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But How Will You Pay For It?
This post stems out of a conversation at the work lunch table. Someone brought up that Brooklyn Bug-Eye’s economic illiteracy. “We’ve chased Amazon away! That’s three billion in tax incentives that we can spend elsewhere!” Not quite how that works. The discussion moved on to banning cow farts and air travel and so forth. I’ll spare you the details, you’ve heard ’em all before. The problem is that by the time you get to how you’re going to pay for such a thing you’ve already lost the argument.
Here, let’s have Rachael Carson tell it.
Rachael Carson:
It is not half so important to know as to feel.
From a game @MattBalzer and I were developing.
By the time the right winger gets to the question of paying for a thing he’s no longer speaking the same language as the leftist. Your right-winger is considering the question “Is this a good idea?”; the leftist is asking “Is this a good thing?” She’s considering the quality of the objective, and not whether the means taken to get to that objective is appropriate or even doing more good than harm. The right-winger looks at the Green New Deal and asks “is this remotely possible?” He decides it’s nonsense and laughs at it as such. The leftist asks “is this a step in the right direction?” She answers “Yes”, and favors the proposal even if she doesn’t expect it to go anywhere, or achieve it’s goals. As long as the heart is in the right place.
Knowing and Feeling
There’s a tendency among the right to dismiss leftist emotionalism as worthless. In the same way that I, as a smart-alecky little brat, decided that logic was superior to everything because I was good at it, or the way that dentists think that proper flossing is the key to happiness. Logic is important, but so is emotion too. If your logic leads you to a conclusion that your gut is telling you is awful then you’ve got good reason to go back over your logic. Somewhere along the line, you’ve slipped a syllogism, or one of your postulates is less true than you want to believe.
On the flip side, you can’t just believe that everything is true that you want to be true. That leads to madness, in a literal sense. The best way to go through things is to know what your postulates are, and when someone disagrees with your postulates take the possibility into account that they might be right and you might be wrong. Consider their logic, their point of view, and most of the time you’ll still come away believing what you did beforehand, but you’ll always learn something. This takes work, and maturity, and is largely an unpopular approach. It’s much easier to just talk past each other.
Arguing with the Left
What you say is “Our best research tells us that Pre-k education doesn’t actually improve outcomes for kids; we’d be better off spending that money elsewhere. What a leftist hears is “I think kids are less valuable than money” which she quite reasonably takes to mean that you’re evil. Who doesn’t like children?
It doesn’t matter that the Green New Deal is completely unworkable, or that DDT wiped out malaria in these United States, or that throwing money at schools doesn’t actually improve the education they provide, or that taxing the rich doesn’t make enough money to provide for things, or that cutting greenhouse gases to the level we’re told is necessary would reduce our quality of life a heck of a lot more than merely dealing with the consequences of any Global Warming as those consequences arise. It doesn’t matter what sources or data or logic you have; you’ve already classified yourself as a hater and hence unworthy of being listened to.
And on the right? I doubt I have to describe this to you; you know how you react to leftists. Idiots who haven’t thought their bad ideas through to their inevitably disastrous conclusion. No point in listening to them because none of their ideas add up. Right? Right? And that’s even when we agree on the conclusion. Try this same discussion over gun control; it only gets worse.
This becomes a serious problem because you can’t deal with bad people. A leftist won’t ever listen to you if she’s dismissed you as evil. There’s no compromising with evil. It’s okay to punch fascists, right? And a right-winger dismisses any ideas which are so ludicrously impractical. People don’t believe the other guy has anything worth saying and simply don’t listen anymore. More than almost anything else this literal inability of the Left and Right to communicate makes me think the coming Civil War is inevitable.
This is the part of the post where I pivot from explaining the problem to discussing how to solve it
If you’ve been following my previous posts about politics you’ll probably be able to guess my answer. “What do we do about this? I don’t know.” Let’s run down the possibilities, shall we?
We could listen to the left more. It’s always good to understand the other side, where they’re coming from, and how they work. That won’t solve the problem. Once you’re listening to them, you’ve got two options; either to agree, which is surrender, or to argue the points with them. Which is ineffective, because they think you’re evil.
We could learn to speak their language. You voice your concerns with their proposals in words they’ll understand. If they don’t think you’re evil right off the bat they’ll listen to you and… decide you’re evil anyway because you keep telling them not to do the things they think are good.
