Also worth noting that it takes four years to fully pull out of the accord (as somebody who was kicked out of the military and had to wait a fuckin' month for the paperwork to clear, I can attest that this sort of bureaucracy is entirely normal), and the date that we'd actually pull out (if he had the attention span to follow through all the steps) would be the day after the next presidential election. So basically we're still in it for the remainder of Trump's reign but it could be reversed basically right away assuming he doesn't get a second term. Also from what I understand most businesses and major cities are saying they'll follow the guidelines anyway either because it's the right thing to do or because they believe we'll have a Democratic president in four years who will put us back in anyway so what the hell is the point of redoing their entire business model just to have to revert it soon after anyways.

And again, there're no penalties whatsoever for not following through with your goals in the accord, it's just so the other countries can say they're doing better than you and you should pick up the pace. So ultimately this is a meaningless, symbolic move that serves to do nothing except make us look bad. Way to go, dipshit.

The funny thing is that the Paris deal was so toothless he could have decided to remain in the accord without cutting any emissions, because the deal basically lets each country set its own goals for cutting. He could have lowered our commitment to the point where we weren't deviating from our original carbon projections---in effect, agreeing not to cut carbon at all---while still staying in the agreement and spewed some verbal diarrhea about how he was working well with others.

So basically he's just doing this to please his dumbest supporters while burning as many international bridges as he can.

If they're such babies that they can't handle the facts being laid bare in a snarky tone by someone on the Internet, then it's not like there was any hope for them. Stupid people are gonna stupid, and as we can see right fucking now, everyone's paying the price.

This was the most easily preventable disaster ever. And there was only a single available solution. There is no excuse.

Relevant: http://explosm.net/comics/4266/

To be fair, people not handling facts is one of the major reasons why Trump got elected. As I noted before, he managed to usurp facts with tactics. Being on the side of facts unfortunately does not work if we're up against people that are fact-resistant. This country has been battling this kind of shit for ages now, and it seems to be a losing battle.

To acid_bukkake's point, you get more flies with honey, but to Morrigan's, you get even more with bullshit. Or a nice fucking corpse. Trump paraded that corpse out there in front of people, and covered it in so much bullshit, people couldn't resist. Some people, anyway. Christians and Alt-Right Nazis and Red Pill virgins, etc. People who love to play the victim. That corpse was their victimization, the bullshit made it taste right for them.

This country has been trained by big-name charlatans, the religious right, anti-science lunatics, emotional vampires, and outright liars on so much nonsense that the people who seem to understand anything are in the minority. Look at the fucking shit we have to fight, here, that other first-world countries don't have to fucking deal with. Creationists. People killing women's rights. "Doctor" fucking Oz. Celebrities like Jenny McCarthy selling anti-vaxxer rhetoric to people who too easily feel bad for babies, sans logic. Other celebrities like Gwenyth Paltrow peddling endless waves of crap and telling women to steam their vaginas. WE HAVE A GIANT FUCKING REPLICA OF NOAH'S ARK IN A LAND-LOCKED STATE, near a museum featuring children riding dinosaurs! People call themselves "pro-life" while being pro-war and pro-execution. Movements everywhere that act like amateurs are better trusted than professionals on anything and everything.

This is fucking madness! Look at this shit!

To top it all off, the majority of this country still didn't want Trump, and still voted against him, and because this country is now the definition of fucking broken, HE STILL GOT THE JOB because the Electoral College is a goddamn, illogical trainwreck.

On the one hand, yeah, this should have been easily preventable. Hindsight is 20/20, and we're using a fucking microscope at this point. This is the perfect storm version of a political disaster. More people did vote against him. The Electoral College was originally created to prevent these kinds of problems.

Yeah, it should have been easily preventable. But it was not prevented. What the fuck happened?

It's like when a ship sinks because a series of freak accidents stacked up and defeated redundant safety systems. Normally, this ship would be fucking fine. But a dozen inconceivable things happened, and by happenstance, they led to the worst possible inconceivable outcome.

You think you're frustrated? Try living in this fucking hell.

If we want to get into really absurd semantics, no, we don't need to protect the environment. The earth will survive... it will survive us. But if we want our civilization to fucking survive, then yes, we definitely need to be protecting the environment because this shit is not sustainable. This is one of the things that irks me about some Libertarians--and Gary Johnson fucking said it, too: Why protect the environment? The earth will be consumed by the sun one day. Yeah, it will, but not in the next 20 years, goddammit!




