Presenting these two pieces of evidence in juxtaposition, as if they are equally trustworthy, is a bit misleading:
I think we're all well aware that pretty much any given career scientist, particularly one who has chosen to dedicate their lives to public service, is more trustworthy than the current administration, which is on record with tens of thousands of lies, most so lazily told as to convey contempt for the listener: They either think you're stupid enough to believe them, or don't care whether you do.
To take just one characteristic example out of the tens of thousands: the person ruling over the administration infamously hand-edited a weather map with a marker, to lie to the public about the path of a hurricane, then lied to the public about the markup itself to conceal the previous lie. Notably, they never even acknowledged either lie, much less apologized, meaning they still think it was a good idea, and still think that sort of blatant, shameless lying is ok.
That's to say nothing of the disdain the administration has for government and science in general: the long, strong track record there belies any claims of good faith, and indicates that actions they take which worsen one or both, do so with that as the primary motivation.
For an administration which claims that their primary goal is removing bureaucracy and making the government more efficient and effective, these whistleblower reports describing the exact opposite are pretty damning, and the objective is clear to all.
For an administration which claims that their primary goals are removing dysfunction and bureaucracy, and making the government more efficient and effective, these whistleblower reports describing the exact opposite are pretty damning, and the objective is clear to all.
Unless we get evidence to the contrary, the most likely explanation is that the administration most infamous for censoring and lying is censoring and lying.
If any evidentiary memos or documents are due, they are due from the administration (with credible independent verification, of course), since at the moment the whistleblowers are more credible based on their assertions alone, and so their claim currently prevails.
So when a judge would ask, “Do you plan to deport these people tonight?” to a government lawyer, if the lawyer replied, “No”, the court wouldn’t intervene because government lawyers obviously wouldn’t just lie to a judge presiding over a lawsuit. Well it turns out that they’re continually lying and being rewarded for it (Emil Bove for one). So courts are now suspending that presumption and ordering explicit actions with strict timelines for updates for basically the first time in modern history.
It’s astonishing at how little regard this administration has for the norms and structures that make up our government and how much damage they’re doing to the rule of law.
https://www.justsecurity.org/120547/presumption-regularity-t...
"HQ" believes climate change is a hoax, and this admin lies about anything and everything, we cannot take anything they say at face value
They don't care what happens to our world because half of them are dispensationalsts and the rest just think: après moi, le déluge.
Can somebody explain the psychology behind these beliefs? I'm pretty sure they know how coal is mined. They must surely have heard about the black lung disease and COPD. Where does this 'clean coal' concept come from? And if that's about the products of coal burning, is it too hard to imagine breathing in hot air containing soot, fly ash, some obnoxious oxides, some unburnt VOCs and some extra CO2? Where have they seen perfect combustion of coal?
Ultimately, what is their motivation to reject their own experiences and endorse such wishful thinking? Why do they choose ideas that harm them? I'm looking for an answer that doesn't assume that they're stupid or insane.
Some folks would rather literally die than have the 'wrong people' have an improvement in their lives:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying_of_Whiteness
Do not under-estimate the power of spite/hate.
"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
There’s deep, growing resentment towards the entire so-called “Professional Managerial Class” - things like wind and solar power are a byproduct of their accomplishments. To kill these things off is a way to stick their finger in the eyes of undesirables; the fact that the externalities of this vengeful decision will mostly be felt by minorities is merely a convenient coincidence for the perpetrators
I don’t think people realize how many private schools exist purely because of reintegration. People decided they would rather build new schools and pay private tuition on top of the taxes they pay for public education. Again, all of this was just so they wouldn’t have to share those schools with black Americans.
This is all recent history. Many of the people who did this are still alive.
Lee Atwater would be proud. It started with Reagan and is used with exceptional effectiveness by the current Republican Party.
It didn't help that the threat was remote and abstract, that the cost was to be paid by future generations (mostly elsewhere), and that the elites who advocated fighting it were conspicuous in their own consumption.
All of these actors were entirely motivated by money and power. No whiteness required.
They do not, they have not, and they do not care. Those people livre purely in the world of words and rhetoric, where the only thing that matters is whether what you say gets a reaction out of people that will lead to you getting more power. Truth is what sounds good.
I know, as a rational educated person it is terrifying to realize that there are human beings who score 0% on the “cares about science and logic and history and truth” scales, but that is the beauty and horror of the human condition - there are many, many people out there whose thinking and mode of operation will be entirely alien to you.