We can convince them to avoid the government as a solution to problems. A leftist trying to make the world a better place without calling down the power of the government on all who oppose them can be a really good thing. You can still help people working towards an impossible goal and never actually getting there. It doesn’t become oppressive until you’re coercing other people into helping you or paying for you. Except getting the government to work on a social problem is always easier than working on the problem yourself. And so I’ve got no idea how to convince a leftist that that’s a bad idea because all the reasons why it’s a bad idea come from the right side of the aisle. That is, they all have to do with reasons why the project will lead to bad consequences in the end, and they have nothing to do with why the goal might not be a good thing in the first place.
We can convince them that their grand designs are impractical and that they’ve got to worry about what will work as opposed to just what’s aimed at a good goal. This is called being ‘mugged by reality’, and once you’ve convinced someone of that then they ain’t a leftist anymore. If we could do that wholesale we would have done so already.
There’s a commonality in all these failed solutions; they all describe what we can do. None of them require any action from the left. That’s the thing about communication; you need two parties to want to communicate before anything happens. I don’t know of any way of compelling leftists to want to communicate short of outright violence. And the left has so thoroughly convinced itself that we’re all racists and evil and whatnot that I don’t see anything on their side which gives them any reason to want to communicate with us. When you can’t negotiate then your options boil down to power plays; political chicanery, street fighting, and eventually revolution.
Do you see why I worry that Civil War is inevitable?
Published in Politics
Where did I get that Joan Rivers quote, and why all caps? Here is the story and here is the audio.
Wish they could produce and package her gumption! She was fearless!
Except that’s not really true.
She may have “quoted” the government, but she did so selectively. Ditto for industry research.
The actual science said that DDT didn’t cause cancer or the other things Carson blamed on it. The only reason it got banned was that an EPA administrator went against all of the actual scientists at the EPA.
Carson used, as part of her “proof,” people who used DDT and died of cancer or leukemia within a month. This is absolutely impossible.
The rest of Silent Spring is riddled with such errors.
DDT causing the eggshells of eagles to become thinner?
Nope. No causal link there, either.
Basically, due to the outlawing of DDT, Rachel Carson has joined the ranks of the worst mass-murderers in history.
I found the book on Google books and ran a search for the word “month.” It does not appear the way you’ve cited here. The first three mentions of the word were about animals. Mention 6 is about birds, and mention 7 is about the book’s publication history. Mentions 4 and 5 read thus:
Running a second search for the word “leukemia” and then getting to page 229 to get the rest of the paragraph:
I don’t know how it was treated or what the survival rates were in the late 1950s or early 1960s, but it remains a deadly disease.
I became a fan of Carson when I moved to Cape Cod 35 years ago and read her books The Sea Around Us and At the Edge of Sea. I enjoyed both of them enormously. Then the EPA and the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority (MWRA) decided it would be a good idea to start pumping its only partially treated sewage from Metropolitan Boston’s 43 cities and towns into what was at the time pristine Cape Cod Bay. In the early 1990s I joined an organization to fight this action. I was involved for a few years with this effort and lawsuit, which we lost, and at that time I was reading an enormous number of science and biology papers, books, and articles. I also picked up Silent Spring. I found her discussion of how petroleum-based chemicals interacted with animal and human cells accurate at least in the way I understand cell metabolism and replication.
The fact that the EPA and MWRA were even considering pumping sewage into Massachusetts Bay from where they knew the currents would take it to Cape Cod Bay is all I need to say to illustrate my point that the very people on the Left citing Carson’s work have either never read it nor ever understood it.
I was very impressed with her work. I can’t say for sure whether it contained errors. I didn’t have the resources to follow her footsteps through the studies she cited.
I would love to see DDT brought back. Mosquitoes and ticks remain threats to human health.
One thing I can say for sure is that she never called for DDT to be banned completely.
I do not believe she is a mass murderer.
We’ll have to agree to disagree on this.
Now, there was research, eventually, suggesting that heavy metals were accumulating in egg shells, making them more brittle. So, man-made pollution may have been to blame, but the DDT panic may have misdirected our efforts. So, this misdirection may have endangered BOTH “endangered species” and inconvenient dark skinned people who white watermelon leftists thought were burdening the planet with their birthrates anyway.
Make. Them. Own. It.
How do the anti-DDT and anti-vax communities intersect?
The problem with this is that they’ll continue to keep staking their ground farther and farther left, which we would now be in the position of having to take “seriously”.
I’m really having trouble parsing “seriously” and “literally”. If something is as serious as a heart attack, and I’m literally dying, does that mean I have to take anything AOC says in either vein? I could just tell her to pound sand, crazy person.
Because I’m an American. I don’t need a reason to criticize politicians. That is what they exist for. To be mocked and ridiculed, and minimized in their impacts upon us, as citizens. If they’re going to propose stupid, you can bet your cheeks I’m going to call it stupid.