Oh hey, I didn't even think of "unfollowing" the guy. I forget that's a slightly separate option. Still, he pretty much never tries to defend himself when I dig into his posts, so this is like easy shit for me. I read similar points on conspiracy theorists, and the big take-away was that they're just lonely people. Lonely, powerless, perhaps uninteresting people, and this makes them feel important.




I don't get the "better than Hillary" comments, before or after. And I have heard them after. I don't understand how someone can think that. For one thing, no, Hillary would not be under investigation now for colluding with fucking Russia. Literally any other candidate would probably be doing better now for that fucking reason alone. Hillary would not have caused mass protests from idiot executive orders trying to ban brown people from coming into the country, and she wouldn't be scrapping years of work that went into the health care system.

I've been watching PolitiFact posts, and Trump has kept a number of his promises, and is working on others. I think this might actually be the first time in American history that a president keeping his promises may ultimately work against him. You know, because his promises were fucking horrible and are just going to screw people over. One article I saw today notes that only 8% of the public thinks the Senate should sign the shit health care bill into law.

Totally agree with you on Sandy Hook "truthers". Fucking scumbags, the lot of 'em.

True. But if we want to survive with it...

I questioned this guy further and he basically said the right to destroy Earth is more important than not destroying Earth, because freedom. He doesn't outright deny climate change, he just denies that humans contribute to it, thus, he thinks there is nothing we could do anyway.


Yeah, that was it: it makes them feel important. My life is already better after unfollowing this guy. He's on my F-list due to other shared interests (video games), but you never know when someone like that is going to fill your feed with Alex Jones bullshit and anti-vaxxer memes.


Some, sure, but I was arguing with the guy for saying ALL. I mean the whole "put Hillary in jail" thing, defeat ISIS in 30 days, repeal the ACA immediately, build a wall and make Mexico pay for it, etc. being the more glaring ones. But yeah, whether he's kept them or not, most of them were crappy ideas.


I recall many defending this line of thinking by saying Hillary would've gotten us into a war with Russia. I really doubt it. But she also wouldn't have been investigated for collusion with Russia, that's for sure. And she wouldn't have spent the first month arguing about crowd sizes. Among other things. And with Clinton, at least we wouldn't be the laughingstock of the entire world and fucking up our relations with most countries.

The "better than Hillary" thing is baffling. I would imagine there wouldn't be anything really noteworthy about her presidency other than being the first female president, would probably be a lot more of the same stuff, but it wouldn't have been a disaster like this is shaping up to be. Bernie probably would've made more interesting changes to things, but since he wasn't an option, I would've settled for HC.

I mean, I agree, but the simple truth is that we have to deal with the fact there are so many dumbfucks in America and the world, and not doing is not helpful. That's the compromise of democracy. So many people voted for Trump simply because of the subjective butthurt they experienced from the Democratic party and many of its self-righteous and overly dismissive constituents. Probably a large chunk of those very Trump voters are bigoted, uneducated morons who wouldn't be worth any reasonable person's time or even thought.

But so what? They still have a vote. And being told you belong in a basket of deplorables is going to fucking hurt, hell, probably the most if it's actually true. It's that careless dismissiveness and smugness of those very idiots that lost the Democrats the election. It's not fair. It's not reasonable. It shouldn't being happening. But none of that changes anything. You play the cards you're dealt.

A citizen has to make a choice between living by stringent self-styled ethics, where anyone you encounter needs to be 'this non-stupid' to be worth even a picosecond of your attention--and watch the world crumble around you even though you are 100% consistent and correct in your beliefs--or be being willing to dumb yourself down and appeal to populism and demagoguery and light a fire in people's hearts when it's needed, and effectuate positive change. Dealing with dumb people is the best way to get things done. Trump's election is proof of that .

True.

Which is why it makes me laugh whenever people tone police people like me. "Your belittling of ___ is why people vote Trump" or whatever, "you can't persuade people with that kind of rhetoric", blah blah blah. Yeah, because Trump used facts and reason and was calm and rational and decent and that is why he lost suppo... oh wait.

Besides which, as you said, facts and reason don't even work on these people anyway. So whatever. I'll continue calling them imbeciles because that's what they are.


Yep, your country is fucked up all right. ^^


Hindsight? You had plenty of people sounding the alarm about Trump every step of the way. But her emails...


Too many people failed to do the one and only thing that could have prevented it. It's really that simple.

And if you're among them, well, you deserve Trump as far as I'm concerned.


