrable evidence and the strictest use of logic and evidence in theory construction and hypothesis testing.
Yet this world renowned scholar and scientist was an unreconstituted, born-again Christian. In his professional life he could accept only a rigorously lawful universe in which everything was lawful and, if you knew enough, predictable. Yet in his religious life, steeped in Christian theology, anything was possible. Virgins can have babies, the dead can come back to life, magic is real, and so on; his “lawful universe” was put on hold when it came to his personal theology. This man epitomized the highest form of hypocrisy, one in which two mutually inconsistent forms of systematic thinking can exist side by side.
It is obviously possible for some people at least to compartmentalize various intellectual domains. Especially if one of those domains is the person’s religion. Somehow “religion” or “religious belief” has, in the Western world anyway, taken on a kind of untouchable status that makes it immune to criticism or questioning. It exists in a different part of the person’s intellect and is not subject to the same requirements as other internal belief systems.
This is how the scientific or religious hypocrite is untroubled by what would otherwise be sheer hypocrisy. In the mind of the true believer It is somehow okay for God to crap in his own nest; the world has to be lawfully predictable for us but anything is fair game for him. Or her.
My guess, part 2.
This involves what might be called strategic hypocrisy. It can be found in many forms perpetrated by just about everyone who is in any kind of authority position. It is practiced most egregiously by politicians. In my experience, when someone engages in strategic hypocrisy, they are counting on their audience not knowing about their other (oppositional) beliefs. Or proclamations.
In some cases — and we see this most obviously in extremists who believe only what they want to — it makes no difference that the person’s hypocrisy is obvious and publicly known. As long as the intended audience, the audience most important to the ends and goals of the speaker, determinedly will not believe the other side of the story. To them the part they don’t want to believe is fake news or its equivalent, so the hypocrite is safe. He can say one thing to one audience and the opposite to another. His auditors have been verbally drugged, either through propaganda or as a product of their own devising. They are the willfully gullible (but only by the ones they have been conditioned to follow).
Three, What’s to be done about hypocrisy?
In some respects hypocrisy is built into the human psyche so it is never going to be eliminated. But ignoring it is not an option when it is detrimental to a cause or relationship or a child’s psychological and moral development.
Exposure of hypocrisy is the best tactic in situations where that will work.
When a hypocrite knows he is being watched, and that his hypocrisy will be exposed if he engages in it, he is much less likely to be hypocritical. Let the hypocrite know you are watching him and it might change his behavior.
Unfortunately there are many situations in which exposure will not work. Another strategy is to sneak up on the hypocrite through successive probes of his latitude of acceptance.
Before getting into that, though, here is the absolute worst way to convince anyone of anything: Make your first statement something with which the other person strongly disagrees. Whenever you make such a statement, regardless of whether it is correct or not, you effectively turn off the other person’s perception of anything you say after that.
It is almost always a bad idea to make strong oppositional statements to anyone you want to convince of something.
Here is an example from an article on the pros and cons of COVID-19 vaccination, written by a medical doctor who bills himself as “an expert in the field of preventative [sic] cardiology and has published seven books. He gives lectures nationally and internationally.”
“It is my opinion, not shared by an ignorant, ill-informed few, that vaccination was the greatest advance in medicine of the last century.”
I don’t know what kind of cardiologist this guy is, but he knows bupkis about persuasion. His very first sentence not only confronts head-on anyone who might not agree with him, it also insults them by calling them ignorant and ill-informed. The only people who will read beyond that faux pas are his choir.
As I said, approaching another person’s belief structure with a view to changing it can be done through his latitude of acceptance. Do an Internet search for this term and you will come up with a lot of information, but here it is in a nutshell: The latitude of acceptance is a window of receptivity to certain ideas. Here is an example using receptivity/opposition to Covid-19 vaccination.
The latitude of acceptance for this person begins at “A few vaccinations might be acceptable for healthy adults” and ends at “Vaccinations are okay for healthy adults. Beginning your campaign of persuasion with anything stronger will be immediately rejected. Plus, and this is important, rejection tends to be sticky and hang around for a long time. So be cautious and avoid outright rejection.
Very often there is no window of opportunity to shift a belief or attitude; the person is closed off to anything related to the topic. Sticking with the example of vaccination acceptance, suppose even the mention of vaccination was not in any way acceptable. In this case you will have to go around back and sneak in another way. by finding a bridge topic with a latitude of acceptance.
Say for instance the person has a pet dog of which he is quite fond. The dog periodically requires a rabies shot. This is, approached gently, a possible opening for the discussion of vaccinations, beginning with the dog’s and advancing eventually to vaccinations for people. This is a bridge topic that might, with a soft and gradual approach, lead to the acceptance of vaccinations for people.
This vaccination issue, by the way, is not simply an academic exercise, a mute point, or strictly hypothetical. Being the reasonable, intelligent person you are — you are, after all, smart enough to be reading this — you might think hey, why wouldn’t someone want a Covid-19 vaccine? So far over half a million people have died from the virus. But of the 75,000 people who were vaccinated, a month later less than five percent had contracted the virus, none were hospitalized, and none died.
Yet there remain about a third of American adults who either don’t want the vaccine or remain undecided about whether they will get it. That’s over a hundred million people on whom you can hone your persuasion skills.
If you agree, that is, that everyone needs to be immunized to bring this virus under control. If you are not convinced, please bear this in mind: Scientists, epidemiologists, physicians and other healthcare workers — virtually all (99.6 percent) say everyone must be immunized before any of us is really safe from this deadly disease. If you are not in one of the groups I just listed, you have only two choices. One, accept the word of highly educated, trained, dedicated specialists, or two, take advice from someone who probably would not know a virus from a Quonset hut.
Your choice. Make it as if your life depended on it. Because it just might.
No, I have not forgotten that this article is about hypocrisy. To bring it to a close let’s consider just one example of extreme hypocrisy related to the Covid-19 vaccine. Most parents claim to totally love their children and say they would do anything to protect them and keep them safe. Yet some are willing to withhold vaccination from their children based on what Derek Thompson of The Atlantic calls “a constellation of motivations, insecurities, reasonable fears, and less reasonable conspiracy theories.” (What Thompson calls “reasonable fears” are not so reasonable when they are dissected.)
Such parents should be put away and their children raised by more reasonable folk. Unless you can bring them around to a sensible position vis-à-vis vaccination.
There is a lot more that could be said about hypocrisy and ways to deal with it. So this article is certainly far from exhaustive. But it does perhaps give you some indications of the psycho-dynamics involved and ways to approach a deeper understanding of what hypocrisy is, where it springs from, and tactics for dealing with it.
As a postscript let me say that the subject of hypocrisy would be worthy of consideration by any academic or scientist looking for a research area. It should appeal to many disciplines, including philosophy (especially from a logic perspective), and any of the social or behavioral sciences.
Like many people I have become more than weary of the incessant greed and profit-driven cynicism of American business. Everyone constantly has their hand out and evidently lies awake nights coming up with ever more devious schemes to filch a little more (and a little more…and a little more…) profit out of every transaction.
We’ve all become wise to product improvements. “New and improved” usually turns out to be basically an improvement in the company’s bottom line and a disimprovement for us customers.
Container walls are a particular peeve of mine. They have become thinner and thinner to the point that a bottle of mouthwash cannot be picked up with the lid off without collapsing and squishing out its contents. Labels have been replaced by printed information on clothing. A food container that used to contain 16 ounces is reduced slightly, like to 14 and a half ounces, but the price remains the same. It looks the same, just slightly (and the company hopes unnoticeably) smaller, but more profitable.
I have visions of company executives winning a (pre-Covid) week in Barbados for coming up with ingenious ways to wrest another penny or two profit on their products.
Greed has become the American national passion. Too much never seems to be enough.
Back in the old days most businesses, especially large, national ones, could be relied on to be basically honest. Not any more. The advertising and marketing pressure, coupled with corporate cynicism, have made consumer cynicism de rigueur. As Lily Tomlin said, “No matter how cynical you become, it’s never enough to keep up.” Amen to that.
Hardly a day goes by that something doesn’t set me off. This morning it was Credo Mobile.
A few years ago my wife and I moved our telephone accounts to Credo Mobile because they claimed to be “America’s only progressive cell phone company.” On their web site they say they have donated more than 80 million dollars to progressive nonprofits. Their CEO says they support repeal of the Patriot Act and other measures that appeal to us.
They talk a good story and I don’t doubt their sincerity. And yet…
And yet they still use measures that tick me off.
