Most GOP folks believe in the absurd caricature of Democrats that Fox and the right-wing entertainment complex feeds them. It's time for them to start listening to us.
This thread puts forth a different view, one with which I wholeheartedly agree. It's the GOP and Trumpists who need to do the work and show us they want to live in society with us.
It’s hard to take these complaints seriously when the GOP called moderate Joe Biden a socialist. The GOP will call ANY dem a socialist. Run better campaigns and figure out how to sidestep it.
I thought about this more overnight, then I saw this thread, which gets at an important point. To paraphrase something originally said about conservatism, centrism never fails, it is always failed.
The GOP will lie and call every Dem a socialist. That's a fact. It isn't the fault of members of the Democratic party who use that term, it's the fault of people who aren't good enough at politics to turn it back on the GOP.
I like to summarize Brandolini's law as "it takes ten times longer to debunk nonsense than to create nonsense". It describes a fundamental asymmetry related to misinformation. ordrespontane.blogspot.com/2014/07/brando…
Here's a corollary to that "law": It is a thousand times harder to debunk nonsense than it is to SPREAD nonsense, making the debunking process even tougher and more time dependent.
This is just another way of saying what Jonathan Swift said in 1710: "Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect…" quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/tru…
There is some truth to this analysis, in the following sense: Both sides see the election as existential. The asymmetry, though, is that only one side is correct. The Trumpist/GOP believes many false and delusional things, and we need to reckon with that problem.
It's not enough to talk about how both sides feel about things, we need to analyze what motivates both sides' feelings.
Dems correctly see that science is being ignored, the pandemic is running rampant, the economy is in a shambles, and the Trumpist GOP is corrupting the democratic process enormously.
I had some fun digging back into our archives. The existence of a huge offshore wind potential in UK has been known for many years. The recent technology cost improvements are spectacular and impressive, and they've enabled more rapid tapping of that resource than anticipated.
In our technical potential analysis for the EC5 (Germany, France, Italy, Netherlands, and the UK) back in 1995 (!) we found that about 40% of total wind potential for those countries combined was in the UK offshore wind/coastal resource.
That was for 50 M hub height, and obviously the turbines have gotten much bigger, with much higher hub heights, bigger swept area, and higher capacity factors than anticipated back then.
We need an honest debate about the role of government in a modern society. Anyone who says that government needs to be "small enough to be drowned in a bathtub" must be excluded from that conversation. They are not good faith participants.
In a modern capitalist society, well-functioning government is a necessity. Otherwise we get lead in children's toys, poisoned rivers, salmonella in our chicken, workers hurt in unsafe factories, and an unstable climate. We know this from history and from the present.