...No it's not. Those who were being called "deplorables" would have never voted for Clinton to begin with. Holy shit how can you people continue time and time again to fail to see such an obvious fact?


Well sure. Y'all need a new Obama because y'all* too dumb to vote rationally so you need a politician that's both smart and qualified AND bubbling with charisma and feel-good slogans because that's what it takes to not take your country, and the world, back into the stone age. But I'm not the DNC and I'm not campaigning and it's not my job to coddle anyone, and so I'll continue to sneer at the imbeciles who are getting what they deserve. If people get butthurt at that and want to keep making excuses, well, whatever, I honestly don't give a shit.

* #notallAmericans blah blah I know

I think a lot of it was the general distrust of ANY politician, which goes along with the distrust of experts that is in fashion now. They *wanted* someone totally unqualfied for the position, and one that talked like someone who dropped out of school at 4th grade.

And part of it was hubris: the left knew Trump was outrageously unqualified, and thought him running was a bad joke and that he would never win. I recall a FB post from the official HRC FB page showing her as a young girl, and saying she was the next president, as if there was no question in anyone's mind. And I admit I'm one of those people who thought Trump didn't have a chance in hell.


I do wonder about the impact of social media on people's voting habits. There are a lot of really badly-informed people out there who believe anything they see that it shared on Facebook, especially if it validates what they already believe (for example, the memes about HRC winning a case for a rapist and laughing about it).

Because humans are social creatures? Telling any massive group of people half of them are shitheaps by the lead candidate is simply reprehensible to the people who live and work with those "deplorable" people on a daily basis. You know, those distant friends who are like mostly okay people on a personal level with great taste in music and video games but they just have supremely uneducated and ignorant opinions about politics and social issues? The people you can get a beer and watch the game with and make jokes about the quarterback's neck tattoo, but just better not bring up the topic of Feminism? His opinions are pure trash, but he's not.

Fence-sitters are famously uninformed about larger issues, that's why they're fence-sitters. All they care about is the people around them.


I'm just saying that's kind of antithetical to helping all of the marginalized people who are being fucked over right now, and in the future, by the current administration. Is the cost of being right really worth the benefit?


Yeah, what the fuck was that about? Even to this DAY I see Trumples referencing that 'event.' Just horrifying anyone could believe that.

I think it's just that a lot of people create an echo chamber, esp. on social media, and they don't allow any dissenting voices or other opinions at all. So if they already disliked HRC, they see that meme and share the hell out of it because it validates their hatred of her. Then all of their HRC-hating friends will comment on how indisputably evil she is until they all start really believing it.

And if you tell them to fact-check or post a snopes link, you either get unfriended or told that snopes is unreliable and has a liberal agenda.

Another reason the screenshot somebody posted of Trump saying journalists probably just made up their sources scares me: you end up with people just believing whatever they want, and if you don't like what the news says, it's "fake news."

My mom had me make her Facebook account for her, and sometimes has me log in and post things for her since she's basically computer-illiterate. It's always shocking to log in and see her ultra-conservative evangelical Christian cousins posting stuff about how Obama was a "dictator" and how evil HRC is, that's the main reason I know about some of the crazy stuff these people are posting.

If you want to blame one person for your problems, bring back the kings, emperors and dictators.

Otherwise, think out your fucking arguments you dumb shaved monkeys.

What a fine argument. Lots of fodder for thought. Thank you.

If you have nothing else to say, please stay the fuck out of the thread. Grown-ups are talking.

really juggles the brainbox

Yes, there was warnings, but the aforementioned way Trump swayed people caused an absurd number of people to miss them. Obvious to you does not mean obvious to everyone. As the "regret this vote" Tumblrs and Tweets showed almost immediately. Again, scoff at the hindsight is 20/20 cliche, but you must not be aware of just how strongly this country felt against Hillary Clinton in general. When the election ultimately came down to Hillary vs Trump, this country let out a collective, defeated groan. From this view, the establishment had completely failed the populace. Hillary was no peach, and she obviously campaigned poorly. The failure of the Democrats in this should not be overlooked, or they'll fail again next time when they really need to be winning some fucking seats.

I'm also curious about the comment of "too few people failed". In that regard, do you not understand the electoral college? It's fundamentally broken. There is a movement for states to change how the Electoral College works, in effect, giving Electoral votes to whoever wins the popular vote, but that this isn't the standard indicates what problems there are. Which people are you then referring to? The voters who were ignored anyway, or those responsible for fixing the electoral college?

