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Society is polarized but our politicians don’t reflect that. The options are too close to each other and they are too far towards the right’s delusions, not close enough to the left’s clear analyses of real problems (mainly climate change).
The convo is that we’re too polarized these days and it is true that that’s a big problem, because it’s hard to see a reconciliatory road forward. I had a terf friend and I loved her and I wanted to have patience with her and see her come home, come out of that gc cult, but in the end we had a falling out when she found out I had been excluding her from things in order to protect my queer friends from her and now we haven’t spoken in years. The solution cannot be that the camps must kill each other. We must reconciliate because living apart isn’t an option either since climate change requires a universal solution because local actions, like drilling and burning, have global consequences.
There are two different media camps. Or three, rather. One with MAGA lies and propaganda, one looking at the real problem and the real facts, and in between there’s a bulwark of false balance.
That’s something we’ve got to fix, and media is a huge part of the problem here, and by media I mean all media from CNN to WhatsApp to Telegram to Trump Social.
I wanna see a media that’s better at telling the hard climate truths and politics with real options, not just greenwashed weaksauce symbolic gesture theater.
Filter bubbles and FPTP election systems are two of the many well-studied factors that are driving polarization. There’s also that they’re running out of arguments for why the rich “deserves” to get richer and are now instead going after a more delusional crowd of science denial and panic.
But this is counteracted on the actual political stage by a process that drives political opponents closer to each other. Imagine an ice cream seller on a beach. Her lil’ stand is pretty far to the north. Like, the beach stretches 1000 feet from south to north and her stand is 980 feet from the southern edge of the beach and 20 feet from the northern edge. Then a new competing seller shows up. Where is it most optimal for him to place his ice cream stand? Turns out that there’s a lot of factors driving him to place it 979 feet from the southern edge. Just next to the other seller. That gives him a huge edge on all the ice-cream shoppers on his southern side, and the established seller only has an advantage towards the ice-cream shoppers on those 20 feet north of her. This is also why the only two Vietnamese restaurants in our li’l town are competing next to each other.
I’m not saying Biden and the DNC have slithered all the way right next to Trump. Both-sides-do-it–ers often overexaggerate the similarities. Overshooting is a real risk and unlike the ice cream example there’s still a real value in actual political differentiation. But I still see it as the Overton window being pushed way too far towards the right and way too narrow.
This is also why I’m gonna endorse Biden even though his head is fried and his politics suck and his four terms were among the worst four years in history (in terms of CO₂e PPM in the sky with diamonds). Because even though his ice cream stand is way too far away, a schlep pretty much all the way into Mordor, it’s still the closest ice cream stand. Trump’s second term is gonna be worse:
Trump’s Second Term: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) - YouTube
Unlike freons and Y2K, this climate crisis is getting delayed and cheated on since there are so many more actors with a guilty finger in the pie, who are trying to remain the richest on the cinder, who are still sawing on the branch we’re sitting on. There are game theory explanations for why this is so which is why we need to step up regulate the heck out of this, leave it all in the ground and introduce energy rationing.
We need election reform and we need to sort out the media issue since elections aren’t the entire story. In Sweden we don’t even have FPTP. We have proportional representation. But even here I still see some of the same junk coming from both sides. Andersson cozying up to nationalist identity crush-​the-​gangs-​and-​back-​the-​blue politics, Dadgostar courting the gasoline populists on the outer right. Listening to the debates here, it’s more like an agreement fest than anything else, it’s heartbreaking when we need a radical approach to actually solving climate change. We took covid so seriously (well, not Sweden or Florida but some other countries did) so let’s please take climate change just as seriously since it’s an even bigger danger. I was frustrated with Svantesson and Busch being all like “let’s just build some nuke plants so everyone can have a car” a few years back and now here’s their supposed political opponent pushing the same ideal.
There’s a lot of room to grow since election participation is so low. It shouldn’t have to be like this.
The free market is an embarrassment