📌

What happens when it's too hot and when our bodies can't evaporate sweat to cool us down? The heat related deaths we've seen in Europe are nothing compared with what's coming

I think about something similar constantly - after the 2024 election, I was in a bougie cocktail bar and a white guy around 30 started chatting me up. He knew the drink I ordered because he came there several times a week. He was wearing designer brands and drinking $14 Old Fashioneds...

He told me he was some big shot in the construction industry. He was glad that Trump won because he was going to "blow it all up" and "finally, the next 4 years are going to be about *us*". I constantly think about what might have been so bad in this guy's life...

He was not concerned about deportations affecting his business, just waved it off. Ignored me when I mentioned that Trump is rich and mostly caters to the rich. I can only assume that he thought I was his comrade because I am a white man, and that he was just racist.

I remember hearing during peak Covid: your grandparents went to war for you, sit on the couch or wear a mask for them. And people couldn’t do it without whining.

Carry that theorem out a little further and you should be terrified of the REAL villains we’re creating today from this shit

Yes. "If it hasn't affected me, it must not be a problem" is alive and killing people daily.

I think about if the tech bros and major media members actually studied a little history.

When a safe guard works so well you forget why you have it only to remove it and realize why you had it in the first place. This is why it's so important to educate people on why the safe guards are there.

Lee Kuan Yew was right about the benefits of air conditioning in the tropics. He did NOT have to apologise for the ecological impact, not when it stopped more people from dying in other places with less hospitable summers than Singapore.

Three generations removed?! Hell, my grandma had polio in the 1940s and she died in 2018! These people just can't see past their own noses.

I'm a boomer (b 1952). The prettiest girl in our class had a limp from polio. (She was in love with another guy... but when she left she kissed every one of us goodbye... I hope she's had a good life.)

Also, the planet's a wee mite *warmer* than it used to be.

Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson really illustrated this point well for me when I first read it. I’ve come back to the idea countless times since.

It makes me think of the Pern series where people started questioning the wisdom of putting so many of their resources into fighting an existential threat just because it'd been so long since it'd been a problem.

it's so painfully true

Yep, whoever uses the "Good times create weak men..." etc. is usually a weak man created by the good times, thinking he is the strong man...

I experienced this working in a union strong state, in a union job. Good Pay, good Benefits, good retirement. Young adults -new employees start work & feel like the union does nothing for them, and they don't need to join. This description reminds me of them. They don't even know what they have.

This is probably a good time to bring up the fact that many indigenous cultures have robust mechanisms for protecting accumulated cultural knowledge, many of which were decimated by their genocide.

People didn't all move to hell in the summer when there was no ac.

I can't help but wonder how many people will get to the end of the tunnel of light, only to be met with the punishment of choice by a outraged and infuriated parent or grandparent that thought you knew better

📌 ! Dubler quote !

I used to think that GOP officials just didn't believe that you could ever break the U.S. no matter what policies you put in place. You know, make it poorer, dysfunctional, corrupt, prone to political violence, non-democratic. But now I think maybe I was wrong. That they like where it's going.

Hm now think about how this material abundance weve created on the back of fossil fuels is directly leading us to the brink of extinction if we dont change anything.

"Well I was alive in the 50s and I didn't die! "

"YOU LIVED IN THE UPPER PENINSULA AND YOU HAD MAYBE 4 CONSECUTIVE DAYS IN THE HIGH 80S EVERY AUGUST AND THAT WAS IT."

I think about this in relation to the move from a military draft to volunteer forces

Same. I remember someone complaining how we don't really need the Third Amendment in the US Constitution because being forced to quarter troops in our homes hasn't been an issue for over 200 years. Like, dude, do you know why it hasn't been an issue?

I see the same attitude in my medical adjacent field all the time, “ well I stopped having x symptoms so I figured I didn’t need the medicine anymore!” Wtf did you think the symptoms stopped?!?!

Exactly! I've seen that too in my previous medical profession life.

I feel that the most overlooked is how much effort it takes to purify water.

This is the poster for the conservative reactionary revolution.

Shapiro’s probably going to use it as a glory hole.

A hardwood board and a piece of unidentifiable lumber

How does he look more plastic than the bag???

botox

This is from 2021, correct? Things have gone downhill from there.