I didn't vote for Trump. I didn't support him. My state went to Hillary. Do I deserve Trump? I did nothing to put him in office. I was against him from the start.

I get that your far-left, and loathe Trump, and that's fine. A lot of things went wrong here, and if they were all obvious to everyone from the start, then we wouldn't be here, right now, spiraling out of control. Now he needs to be stopped. One analysis I read estimates that the only people who still actually support him are those that were his core base from when he first stepped in--those from the beginning. The stubborn ones clinging to him like grim death.

Liberals are big on tolerance and understanding, which is fantastic. And this is a time for that understanding to be put to the fore, or this shit will not get better. Currently, Trump is mostly just fucking up our country, with the exception of mega-bombs designed to create the maximum number of terrorists while he does a bunch of dictatorial posturing. His climate change conspiracy mongering, however, risks everyone. Many states and cities have opted to simply ignore him on this, and are working to stick with it.

I'm not dismissing your harsh, bitter rage or dismissal that everyone that voted for him is a monster worthy of scorn. That's your right as far as I'm concerned, and frankly, every person changes their mind through different approaches. Typically, snark and sarcasm work for me. Stupid as it is, what broke down my stubbornness on Climate Change was snark--"so what if climate change is a hoax and we made the planet better for nothing?" I know that's dumb, but I can admit it. Because it created a small hole that broke down a dam of stubbornness. Being berated makes a lot of people dig in their heels. Humans are stupid animals.

Your anger will likely find resonance with someone who voted for Trump and then became equally angry later. For those that aren't as angry, the risk is that they'll double down on their decision, even if it's bad. People are fickle, easily embarrassed things, and most do not handle being wrong very well. (Personally, I've been trying to remedy that for myself, mostly by not being as wrong, and going, "yeah, I'm totally wrong" when I am.)

It's frankly exhausting waking up every day to see what more buffoonery this idiot has done to our country in the intervening 12 hours.

I don't know why I wrote "too few", I clearly meant "too many". Oops. Typos happen (I mean, no, I meant to do that, and me and a small group of people clearly know what I meant! Yeah that's it).

And darkeningday: I don't see how me calling Trump voters imbeciles is screwing over minorities. Like seriously, what the fuck. This is a pathetic deflection at best. FWIW, most American minorities I've talked to online agree with me and refuse to coddle those people, because they're sick and tired of trying to engage in conversation with these people and get ignored anyway.

Fixed. Removing that comma makes the sentiment more accurate, I think.


Because they lost the majority of the popular vote? ey-o!


+ Nah, they're fucking idiots. Trump's America is a piece of shit idea. If he really wanted America to rally behind him he would have appealed to the misogynistic, religious conservative values of ALL religions instead of white-supremacisting all over; moreover, if he really wanted America to succeed, he would have turned sustainable technology into the next bragging rights arms race, blaming everyone else (especially China) for the state of the atmosphere, and promising to make the whole world pay top dollar to America for the best green tech ever it's going to be so amazing no one does green tech like America it's going to make Sean cry we're gonna do such a great job. But no, primordial tech and shelf-life industry. He could still have blamed Obama, hell he could have blamed Obama for keeping the coal industry around at all and grinding good salt of the earth people into dust for no good reason. He missed major shit-slinging, self-aggrandizing opportunities here. He's playing grandpa's ball, and it's painful to watch. Anyone who supports him despite his deranged behavior is a blindingly stupid person living with the mental capacity of a debilitating hangover, but I'm the one who gets the headache.

Fair enough, you're right (as you pretty much always are) and I agree with you. Maybe I'm just trying to rationalize this unmitigated catastrophe in my country, something I'm so ashamed of I can barely put it into words.

Still, I don't think alienating the insane amount of dumbfucks in the US is particularly helpful. What was it Hillary said in the second debate, "They go low, you go high?" That philosophy could have won her the election...

No covfefe. It's all cromulent.

It's cool you guys, God will fix the planet.

I don't get this mentality at all.

Christians: God gave us this beautiful planet.
Observer: We fucked up the planet, we need to do something to fix it.
Christians: God will buy us a new planet.

Real life version:

Teenager: My parents just bought me a new car!
Ovserver: You fucked it up through avoidable gross negligence.
Teenager: I'll just get my parents to buy me a new car!


If God is the omnipresent, all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful being they think he is, why are they treating him like a stupid, gullible parent? Hey dickweeds, if this planet is a gift from your all-powerful deity, do you think his hope was that you'd fuck it up and kill half of it? I'd like one of these people to buy me an expensive gift so I can watch their reaction when I smash it. Then ask for another.