I’m a fan of Carson’s as well because of the reforms she helped set in motion. There would not have been the advances as rapidly in toxicology without her – and that is an altogether good thing. Where we part company is over the precautionary principle. This has been taken to extremes.
It is rather bizarre that the politicians of Massachusetts did not take advantage of the funding that was available through the Clean Water Act in the late 1960s throughout the 1970s to build the wastewater treatment plants to avert the disaster you are describing. I can’t imagine that Sens. Kennedy and Brooke could not have lined up the money. EPA at that time was handing out money (loans primarily) to communities left and right and did a lot of good that continues to benefit at least my home state to this day. And EPA back then liked seeing large wastewater treatment plants serving multiple communities, so this at that time would have been ideal. But by the 1990s that possibility no longer existed.
Leukemia has NEVER been something that you came down with in under a few years, and pretending that they knew what caused it is pure fantasy.
The time delay in cancer (of any sort) is usually measured in decades, not months.
Sorry, but “agree to disagree” happens with opinions, not science. And that’s not science.
Most of the rest of Carson’s work is similar – it sounds impressive if you know nothing about science, but in modern terms, it’s just the ancestor of things like anti-vaxxer sentiment.
I have trouble speaking about this to this day. I will never get over it. You are right on all counts. Suffice to say Boston wanted a beautiful waterfront and they got what they wanted. And I consider myself a Bostonian, not a Cape Codder. It remains a terrible chapter in my life. :-)
At least we gave them a run for their money for seven years. And we wouldn’t have been to do that were it not for Rachel Carson because the EPA had to do research and studies they would never have done otherwise and then hold public hearings and answer questions from the public. That 4,000-page environmental impact statement was a direct result of her work.
The entire project was illegal. Ronald Reagan had signed the toughest sewage discharge act the country had ever seen. Our own Massachusetts laws were tougher than the federal laws. We had set up ocean sanctuaries because of the threat of oil drilling in George’s Bank twenty years earlier. I spent a day in the local law library, and–I’m working from memory here, I might be slightly off in my facts–Reagan’s law barred cities and towns from discharging sewage even into freshwater.
If I could write as well as Rachel Carson, it wouldn’t have happened. She was a gifted writer. I wish there were more people like her so we could tackle some of civilization’s tough problems better than we are.
I don’t consider myself an environmentalist because they have become simply political. They couldn’t defend a blade of grass if their lives depended on it. That said, I respect the early movement. Frustrated Republicans sometimes forget that we are talking about poison in our soil, air, and water. It’s important work.
Postscript: I sometimes wonder if my fears were overblown about the damage that would result in Cape Cod Bay. It seems to be okay, and the tunnel has been operating almost twenty years. Or perhaps we were more successful than we thought. We gave them such a hard time that there were expensive measures they had to take before they turned the stupid thing on. :-)
I’ve been thinking about this. There’s a good chance that you could manage this, at least on the subset of issues where we and the left agree on a similar end state. I don’t think I’m salesman enough to do it myself though.
Eh. It flows better than ‘rightist’, and I’ve stopped using ‘conservative’ since there’s no good definition of that word. And by any reasonable definition I can’t be considered a centrist, ergo ‘right-winger’ is technically correct. There’s a long history too of groups owning the pejorative labels others apply to them, from at the very least the Methodists to the Bronies.
I’ll agree though that if you self-identify as a right-winger to any leftist they’ll automatically class you as a hater and ignore you. Speaking of which…
Yeah, your audience has classified you as a ‘hater’ and is ignoring you already.
The “wing” part specifies being an extremist; that’s not helpful.
It’s actually pretty easy, as long as you stay away from the obvious back-and-forth and the talking points.
For example… take income inequality. A lefty will say it’s important to do something about income inequality. I would say, “Okay, great. But what are you going to do about it that doesn’t make it worse? Obama literally ran on a platform of “spreading the wealth around”, he raised taxes on the wealthy and increased benefits for the poor, and you can find numerous articles (NY Times, etc.) that showed that income inequality increased more than ever under his presidency.”
Sure, if you meet AOC in person, go right ahead.
I was thinking more about the question in the OP as to how to debate someone “at the work lunch table” who endorses a proposal like the Green New Deal. Of course you could simply tell them to “pound sand, crazy person” as well, but that’s not likely to change minds or win votes (never mind poisoning professional relationships).
My thesis is that taking the proposal literally, and trying to refute specific points like “how can you possibly replace all internal combustion engines in 10 years?” isn’t likely to change minds either, just as asking Trump supporters in the last primary “but how precisely do you think Trump will get Mexico to pay for his wall?” almost never elicited the response “hmm, good point, I never thought of that. I guess I’ll vote for Marco Rubio instead.”