Their procedure for paperless billing, for example. It seems obvious to me that it is all designed to get customers to pay online. But not with a credit card; you have to give them access to your bank account. And pay early. They love the float. Here’s the way they work it:
They send an email telling me the bill is available to be paid, several weeks in advance. NO amount, NO due date, NO other information (unlike other online billers). UPDATE: I don’t know whether it is because of anything I’ve said to them or not, but now the emailed bill notification shows the date due. But only that. That is an insignificant improvement because it does not eliminate the necessity to go to the site, sign in, and negotiate several pathways to finally get the amount of this month’s bill.
I have to sign onto the account in a browser, pull up the account which shows the amount but NOT the due date.
So I have to pull up a pdf of the statement to get the due date, then Log onto my bank’s billpay and pay it.
This is a pain in the butt. I wanted to switch back to paper, which is a lot easier for me, but—TA DAH!—that costs an extra two bucks a month.
The options: I want paperless billing. I want to receive paper bills. I understand that I will be charged a $1.99 monthly fee.
And they absolutely do not want to hear anything from me about being dissatisfied with their procedures—I was unable to find any way to contact them other than CHAT which in itself discourages communication because of the anticipated lags between responses, PR blather in a thick Indian accent, and the knowledge that it is all ultimately going into the trash anyway.
I write this at a calamitous and dystopian time in America. A troglodyte Donald J. Trump of immensely meager quality occupies the U.S. presidency, a national election is just two weeks away, and he has threatened nothing less than a coup if he is not re-elected. He and his Republican enablers are busily destroying democracy at home with OrwellianBritish author George Orwell who wrote a dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. It was published in 1949 and contained many social and political dystopes that have recently come to pass. It is generally considered a bad thing to be Orwellian. tactics and vilifying us abroad while their corporate and Wall Street masters loot and pillage. Meanwhile the Democrats remain true to form by seeking safety in cowardly inaction. They back away from every fight so they can live to not fight another day.
“What’s wrong with these people?” Indeed, what is wrong with them?
Note: Role the cursor over underlined wordsSee what I mean? for further information.
Naive and uninformed voters
Driving past a neighbor’s house the other day I was surprised to see a re-elect Trump poster in their front window. They are both retired public school teachers, educated, reasonably intelligent-seeming, with grandchildren who are the focus of their lives. Those are all qualities one would like to think militate against being a Trump supporter.
One of them, when challenged about their Trump support, reportedly said, “What difference does it make? They’re all alike.”
That comment struck me as extremely naïve and uninformed, to put it charitably. How many other people I know, I wondered, are in their category (for lack of a better term). It reminded me of my long-ago experiences in Europe. I was a musician and worked all over Europe, but my home base was in Germany. So I was around, knew and interacted with a lot of Germans. This was in the 1960s, which was not really all that long after the end of World War II.
Germany’s Nazi past
Whenever I met a German for the first time, if the person was old enough to have been an adult during the war, I would wonder if that person had supported or been a member of the Nazi Party. Many of them must have been because just before the war 43 percent of German voters voted for Hitler and his National Socialist German Workers’ Party (the Nazi party). But there was really no way for me to know who had and had not been a Nazi because they never voluntarily talked about the past and it would have been a social faux pas for me to bring it up.
Hearsay was the only way I learned anything about Germans’ political positions before and during the war. A fellow musician, Igon, for instance, told me about three close members of his family who had survived the war. His older brother had been in the Hitler Youth, a Nazi organization infamous for its National socialist propagandizing of its members. His brother was still, at the time I knew Igon, fervently in support of Nazi ideals, although he was quiet about it and only his closest family members knew. The Catholic Jesuits would understand this. They’re the ones who say “give me a kid till he’s seven and we’ll have him for life.”
Igon’s uncle and mother had believed in the tenets of the Nazi Party up to and into the beginning of World War II but later came to regret their support. Like Igon, most of the Germans I knew who were too young to have been Nazis had stories of relatives and other people they knew who had at one time or another been Nazi regime supporters. I eventually concluded that there were three reasons — either altogether or singly — people came to regret their Nazi involvement or support: Guilt, embarrassment, and political correctness. But they felt that way only after their world began to crumble and the writing on the wall became evident to all except the most ardent supporters of the Third Reich.
About the Germans back then I was mostly just curious. Today my curiosity about Republicans is much more serious because it appears to me the United States is in a condition somewhat similar to Germany of the 1930s when the National Socialists were forming and coming to power.
“Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, über alles in der Welt.” Germany, Germany, above all, above all in the world. This is the first verse of the German national anthem, and it is now illegal in Germany to include it when the anthem is sung. “Germany above all.” That kind of sentiment is implied by “Make American great again”: Amerika über alles. And here is a typically Republican phrase from our own national anthem: “Then conquer we must, when our cause it is justLyric from the full version of “The Star Spangled Banner.” (And you thought you knew all the words to the U.S. national anthem.).”
The total social, civic and political disruption in Europe that resulted from fascism and nationalism has already begun in the Western world. Many find it easy to ignore reality and pretend everything is alright. It is not. Malevolent menMostly men, but there are plenty of malevolant women, too. have been elevated to positions of power, abetted by a largely somnambulant electorate in thrall to corporatists and thugs. There is in fact a national malaise that defies any description I can come up with. Today my fellow Americans are unhappy in a deeply unAmerican way. The country has drifted away from the sense of purpose and optimism that used to be its driving force. Its élan vital.
Liberal democracies and authoritarian tyrannies
Liberal democracies all over the world are giving way to sinister, horrifying authoritarian tyrannies. Barbarians are in the ascendance, breathing new life into fascist hype and blather, subverting language, eviscerating values, punishing courage and replacing it with their own loutish bullying, and blurring vision and critical consciousness with a relentless stream lies and obfuscations.
So who are these perpetrators of barbarity, and who are their supporters? What makes them tick? What can be done about them? These three questions have been on my mind a lot the last several years — since 1979, actually, when the Brits elected Margaret Thatcher, and 1980, when the U.S. elected a vacuous actorRonald Reagan who immediately began dismantling everything. The political road has been downhill ever since. The coup de grâce came in 2016 when America went berserk and elected a vile, phony dipshit president. That is, it will prove to have been the final, killing blow if Trump is re-elected in a couple of weeks.
[Update: Since I wrote this the election has been held and Trump lost to Joseph Biden. Trump is now busily proving his insanity by denying he lost. The Electoral College certified Biden the winner of the election and Trump has become the whiny Loser-in-chief.]
We know who many of these barbarians are, whether we want to or not. There are plenty of mad-eyed citizens loudly proclaiming their conservative convictions at the drop of a MAGA cap. Many are armed and dangerous. Not all conservatives are loudmouths, of course. Many are not first- or even second-brick throwers; they are malevolently quiet; lurking, mewling, say, in the anonymity of a Trump political rally or watching it on TV in their darkened homes. And there are clearly many who are closet conservatives and only occasionally feel strong — or deranged — enough to make their political position public. Like my neighbors who surprised me with the Trump sign in their window. After being challenged they removed the sign and have not been seen since. That was a disappointment because if people insist on being stupid I would like them to at least have the courage of their convictions.
There are conventional conservatives who strongly dislike Trump but who will vote for him because they prefer the poison they know over the poison they don’t. As far as I’m concerned that is an operational definition of shit-for-brains. Far too many on the political left also fall into that category, voting for whomever the Democratic Party tells them to. There is plenty of that kind of ignorance around; ignorance has become the primary stanchionWhen I was growing up in farm country a stanchion was a frame that held the head of a cow in place, especially to facilitate milking. Think about it. of American Society.
Benito Mussolini of Fascist Italy and Alolph Hitler of Nazi Germany, c. 1939.
Sun Tzu, in The Art of War, said “know your enemy.” Americans don’t. Liberals don’t know much about conservatives and conservatives don’t know much about liberals. In my early adult years I was what today would be called a political operative. I ran, co-ran, and helped in numerous Republican electoral campaigns ranging from county commissioner to governor. In those years I had plenty of opportunity to observe Republicans of every stripe. My conclusion about them was that conservatives are hardly ever deep thinkers. They would almost always rather spend more of their time in action than thinking. Democrats, on the other hand, are more devoted thinkers but seem to have never seen a fight they couldn’t run from.
Based on my own experience — and on his high esteem among conservatives — I would say Russell Kirk’s 1953 landmark book The Conservative Mind is a good source of information about how conservatives think, their principal beliefs and principles in general, and how they differ from liberals. A brief and more concise online overview of Kirk’s idealized version of conservative values can be found in his article, “Ten Conservative Principles.” You can read a brief biography of Kirk in “About Russell Kirk.”
