I appreciate your argument, but I don't share your alarm.

Displaced by sea level rise (which would be a gradual thing, but I agree very serious), combined with droughts/floods might potentially fall under "decimation". But only, I think, to the historical definition of 10% dead. Include wars resulting from territory and resource squabbles (should that count as fallout of climate change?), and it could be (much) worse. But still not on a 4-year timescale.

Second, if we're already "way past the tipping point", it logically follows that blame for that can't really be laid on Trump. His policies can certainly make things worse, but I think that 4 years of terrible climate policy in ONE country on Earth (granted, a country with a lot of influence) simply aren't going to be catastrophically, drastically worse than 4 years of magically ideal climate policy (even in a hypothetical scenario where Nader or Stein or Clinton or whatever ideal person was president and could dictate perfect climate policy without being filtered by congress).


So to answer your question, basically no, I don't think that "raising our emission levels exponentially while advocating closed borders will have an irreversible negative effect on the planet and humanity."

One, "exponentially" is an exaggeration. US emissions under Trump won't be an order of magnitude higher than they were under Obama, or would have been under Clinton. In the range of 10% to 50% higher seems well possible, but 100% higher (double) would be next to impossible. Worse, yes. Exponentially worse, no.

Two, "irreversible" is a word I would hesitate to use because it carries an implication that there is some magic bullet to immediately fix things. If a plague wiped humanity off the face of the Earth tomorrow, it would take some time for climate to adjust to pre-industrial levels. Like you said, it might take 25-50 years before things even could start getting better. But eventually, it could be mostly like we were never here. Some things about climate would never be the same, but in broad terms, things could get back to "normal" eventually.

On the other hand, if the plague wipes us all out on the last day of Trump's 4 years in office, it might take longer for that adjustment to happen. But not by a comparatively massive margin. So that's why I dislike "irreversible"; depending on what timescale you are referencing things are either already irreversible, or pretty close to a statistical wash (what's another 4 years in a recovery timeline of 250 years, or 100 in 10000?), or not worth worrying about at all (on a geological timescale that doesn't care 2 cents about things like species extinctions). Does that make sense?

Finally, "negative effect on the planet and humanity" is something that I totally agree with. And that negative effect will be real and significant. But I don't think that the walking disaster that is Trump will make things inescapably, horrifically worse. Not enough worse that it makes a persuasive argument to me that I should have voted for Clinton (again, I didn't vote for Trump, but I didn't vote for Clinton either).

I dunno. Maybe I'm a cockeyed optimist.

"Literally doom the human race."

I used to be a global warming denier, then a skeptic. I've come around that it is real and that it is caused in large part by human actions. I do admit that I'm still a bit skeptical about how catastrophic it would be to do nothing. Doom the human race? Nah. Decimate the human race (literal/historical definition of "decimate" meaning 10% dead)? Possible, but I think unlikely -- extremely unlikely unless deaths by famine/disease are wholly attributed to climate change. Lots and lots of people displaced over the next 100-200 years if, say, all polar and glacial ice melted (resulting in a ~70 meter sea level rise)? For sure. But they won't drown unless they are incapable of moving away from the ocean at a rate of at least a few meters per year.

In climate terms, a 4 year presidential term is a fraction of a second. In geological terms, 4 years is absolutely nothing. If the (admittedly terrible) climate policies of any single person, even one as powerful as the "leader of the free world" President of the United States over 4 years could literally doom the human race, we'd have been dead a LONG time ago.

I'm not saying it isn't important, and that it won't matter at all what Trump does with regards to climate, the EPA, etc. But even if you limit the timescale to sensible human terms (say, since the Industrial Revolution roughly 250 years ago), another 4 years, no matter how bad, aren't going to throw us over some sort of unrecoverable tipping point.

Umm... it didn't stop... if it had just stopped this would be a non-issue. That was a catastrophic failure.

A snippet from Lord Beveridge's "Full Employment in a Free Society":

The proposition that there should always be more vacant jobs than unemployed men means that the labour market should always be a seller’s market rather than a buyer’s market. For this, on the view of society underlying this Report — that society exists for the individual — there is a decisive reason of principle. The reason is that difficulty in selling labour has consequences of a different order of harmfulness from those associated with difficulty in buying labour. A person who has difficulty in buying the labour he wants suffers inconvenience or reduction in profits. A person who cannot sell his labour is, in effect, told that he is of no use. The first difficulty causes annoyance or loss. The other is a personal catastrophe. This difference remains even if an adequate income is provided by insurance or otherwise, during unemployment; the idleness even on an income corrupts; the feeling of not being wanted demoralizes. The difference remains even if most people are unemployed only for relatively short periods. As long as there is any long-term unemployment not obviously due to personal deficiency, anybody who loses his job fears that he may be one of the unlucky ones who will not get another job quickly. The short-term unemployed do not know that they are short-term unemployed till their unemployment is over.

