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Tom Calarco's avatar

Much of this newsletter with out-of-context quotes from forgotten literature and no elaboration went over my heard, to be honest.

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Blackthorn's avatar

And, re "It's the trauma stupid": there's been a lot of inconclusive back-and-forth as to whether Trump voters are genuinely economically aggrieved or just greedy, racist or otherwise wicked. I won't dive into that here. But speaking of trauma, remember that 80s-90s term "going postal"? Meaning there had emerged an archetype of the lowly, aggrieved postal worker who eventually showed up at work with an assault rifle? The current regime has suddenly created tens of thousands of lowly aggrieved ex-civil servants. How many of them will go postal?

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Blackthorn's avatar

Re the chart of atmospheric carbon and temperature: I somehow was not aware of this Eemian peak about 120,000 years ago. +6°C!! This raises many questions: what triggered the carbon burst? How did it and the consequent temperatures recede in relatively short order? Why didn't it make itself permanent by setting off the series of feedback loops we now have, such as loss of polar-ice albedo and burning of forests? (Whence comes this graph? It's not in Glen Peters' BlueSky post nor the NOAA page to which he links, which thankfully is still up for the moment.)

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the suck of sorrow's avatar

The H.L. Mencken quote is particularly apt for this last Presidential election in that the Republicans actually had a competitive primary. Those rooting for Team Blue had a billionaire vetted candidate.

As for "... getting it good and hard" I imagine that Trump voters did not expect the giving for that getting to be so uniformly distributed.

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Thomas Neuburger's avatar

I don't particularly blame Trump voters. We're all "getting it good and hard," both before and since the election. If Democrats had allowed Left solutions, people wouldn't be seeking them, in such great numbers, from deceptive Right.

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the suck of sorrow's avatar

I don't blame Trump voters either.

As I said, the getting is uniformly distributed.

However, if any Democratic administration in my adult* life had prioritized giving concrete material benefits uniformly to those residing in this country, then our nation would not be on the cusp of martial law now.

So the blame I assess gets directed towards the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional leadership that did not listen to the multitudes voicing distress.

*(21 in 1974, but part of the 18-20 year old cohort that was the first eligible to vote in 1972.)

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