Better: “Hey, that is a very caring idea. So, what can we do that will really make things better, and not worse, for people at the bottom?”
Oh, I thought the “wing man” in a formation, or in on an introduction, is designed/designated to be supportive/helpful…My mistake.
I think you have to start by actually doing something; being involved with some sort of service to people in trouble. If you’re all talk and no action, why should anyone listen to you?
A belated response- I suggest that you first try to dialog like a Venn diagram. I.e., first establish what you both agree on, then try to extend the area of agreement. If that doesn’t work, it’s time to hurl insults at them.😀
I don’t want this to stand unanswered. Forget Rachel Carson for the moment.
Cancer can sit in a human body, it’s true, as a cluster of relatively harmless cells. But, for reasons we don’t understand, it wakes up and spreads fast. It’s the reason the American Cancer Society pushes so aggressively for cancer detection. A friend of mine is going through treatment for prostate cancer for that reason. The cancer is really small right now, but prostate cancer moves fast when it wakes up. Same with breast cancer. It connects to the lymph nodes. Ovarian cancer is the worst. My sister-in-law had no symptoms and then had some, went to the emergency room, and was dead two days later. Granted, that was twenty years ago. The doctor told us that ovarian cancer is the fastest-moving cancer. We used to call some cancers “galloping cancers.”
I knew a guy who was diagnosed with lung cancer and was dead six months later.
People should get the screenings. The treatments are easy when the cancer is small.
Cancer screening is a good thing, but my original point still stands.
No, you really don’t come down with leukemia, or any other cancer, and die – in less than a year. You have it for years, then it suddenly gets worse.
So no, exposing someone to DDT will not make them drop dead of leukemia in a few months. That does not happen. We have decades of epidemiology research that shows it.
Some people tried to tie pesticides to children dying of cancer, but that’s basically “they’re not dying of polio or the measles or a number of other diseases any more, so a few more die of cancer.”
However on the one hand, you have Rachel Carson, who held a Master’s Degree in biology, and her insistence that we as a nation look into some of the ac tual problems with The Green Revolution. This revolution allowed not only farmers to grow crops without a worry that pests would eat the crops down to the nub, but also it allowed people to obtain dangerous chemicals and spray their backyard fencing full blast with goddess knows what, and not even be required to tell the neighbor who might be sunbathing on the other side of that fence that they might be about to be poisoned.
Carson received not a thing to advance her cause, in terms of monetary gain, or to persuade her to do one thing rather than the other.
Al Gore, circa 1993 or 1994, he actually backed the nation away from the Precautionary Principle, when as President of the US Senate, he cast his vote against a comprehensive anti-pesticide piece of legislation. So he actually did not advance the Precautionary Principle, but stopped it dead in its tracks.
However, when he was (or should have been) in a fight for the abilit6y of a full count of votes in Florida to help decide if he had won or lost the Presidential election against George W, was somehow persuaded to drop his fight. Whatever helped him in his decision him to do that?
Some very short amount of time after he refused to pick up his own fight for ballot count determination, he became the leading person in a Global Climate Regime Change… This Climate Change activity has brought forth a one trillion dollar annual revenue stream, and Gore heads it. You may draw your own conclusions.
This can be quantified by what is called “competing risk analysis.” That is, we are all going to die. So, a decrease in infant mortality means more people are exposed to the risk of childhood diseases. Successful immunizations, antibiotics, and surgical responses mean that more people survive childhood risks, so now are exposed to risks manifesting later, and so on, and on, until we are asking why there are more instances of people in their 80s with dementia…
It is not the childhood immunizations that caused the dementia, it IS the success of the childhood immunizations, along with a series of other things that improved survival rates into the 8th decade of life, that increased the number of people who survived to have the chance for dementia to manifest. If you died of a heart attack at 65, your underlying genetic predisposition for dementia was never observed.
Actually there are people out there who can explain some of the mechanisms that cause cancer cells that have hidden away inside our bodies to go from their dormancy to full over blown active.
Warren Porter, PhD and professor at University of Wisconsin was able to explain some of the mechanisms. One thing he would note is that Alkyll, an ingredient/toxin found in most Lysol products, is not itself a carcinogen. However Alkyll has the ability to turn those cancer cells from off to on.
Although pesticides are somewhat regulated, personal care products are not. So Lysol is not only advertised over the TV as something that should and must be sprayed everywhere – in the kitchen as you cook, on items in the nursery, in the living room as people socialize, Lysol disinfectants are products that contains the nasty ingredient known as Alkyll.