Fucking retarded.

While it's disgusting that 22 senators wrote Trump to get him to get out of the Paris Accord, it's also telling that *only* 22 of them did. It just shows how not only is he climate denying actual fucking paramecium, he's also too goddamn stupid to realize that he could have exactly enacted his pro-coal, anti-Earth agenda by simply not meeting the obligations of an unenforceable climate agreement. He could have had his cake and eaten it, too, but no, he had to burn every single bridge ever because he's an actual fucking paramecium.

People brought up fence-sitting before, and I'm absolutely a China fence-sitter. Reports say that they've poured a shitload of money into renewables, and their diplomacy says they're very quickly maneuvering to try to be at the forefront of combating climate change and reaping the profits from it, but reality shows that they're also just the filthiest country ever with obscene levels of pollution and basically no laws or concern for the environment whatsoever. So yeah, I have no clue what to make of their politicking in the wake of the Trump Paris pullout.

What I do like, however, is the new president of France openly trying to poach American climate scientists. Shameless, completely shameless, and glorious. Brain drain the swamp.

This is amazing.

Re: China and renewables. It's exactly because they are so polluted that they've started investing massively in green tech etc. You don't throw this amount of money (China invested 83+ billion dollars in renewables in 2014 alone) after stuff you're not committed to. So yeah, there's a long way to go, but they're serious about going there.

They're serious about making money off of it, sure. But given the country's record of completely making shit up, plus the basically lawless capitalism they've got going on over there and the absolutely brutal pollution they're pumping into the skies daily....well, I'm skeptical.

Fight Trump:




To be fair, China made announcements of their climate change focus last year or earlier this year, to the tune of 300 billion (Murican Equivalent) dollars. They have also been reportedly shuttering coal plants and focusing on solar.

China's insane pollution is probably a bigger motivator than anything, though. You need a shovel to get through their air at times, and after a couple decades of absurd efforts to hide it or pretend it's not so bad, I think they finally got the message. In this, I'll give China the benefit of the doubt for now. [EDIT] Here we go, it's $360 billion, and this is from January. I think they're just reminding people they're better than Trump. Not that that's difficult.

Also, France wins. That guy is already kicking ass. He basically told off Putin to his face about his shady media bullshit.

Basically "I'll believe it when I see it" when it comes to China. I'm not gonna take them at face value even for spending figures. I've been living under the cloud of their pollution for years now and it ain't no good. I remember flying into Beijing and as the plane was coming down it was almost shocking to think of what I was seeing as even Earth: just an endless sea of dirty gray and yellow clouds with clumps of brown. The cloud equivalent of four day old blackened dirty snow. Just standing there in Beijing was exercise, and I could feel my lungs protesting at every breath. Their fine particulate pollution is just fucking comically high.

I mean, we're talking about the same country that slams the US for human rights hypocrisy when white cops shoot unarmed black people, meanwhile they have a state-sponsored organ harvesting murder campaign to eliminate subversive New Age yoga practitioners by the thousands to sell their organs to medical tourists on the cheap. China in 2017 is a deeply, DEEPLY fucked up place, and while there are signs that their foreign policy is starting to veer toward the vaguely normal in some circumstances, in many cases they still very much operate under the Middle Kingdom philosophy where they have absolutely no qualms about outright lying or manipulating global discourse for the betterment of their own position with no regard to how their actions might negatively affect other countries.

I'm glad we pulled out of that mess. The UN's climate prediction model says that with the 1 trillion dollars put towards it (the US footing most of the bill because Obama said we will be the leader in this) will only decrease the climates temp by .3 of a degree! ..... at the end of the century! The two world leaders in co2 emissions are China and Africa so I'd like to see them dish out more of their fair share in the bill/deal since US are no longer any part of it.

Uhhhhhhhhh.......

Whut

Nigel Farage, one of the guys responsible for Brexit... has apparently been turning up in FBI probes. As a person of interest.

http://www.snopes.com/nigel-farage-repo ... ium=social

Okay, paranoia setting in.

...there's no "bill". That's like saying Germany owes us money because of NATO. That's just not how it works.

Yeah, they have pollution. But globally they only emit less than half of the CO2 USA does, per capita. And that's what should count. USA is filthy. And extremely wasteful.