My reference to Kirk is simply to provide a readable source on mainline conservative values. In my opinion he was (he died in 1994) a middleweight thinker who, along with William F. Buckley, Jr. and the Kristols, did much of the (shallow) thinking for a long list of conservatives. (Frank Meyer, George Stigler, Milton Friedman, Phyllis Schlafly, George Will, Peggy Noonan, Nixon, Thatcher, Reagan, Bush … need I go on? Trump is not mentioned in this list because he does his own, well, whatever it is that passes for thinking with him.)
Conservatism and liberalism and the anterior cingulate gyrus
Mainline conservatives and liberals (as distinct from the radicals of either direction) differ in ideologies which in turn stem from differences in perception. We now have plenty of neuroscientific evidence — particularly in the form of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) — that brain physiology contributes to, or even determines, conservative or liberal orientation. The cognitive styles of each are different and correlate with the size of the anterior cingulate gyrus (smaller in conservatives) and the right amygdala (smaller in liberals) in their brain. These differences are present very early on, perhaps at birth.
Correlations have been found even in very young children. Whether the differences are there at birth, or are the result of environmental influences, is not yet known. But this goes a long way toward explaining the hard-headed stubbornness of conservatives to any form of rational argument against their beliefs.
People with a relatively larger cingulate gyrus have shown in research to be more amenable to belief change. But not a lot! Take any fundamental tenet of conservatism and try to get a liberal to agree it has any merit at all. You will see the same intellectual brick wall for which conservatives are notorious. They just won’t pull a gun on you.
Ambiguous figure-ground. Some people see a vase, while others see two faces in profile.
The (probably) genetic differences between conservatives’ and liberals’ cognition explains why they see the world differently. Liberals see the glass as half full while conservatives see it as half empty. A more subtle test might be the way people see ambiguous figure-ground illustrations. Looking at the illustration on the left, the conservative initially sees a vase while the liberal sees two faces. I just made that up — which sees one or the other — but I’m probably right.
On the other hand, if one looks at an ambiguous figure long enough it tends to flip back and forth. One minute you might see the vase, then suddenly all you can see is two faces. Then it might flip back again. And so on. Does this mean that people can be conservative or liberal at will? Or if a liberal stares at at conservative long enough does he begin to look like a liberal? Nah. Not a chance.
Unless you can get them to look you in the eye for an extended period of time, and you do the same to them.
Eye-to-eye bonding
Eye-to-eye gazing causes positive affect and social bonding. You see it happening between just-born children and adults, and between pets and their people. Although it usually drives pet people nuts because they can’t figure out what their dog wants, just quietly staring at them. The dog doesn’t want anything, he’s just adoring you. Stare back and he’ll love it.
Just so you’ll know there is science behind what I am saying, here’s what happens. The eye-to-eye gazing causes the amygdala to produce oxytocin which is secreted by the posterior lobe of the pituitary gland. This is sometimes referred to as the cuddle hormone. “Cuz that’s what makes ya wanna do it, Dopey.”
Don’t try this eye-to-eye gazing with just anyone. Pick the wrong conservative and you might get shot. There’s a lot of that going around.
This might be a more practical example of the difference between conservative and liberal thinking: Observing themselves and fellow human beings, conservatives come to the conclusion that humankind is not perfectible and therefore must always be kept under control by external forces. On the other hand, the same observations by liberals convince them that humans are infinitely malleable and utopia is possible along with great individual liberty and freedom.
Cognitive predilections of liberals and conservatives
Cognitive predilections do indeed have a profound influence on what we perceive. We might see the same things but what we perceive can be quite different. We don’t see eye to eye, as the expression goes.
Liberals are optimistic about human potential whereas conservatives believe Edmund Burke was correct when he wrote, “…nothing could be more fatal to mankind than his success.” This at least partially explains the strong dislike conservatives have for anything that smacks of socialism. Liberals generally have less trouble with it. In fact, the Republicans have made themselves so hated by the thinking classes that there is now a whiff of democratic socialism in the air. Populations here and around the world are beginning to rebel against the predatory capitalism of neoliberalism which has concentrated much of the planet’s wealth in the hands of a hateful, undeserving financial elite.
The financial elite have found willing henchmen in evangelical Christians and batshit crazy conservatives like Moscow Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham and William Barr. I avoid listing Donald Trump because he is mentally disturbed and belongs in either an asylum (other than the White House) or just, you know, dead. [Update: Barr just resigned. Good riddance.]
Modern Republicans’ characteristics
Today’s Republicans are despised by the Left and frankly by everyone capable of finding their way out from under a MAGA cap in the dark. You know a Republican when you see one, but you might not have taken the time to inventory their characteristics. I’m about to do that. Keep in mind that no one is likely to be all of the things at any given time. Also keep in mind that there can never be a complete list because Batcons What else could we call them? They’re just batshit crazy conservatives, as opposed to just garden variety conservatives. lie awake nights thinking up ever new ways to be mean and obdurately stupid.
Facts are foolish. Batcons will always choose alternate facts when they don’t like the real ones. In fact, most facts are anathema to them because facts force reality to intrude on their fevered dreams.
Government is bad. The less there is of it, the better. Which goes to show the Batcon’s almost total absence of rational thought in light of the next point.
Batcons MUST have a leader. Clearly they will follow anyone who can properly feed and maintain their self-delusions. The only requirement is that the presumptive leader must (1) already wield some power; (2) be willing to throw the first brick; (3) be male; (4) be annoying, painful or destructive to everyone and everything hated by the Batcon (and that’s just about every intelligent, civil and worthwhile human on the planet); and (5) be generally as batshit nuts as they are. (Cf. Trump.)
Global warming is a myth concocted by prissy liberals “who think they’re so damned smart just ’cause they got college degrees and shit like that.” After all, climate change is normal and to be expected and, anyway, even if there were such a thing, it’s certainly not our fault.
Everyone but us is lazy. People have to be forced to make their own way. Nothing should be free. Anyone can get a job who’s willing to work and lift themselves up by their own goose-stepping bootstraps. Hence any form of welfare (except bank and corporate welfare, of course), free healthcare, or any other form of freely given largess will only subvert capitalism and put a dent in human ambition. Any weakening in a leftward direction must be resisted.
The death penalty is good. It helps cut down on the number of Negroes and Mexicans running loose, and other elements of the surplus population. An additional bonus is that it feeds the Batcons’ insatiable need to hurt and kill anyone who disagrees with them. (Why else would firearms be such a fetish, and absolutely essential, for them? There are other bases for a fascination with guns, of course, but that’s an unrelated topic.)
Commies, queers and darkies should be killed when they riot. And every left-leaning demonstration is to be considered a riot. What else are we supposed to do with all these guns? Oh yeah, and Mexicans too. In fact everyone who ain’t white like us. Probably Gypsies too [spit]. And the towel-heads (that’s Muslims to you, you over-civilized mugwump). [Okay, my bad. No Batcon is likely to know what a mugwump is. I’m a mugwump. A person who remains aloof or independent, especially from party politics.]
Socialists should also be killed. Capitalism, although only dimly comprehended by your garden variety Batcon, is the only acceptable system. Free markets and corporations should be unhampered by taxes and government regulation.
Guns are good. They are not to be controlled in any way, in case this needs repeating.
No universal healthcare. Like Medicare for all, for example. Again, in case this needs repeating: Freeloaders must not be encouraged. (Keep in mind that this sentiment is held even by the Batcons who are on Social Security and Medicare. They are supremely ignorant of almost everything except what they have been told to believe. And, being truebelievers, they believe fervently.)
The United States is a Christian nation. Everyone should be Christian just like us. A Christian theocracy in the U.S. would be just fine. Forget all that science and all those fake facts. Just pray (beats the hell out of having to actually think about anything because thinking is hard!).
Same-sex marriage and all forms of gender difference are bad. Forget all that alphabet crap lgbtqrsdbd…argh!
Batcons really, really hate logic, reason and rational discourse. Thus they deprive themselves of even the simplest understanding of civilization’s foundations and everything that is the result of several millennia of human thought, value and work toward a civilized world.
Batcons are driven by anarchic impulse. The world is so screwed-up, in their opinion, so far from being the way the garden variety Batcon would like it to be (not that they really know in any detail how they would like it to be), that only destruction can produce improvement. Anarchy is welcome.
