Okay, so like…the green skills are stupid.

These could be technical skills relevant to renewable industries (knowing how to preserve water systems or install heat pumps for example), or broader skills such as climate action planning, corporate sustainability, sustainable procurement, sustainability reporting and impact assessment

Corporate sustainability?! Come the fuck on.

I got one.

Boomers are desperate to be good people but the experience of a whole three generations after them said they are so underskilled they actually pose a ‘risk’ to democracy.

Exactly. That’s exactly what OP is saying.

What’s the roadblock? Oh, of course, corporate heavy-handedness against the government:

This year, a former Caltrans executive said she was demoted after raising concerns about a repaving project that surreptitiously widened 3½ miles of the freeway where the toll lanes were being proposed. That project removed bushes and paved the median, creating more space for lanes. State regulations demand environmental analysis, a public airing and mitigation before major freeway widening, but none of that occurred.

Surprise surprise!

It’s like a double negative in my head, and it’s very confusing

Because activists like them are known for rollin’!

Declare bankruptcy and rinse and repeat.

Yeah, I get it. It’s really hard to understand. It’s just basic respect, right? How could someone not value basic human decency?

I can’t answer that question. All I know is that some people just don’t.

It doesn’t make sense to me that domestic abusers will beat up someone that loves them, yet it still happens. Politicians push legislation that they know will hurt their constituents, yet they still push it. Parents will try to force the lifestyle they desire for their children on their children out of love, even as it alienates their children, yet they persist. Some (many/all??) criminals know what they do hurts other people, yet they still commit crime.

I don’t get it either. I only know basic human decency isn’t valued by a lot of people. And you can indignantly scoff at such people all you want, incredulous that they just don’t get the basics of empathy, a fundamental human emotion. They’ll hurt others all the same.

Me, though? Drawing on my empathy, I hope such people find the happiness and freedom they’re looking for without the pain and suffering they cause.

This is going to be counter intuitive: being a POS is something some people want. They especially want it if it promises them comfort, luxury, or status.

I mean, look at all the trash people consume everyday despite how bad it is for them. We all know it’s bad. Still, we gotta have it.

Being a POS is like drinking soda with no one to tout the benefits of drinking straight H2O. The left needs to make drinking water sexy!

Me too! I plan on doing a PhD sometime in my 40s, before I turn 50.

It sounds good if you don’t think about anything

Exactly. Don’t uphold the law to avoid being shamed by Republicans. Do it because it’s the right thing to do and because it’s extremely important to the integrity of our society.

Who cares if they do? They literally lie to slander the “radical left” as they call it. They’re shameless and half the eligible voters are too.

That’s too broad sighted. They don’t care about the country. They’d be plutocrats of a well with a Korean curse on it if meant they had more water than the poors.

More the love of money is the root of all evil

I’d like to ride up front please!

From your link:

With the creation of the Socialist Party of America, this group formed the core of an element that favored reformism rather than revolution, de-emphasizing social theory and revolutionary rhetoric in favor of honest government and efforts to improve public health.

I think you’re both wrong and right. People do recognize the necessity of producing and consuming less. But that doesn’t necessarily lead to degrowth’s proposed goals.

But focusing on the goals as such is the more effective approach. If we want people to consume less, then we should give them a reason to do so. A day spent at an animal festival (just randomly off the top of my head) is one less spent doom scrolling and buying something from Amazon and is fun af.

Why people consume less matters less than that they do so, imho.

Hence, given the immediate relevance of the monetary growth imperative for degrowth, one would expect that degrowth scholarship would feature the issue of money rather prominently. The same is true for the development of concrete policies addressing distributional issues or monetary system design. However, a lack of concrete policy proposals from the degrowth literature has been lamented repeatedly over the years in different contexts…

This is my criticism of most leftist ideas: how do you get from here to there? Most of the stuff I’ve read on degrowth is often about why it matters based on the result it’s intended to science, as if people aren’t taking the idea seriously enough. But there’s so little on how to get from here to there, what should happen if we do take the idea seriously.

Sometimes, I forget how awful Trump is.

He can say true truly outrageous things and then somehow have them written off as less important than they really are because the media reports on it.

LOL, I hope they ban it.

I love women, and a ban would galvanize them like abortion did in 2022. And then Clarence Thomas can die, Biden or Harris, whichever is alive at the time, can replace him with a young upstart progressive and then get shit done and undo the absolute bullshit that’s been going on for the last four years.

For once, I sincerely hope they obey their evil corporate masters.

Can you explain to me how this is a joke?

His audience laughed because they’re dumb. But to me, this looks like the negging thing where you anticipate being called out for your insult and say “It’s a joke. It’s just a joke!”

It’s insane how we’ve relied far too long on a sort of gentleman’s agreement around presidents and congress and all. I don’t think the founding fathers could have EVER anticipated the amount of corruption that could occur.

They did. The entire point of the structure of Congress was to ensure that the passions of the people were tempered and “cooled” through the political process. Between competition between the three branches and the structure of government, they did their best to ensure this wouldn’t happen.

What they didn’t anticipate was that competition would give way to collaboration among so many competing elements. From state legislatures to the federal House and Senate, across to the Supreme Court (intended to be insulated from political generally to focus on the well-being of the nation), and across again to the president. Those stars shouldn’t align all that often. But anti-American authoritarians, the underhanded bastards they are, have made it so that those stars align more often than not for their political goals.

So, that’s the problem. What do you do when all the elements of the government are working together? Sure, Trump absolutely abused his position, but so what? We’re barely holding any of these anti-Constitutional people responsible for the damage they’ve done to the political process and democracy in general.