> Can somebody explain the psychology behind these beliefs?
That phrase is chilling, and perfectly describes what I've been feeling like where the society at large is heading.
Thank you for introducing it to me.
They commonly arise when someone is getting paid by the coal company. Just boring human greed, not stupidity or insanity.
> Where does this 'clean coal' concept come from?
Here's a good overview of the marketing history behind the term: https://www.gem.wiki/Clean_Coal_Marketing_Campaign
"Wind power is bad" because Trump doesn't like the way wind turbines looked near his golf course.
Yes, the actual reason is that dumb.
Trump is the world's biggest baby back bitch and is the greatest proof we will ever have that the idea that we live in anything remotely approximating a meritocracy is one of the greatest fictions ever told.
Take the Tylenol thing. You can explain to one of them the scientific method, what a survey of studies is, why correlation often appears when there is no causation, etc. I experienced this last week: at the end of my explanation, the person (a 45-year-old) replied that he "simply disagreed."
The coal, the climate, etc. are all the same. There is a broad sense that because they've been convinced of the value of expanded oil drilling through lines like "Drill baby drill," their current perspective on it is of the same merit as actual scientific research.
However, these people do have a weakness. They feel good when they win the attention economy and the emotion economy, and those are actually really easy to subvert with a little out of the box thinking.
"I'm glad they've finally figured out the cause of autism."
"Chemtrails?"
"No, they said it was Tylenol."
"I don't think so. Did you know that the number of chemtrails the government has put into the air has increased 7-fold since January?"
The person I was talking to is someone who cares deeply for me (and whom I care for deeply too), someone I've known for almost my whole life. He wasn't having fun contradicting me. In fact, it was making him visibly uncomfortable to do so. He was engaging in the conversation in good faith. He just doesn't have the foundation to understand what he doesn't understand. I'm optimistic that even though he came away still disagreeing with me irrationally, there is a chance that by exposing him to a fuller explanation, he'll seek out more information for himself at some point in the future.
However, the people I use this trick on aren't strangers. They are regular acquaintances that have conspiratorial views, but think I am one of the "good" ones. When these people tell me things like it's just a difference of opinion, you can tell that they derive strength and satisfaction from their ignorance.
My goal isn't to convince them, it's to stop them from reaching into their bag of conspiracy theories when talking to me. In that, it has been wildly successful.
I think that with my experience, I've had to recognize how fragile some of the most important incentives are. Like the safety that underpins trust. To have trust, it needs to be safe for people to be wrong. That means I often have to listen respectfully to views that I find abhorrent, in order to get to the point that I can share my own thoughts fully.
Of course they have? I'm sure you've seen pictures of miners back in the 19th century covered in soot? Why would the wealthy and powerful care about people who aren't them? You can't assume that everyone everywhere thinks "powerless people suffering and dying is wrong", that's quite demonstrably false. It might even be a plurality of people on earth who could not care less about the suffering of those outside of their immediate family and friends.
> I'm looking for an answer that doesn't assume that they're stupid or insane.
they just dont care! Why assume that people who ran for political office actually care about the welfare of others?
if the question is "why do this coal stuff when it's also unnecessary", well that gets into another MAGA value which is "dominance". That is, making people suffer and accept things that are horrible is also a big power play. Just watch any Game of Thrones episode for examples.
There is nothing you can do about this. The more you try to educate people the worse people fall back to it.
A lot is driven by contrarianism. They see what the other side wants and automatically fight for the opposite.
Among those who actually think deeper, they hold beliefs that putting restrictions on coal will make their energy bills explode or make industries in their town go out of business.
Some come from states with coal mining operations. They see the initiatives as an attack on their state.
There is also a lot of misinformation about clean energy. You can still find people who believe that it’s impossible to build enough solar or wind energy to make a difference so they believe it’s all just a scam to spend their tax dollars on useless ventures.
> I'm pretty sure they know how coal is mined. They must surely have heard about the black lung disease and COPD. Where does this 'clean coal' concept come from?
Modern mines are still somewhat dangerous but they’re not like the Zoolander style pickaxe and black lung operations you might have seen in history books. Modern mining relies heavily on machinery and many coal mines are surface operations. The number of humans involved has decreased every year for a long time while safety improves, much like how farming today doesn’t resemble farming of 100 years ago.
It’s not the safest industry, but arguing that we need to eliminate it to avoid black lung is going to be very unpersuasive to anyone in an area with mining operations.