What are you gonna do with that board-in-a-bag, Ben?

Caption: “This is how flat my chest will be when I can finally get rid of these man boobs.”

So look, I don't usually punch down, but Joey Man-tits here has a neck about the size of my biceps and I'm not exactly an NFL linebacker. Who the fuck are these buttlickers to define manhood to anyone?

Why are there no muscles in his shoulders?

And then the shampoo bottles clapped

Is this what Jefferson meant about refreshing the tree of liberty?

Constantly.

Saw a comment about the idea of the census only counting citizens and what's the harm. Explained how the census is used for important things like infrastructure. "Well we will just get the numbers without the census from someplace else." The assumption things "just happen" and "are there"

See the UK for what would have happened in heatwaves with no AC. People genuinely do die when the temperature gets to around 30°C and above because we're not set up for it to be normal.

Yup - the heatwave that hit my area a few years ago killed a lot of people because our houses are designed to trap heat, after generations of temperatures keeping pretty mild throughout the year and only climbing above 30°C on a rare basis, and not usually for very long. Then suddenly that changed.

We had an entire week of temperatures that LOWERED to around 30°C around midnight and went as high as 43°C in areas during the day. Our infrastructure was literally melting and combusting. Roads liquefying, power lines breaking apart and burning. My entire house lived in the basement that week.

The air above basement level was so hot, it was difficult to breathe it. The housemates bought a standalone AC unit within the week after it cooled down enough to actually go outside. I wouldn't dream of begrudging them because I live in fear of another heatwave like that.

“Burn it all down,” says dumbass who *owns a boat.* I think “it all” has served this dumbass quite well.

I often marvel that the people who seem to have lost appreciation for democracy and rule of law, are the same people who binge watch Band of Brothers every Memorial day weekend. Do they have any idea what WW2 WAS ABOUT?

The South would be a fucking sparsely populated backwater without the invention of air conditioning. It is an overlooked aspect of America’s economic changes in the 70s and 80s. Texas is built on oil and AC

The "old saying" is from a postapocalyptic novel from 2016 by a guy no-one's ever heard of. It literally only has 20 reviews on goodreads.

I'm pretty sure it's from Ancient Greece and was presented as incorrect in the very same document (The Socratic dialogues? IDK) that it was first stated in.

You’re pretty sure? I can’t find any evidence of the quote from before 2016 and discussions of the source always lead to G. Michael Hopf’s book “Those Who Remain”.

Never heard of, but he doesn't have a Wikipedia entry but is on twitter. So yeah, think I already know everything I need to about him.

Upon some cursory internet searching: You are correct.

This is so maddeningly accurate. Along with decadent, I'd label many of these people unserious as well

Not a single one of these "good times make weak men" fuckers could run a water treatment works.

I was reading recently (no idea of validity) that the AC example is still killing thousands in Europe because they apparently have cultural stigmas around AC. It seemed to be mostly northern countries (of course) like Britain and up. I saw plenty of Spanish folk etc like "yeah no love my AC" lol

…….woof.

h/t @jay.bsky.team

HAHAHAHA I haven’t ever seen this one before. God, talk about getting to The Point in only three panels. Masterful!

We talked about this when we were in Normandy last month. We looked at ruins and said Americans just don’t get the horror of war because we haven’t fought a war on our soil in recent memory. And the dolts who are attempting autocracy would have ridden their buggies out to watch the battle in 1861.

Related to this as well. www.liberalcurrents.com/a-disease-of...

Stupidity is rampant in the USA and it’s a choice.

Yup, that's the Trump admin, and right wing reactionary stuff in general, in a nutshell. Everything is fine so we don't need those pesky international conventions, political norms, regulations on finance, laws, vaccines, whatever! Just kick it apart and loot the wreckage! Nothing bad will happen!

Heat is apparently the #1 cause of death in the US. Oregon was using Medicaid funds to provide poor people with air conditioners. So much for that.

It’s not even in the top 10% but it’s still a serious issue

Winter Soldier also had something to say about algorithms and surveillance states.

This is the train of thought the Oceangate guy had. “Safety regulations on submersibles are too restrictive! Submersibles are so safe that they don’t need such stringent safety protocols!”

