This one Hutchinson is after spraying the room with bullets
Easy on the eye too
Mad to think some people used to argue with a straight face that Trump wasnât a fascist. Lolz.
The US supreme courtâs overturning of Roe v Wade was a direct attack on women. It will result in countless deaths, especially among vulnerable women, and it set civil liberties in the United States back by half a century. Now, the court has made yet another devastating decision for humanity.
In a 6-3 decision, the openly partisan and undemocratic court ruled in favor of a lawsuit brought by fossil-fuel-producing states against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The decision strips power from regulatory agencies and advances the Republican goal to end government oversight. In particular, it eliminates one of the only remaining avenues for systemic federal climate action: using the Clean Air Act to phase out fossil fuel power plants. As a result, it may now be mathematically impossible through available avenues for the US to achieve its goal of halving greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, which is anyway feeling dangerously unambitious in light of recent climate disasters.
In an era of crises, global heating increasingly stands out as the single greatest emergency humanity faces. Global heating is driving extreme heat, drought and flooding in the US and around the world. Itâs driving wildfire and ecosystem collapse, and may already be contributing to famine and warfare. Crucially, this is all worsening day by day, and it will continue to worsen until we end the fossil fuel industry.
The scientific consensus is that global carbon dioxide emissions must peak now (ie, between 2020 and 2025), and no new fossil fuel infrastructure can be built, if we are to preserve a two-thirds chance of keeping mean global heating below 2C. In my opinion, our current level of mean global heating of 1.3C is already obviously unsafe; 1.5C, which we are on track to reach in the early 2030s, would be catastrophic; and 2C, which we are on track to reach mid-century, could make global civilization as we know it impossible.
These are the stakes of this supreme court decision, which adds another layer on to already daunting strata of blocks to climate action. More than a quarter of members of Congress are still hard climate deniers. These 139 Republican members (more than half of the Republican total, including Mitch McConnell) have accepted $61m so far in direct contributions from the fossil fuel industry, not including âindirectâ support. Many other members of Congress also accept fossil fuel money, including Democrats; indeed, the politician who takes the most is Joe Manchin, and four of the top 10 are also Democrats.
In the White House, we have a president who has recently put fossil fuel expansion and lower gas prices at the top of his agenda, who barely mentioned climate in his first State of the Union address, who approved far more new drilling permits during his first year than Trump, and who has deep ties to the fossil fuel industry. Internationally, we have annual meetings which have failed us for 26 years, perhaps because they have been deeply compromised by the fossil fuel industry.
Conflict of interest, lobbying, bribery ⌠whatever you choose to call it, it amounts to the already rich further enriching themselves at enormous cost to humanity and the rest of life on Earth, and it extends all the way to the justices themselves. This is the intersection of a social system designed to concentrate wealth like a gravitational singularity (we call it âcapitalismâ) and fossil fuel power. For example, billionaire Charles Koch, who runs the worldâs largest privately held fossil fuel corporation, not only directly pushed for this decision, he campaigned to install the three new Republican justices in the first place. Rupert Murdoch has spent decades creating a worldwide climate denial media empire that includes Fox News. And fossil fuel executives have colluded for decades to prevent climate action with full knowledge of the consequences .
Without a livable planet, nothing else matters. As the Earthâs capacity to support life continues to degrade, millions, eventually billions of people will be displaced and die, fascism will rise, climate wars will intensify and the rule of law will break down. The myth of American exceptionalism will offer no protection from deadly heat and climate famine.
In the US we now live under the sway of robed, superstitious fools hellbent on rolling back basic civil liberties and rejecting scientific facts. Carl Sagan, warning against this sort of anti-science, wrote: âThe candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.â The consequences of ignoring scientists for too long are coming home to roost.
