(Apologies if this one reads a little scattered - harder to collect thoughts when out of town visiting family, instead of at home in your nice home office!)
Regarding the Spinal Tap turning up the Amp to 11, that happened in sports long ago. You used to be able to go to a sporting event, and have silence between action. The silent breaks could be used to talk to people around you, and if they were season-ticket holders, then such talking could develop friendship and a community. Now fans are part of nations and have an unforgettable experience each and every time, with continual music. As it turns out, most kids, especially the athletes being recruited to college teams, like and want such an atmosphere. A disheartening number of adult fans don't mind it either, because, they tell me, it's what's normal.
Regarding your comments about talking to left-of-centers who are skeptical about cc because of Covid - what walk of life have you encountered such people? I would be encouraged to talk with someone like that. I've never run into a person whose changed their cc thinking to more skeptical. The polite and proper (and only acceptable way I gather from body language), is to say there is something there, and a good person doesn't doubt a scientist and so the best way is to have a proper sense of concern, while being sure not to offend the NPR viewpoint.
Working at a Michigan environmental department leaves me with a much different perspective than yours. These claims of weather being due to climate change is as deeply held among 80% (?) of my 1,200 coworkers as any belief I hold. So this drum beat absolutely gets the vote out and is completely accepted as normal fact. Whitmer probably has a greater than 30% chance of being our next President or VP, and I heard her say in a speech that the time for climate change back and forth is over. Huge cheers were the result of that ridiculous assertion. What they lack in argument is successfully bolstered by loud repetition.
Side comment, but when I was younger conservatives were demonized as the "black and white" people who failed to understand nuance and the place for debate. But the modern Left now LOVES to proclaim "the debate is over" and speak of everything in the starkest most dogmatic terms. Perhaps they demonized our speech precisely because they realized it was effective and wanted us to stop speaking that way.
I recall a time when liberals expressed dismay over the emerging doctrine of exigent circumstances. I agreed with them. But in hindsight, their dismay was more envy than anything else. In another context, I called it "Gulag Envy". They had no principled objections to prison camps and capricious jurisprudence; they just wanted to control the process.
This is a good prompt to post this sentence of H.L. Mencken's from 1920:
"What chiefly distinguishes the daily press of the United States from the press of all other countries pretending to culture is not its lack of truthfulness or even its lack of dignity and honor, for these deficiencies are common to the newspapers everywhere, but its incurable fear of ideas, its constant effort to evade the discussion of fundamentals by translating all issues into a few elemental fears, its incessant reduction of all reflection to mere emotion."
Also, last week the House held five votes on five resolutions to end five of the seemingly endless emergencies. They were declared by Obama and G.W. Bush. None of the resolutions got more than 30 yes votes.
Regarding the Spinal Tap turning up the Amp to 11, that happened in sports long ago. You used to be able to go to a sporting event, and have silence between action. The silent breaks could be used to talk to people around you, and if they were season-ticket holders, then such talking could develop friendship and a community. Now fans are part of nations and have an unforgettable experience each and every time, with continual music. As it turns out, most kids, especially the athletes being recruited to college teams, like and want such an atmosphere. A disheartening number of adult fans don't mind it either, because, they tell me, it's what's normal.
Regarding your comments about talking to left-of-centers who are skeptical about cc because of Covid - what walk of life have you encountered such people? I would be encouraged to talk with someone like that. I've never run into a person whose changed their cc thinking to more skeptical. The polite and proper (and only acceptable way I gather from body language), is to say there is something there, and a good person doesn't doubt a scientist and so the best way is to have a proper sense of concern, while being sure not to offend the NPR viewpoint.
Working at a Michigan environmental department leaves me with a much different perspective than yours. These claims of weather being due to climate change is as deeply held among 80% (?) of my 1,200 coworkers as any belief I hold. So this drum beat absolutely gets the vote out and is completely accepted as normal fact. Whitmer probably has a greater than 30% chance of being our next President or VP, and I heard her say in a speech that the time for climate change back and forth is over. Huge cheers were the result of that ridiculous assertion. What they lack in argument is successfully bolstered by loud repetition.
Side comment, but when I was younger conservatives were demonized as the "black and white" people who failed to understand nuance and the place for debate. But the modern Left now LOVES to proclaim "the debate is over" and speak of everything in the starkest most dogmatic terms. Perhaps they demonized our speech precisely because they realized it was effective and wanted us to stop speaking that way.
I recall a time when liberals expressed dismay over the emerging doctrine of exigent circumstances. I agreed with them. But in hindsight, their dismay was more envy than anything else. In another context, I called it "Gulag Envy". They had no principled objections to prison camps and capricious jurisprudence; they just wanted to control the process.
This is a good prompt to post this sentence of H.L. Mencken's from 1920:
"What chiefly distinguishes the daily press of the United States from the press of all other countries pretending to culture is not its lack of truthfulness or even its lack of dignity and honor, for these deficiencies are common to the newspapers everywhere, but its incurable fear of ideas, its constant effort to evade the discussion of fundamentals by translating all issues into a few elemental fears, its incessant reduction of all reflection to mere emotion."
It's from an essay that I posted a much longer excerpt from at https://arnec.substack.com/p/hl-mencken-on-newspapers-and-the
Also, last week the House held five votes on five resolutions to end five of the seemingly endless emergencies. They were declared by Obama and G.W. Bush. None of the resolutions got more than 30 yes votes.