Wow. Aren't you embarrassed that someone as incompetent as Spicer is representing your side? He's so clearly out of his depth, and he has engendered a catastrophically adversarial relationship with the media. Politics aside, Spicer is just someone who doesn't seem to be very good at his job, and he is a major contributor to what makes the Trump administration look so haphazard and bullish. He's a liability to your team.

TL;DR - he is bad and you should feel bad.

Never forget. Trump won by 70,000 votes. And lost the popular vote by over 3,000,000 votes. To say that these pundits' "entire analytical framework was drastically and catastrophically faulty" is totally wrong. They were wrong by whatever percentage of the total votes 70,000 votes is. Or maybe double that, to cement a Clinton lead. So they were wrong by 140,000 / 138,884,643 = 0.00100803081 so

They were wrong by 0.10%.

And based on the population who voted they were right by (Clinton's votes: 65,844,610) - (Trump votes: 62,979,636) = 2,864,974 votes / 138,884,643 = 0.02062844341.

They were right by 2.06%. They were over 20 times more right than they were wrong.

Also, regarding Economic and Racial anxiety, BOTH were correlated as predictors of support for Trump. That does not mean that every person who was Economically anxious was also Racially anxious but I would bet those populations do overlap somewhat, partly because the question isn't just 'Are you economically anxious?' but 'Are you economically anxious while Barack Obama is in the White House?'

I don't necessarily feel dumber having watched this video, but it's clearly very biased, and I do feel like it was a waste of my time to see it. The video's writer is obviously just looking to name a few Liberal up and comers and attempt to cut them down.

Also, consider the post source. @bobknight33 is as Russian-trolly as Russian trolls get. This is exactly the kind of right-wing propaganda they love to use to bash Liberals in America and push them further towards their wing.

Pretty much interview scripted by Putin personally.

Why the drama about US - russian relations if the russians supposedly are not dangerous and Putin is not evil.

Building a case to sell Poland and the Baltic countries to Putin. Worked like a charm with Hitler and Czechoslovakia before WWII. Poland these days does not even have a border with Russia proper, only with what used to be Koenigsberg. Poland is part of NATO and if Abby and her friend the professor want to give that up then it is them who are pushing us all closer to a war (cold or not).

Ukraine has already exploded. Putin has already taken 1/3 of the country breaking bilateral treaties. Cant get much worse, hard to imagine how the US can get involved, Trump notwithstanding.

Syria - its basically over, except for the humanitarian and human rights catastrophe. Putins ally won - a slightly pyrrhic victory perhaps, but for the meantime Assad stays. Did they level cities or liberate them? Hard to tell the difference. Probably both. That said US involvement in the middle east is a grave shitstorm.

This awesome "analysis" somehow misses the biggest current problem of NATO - Turkey - possibly because Putin does not have a good handle on Turkey yet so its off-limits. Also Pakistan/India and North Korea does not get a mention for the same reason - no chance to push Putins agenda.

NATO might have reassured Gorby it had no intention to spread. It is important to understand that Warsaw pact countries generally accepted Russians as saviours from German occupation, by the 1970s this had changed firmly to perceiving Russians as occupants, political persecutors and economic idiots.

After the economic collapse of the USSR (supposedly somehow caused by Ronald Reagan :-) all these countries needed reassurance that the Russians were not coming back. The only possible reassurance was joining NATO. If that meant breaking a promise made to an ex-representative of a no longer existing country, that is fine by me. If NATO had promised not to spread to Mother Theresa I would be more concerned.

The problem with the Ukraine is that we (EU) made an offer that put them in danger (from Putin) and we could not back that up with real economic or military assistance. Dumb move. But also Ukrainian politics is an incredible mess and simply too many ethnic russians live there giving Putin a strong nationalist base.