Equality is unrealistic and unachievable. [A belief also commonly held by mainline conservatives.] That goes for every kind of equality. No two things in this world are exactly alike. You want to be equal, you should have been born a white male. If that’s not what you are, go back where you came from. And if you are a white Christian male, and you don’t agree with me on every single point, drop dead. Here, let me help you with that…
Utopia is impossible. [Related to the point above and also commonly held by mainline conservatives.] Not only is the concept of utopia unrealistic, it would be fiendishly boring if ever achieved. If no utopia is possible then any effort in that direction is a waste of time. THIS IS A KEY TENET IN BATCON THINKING! All attempts at liberal achievement are considered a waste of time, energy and — this is particularly important — resources, some of which either belong to the Batcon or are provided through taxes. Therefore they are to be stopped and eradicated at all costs. This partially explains why Batcons are so mean, cruel and despicable. At least in the view of anyone with even the slightest leanings toward Enlightenment values.
Batcons have a Manichean vision of the world. They are in an irreducible struggle between good (themselves) and bad (everyone else). There are no shades of gray.
Private property ownership is the foundation of all great civilizations. [Another belief held also by mainline conservatives.] An attack on the concept of private property is an attack on civilization. That is, civilization as interpreted by Batcon warped metrics, of course.
Compassion is for sissies. Don’t bother me with all that touchy-feely crap.
Wisdom is whatever I say it is.
Meta-cognition is stunted. Okay, this one is a toughie to explain to anyone who is not a cognitive scientist. It is the collection of mental processes that guide our thoughts. In addition to emotions, motives, and visceral responses, thoughts are also influenced by other thoughts. That is what meta-cognition is about. Meta-cognition helps us: — Check ourselves when we are wrong. — Investigate complex issues to gather a broader range of perspectives other than our own. Legitimately consider the diverse perspectives of those with whom you don’t agree. — Construct a big-picture view. — Recognize the limits of ones own knowledge and experience intellectual humility.
These, then, are at least a beginning list of the primary descriptors and characteristics of Batcons. There are others. There will always be others because Batcons do not have values. They entertain only the unfounded beliefs that have been handed to them by those who know how to manipulate and control them to forward their own selfish ends. Batcons readily and willingly serve the wealthiest, elitist elements of society.
Batcon mentality
A Batcon’s mentality can only be comprehended through an understanding of the mentality of his masters, whom Batcons will unquestioningly follow. No assault upon a Batcon’s beliefs and attitudes will change them except in the unlikely event the assault is from Batcons’ enablers. Batcons are notoriously hard to proselytize, once they have committed to their leaders, because they have been inoculated against any information that (1) deviates from their received dogma or that (2) does not come directly from their leaders.
Just as measles virus cannot invade an inoculated host vaccinated against it, new or opposing ideas cannot gain purchase in the mind of a Batcon inoculated against them.
Reasoned discourse with Batcons is a fruitless waste of time. The inoculation of Batcons has rendered all forms of logical discourse and reasoning ineffectual.
The recruitment of Batcons in America takes place primarily through conservative talk radio, Fox News, and social media (Facebook and Twitter). How talk radio came under the total control of batshit conservatism is a story in itself, and Fox News has long been recognized as a primary Batcon propaganda ministry. Batcons have voluntarily subjected themselves to thousands of hours of far-right-wing propaganda spewing out of these media sources. Few humans can withstand that kind of sustained, withering brainwashing.
Nascent Batcons are initially attracted to illogical tenets of batshit conservatism because it seems to offer them strength to compensate for their own unacknowledged weakness and vulnerability, and retribution against those they have come to hate. They are quickly and easily hooked. The daily media doses of far-right drivel indoctrinate them beyond redemption. Thus is constituted both their instruction and their inoculation against any and all opposing views. Like the citizens of North Korea they are soon beyond saving. There is no logical, reasonable, humane way to break through their self-chosen bubble of irrationality and hatred, and their sense of invincibility.
They are frightening. Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and the many conservative talk radio stations are frightened by their audience. They live in terror of the monster they have created.
Censorship, though, is not the solution. The way to combat bad ideas is with good ideas. But it is now obvious that Fox News and talk radio must be dismantled if we are ever to get control over the Batcon epidemic among the susceptible.
One of the reasons there is such a large susceptible segment of the American population is the failure of our educational system. It must be reconstituted and begin teaching children the Enlightenment values so essential to the kind of culture and society in which most people prefer to live.
So how many Batcons are there in the world? This brings me back to my earlier comments concerning my curiosity about how many of the Germans I met were ex-Nazis. How many Americans truly fall into the Batcon mental sewer?
There is no way to be sure and the number is constantly changing because, as with any structurally defined population unit, there will be at least a few on the fringes who slip in and out of the defined group, depending upon how they think the world is treating them at the moment. But here’s an educated guess.
Standard normal distribution curve showing possible percent of Batcons in the larger society.
Begin with the assumption that the genetic tendency toward conservatism or liberalism is normally distributed in the population. As you can see from the normal distribution curve on the left, half of the population is conservative leaning and half is liberal. The beliefs and behavior of those in the very middle region of the curve might be hard to distinguish one from another, while those who fall into the farthest right and left are the more rabid cases; liberals on the right side conservatives on the left. On the farthest left are the Batcons. (Please note the intentional reversal of traditional “right” and “left” in the diagram.)
Considering the best evidence I have found (certainly nowhere near conclusive), I estimate the percentage of the American population that are Batcons to be nearly ten percent. About 75 percent of Americans are 18 or older. With a total U.S. population close to 330 million, that puts the adult population at roughly 250 million (or near-adult population, one could argue).
According to my estimate, then, there are close to 25 million Batcons in the U.S. I don’t think they are evenly distributed around the 50 U.S. states but if they were that would be about 495,000 in each state. You can see by the U.S. map below the political ideology of the population in each state. Whatever the distribution of Batcons actually is, there are plenty of them to go around.
United States political ideology by state in 2020 according to Gallup information.
To say that one out of every ten Americans are Batcons might seem a lot, but frankly I have the impression they are everywhere. Maybe it just seems that way because they are so noisy and obnoxious.
There used to not be nearly as many as there are today. About a half a century or so ago when I was active in conservative politics there were a lot fewer Batcons. As noted above, conservative talk radio and Fox News have really done a number on the American population, serving to divide as nothing else has since the Civil War.
And keep in mind that over and above that number are the hard-core conservatives who can still be plenty unreasonable. They are the people represented in the right-hand side of that 13.59 percent part of the curve (the second gray section left of center), between minus one and minus two standard deviations from the mean. (You don’t have to know about standard deviations if you don’t want to, just know that “deviations” in this context is a statistical term, not a slur on conservatives. At least, not intentionally.)
Batcons’ threat to society
Batcons are clearly a threat to civil society, a kind of threat that extreme liberals will never be. Not from overt aggression, anyway. It is the Batcons who are the domestic terrorists (they fashion themselves “militias”), killer cops, and kamikaze drivers into crowds of demonstrators. Most of them are too far gone to be converted into compassionate, thinking human beings. And they cannot be allowed to run rampant over everyone else. They can only be subdued, and to do that requires a massive, concerted effort on the part of those who recognize Batcons for the miscreants they are.
The more rational conservatives have already begun attempts to reign in the Batcons. There is widespread awareness that conservatives’ fortunes are sinking and American culture is turning against them. Their views, commonplace only yesterday, are coming under more and more condemnation. American conservatives’ redoubt, the Republican Party, has show itself willing to tear the country apart rather than face a bleak future of failure to win elections. Their main strategy is to narrow the electorate to give it a better chance of winning legislative majorities with a minority of votes. They have stacked the courts with incompetent, Batcon-leaning judges who can be relied upon to vote as their corporate sponsors direct. The henchmen of this disturbed and sinking order are the Batcons, and they must be constrained.
To get moderate conservatives on board with this will require shunning of Batcons, ridicule of them, and outright rejection by the rest of society. Only when Batcons are widely shown to be foolish and inept — and only when the Batcons themselves realize how foolish and inept the rest of the world considers them to be, even though they will never agree — will they pull in their horns and go back into philosophical and political hiding. They have to be forced back under the rocks from whence they came.
However, it is extremely important that things not be made to look hopeless for the more moderate conservatives. If they come to the conclusion that they will be permanently excluded from government by electoral politics, they may well reject democracy altogether. Some of the more benighted Republicans in Congress are already making disparaging remarks about democracy and representative government. Some of them would clearly rather bring down the whole national edifice than lose their cushy jobs and preference.
What it will take to get America’s Batcons on the run
The kind of concerted social demonstration needed to send the Batcons running will require participation by moderate conservatives, and to get them onboard will require a minimum of two things:
Conservatives must not be made to believe that all conservative causes and concepts have forever been plowed under. There must remain a glimmer of hope for them and they must be made to believe that losing elections in a democracy is preferable to winning in a state of anarchy. Some might of course actually prefer anarchy under the delusion that their own personal “specialness” and exceptionalism will keep them on top of the heap. They must be disabused of such thoughts.