Right, but that's because huge portions of their population are still rural poor who don't contribute much CO2, but the country is changing *fast* in this regard. It's urbanifying at an insane rate, people are switching from not having cars at all to having them, there's tons of diesel. So while the US is dirtier per capita right now, I can only imagine that emissions per capita in the US are in decline while in China I cannot possibly imagine they're doing anything other than skyrocketing. Let's find some data...

Here's the US, where you can see steady decline in the 70's and again coinciding roughly with the Obama era, through vaguely now:
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?locations=US

And here's China, which has not only been seeing steady growth in emissions since data collection began, but is also frighteningly geometric in their growth in more recent years:
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?locations=CN

According to this: http://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/news_docs ... 103425.pdf

...CO2 emissions by the US decreased by 2.6% in 2015, whereas China is seeing between 9 and 10% increases in CO2 emissions annually.

iamntbatman:
Don't forget that China is the factory of the world. Most pollution in China is indirectly caused by occidental countries. European/north American countries are the actual big polluters. They only have been relocating most of their pollution to China. Thus, it seems normal the rate of CO2 emissions decreases in European/north American countries while it increases in China.
Don't get me wrong, I don't say that Chinese people don't pollute at all, they do, and more so than they did in the past but China wouldn't have such a critical level of pollution without occidental countries… and occidental countries wouldn't see their pollution rate decreasing every year without China.
The lack of laws or concern for the environment in China is part of its industrial and economic success along with their pool of cheap labor. They would have never made it to a world's top economic power with strict environmental laws, it's undeniable.

Well, yes. And this is the main reason why their investments in clean tech are so important. They will likely start shutting down the worst coal plants pretty soon, and as with every developing nation, it would be nice if they could skip some parts of the traditional ladder to becoming a rich nation. All of them directly having Teslas instead of Dodge Shitboxes would mean lower CO2 emissions.

And yes, in these things, CO2 per capita is the only fair metric. Just saying "China is worse in absolute tonnes of CO2" is the climate change version of "...but her emails!".

Thank you for clearing that up, everyone ignore "bill"

And don't forget that Trump outsourced his merchandise creation to China. You know, the guy who says he loves creating American jobs.

Let us never forget the past! You hold onto that while I hold onto the fact that Hillary getting fired from the House Judiciary Committee for lies and unethical behavior by her then supervisor Jerry Zeifman (a lifelong democrat) who said "She was an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee and the rules of confidentiality." He also refused to give her a letter of recommendation, 1 of 3 during his 17 year career. Damn.

Back to the subject of hypocrisy, Hillary smeared a child in 1975 to get the child rapist she was defending a lesser sentence, who she KNEW was guilty. Hillary said "I had him take a polygraph test which he passed - which forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs." She said with a laugh and the audio is online. This is our champion of women's rights? Damn.

And even if that were all to be true, the US would still have been better off with Hillary because Trump=dumb authoritarian narcissist and Hillary=smart practical lady with a lifetime of political experience. Sometimes choices are really simple. And I'm pretty certain this was one of them.

Wow.

This has been debunked a thousand times. She was a lawyer and was assigned that case. Would you rather live in a country where you DIDN'T have a right to an attorney? But Trump fans don't seem very good when it comes to fact-checking, I've noticed.

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter ... rape-case/


I mean to say, if you had listened to the tape you'd notice she's not laughing at the victim at all, but you seem to have just taken Trump's word on it instead. This is pretty much how he got elected: by lying or making empty promises and people weren't smart enough to notice.


As for the past, it makes sense to consider when relevant. For example, the way Trump has outsourced his things to China and fucked over former employees. I think that's relevant to how much he (doesn't) care about creating American jobs. This is just not a guy who cares about American jobs or the US economy, he cares about how much money he is making.

That would be true... if it were even remotely practical to attempt to reduce GHG's by making impositions on individuals' per capita consumption and pollution. But it isn't; which is why all efforts toward this goal target gross national emission totals. And by that metric, China's 9700 tons are worse than the USA's 6700 tons.
Not that finger-pointing is really useful at all, I'm just so sick of this reflexive blame-the-west attitude for every damn thing. Hell, I could even argue that the 1st World countries have an excuse, since they industrialized in a climate (pardon the pun) of relative ignorance. Greenhouse effect and global warming were not known for the first ~100 years of the fossil fuel age. Whereas for newcomers like China, the data has been around for decades, but they carried on polluting themselves anyway. Now I realize that's a dumb point to make, but it's no dumber than letting developing countries off the hook in global climate deals for the sake of assuaging our post-colonial guilt.