We desperately need a government working to stop Earthâs breakdown rather than accelerate it, but petitions or pleas to âvote harderâ will not make this happen. Due to capture by the ultra-rich, our only option is to fight. To shift society into emergency mode and end the fossil fuel industry, we must join together and do all we can to wake people up to the grave danger we are in. We must engage in climate disobedience. I believe that the tides could still turn, that power could shift suddenly. But this can only happen when enough people join the fight.
- Peter Kalmus is a climate scientist and author of Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution
7 Likes
Thatâs not real 
Wyomingâs was a dinger too
Liz Cheney for president
âThereâs a reason we donât invite Scottâ 
I think Scott is taking the piss to be fair
1 Like
Canât be real? Scott is Kenny Powers
Treat human life the way we treat alien life
A Cy Op
Perhaps it makes sense that women â those supposedly compliant and agreeable, self-sacrificing and everything-nice creatures â were the ones to finally bring our polarized country together.
Because the far right and the far left have found the one thing they can agree on: Women donât count.
The rightâs position here is the better known, the movement having aggressively dedicated itself to stripping women of fundamental rights for decades. Thanks in part to two Supreme Court justices who have been credibly accused of abusive behavior toward women, Roe v. Wade, nearly 50 years a target, has been ruthlessly overturned.
Far more bewildering has been the fringe left jumping in with its own perhaps unintentionally but effectively misogynist agenda. There was a time when campus groups and activist organizations advocated strenuously on behalf of women. Womenâs rights were human rights and something to fight for. Though the Equal Rights Amendment was never ratified, legal scholars and advocacy groups spent years working to otherwise establish women as a protected class.
But today, a number of academics, uber-progressives, transgender activists, civil liberties organizations and medical organizations are working toward an opposite end: to deny women their humanity, reducing them to a mix of body parts and gender stereotypes.
As reported by my colleague Michael Powell, even the word âwomenâ has become verboten. Previously a commonly understood term for half the worldâs population, the word had a specific meaning tied to genetics, biology, history, politics and culture. No longer. In its place are unwieldy terms like âpregnant people,â âmenstruatorsâ and âbodies with vaginas.â
Planned Parenthood, once a stalwart defender of womenâs rights, omits the word âwomenâ from its home page. NARAL Pro-Choice America has used âbirthing peopleâ in lieu of âwomen.â The American Civil Liberties Union, a longtime defender of womenâs rights, last month tweeted its outrage over the possible overturning of Roe v. Wade as a threat to several groups: âBlack, Indigenous and other people of color, the L.G.B.T.Q. community, immigrants, young people.â
It left out those threatened most of all: women. Talk about a bitter way to mark the 50th anniversary of Title IX.
The noble intent behind omitting the word âwomenâ is to make room for the relatively tiny number of transgender men and people identifying as nonbinary who retain aspects of female biological function and can conceive, give birth or breastfeed. But despite a spirit of inclusion, the result has been to shove women to the side.
Women, of course, have been accommodating. Theyâve welcomed transgender women into their organizations. Theyâve learned that to propose any space just for biological women in situations where the presence of males can be threatening or unfair â rape crisis centers, domestic abuse shelters, competitive sports â is currently viewed by some as exclusionary. If there are other marginalized people to fight for, itâs assumed women will be the ones to serve other peopleâs agendas rather than promote their own.
But, but, but. Can you blame the sisterhood for feeling a little nervous? For wincing at the presumption of acquiescence? For worrying about the broader implications? For wondering what kind of message we are sending to young girls about feeling good in their bodies, pride in their sex and the prospects of womanhood? For essentially ceding to another backlash?
Women didnât fight this long and this hard only to be told we couldnât call ourselves women anymore. This isnât just a semantic issue; itâs also a question of moral harm, an affront to our very sense of ourselves.
It wasnât so long ago â and in some places the belief persists â that women were considered a mere rib to Adamâs whole. Seeing women as their own complete entities, not just a collection of derivative parts, was an important part of the struggle for sexual equality.