Liberal extremism must be toned down. Liberal principles need not be abandoned, merely moderated and made less extreme. This does not mean there should be movement toward the middle in the way the DNC and mainline Democrats would like to see. That would merely be continuing to kiss the collective ass of the One Percent. Mainline Democrats — but not progressive Democrats and some Independents — have been doing that for too long. It is that prolonged butt-smooch that has contributed in large measure to what got us into the current mess in the first place. It must be avoided at all costs.
So changes will have to be made on both sides of the divide. But the biggest, most important changes will be required of the conservatives. They have already damaged their standing and reputation, perhaps beyond salvage. Already there are clear signs of many Republicans trying to distance themselves from Trump and his ilk. But whatever their fate, they must re-join the more humane segments of the people and embrace the tenets of liberty, equality, and reason. Batcons must be vanquished and dispersed, and anyone who sides with them should suffer the same fate.
Enough with the problem recitations, please. Article after article, in all sources both print and electronic, all we get is descriptions of problems, admonitions to face the reality (whatever it is at the moment), and the advice that we should do something.
But hardly anyone offers concrete steps to be taken or solutions we should implement to solve our problems.
Typical of the proliferation of such articles is this one: “Are we prepared for a climate crisis in the middle of a pandemic?” by Olivia Aguilar. According to Dr. Aguilar, we are not. So what should we do about it? Form committees. In about 1100 words that is the only concrete step she recommends.
Articles of little merit or value are generated by the score every day in colleges and universities that pressure their faculty members to publish something, anything, whether they have anything to say or not.
So-called think tanks are also prolific factories of shrieking calls to do something without even a scintilla of solutions offered. I’ve read article after article, watched countless mind-numbing Youtube videos, and listened to a few podcasts, all about how we need to prepare for this or that problem: global warming, swarms of climate refugees, the Coronavirus epidemic, food shortages, overpopulation, and on and on. The list of problems facing or about to consume us is endless. The list of solutions is, well, pretty much blank.
What follows are a few of the problems that need solutions, at least in rough format, that come to my mind without a lot of thought (which is my preferred mode). They could be fleshed out with a little research and high-powered thinking on the part of these people who have sinecures in academia and think tanks. With more of a project-orientation—solution centered as they like to say—they could actually earn their money by giving us some steps to follow.
Lawn to gardens. For at least eight years there has been a push in some quarters to convert our ridiculous lawns into gardens, especially vegetable gardens. Food supply is going to undergo serious threat so we need more how-to instruction on things like: — Getting municipal codes changed to accommodate gardens in place of lawns. — Psychological methods for breaking homeowners away from their grass fetish. — Protection methods against natural pillagers and human thieves. — And while we’re at it, canning procedures to store the produce from those gardens.
Golf courses to affordable housing. Golf courses are going to rapidly become a thing of the past. The areas they occupy could be converted to affordable housing. Focus on: — How to bring about forced change of ownership from private golf course owners. Municipalization? — Political action to achieve conversion of municipally owned courses. — How to incorporate the renting of small garden plats for individuals on former golf courses.
Farmland conversion. The dominance of beef and corn production are extremely problematic aspects of agriculture that must be radically changed. — Alternative crops appropriate to particular areas and circumstances. — Debt amelioration for farmers heavily invested in equipment and land.
Wind and solar acceptance. Over 70 percent of the American public supports alternative energy sources. But when it comes to actually implementing them the public wants them anywhere but in their own vicinity. — What influence techniques or methods would bring better acceptance of local installations? — What financial incentives or other benefits could be generated, and what would their sources be, to gain acceptance?
Propaganda remediation. Talk radio, social media, and Fox News have been seriously and in some cases almost entirely subverted to propaganda machines for contemporary populists and other rabble. — How can these media be effectively neutralized without censorship? — What methods could be employed to undo years of biased influence in people who have willingly subjected themselves to the relentless barrage of right wing misinformation and anti-social ideas?
Education rejuvenation. Starting in the late 1950s the far right-wing segment of the Republican party began to advance a policy of influence over the educational system to bring it into alignment with their warped values and focus on personal, financial wealth. Their strategy included gaining control of school boards, state departments of education, and educational legislation. They have in large measure been successful. — What kinds of political strategies will be necessary, and effective, in returning school board representation to the broader swath of the public? — What will be required to bring about truly free education from preschool through college? — State legislatures need to step up and fund higher education. How can that be achieved? — How can organizations like parent teacher organizations be more empowered to help bring about substantive, positive changes in public education?
Enlightenment values. The United States was once the proud embodiment in the world of higher enlightenment values. That is no longer the case with our incessant, never-ending wars and interference with foreign governments everywhere. What would it take to get back to a positive moral stature?
Freedom. It would be difficult to enumerate all the losses of freedom and liberty that have occurred just in my lifetime. This must perforce be the broadest and most difficult topic on this list. In brief, how do we regain our liberty?
This is a list I conjured up in just a few minutes. Certainly they are among those topics I think about frequently, and they are really only a small subset of the possible topics people could be studying, researching, and writing about.
And of course some are doing exactly that. Do an Internet search of any of the terms of this list and many sources will come up. But they are often, as is this one, isolated and relatively obscure websites. What we really need is for those with the biggest megaphones to stop dithering with resume or CV padding crap and produce something meaningful and useful.
Wife Chris and I have decided to install a natural gas powered 16 kWh stand-by electric generator.
Natural gas powered generators are quieter than the smaller, portable, gasoline powered types of generator. The location we have chosen for the generator, plus its quieter sound, will make it minimally obtrusive. We do not like noise and assume others feel the same way. The only time the generator will be running–other than when there is an electricity outage, of course–will be for periods of 10 minutes or less, once a week, which is part of the maintenance program. We will schedule this for a time during the middle of the day.
You might be wondering, why? Natural gas powered generators
with their permanent installation are not cheap. Plus they require
maintenance and upkeep. So why did we decide to do this?
Given the tenor of the times and the ways in which so much of our contemporary world is clearly breaking down, I have been giving a lot of thought to just how our quality of life is most vulnerable. It did not a lot of thought to conclude that one area in which a catastrophe would be most devastating is electricity.
Almost every aspect of our lives depends on the electricity being on. In the past we have lived in places where electrical outages were commonplace. Loss of power for even an hour is pretty inconvenient. It never happens at a good time.
We were living in New York during the Northeast blackout of 2003.
When that struck we were without power for several days. That made us
outage sensitive, so we subsequently invested in an emergency
generator (portable, gasoline powered) and electrical transfer switch
wiring. That made a world of difference in our quality of life during
those frequent times when the electricity went off, sometimes for
many hours.
The Achilles heel of that system was the fact that it was gasoline
powered. In a widespread blackout, like the one in 2003, gasoline was
hard to get because filling station pumps require electricity to
work. We had to either drive outside the blackout area (too far) or
find a filling station that had its own backup generator (and had not
run out of gasoline to sell).
An added inconvenience was the limited number of household
circuits we could power with our portable generator. We could power
some of the basic circuits but we were nowhere near whole-house
coverage.
With our electric-outage experience in mind I contacted the local electric utility before moving to the Madison area in 2013 to see what the outage history was like. I was told there had been only one brief outage, lasting less than an hour, in the previous ten years.
Great! I thought. We won’t be needing an emergency generator.
In the six-plus years we’ve lived here there have been a few brief
outages. More than I expected from what I had been told, but nothing
to get seriously bent out of shape about. So I was feeling pretty
secure about our electricity supply and the unlikelihood of
experiencing a serious outage.
It detailed the four most likely ways in which the national
electrical grid is vulnerable to prolonged collapse:
Geomagnetic storms
Electromagnetic pulse attack (EMP) via a high altitude
nuclear detonation.
Cyber attack.
Kinetic attack. (Structural damage resulting from acts of
terrorism; nature, such as lightning; vandalism, such as someone
shooting at transformers; etc.)
The DOE Assessment makes for some bleak and scary reading,
especially when you consider that we the public are usually fed
feel-good nonsense that paints a rosy picture. If these people are
bad-mouthing the situation, then it must be really bad. Everything is
not hunky-dory.
“Even if all the recommendations
of the Congressional EMP Commission were implemented, there is no
guarantee that the [national electrical] grid will not sustain a
prolonged collapse. There should therefore be contingency plans
for such a failure.” (Emphasis added.)
Evidently there are no contingency plans: “There should be an
actionable plan in anticipation of a possible prolonged collapse of
the grid—a retro-structure and a skill set to provide a framework
for survival. Our sense is there is no plan.” (Emphasis
added.)
