Year 3, Month 10, Day 3: Soothly!

David Horsey takes on the ignorati, in a brilliant piece of analysis for the L.A. Times, titled “Republicans have a medieval mindset about climate change.” Aye:

In the U.S., some states have begun to prepare for the inevitable. In California, plans are being made for the decades ahead when coastal highways are swamped, Yosemite waterfalls run dry, agricultural areas turn to dust, the San Francisco airport floods and the famous beaches near Los Angeles are reclaimed by the Pacific. But states cannot do it alone; the federal government needs to become fully engaged.

And that will not happen as long as the Republican Party stands in the way. Partly to do the bidding of the industrialists who are their benefactors and partly because they seem to have abandoned belief in science, Republicans have become climate change deniers. Even in a year when the West is aflame in wildfires and extreme weather batters the East, Republicans continue to insist there is nothing unusual going on – just a little blip in the weather.

If we lived in a rational society, any Republican who insisted climate change is not real would be as shamed and ostracized as the backwoods snake-handlers in the GOP congressional caucus who say a woman cannot be impregnated if she is raped. As a country, we should all be embarrassed. Americans, not the Dutch, should be leading the world in dealing with the imminent calamities being brought on by the rise in global temperatures. But we will not be able to take the lead until one of our two major political parties stops shilling for the big energy companies and abandons its medieval scorn of science.

This guy is goood. Sent September 26:

Over the past twelve years, the GOP has effectively abandoned any pretense of intellectual consistency. Policies developed by Republicans become anathema when promoted by Democrats; experts touted as the embodiments of truth and virtue are anathematized should their opinions change; skepticism is heresy, but “skepticism” is dogma. The erstwhile party of Lincoln, Garfield, Teddy Roosevelt and Eisenhower has become an ideologically contorted conclave of true believers, impervious to reason, logic, data or compassion, incapable of admitting (let alone rectifying) error.

This medieval mindset, as David Horsey suggests, evokes feudalism’s cruelty and the Inquisition’s terror — and when it comes to the slow-motion catastrophe of global warming, it’s a guarantee of planetary disaster. When cultish anti-intellectualism stands in the way of any responsible and meaningful response to climate change, it exacerbates a crisis of unprecedented magnitude in human history. To paraphrase Voltaire, by believing absurdities, the GOP ensures atrocities.

Warren Senders