I see what you’re saying about lionizing Obama and didn’t really intend to. I don’t think he’s superhuman, I just think he’s got this one tactic down cold.

Peace!

i will try. if you will promise not to lionize the current president. he’s also human. his bread is buttered differently and better than joe barton’s but still buttered.

Everyone’s been wrong and acted stupid because of it before. And everyone’s behaved irrationally out of fear before. Maybe this scales and maybe it doesn’t. But I know that I am much more likely to drop my silliness when I am being stupid and/or irrational when I feel safe and respected.

Appealing to shame makes intuitive sense, but it also produces a lot of resistance. On the other hand, if environmentalists were telling the most compelling story about safety and were making every effort to respect the opponent, there would be nothing left to resist.

It expresses itself in snickering and ridicule, but underlying all of it is fear. Fear of being wrong. Fear of not being one of the most special, smartest people in the world anymore, should dittohead in chief Rush turn out to be wrong.

Perhaps to reach conservatives we have to come up with a moral argument:

Shame on you for fouling your nest! Oh, the shame of it! We have sinned, and are now being punished! To repent we must make amends to the planet!

We are dealing with heavily propagandized, authoritarian people, who view the world in stark moral terms, and who are being misled by cunning paid propagandists.

I don’t know how to get through to such people, other than by repeating the truth, appealing to their sense of shame, and pointing out that Rush Limbaugh’s last 8 year contract was 400 million dollars – 50 million dollars per year.

Being “a friend to corporate America” pays pretty well, these days, I guess.

Regarding CO2 from breathing, our industrialized agriculture has in effect injected fossil carbon into our food – as transportation energy, fertilizer, and so on. Eating locally, growing a garden, and eating lower on the food chain by eating less meat are great ways to lower our carbon footprints, IMO.

Personal lifestyle changes are trivial compared to political involvement, though.

We need to seize the coal fired power plants, and forcibly transform them into advanced, more efficient carbon negative power plants, which combine biocarbon fuel, oxyfuel combustion, and carbon capture and storage.

A more terrestrial example would be the one about the family who followed Homeland Security’s advice on protection from chemical attacks and covered their home windows with plastic and duct tape only to asphyxiate themselves.

I am advocating empathizing with them as a tactic. It’s certainly something that every single one of us has the capacity to do. Haven’t you ever been wrong in a public setting, and defended your wrong point way past the point of reason because you were embarrassed and didn’t want to admit that you were wrong? I sure have!

And haven’t you ever lost a lover or a job, or otherwise faced an adversity, and clung to a kind of weird, unhelpful, made-up viewpoint about the problem out of sheer fear? I sure have!

These people are not idiots. They are humans having human emotions that you’ve had too. Punishing and ostracizing them will make them stronger, and you (us) weaker.

Barack Obama actually offers lesson after lesson in how this works. He consistently gains strength by respecting and empathizing with his enemies, and at the same time he sucks away all the reasons that they have to oppose him–he makes them weak by empathizing with them. His graciousness is the primary reason that you can rightly say that conservatives have wandered far out into the weeds! Imagine how far we would get if regular people who care, like you and me, behaved with similar grace and equanimity. What would there be left to argue with?

Every single time anyone, including Joe Barton, is called a moron, we step a little bit further from the goal, because it becomes just that much harder to bring that person back, and we need them. We need everybody. We can’t solve this problem by carving the world up into The Green Zone and Emittistan.