So just how bad is it? I wondered. How likely is it that the
national electrical grid could go down, that there could be a
“prolonged collapse”? How long would the collapse last if
it did? After all, in modern times we have never experienced a
complete collapse of the national electrical grid. But if is
possible, and there is no plan . . .
I looked into the four “postulated mechanisms” that
could potentially cause grid collapse:
Geomagnetic storms. According to Science Daily,
a “geomagnetic storm is a temporary disturbance of the Earth’s
magnetosphere. Associated with solar coronal mass ejections, coronal
holes, or solar flares, a geomagnetic storm is caused by a solar wind
shock wave which typically strikes the Earth’s magnetic field 24 to
36 hours after the event.”
Often called solar storms, these magnetic disruptions can wreak
havoc on electrical equipment of all sorts, especially the essential
components of the national grid. In March 1989 a geomagnetic storm
blacked out large parts of northeastern North America. In 1921 there
was a solar storm several magnitudes stronger than the 1989 storm.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has
estimated that if a storm of the 1921 magnitude were to strike today
it would take down the entire U.S. grid. (There was no grid in 1921
like there is today.)
The 1921 Solar storm was not a unique, one-time event. NOAA is
confident that a storm of that magnitude, or even greater, will
eventually strike us.
Electromagnetic Pulse Attacks (EMP).
An EMP of sufficient magnitude damages electrical equipment. The most
likely EMP vehicle would be a high altitude nuclear
detonation. From what I can gather this is the least likely thing to
happen, but that might just be wishful thinking on my part.
A lightning strike is an EMP. As a result of global warming,
storms are getting more frequent and more powerful. A few unluckily
placed lightning strikes could leave us in the dark a long time.
Cyber attacks. A
cyber attack is an assault launched against computer networks and
systems. As might be
expected, the electric grid is managed by computers from stem to
stern.
Not long ago Russian hackers
took down a large part of the Ukrainian electric grid.
The damage, destruction and loss was enormous. It has been suggested
that the Russians could take
down the U.S. grid whenever
they want to.
A power company in the Midwest hired a
group of white hat hackers known as RedTeam Security to test power
company’s defenses against hacking and sabotage. The team was able to
break into buildings and hack into the power company’s network with
relative ease. They were able to gain full access and could have
easily done serious and permanent damage, plunging the entire region
into darkness for an indeterminate time.
Kinetic Attacks. These are old fashioned methods like
bombs, fire, bullets, and so on. A few years ago in California
someone with a high powered rifle took down a large power transformer
by simply shooting at it. Much of the region was without power for
months.
Speaking of transformers, they are a critical component of the
transmission system. They adjust the electric voltage to a suitable
level on each segment of the power transmission from generation to
the end user. They are essential to the transmission of electricity
across the grid.
High voltage transformers (HVTs), sometimes referred to as large
power transformers (LPTs), are big and heavy. They weigh between 110
and 410 tons, and cost millions of dollars apiece. They are all
uniquely designed so they cannot be mass produced, and it can take up
to two years to make one.
There are approximately 80 to 90 of these LPTs in use across the
country. They are essential to the U.S. electric grid. Because they
are huge, transporting them from the point of manufacture to their
destination in the grid is costly and expensive.
Making them is even more problematic. It can take up to two years
to make one of these LPTs. That is, if the materials required to make
them are immediately available. (Don’t even get me started on the
problems associated with electrical steel, a special steel that is an
essential ingredient of all LPTs.) Keep in mind there can be no
economy of scale with these things because each one is unique. They
must be designed and built for the particular requirements of where
they are to be used.
It would seem reasonable to make a large power transformer in
place, where it is needed. But that is impossible. There are only a
couple of manufacturers in the world capable of making the largest
LPTs. One is in South Korea and the other in Germany.
The German manufacturing firm is Siemens. In an impressive 568
page company publication they state that LPTs have a lifespan of
around 35 or 40 years, and approximately 70 percent of the LPTs in
the U.S. are at or past their end of service date.
The publication cited above says the entire U.S. grid would go
down with the loss of no more than eight or nine LPTs. Yikes!
Think about it. Around 60 of our LPTs are outdated and could fail at
any time. And most of the rest of them are approaching that point.
Call me Chicken Little, but I find that more than a little scary.
From what I have learned over the past few months there is no
doubt in my mind that we are going to experience more frequent and
longer lasting electric outages. (I haven’t even mentioned the aging,
inadequate, and sorely neglected infrastructure of our national grid
of which the LPTs are a part.)
What to do? The first thing I wanted to know was if the electric utility had any kind of program, or perhaps suggestions about how to deal with outages, especially an extended outage which might even be nationwide, and might last for months or even years.
The utility’s manager courteously responded to all my questions in a timely manner, but what he had to say was not comforting. In his words, they were a small electric distribution company. It has little to no control over the supply of electricity to them. If they can’t get electricity, game over for them.
So! If an extended power outage is a real possibility, what’s to
be done? Do we really want to make a sizable investment in time and
money to install a permanent, natural-gas fueled stand-by electric
generator? After all, the national electric grid has never totally
gone down, and local outages have never been very long-term. It’s
never happened; maybe it never will.
First I looked at it from an actuarial perspective. We have paid
and lot in premiums over the years for life insurance, even though
neither of us has ever actually died. Same with fire insurance, auto
insurance, health insurance, and so on. We’ve had some claims over
the years but we’ve certainly never recouped the total cost of the
insurance premiums.
The way we’ve usually looked at it was that we were insuring
against catastrophe. The ramifications of a possible catastrophic
event were far more horrendous than paying the insurance premiums.
I believe the same applies to electricity. To be without it is
one of the most disruptive and potentially dangerous conditions I can
imagine. Or in some ways, that I can’t imagine. Things can
happen that were undreamed of just the day before.
Like the sudden appearance of a new virus for which no one has
immunity. As I write this Chris and I have isolated ourselves at home
due to the Coronavirus outbreak. I don’t know how long we are going
to have to be holed up here, but I would not want to do it without
electricity.
We finally decided to get the generator if we could be
confident there would be gas to power it. I wanted to hear from
Madison Gas & Electric as to whether or not they could continue
to provide gas in an extended power outage. It was difficult to get
them to answer my questions but I kept badgering them until they did.
Their answer: Their ability to provide gas is not dependent upon
electricity from the grid. They do have to power the gas pumps with
electricity, but they have some very large stand-by generators for
that. I have to take their word for it that they can continue to
deliver gas even with the electricity is off.
I did ask, a couple of times, just how long they would be able to
provide gas with the electricity off. That question never got
answered.
So we decided to install a permanent stand-by generator. One that
is capable of powering our whole house. As long as there is natural
gas we will not have to be without heat or air conditioning,
refrigeration, light, hot water, computers, charged cell phones,
CPAP, and so on.
Solar panels and whole house batteries would be a better solution
but that option is not presently available to us because the
homeowners’ association voted against allowing solar panels. We would
prefer solar because it is renewable. But instead we will have to
burn fossil fuel. (I have wondered how many of the homeowners’
association members who voted against solar own MG&E stock.)
Wind power is out of the question for the present circumstances.
That just leaves natural gas
By the way, potable water was of concern to me in case of an outage. Local water company told me they have natural gas powered generators that back-up several of their water-well pumps. They can continue to supply water as long as there is gas.
It really is time for the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to start breaking up the gargantuan online companies like ebay.
Amazon should also be broken up, and certainly Google and Facebook. But one thing has to be said about Amazon: They make buying (and returning) easy.
Not so ebay. I ordered a product from iherb on ebay. They evidently did not have the product they pictured and described, so they sent me a substitute. So I wanted to return it and get a refund.
That’s when all the fun began. I won’t go through all the laborious and ridiculous steps I was required to go through only to end up unwilling to spend any more time trying to get them to do the right thing.
The vendor, iherb, never did respond to my attempts to get their attention. After they had ignored me for a couple of weeks I went over their head to ebay. Although quite friendly about it, they required me to jump through numerous hoops, eventually said the vendor iherb would be sending me a return label.
They did not and getting back in touch with ebay about this specific matter has been a nightmare and now a complete failure. I have no more time to mess with them. I am stuck with a $50 item I did not want, did not order, and evidently cannot return for a refund.
This is becoming more and more a common experience in late-state predatory capitalism. I used to believe whole heartedly in capitalism and the American Dream. No more. There never seems to be enough profit for these greedsters and they lie awake nights figuring out ways to screw us, the consuming public, out of yet more money.
I was once used ebay’s service to take credit cards but stopped because of all the bad experiences others had with them.
Now I will not buy anything from anyone on ebay ever again. The ebay “guarantee” is BS, in my experience. You might be able to get a refund from them or with their help, but not without a lot of patience and time.
