Map of life expectancy at birth from Global Education Project.

Saturday, November 05, 2022

Political Science

There's a Facebook group for my small town. It's mostly about stray animals, small businesses advertising, local events, high school sports, that sort of thing. The rules are supposed to be "no politics" but as you might guess that isn't always honored. People have posted weird paranoid propaganda about the public school system, which I won't dignify with an explanation. A couple of days ago somebody posted a link to a news article about coming electric and natural gas rate increases, and a commenter posted a boast about some of our fellow townspeople having been at the January 6 insurrection. Really.


So, here's the problem. A lot of voters just don't know how anything works. The reason for the rate increases is that Russia invaded Ukraine. This means Europe isn't getting natural gas from Russia so they're buying more of it from the U.S. We are in fact energy independent in the sense that we produce more than enough for our own use. However, it's sold on a global market and thanks to Donald Trump's best friend Vlad, there's a shortage. The companies sell to the highest bidder and that means it's more expensive here, because they're exporting gas in tankers and we have to pay as much as everybody else. The only way to stop that is to ban natural gas exports, which believe me, the Republicans will never do because they are financed by fossil fuel companies and do their bidding. There is nobody happier about high gas prices than Republican politicians.


But trying to explain this to Republican voters is like talking to a rock. I despair.


Note: Sure, the Biden administration isn't banning fossil fuel exports either. But Republicans definitely aren't going to do anything about inflation and don't even make any specific claims about what they might do. They just complain about it.

1 comment:

Don Quixote said...

Who knew that in the age of the Internet, the so-called information superhighway, that it would be so flooded with lies, damn lies and bald-faced lies that truth would become a scarcer commodity than fresh water?