I cynically started a IMHO post back in 2016 aimed at conservatives whether we should fire climate scientists for incompetence (for being wrong about climate change) or whether we should prosecute them for fraud (as they must know that climate change is fake and are taking tax-payer dollars). While the poll is long gone, you can see the thread here.
Oh, they aren’t going to stop with this. To the extent that we are already not doing anything effective about climate change other than crafting ‘narratives’ about how great we are doing with renewables, they are actually trying to shut down not just climate monitoring but surveillance for extreme weather events and public outreach.
From a post I wrote nearly five years ago now:
Tony Fauci has been pursued and threatened for promoting medical science in the public interest because there are people who just don’t want to hear anything that contradicts their parochial world view. I can’t even imagine what it is like to have a forty-odd year career devoted to public service only to have a venal kook like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. be appointed Secretary of HHS and systematically dismantle basic public health systems like childhood vaccination and pathogen surveillance. We are really going down a path of superstition and persecution of anyone do defies this regressive doctrine. Margaret Atwood intended The Handmaid’s Tale to be a somewhat hyperbolic allegory, not a futurist prediction of the United States, but here we are, I guess.
Oh, it’s not a surprise to me, but if you go through that thread I linked to there was a lot of pearl clutching by SDMB conservatives saying it would never happen.
Habitat for Humanity. They’re going after Habitat.
Welp. If there was any doubt left, they are truly the party of evil. Can’t have poor people living in actual homes, or have another president’s legacy outshine the Tangerine Traitor’s.
The organization is closely associated with Jimmy Carter, who received a lot of praise for his humanitarian work around the time of his funeral. Trump has to destroy his legacy.
A legacy is going to be destroyed but it isn’t going to be Carter’s.
Habitat can be rebuilt but trump will forever be enshrined in the history books as the worst President by far America has ever had (and that is saying something).
I recall now that he got pissed at me because I responded to his notion of a “time-reversed star” by saying that it was nonsense, and while I certainly could have been nicer about it, he proceeded to follow me around from post to post for several weeks trying desperately to debunk me, and then somehow managed to get my email address and started bombing me with anonymized emails that were some combination of threat, conspiracy theory, and gibberish. So, he was mad as a fucking hatter long before he became a Trumpster.
We had a pretty good run, managed to discover a few useful things and invent some clever gadgets, and even made it as far as exploring our local neighborhood with the brave little probes that could. If we can just not manage to nuke the entire surface of the planet and push evolution back to the barely multicellular stage maybe the future cephalopod civilization won’t regard us as a total failure even though we were highly limited with only our two marginally functional grasping appendices and primitive centralized cognitive structure.
Who’da guessed that mammalian hyper-intelligence combined with a heightened, but faulty, agency detection would turn out to be an evolutionary dead end?