Ebay should take a lesson from Amazon. At least Amazon knows how to treat customers.
Sometime around next February the U.S. will send 20,000 troops to participate in a joint NATO military exercise in Europe called Defender 2020. There will be a total of 37,000 troops involved.
That’s 20,000 from us and 17,000 from the rest of NATO. There are 27 current European Union members 22 of which are members of NATO. So, what, five European countries are getting a free ride? And why are the European members contributing only 46 percent of the troops while we, the U.S., only one of 29 members, dishing out 54 percent of the personnel?
The national differences between European countries were put aside when NATO was formed after the last world war. But World War II ended 75 years ago and now those differences are resurfacing with a vengeance. Which detracts significantly from the primary objective of NATO has always been protecting the Europeans from Russia. It is time to call it quits. We can’t even protect ourselves from Russia’s vile influence (otherwise what’s all that noise about their interference in our elections?).
Besides, of total membership of NATO only Poland (and maybe France?) are contributing to the costs of NATO which they agreed to share a long time ago.
The NATO war games next February have been designated Defender 2020 but to me that seems disingenuous. The number refers to the year of course but I can’t help ruminating about the ophthalmological implication. It stands for perfect vision which we certainly do not have when it comes to anything military.
For instance, we are in the grip of global warming caused in no small part by the burning of fossil fuels. To that end Defender 2020 promises to make a significant contribution. Not to the solution but to global warming itself.
There is no way to even begin to estimate the carbon “footprint” of such a military exercise. Boeing C-17 Globemaster III jet planes will probably be used to transport the troops from the U.S. to, say, Ramstein Air Base in Germany. It will require 170 flights—yes, one hundred and seventy—to get the troops there. And of course they will have to eventually be brought back. What that costs us will never be made public by our government. In their mania for secrecy even public knowledge about something as silly [1] as the cost of one toilet seat to be a threat to national security. Conservative estimates range from 106 million dollars to over 200 million. That’s just for the transportation to get our well-heeled warriors there and back.
For what? Is it just a show of force? If that’s it it is not likely to impress anyone. When I was in the Army in Europe there were something like a quarter of a million of us there. Moving a mere 20,000 military meatballs a quarter of the way around the globe carries little threat to people like Russia’s Vladimir Putin or China’s Ski Jumping or whatever his name is (yeah, yeah, I know, it’s Xi Jinking; easily googled).
A typical U.S.-Europe round-trip flight produces between one and two tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per person. You know, that much loved and adorable greenhouse gas that is killing our planet. So if we multiply, say, one-and-a-half tons by the number of U.S. troops involved we get something in the ballpark of twenty to forty thousand tons of carbon dioxide. I don’t know what the correct number will be—does anyone, really?—but it is a lot.
The United States Environmental Protection Agency says that “CO2 remains in the climate system for a very long time: CO2 emissions cause increases in atmospheric concentrations of CO2 that will last thousands of years.”
What does that mean in comparative terms? The U.S. EPA calculator [2] tells us the amount of CO2 generated just to get the troops there and back will be the equivalent of the amount of CO2 created from generating the electricity used in one year by 2,395 U.S. homes. Or the burning of more than 21 million pounds of coal.
What would it take to sequester that amount of CO2 and keep it from entering the atmosphere? It would take 23,538 acres of forest a full year to do it. Or, if you were to plant 330,704 tree seedlings and nurtured them all into full and healthy growth they could sequester the CO2 in ten years. Or of course they could just not do this kind of stupid crap.
Our military is committing this rapine on our environment, and blowing countless tax dollars, all to justify their ability to re-fight World War II. Or to just keep fighting the endless wars predatory capitalism keeps coming up with to make ever more profit.
It is past time to put an end to all the war mongering warrior worship that has contributed so much to bringing us to the edge of extinction.
Starting now the Pentagon budget should be cut in half each year for at least three years, then re-evaluated. To do that will require replacing the current political leadership (?)—meaning Republicans and Centrist Democrats like Pelosi and Schumer—with people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders.
I realize none of this is likely to happen, even on the smallest scale. But, hey … I can dream.
Scientists have been telling us for several decades that we were running out of time to do something about global warming. Last year (2018) the consensus of scientific thinking gave us twelve years. Now, in 2019, we’re down to eleven. That is, we have eleven years to change the ways we live and do business to drastically reduce our global carbon footprint. The objective is to keep average global warming to below 1.5 degrees Celsius. The baseline average is based on NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) for the years 1951-1980.
According to NASA/GISS the global temperature annual average for 1951-19800 was 14 degrees Centigrade (57°F). What happens when the global average rises to 1.5 degrees warmer? If you have to ask, you have not been paying attention to what is going on in the world. Here’s the way Astra Taylor put it writing in Laphams Quarterly:
[There will be] the annihilation of coral reefs, greater melting of the permafrost, and species apocalypse, along with the most dire consequences for human civilization as we know it. Food shortages, forest fires, droughts and monsoons, intensified war and conflict, billions of refugees—we have barely begun to conceive of the range of dystopian futures looming on the horizon.
Get it? Pay special attention to that part about how “we have barely begun to conceive” of the horrors that lie in wait for us. Clearly it would be in our—humanity’s and the rest of the world’s—best interests to get our collective butts in gear and mitigate the effects of global warming. And mitigate is the best we could hope for because we have already done things that will negatively affect our climate for at least several hundred years.
We were told 30 years ago what we needed to do to avoid most of the problems of global warming. We did nothing. Nothing significant, anyway. A relative handful of the world’s population began doing a few constructive but insignificant things, like recycling paper and plastic, most of which somehow ended up in landfills or the ocean. Out of sight out of mind, I guess.
(Please don’t mistake my tone. I have been no better than almost everyone else.)
There have been activists all along, trying to draw public and governmental attention to the problems of global warming, but recently there has been an uptick in public awareness. Most notably there is Greta Thunberg, the sixteen-year-old Swedish environmentalist who has roused students and adults alike to demonstrate for global action against climate warming. Someone has referred to her as the tiny Swedish climate devil.
The worldwide attention now being drawn to global warming has many people hopefully asking, and speculating, about whether or not the world is finally going to meaningfully tackle the problem. Is there reason to hope that we will now do what is required to avoid at least the most serious effects of global warming?
The answer, I very much regret to say, is no.
As I see it there are some fundamental reasons that nothing is going to be done. There will undoubtedly come a point when there will be a scurrying to take action, but it will be far too little and pathetically late. Americans always do the right thing but only after they have tried everything else.
The corporatism which rules today is composed of and fed by many attributes, not the least of which are personal greed for wealth and power of the ruling elite. Corporations rule the world as proxy to a small group of ruling elites, the oligarchs who continue to profit from ecological extraction. The standout examples of this are the numerous companies and activities of the infamous Koch brothers. Make that Koch brother (singular). One of the brothers died this year; so sad. Their immense fortune was derived largely from the extraction of coal.
It is the burning of coal which has contributed more than any other single cause to global warming. Because the Kochs successfully used their wealth to stymie any meaningful attempts to stop the burning of coal, they stand out to many as the worst enemies of the future of Earth, especially any future that presumes to include humans.
For life on Earth to continue in any semblance of how it has been, coal and oil extraction and emissions would have to be lowered to virtually zero and replaced with renewable energy sources. That would require corporations to forfeit trillions of dollars in assets. Stock markets would crash. American politicians would be cast adrift without their regular infusions of cash and direction (by virtue of being told how and when to vote). There is no question that the ruling elites and the politicians they own—in America that includes almost all Republicans and most Democrats—would continue to fight tooth and nail to prevent any change in the status quo.
The well known human aversion to change has never been more evident than in the national debate (weak as it is, considering the stakes) about global warming and what to do about it. By my tally, thirty-three percent of the American public have thoroughly deluded themselves with their denial that there even is such a thing as human-caused global warming. The excuses they give for their position are ludicrous and, were it not for the seriousness of the consequences, laughable. But they will not change.
I suspect that this group is roughly the same as the thirty-three percent of the American population who support and believe in Donald Trump. I know a thing or two about brain washing and I want to tell you something about those Trump supporters. They are the Americans who have voluntarily exposed themselves to years of right-wing, populist, narrow-minded propaganda. That is how they became the political and educational retards they are. The kind of mind control-slash-brain washing to which these people have voluntarily subjected themselves does two things. It creates a mindset in line with the objectives of the oligarchical, capitalism-loving plutocrats; and it makes it extremely difficult to change that mindset to another direction. It is mind control with built-in inoculation against other ideas and values. Especially those of the Enlightenment sort. It is highly unlikely they will ever change.