@worm
tort reform.
which is not unreasonable,considering it spawned its own cottage industry:ambulance chasers.
and i can agree,in principle,for catastrophic insurance.

but i still think if you are going to do it,don't be a pussy about it.
single payer all the way and we already have a system in place to accommodate single payer.

I'm all for free markets and free market solutions. My only problem with that as it applies to the medical industry is emergency and catastrophic situations, where you cannot price-shop and compare hospitals on the way to the emergency room.

In THOSE cases, the only way you can shop free market style, is insurance (or single payer I suppose, if you believe in Government products).

I still say if you want to get medical insurance costs down then the number one priority should be to find a way to make suing the medical industry for EVERYTHING not so profitable. I honestly don't know the solution to this, but it MUST be figured out and solved. As long as every patient walking through the door is a potential multi-million dollar lawsuit liability, medical costs are just going to keep climbing.

Figure that out, and allow the insurance industry to offer Catastrophic-only insurance policies. People really should be paying for their own doctor visits for the little things. The only way to make the free markets work is by knowing what you are paying for...

*quality *doublepromote

This is what we've fucking sunk to.

Remember John Olivers "look way up, you'll see rock bottom" bit?

We have now fallen so far that we have looped around the universe in some bizarre space-time weirdness and are now plummetting toward rock bottom again from the other end of the universe, calmly waiting for the sweet relief of oblivion as we smash face first into catastrophe.

Are you familiar with Zheng He? He led expeditions to east Africa in the early 1400s. Nobody in east Africa speaks chinese.
Of course you know Christopher Columbus. All of south America speaks spanish now. With the exception of Brazil, they speak portuguese thanks to some Pope, if I remember correctly.
That's what I'm talking about.
It's not the genes, it's not even the corruptive nature of power, it is culture. European culture. The only way we started to begin to understand the error of our ways was to wage two catastrophic wars against each other that destroyed our continent to an unseen extent. Sadly, we exported that toxic element of our culture to another continent. Just look at recent elections.

And in regards to the whitewashing of this IP, well, Hollywood doesn't trust its audience to embrace a more colorful world. It's gotten better but it's still a long way to go. At least we're going there. I just wish we'd hurry up a bit. I'm still baffeled about that Airbender movie and how they fucked up casting that so badly.
I like Johansson but she makes as much sense in that role as a black James Bond. It one of the things that make me hope the movie is good despite of it.

One of the great intellectual catastrophes of the modern world, and probably the harbinger of the ultimate doom of our civilisation, is the collapse in the distinction between 'compare to' and 'equate with'. We can reasonably compare almost anything to almost anything else, and how unfortunate that we can expect immediately to be confronted by some aggrieved outrage-peddler who imagines they have a right to find the comparison insulting.

It is a literal fact that any group of two or more people, or living things, or indeed most objects of any kind, will possess some internal differences. As a matter of certain truth, not subject to doubt, muslims share with rats and serial killers the trait that they evince diversity of behaviour and belief. This demonstrates the total banality of the 'but they're all different' argument. It's not for their differences that these groups are disliked.

That's probably enough of a lesson for one day, and certainly @oritteropo ought to know better. I don't want to take the trouble to argue deranged claims like 'there are muslims who don't believe in god', or tiresome diversions on how christians and other jews can be just as bad, or to debate the relative merits of various religiously mandated dress codes; but you are right about one thing @SDGundamX: I would much prefer that islamic violence and oppression were a harmless and overblown bogey, but ethics is not a children's game - these are real people, with real victims, and too many of both.

The Dreadful Chronology of Gaddafi’s Murder

"Much has been written about the catastrophe visited upon Libya following the murderous attack by France and the US—400,000 people driven from their homes, an endless cycle of terror and reprisal, the creation of yet another failed state in the wake of a US foreign policy initiative. But the real damage was done to Africa itself, for had Gaddafi’s proposal for a trans-African banking system reached fruition, that unhappy continent for the first time in centuries would have had true freedom and real independence within its grasp, a circumstance the Western powers could not abide. Freedom and justice were never part of the West’s agenda."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6pN6x6pGwA

"This idea that somehow we've got to opt for neoliberal disaster as the only option vis-á-vis the neofascist catastrophe -- as a blues man, I appreciate you playing that blues."

I just love Cornel West.

Cheers for the talking down-to at a personal level mate, really top notch community member.

A single bullet aimed at a skyscraper wont bring it and all its inhabitants into a catastrophic implosion event.

Conflating the two is just a touch silly, no?