They got bought out by coal and petroleum, so now they just lie to support them. I don't think anyone can legitimately believe these things.
They probably don’t understand or care why tuna and others parts of our food chain are contaminated by mercury.
Maybe they just want to join a team and beat up on the other team. The fossil-funded GOP tells them each liberal position is evil, so the MAGAs reflexively go against it all, even if it means mutual destruction.
When I was a kid, it was common knowledge (IIRC) that you couldn’t trust lawyers or politicians. It’s crazy to me how people nowadays are putting so much trust in politicians.
The USA is big, but China bigger. If the USA over optimizes on reducing greenhouse gas today, at the expense of our long term economic and world power, China, who cares for less about preserving the world will continue to destroy the world and claim the most power simultaneously.
So while we can reduce OUR footprint by taking ourselves out of the game, the world still loses.
So now try to find a less myopic solution where we remain powerful enough to get the whole world to tamper down their impacts.
We don't win by removing ourselves from the competition. And the competition has a high chance of killing us all. But rolling over is a guaranteed way to lose everything everywhere.
Oh and the prior commitments like the Paris accord were engineered to harm us while allowing China to dominate.
Who engineered them to harm us? You’re saying there’s a powerful pro-China cabal that designed the Paris accords on purpose to harm us and benefit China? Come on..
One example is airline miles. Americans travel 2000 miles by plane every year. In China the figure is 1000 miles. So your argument is basically "sure, we could stop traveling by plane, but if Chinese people travel an extra 50 miles a year that wipes out our progress." But that's a pretty poor argument to justify continuing to do 2000 miles/year, if you genuinely think the problem should be addressed.
If both countries reduced to 100 miles/year, it probably wouldn't be enough. But this is an ongoing choice all around. It's not reasonable to suggest that Chinese people have less individual need for air travel. Looking at contribution per country and not per person is not reasonable.
I'm not sure I follow this. If I was to summarise GenerocUsername's argument it would be "the Chinese government is less concerned with making their economy green, and if the US begins taking an economic/influence hit to make it's economy greener, it'll be yielding an economic advantage to China, which will canabalise more global industry in a non-green way, resulting in a net worse environmental outcome." They're claiming basically a fundamental ideological difference between the countries on climate change that, coupled with a claim of zero-sum international industry, means long term environmental outcomes are better if the US is a dominant international player today.
Sidestepping the argument itself which I believe has a number of key weaknesses (as outlined by others in the comments), can you go over how you're linking that to a devaluation of Chinese lives?
Essentially you're saying that the US should bully the Chinese people into increasing hardship because it's the only way to meet our climate goals.
The premises of your argument are refuted by facts.
A larger percentage of people in China (compared to the USA) believe climate change is a serious threat to humanity and support policies to tackle climate change. https://ourworldindata.org/climate-change-support
The US is much worse than China in terms of emissions per capita, both historically and today https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita
China also leads the world in tech that is crucial for the move away from fossil fuels (solar, wind, electric vehicles and batteries). You can easily look up evidence for this, if you feel any initial doubt.
This recent news article has a nice snippet on the current trajectory on climate change https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/24/china-doubles-down-... "China pledged Wednesday to cut its world-leading levels of climate pollution by up to 10 percent during the next decade — one day after U.S. President Donald Trump urged global leaders to abandon the effort to halt the Earth’s rising temperatures."
I wonder if this sort of thing has ever been tried.
He was ultimately assassinated in 44BC. I believe his name was Julius Caesar.
Probably led to his downfall. Augustus made sure to squash all potential sources of opposition before taking over.
Also it’s not like Caesar was the first to do what he did. He followed in the steps of a much more brutal and oppressive conservative/reactionary tyrant who almost had him executed a few decades ago.
Also Sulla and his opponents in the preceding civil war. Who paved the way for Cesar.
Sounds like S E C E S S I O N
Ideally the Federal gov't gets back into play, but we shouldn't plan for that future. It's a nice to have, but its a single point of failure. Especially if the Supreme Court doesn't believe in the independence of agencies anymore.
As an example, the American Academy of Pediatrics now has their own vaccine schedule, which they didn't have before. Nobody in their right mind trusts the CDC / FDA on this right now.
This same phenomenon shows why California will struggle to replace the federal government for funding basic research.