Here is how you can spot these folks. As you already know (probably), they tend to spout misogynistic, white supremacist, anti-science, illiberal claptrap. But what really gives them away are the expressions, phrases, even whole articulated arguments, that are repeated verbatim over and over. Especially on right-wing talk shows and that conservative propaganda machine, Fox News. I know because I lurk and listen to them.
Here is an example. This is a phrase that I first heard from Rush Limbaugh, whom I occasionally listen to when my stomach feels particularly strong:
Greta Thunberg thinks she has it figured out at age 16, when she has no concept of the long term cycle of climate change which is thousands of years.
This phrase was repeated almost verbatim over and over in the right-wing conservative echo chambers. No credit given, no one saying they heard it from so-and-so. And each hearer absorbs it as their own. So when they spout it later they really believe they are speaking a wisdom that is their very own.
I most recently came across this particular phrase in an email from an old friend. He has been listening almost exclusively to Rush Limbaugh, conservative talk programs and Fox News for decades now. In his email to me he repeated the above Greta disparagement almost verbatim. When I challenged him on it he back-peddled and said that maybe the statement did not actually represent his own thinking. But I suspect he was being disingenuous with me. Most people like him will not budge, or if they do, they sooner or later return to what is for them the more comfortable (brainwashed) position.
The brazen Criminal in Chief, President Trump, has publicly and loudly stated that global warming is a scam. His mindless followers think they know it is a the-sky-is-falling scam, although all they really know is what they have heard him and his servile minions say. But what would happen, you might wonder, if President Trump were to do an about face and declare global warming real? After all, since he is one of the most corrupt people on the planet, he could easily contradict everything he has said about it.
If that were to happen every brainwashed Trump junkie would experience cognitive dissonance. They would deny the reality of what Trump was saying, convinced that the evil, conniving forces trying to bring Trump down had somehow taken control of his brain and made him say it. Or even deny that he actually said whatever it was he is reported to have said, and indeed that they may even have actually heard him say. “Fake news,” they would say. They would remain loyal to the real Donald Trump and continue to believe global warming is a scam.
As for the rest of us, polls show that sixty-six percent of the American public believes that global warming is real and that it is caused by human activity.
A majority of Americans are clearly concerned about the problem but here again we see the effects of denial and cognitive dissonance. People are not filling the streets screaming for action. The only people coming close to that are students activated by Greta Thunberg and her Friday for Climate actions. The adults are determinedly not bestirring themselves except to pat her on the head (figuratively speaking) and tell her how nice it is to see young people taking an interest in things.
The fact is, most humans don’t function well in the face of impossible odds. And that is what we face now with global warming. The thought of getting ruling elites, oligarchs, and governments to back massive change and expense for the sake of the planet is just too daunting to even contemplate. It is clear to most people that there just is not much that can be done.
Except hope! And maybe pray among those who are religious, although most of the religious factions don’t seem to place much confidence that we can pray our way out of this mess if they even acknowledge the mess to begin with.
As for hope, as Chris Hedges has often pointed out, hope is for suckers. In “Our Mania for Hope Is a Curse,” he said:
The naive belief that history is linear, that moral progress accompanies technical progress, is a form of collective self-delusion. It cripples our capacity for radical action and lulls us into a false sense of security. Those who cling to the myth of human progress, who believe that the world inevitably moves toward a higher material and moral state, are held captive by power. Only those who accept the very real possibility of dystopia, of the rise of a ruthless corporate totalitarianism, buttressed by the most terrifying security and surveillance apparatus in human history, are likely to carry out the self-sacrifice necessary for revolt.
“…to carry out the self-sacrifice necessary for revolt.” Indeed. The problem, though, is that there is no time left. The UN has told us that oceans are already so warm we will not be able to avoid the dire consequences already set in motion. That in itself, I believe, deprives us of the eleven years we thought we might have in which to do something about climate.
Add to that the possibility of at least seven potential tipping points that, once any one of them is tipped, will cause a vastly sped up runaway greenhouse effect. The seven I refer to—melting of the Arctic permafrost, burning of the Amazon, marine ice sheet instability in West Antarctica, melting of huge methane clouds in the deep ocean, things like this—are only the large scale tipping elements. There are also many regional or smaller-scale tipping points. The faith (or even hope) that none of these will be tipped is beyond my ken.
The faith in a scientific miracle is also beyond my ken. I am a scientist and have always respected science and scientists but expecting a miracle at this point and and in this time frame is beyond irrational.
Our time is growing extremely short. For the first time in my life I am fatalistic about our chances for survival. It is best, if possible, to not worry about it. If even one of those tipping points is triggered we are probably done for.
In the meantime I believe we have an obligation to maintain a moral position in keeping with the highest ideas of the Enlightenment. If we have to go out we should go out standing tall, caring for one another and easing suffering of people and animals as much as possible.
I personally intend to do as much as I can to head of what looks like our guaranteed end. Not from any senseless hope but out of principle. And celebrate my good luck for having lived in this best and worst final stage of humanity.
Your concepts regarding the snow on Crestone Needle [a Colorado mountain] are irrelevant. Whether or not the snow is melting does not constitute an argument against global warming. I think you are being mislead by isolated “facts” like this. I recognize the roots of your comments in contemporary Republican misinformation enabled by the propaganda machine Fox News and Rush Limbaugh.
Please take a look at this 6,000 word article on snow and global warming by some of the top climate scientists in the world: Scientific American. You will not find any Fox News blathering heads or Trump tweets or administration poobahs cited in it. Nor can you find any more than a tiny smattering of crackpot scientists who claim to refute the scientific facts supporting the view that global warming is real, that it is the result of human action, and that we are headed for a near-time catastrophe. The crackpots’ claims are each and every one invalid, unscientific, and totally without merit. I know, I’ve looked. Trust me; I’m a doctor — as we used to be fond of saying.
Then please view this speech by Greta Thunberg. Earlier when I asked you your opinion of her you said, among other things, “Greta hasn’t lived long enough to have knowledge of all the planet’s weather patterns.” And you have? What the fuck?
Both the article and Thunberg’s speech
are powerful. But they will not be viewed as such by anyone
constitutionally incapable of facing the reality of our rapidly
approaching extinction. To them I say, I am no longer disposed to humor
bullshit. There is no more time to waste swallowing the insultingly
erroneous, wishful-thinking-based capitalist swill blasted forth from
the Trump administration and his propagandists.
You also said, “I must find fulfillment in other ways. It has to be with my mind, my resolve, my decision to be productive somehow, and not be satisfied with limited time and place.” You are certainly capable of doing that. Your excellent writing skill and perceptive intelligence have always been a model I have looked up to and tried to emulate. We both started out — you were the department chair, I was lowly faculty — as conservative Republicans and I still consider myself somewhat conservative (but now definitely and defiantly anti-Republican). Where we differ significantly is on the concept of intellectual freedom. I fear you have voluntarily subjugated yourself to the rigorous straight jacket of contemporary political conservatism and it hurts me to see you slip into claptrap mode, expressing thoughts and reasoning not your own on politics, economics or climate.
None of us has all that much time left. To me that makes it all the more important to spend time in ways that are honest to myself and to others. I continually strive to honestly question the positions and stands I take. That, I believe, gives me license to challenge the opinions and positions of others in like manner. Which of course makes me offensive to a lot of people, especially those who are perpetually offended.
Cutting through the bullshit, I have always found, is expensive. It does not make life any easier for me. But I have no trouble sleeping at night. I used to take great pleasure in discussing, or debating when appropriate, contentious issues with you. But in recent years you have more and more parroted Rush Limbaugh or the talking heads on Fox News.
It would be unreasonable and foolish to expect you to agree with me on everything, and I have enjoyed batting around ideas and concepts with you when we did not agree. But only when the positions you espouse are your own thinking and not the residue of Trump/Fox/Limbaugh propaganda.
I know you have felt alone since your beloved wife died, you hurt, every day is a litany of discomforts and inconveniences, your dignity is frequently assaulted, and you have very little freedom left. Believe me, I get it. But the great thing you so have left, the thing that is so valuable and precious, is mental freedom. Videtur quod sit libera. “Think and be free.” But only if you sunder the shackles of conventional wisdom (the phrase itself is an oxymoron). I believe it a far grander finale to go out free and liberated than to go out whimpering, being a chump who hews to the party lines of those pygmy intellects who are abjectly terrified of intellectual freedom.
If I were advising someone else about the wisdom of writing a message like this I would tell them to save their breath; don’t waste their time. I know how difficult it is — impossible, often — to break through those obdurate, protective boundaries the human mind sets up to protect an embrace of conventional wisdom.
But I had to try. This is the only way I know how to be an honest friend.