But here we go again, parsing women into organs. Last year the British medical journal The Lancet patted itself on the back for a cover article on menstruation. Yet instead of mentioning the human beings who get to enjoy this monthly biological activity, the cover referred to âbodies with vaginas.â Itâs almost as if the other bits and bobs â uteruses, ovaries or even something relatively gender-neutral like brains â were inconsequential. That such things tend to be wrapped together in a human package with two X sex chromosomes is apparently unmentionable.
âWhat are we, chopped liver?â a woman might be tempted to joke, but in this organ-centric and largely humorless atmosphere, perhaps she would be wiser not to.
Those women who do publicly express mixed emotions or opposing views are often brutally denounced for asserting themselves. (Google the word âtransgenderâ combined with the name Martina Navratilova, J.K. Rowling or Kathleen Stock to get a withering sense.) They risk their jobs and their personal safety. They are maligned as somehow transphobic or labeled TERFs, a pejorative that may be unfamiliar to those who donât step onto this particular Twitter battlefield. Ostensibly shorthand for âtrans-exclusionary radical feminist,â which originally referred to a subgroup of the British feminist movement, âTERFâ has come to denote any woman, feminist or not, who persists in believing that while transgender women should be free to live their lives with dignity and respect, they are not identical to those who were born female and who have lived their entire lives as such, with all the biological trappings, societal and cultural expectations, economic realities and safety issues that involves.
But in a world of chosen gender identities, women as a biological category donât exist. Some might even call this kind of thing erasure.
When not defining women by body parts, misogynists on both ideological poles seem determined to reduce women to rigid gender stereotypes. The formula on the right we know well: Women are maternal and domestic â the feelers and the givers and the âDonât mind mes.â The unanticipated newcomers to such retrograde typecasting are the supposed progressives on the fringe left. In accordance with a newly embraced gender theory, they now propose that girls â gay or straight â who do not self-identify as feminine are somehow not fully girls. Gender identity workbooks created by transgender advocacy groups for use in schools offer children helpful diagrams suggesting that certain styles or behaviors are âmasculineâ and others âfeminine.â
Didnât we ditch those straitened categories in the â70s?
The womenâs movement and the gay rights movement, after all, tried to free the sexes from the construct of gender, with its antiquated notions of masculinity and femininity, to accept all women for who they are, whether tomboy, girly girl or butch dyke. To undo all this is to lose hard-won ground for women â and for men, too.
Those on the right who are threatened by womenâs equality have always fought fiercely to put women back in their place. What has been disheartening is that some on the fringe left have been equally dismissive, resorting to bullying, threats of violence, public shaming and other scare tactics when women try to reassert that right. The effect is to curtail discussion of womenâs issues in the public sphere.
But women are not the enemy here. Consider that in the real world, most violence against trans men and women is committed by men but, in the online world and in the academy, most of the ire at those who balk at this new gender ideology seems to be directed at women.
Itâs heartbreaking. And itâs counterproductive.
Tolerance for one group need not mean intolerance for another. We can respect transgender women without castigating females who point out that biological women still constitute a category of their own â with their own specific needs and prerogatives.
If only womenâs voices were routinely welcomed and respected on these issues. But whether Trumpist or traditionalist, fringe left activist or academic ideologue, misogynists from both extremes of the political spectrum relish equally the power to shut women up.
64% of democrats dont want teleprompter to run in the 2024 presidential race. God knows what state of cognitive decline he will be in by that stage or even the shape of the world. Would Gavin Newsom be a safe bet for Democrats? It will probably be DeSantis on the other side.
Elon and the Donald seem to be having a spat. Two egomaniacs. The Joe Rogan crew wonât know what way to look
Sheâs the best of the republicans but Trumpâs base hate her. If she was somehow the republican nominee sheâd be a shoo in as will appeal to all the middle ground swing voters.
Theyâll have to listen to the four hour podcast a few times first to have their minds made up for them.
She wonât get within an asses roar of a nomination
She wonât even win the nomination for her house seat. Saying Biden won the election is a disqualifying offence.