Every time Californians urge to give the federal government more power, even for "good" things, the rules of the game virtually demand it will be used against them. This might be a necessary evil for the bare minimums (military protection, federal court to settle contracts, enforcement of some federal laws), but I don't understand how Californians justify that every positive intention will be turned against them and carry on anyway.
In the US, the rich always win anyway. Full stop.
If you believe otherwise, I’m sorry to say, but you’ve probably not been paying attention.
Under the current administration, as under all administrations, it’s the poor and middle class states that have the problem.
The entire reason we have the senate is because the less populated slave states didn't want to get steam rolled by the the more populated northern free states. It was an anti-democracy measure to ensure low population regions get over-represented.
i.e. California for a very long time, and even on rare occasion today, is constantly harassed by the DEA over intrastate commerce of marijuana despite the federal government having no power to do so. Californians were basically made to fund the extra-constitutional enforcement against them voted for by other states with per-capita outsized votes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colonial_and_pre-Fed...
Virginia would had still been the most populous or at least second most populous state if only white people were counted.
Also there were plenty of small states in the Northeast with very small populations.
* Free states: 1,390,067
* Slave states: 1,390,302 - 500,000 = 890,302
> Still not that massive in relative terms
I don't know why you persist in saying this.
[1] https://userpages.umbc.edu/~bouton/History407/SlaveStats.htm
1780 is probably not the best year, though. e.g. New York was still a slave state. Of course the gap only grew bigger over time
Sclerotic severe gerrymandering of every seat in the House of Representatives, enabled by the Roberts Court, though, is new.
tl;dr: the Republican party recognized that demographic shifts were going to make them a permanent minority in the House, so they refused to re-apportion the number of house members after the 1920 census, then in 1929 decided to cap the number of representatives permanently.
The simple fix is to repeal the law and apportion seats properly, likely by significantly growing the size of the House.
However, in typical Democrat fashion, they never bothered repealing the act and re-apportioning properly once they had power to do so.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reapportionment_Act_of_1929
Mexico
You can replace the label "Conservative" there with just about any ideology or political leaning.
I think people on the left arguably did the same with various social justice initiatives. Things got crazier by the month for a while until people were genuinely afraid to speak, people were being cancelled for dubious reasons, etc. I recall long periods of needing to be very careful about how (not just what) I said to peers and even some friends. This was a very left-driven phenomenon. While it was started with arguably good intentions, it got weird.
The right has adopted this, ironically, though in a different way and for different reasons. In both cases it's about ideological purity and power, though
A lot of the other stuff, like actual policy, they're still pretty dug into. But IMO there's a greater proportion of that stuff on which they're just correct, so that's kinda respectable for me.
I'm not seeing that; not yet anyway.
I expected to see that after the disastrous election that demonstrated just how fringe some of those vocal views were, but I did not.
Is there much left in there besides extreme hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance? Their beliefs seem to be highly fluid and aligned with whatever the dear leader is saying at any given movement. Daily radical swings are not that uncommon..
The EPA was originally put into place by richard nixon as was championed in a bipartisan fashion.
This is rather silly, but then it is a rather silly regime.
If you want to understand why the US seems so uniquely politically divided, then you will understand once you understand how FPTP voting works and how it inevitably leads to binary politics. Most countries have a voting system that leads to broader representation. US politics will always be black and white and divided so long as FPTP voting is used.
There's a great video by cpg grey explaining FPTP: https://youtu.be/s7tWHJfhiyo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qf7ws2DF-zk
Keeping a democracy requires people to understand it as well. At least in US it seems they'd rather elect a dictator wannabe who clearly said he wanted to be dictator for a day than elect a woman.
Case in point - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBllzAb_vAk
Kevin Hall's study didn't find ultra processed foods being addictive like cocaine. It seemed to have rubbed the RFK MAHA agenda the wrong way.
Trump and co. are the biggest "snowflakes". Trump can't even take a question from a reporter he doesn't like without threatening them with prosecution... for asking a question.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/videos/maybe-trump-threatens-abc-...
Cheer2171•4mo ago
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/videos/the-most-transparent-admin...
shakna•4mo ago
nine_zeros•4mo ago
The real question is why are so many people completely willing to sell their country, community, and future to these liars?
Ask any trump voter and you'll find various racial nationalism answer to it.
lotsofpulp•4mo ago
nine_zeros•4mo ago
Downvoters: Prove that this administration is not corrupt and not hurting people instead of downvoting - or just accept the truth.
theossuary•4mo ago
tempodox•4mo ago