This is one I agree with. I want more rich guys going into the ocean in shoddy submersibles.

Don’t even get me started on that dipshit! The arrogant recklessness.

Oh, I know. I can’t fathom wanting to scrimp on safety when you’re sending people into environments that, if they leave their vehicle, will kill them. See also: outer space.

📌

If you haven’t read yet The Death of Expertise by @radiofreetom.bsky.social

Cultural nostalgia has always been a reactionary aesthetic and ideal.

In hindsight the “30-year nostalgia cycle” thing should have been seen as a flashing red warning light, instead of just some peculiar thing our society does.

yeah you see it all the time in like, tabletop rpg or videogame spaces where some people love retro rpgs and retro videogames for the aesthetic or weird quirks of the genre and some people love it because they want back Gary Gygax's encounter tables full of "slovenly trollops"

I was born in 1970, started playing ttrpgs in 1982, and I have nostalgia for almost every game of the period except for Gary Gygax's AD&D 1st edition.

I started playing in the 90s, I remember leafing through first edition world of darkness books and whatever used supplements my store had for whatever insane 80s and 90s rpgs came out and got abandoned, and yeaaaaaah. yeah.

and usually manufactured. A LOT of the "good ole' days" was created by ad men in the 70s/80s.

Also go follow @maxdubler.com

I do too. The number of times I have confronted an online leftist with, “and what will you replace it with because it does X, Y, and Z?” Only to receive the reply of a vague, “something better.” obviously, only one of us is trying to solve the problem the other one’s trying to wish it away.

Understandably so! And I keep coming back to his conclusion that "good times make weak men" is actually sorta true -- it's just that the weak men mistake themselves for the strong men.

Yes, they think we’re just coming out of the “weak men make hard times” phase and into the “hard times make strong men” phase, but it’s basically the exact opposite.

Right? As the pandemic taught me, anyone who tried to weasel their way out of getting a vaccine and wearing a mask indoors for 10 minutes who tries to convince me they're a "strong man" is just going to make me laugh.

25% increase measle infections in kids due to exactly this. Stupid parents listening to fucking idiots rather than science.

This is unfortunately true on the left as well. An awful lot of people said “the US is already a fascist police state under Biden so it doesn’t matter if Trump wins.”

Most of them didn’t know what fascism is. We are all paying for their stupidity.

Definition of privilege.

The ultra-wealthy dismantling the systemic protections of all kinds in the US is an example of that. If the system has been especially beneficial for me, I wouldn't be rocking that boat but they are going at the boat with chainsaws and flamethrowers.

Yep! And the strong people created by hard times aren't fascists, they're the people who smash fascism in its stupid fucking face.

I often think about how vaccine skeptics have no heat for non-needle based vaccines. So many of them are just afraid of needles.

🙂

Yo you got reposted by Will Wheaton. That’s pretty rad.

Astrology for very online armchair political scientists en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss...

It's all true. They're tearing the country to pieces because they are bored, and also boring.

My late company prez (born in the 1950s) had 16 (!!!) siblings. His mom was more or less pregnant non-stop from when she became an adult until her mid 40s. 5 of them did not live to adulthood. These are the “good old days” that people yearn for. Where a significant percentage of your kids died.

And let's not forget that kids could get to adulthood but irreversibly harmed bu those diseases for which at the time there was no preventive treatment available.

Oh, absolutely. Of the 11 that made it to adulthood, 9 of them were dead by before 60. My prez and one sister were the last left, and neither made 70. I think my prez would have made it, but died accidentally.

I was a volunteer vaccinator during Covid. The elderly (over 80) were most enthusiastic and regularly shared stories from their childhoods about fear of disease.

I helped at a couple clinics and the only adult who made a fuss about having to do it was a cop

I'm glad somebody's out there articulating this

3 generations old now at 77. Had 4-5 diseases before there were vaccines. Polio in ‘49 paralyzed an arm of my mother & both legs of neighbor. I was 18-months old & cared for by grandparents for 18-months. (mumps, chickenpox, measles, pneumonia)

"We don't need a State Department," say people who are 80 years away from the last world war.

Malaria and yellow fever too

cc: @radiofreetom.bsky.social

Same.

Something about the thin veneer of civilization…