AccuWeather's owner and Republican megadonor Joel Myers has been dreaming for years about destroying the National Weather Service. He wants weather to be a for-profit venture (specifically his profit).

Lol, "one side of the climate debate." There isn't debate among scientists - there's like less than one percent of climate scientists who don't believe that humans are putting our climate in a terrible place. So just that part the tells you the bias. It's just like when they talk about the debate between evolution and creationism: the only debate is with people who reject the data to further their own agenda.

The claim is false and we should absolutely be careful about how we word things but also the outcome will be, as you say, essentially the same.

“…reminder that Project 2025 plans to defund large sections of the NOAA and is more worried about how facts ruin their arguments than the safety of your towns and cities.”

A little longer but at least it’s true.

Data collected by the department should be presented neutrally, without adjustments intended to support any one side in the climate debate.

Using recent history as context for my interpretation of this, I believe what they actually mean is “…should definitely not be presented neutrally, because doing so would rely only on the peer reviewed science which overwhelmingly agrees that climate change is definitely a real thing that is currently happening. Instead, DO adjust it to make it seem like it’s impossible to say for sure.”

Also it’s important to note that NOAA is often used for military purposes. Four of our six military branches (Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard, and the Space Force whatever they do) absolutely and unequivocally depend on their data to do their job, one just relies on it, and the sixth hitches rides on navy equipment.

I’m not the biggest fan of the military industrial complex, but if the oceanic and atmospheric arm of one of the world’s most significant consumers of mined hydrocarbons has been sounding the alarm bells for decades I have every reason to believe them

Which is odd because NOAA has like, no regulatory power. The regulated community kinda loves agencies like NOAA because they can tell them to pound sand over anything and that's that

They're not the EPA or anything.

with enough bombs they can blow up the next hurricane before it becomes a problem for the people living in florida

all you need is a fat sharpie...

or maybe some idiot just forgot to turn on the faucet while it was still over the ocean....

They knew it would pass so they all got to pretend at being "fiscally responsible". I guarantee they'll go home to their districts and take credit for every penny doled out.

The uneducated can vote.

Belief is largely social. This is true for all of us, to some extent. It doesn't matter much when the social belief is "our baseball team is the best". Unfortunately, the republican worldview is afactual and hateful. That's really the bulk of it, I think. People identify with republicans, or with their neighbors that are republicans, and that's the most important thing. More important than facts or truth.

Also there's a lot of authoritarians. They want a strong in-group and an out-group to hurt.

So when someone says like "So-and-so Republican is a rapist, felon, and liar" that smashes right into the "my in-group is important, and if i reject my in-group I will die alone" part of the brain. So the facts bounce off and they write you off as an asshole.

Fixing that seems difficult. Appealing to a shared group identity can work (eg: we're all americans here and we want to make the best of our great country, together). You see this sometimes where someone hates some out-group, and then actually meets a member and spends time with them. Now that person might be part of the in-group, and things have to shift around.

The other thing that changes minds is trauma. Horrible trauma. If your house gets blown apart by a hurricane, that might be enough for you to reevaluate your world view.

Anyway, the oatmeal did a comic about belief: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe Here's a free book about authoritarians: https://theauthoritarians.org/

In their districts, they have the right letter next to their names on the ballot. Also, the “own the libtards.”

My Uber reductionist explanation.

I get you scared. You vote for the cure to what I'm scaring you on.

Most people, except the very scared, don't vote.

Republicans say "hell is coming unless you vote for me", which gets people scared and thus voting

Democrats, "well try our hardest to build helpful systems that make the middle class grow again" ...... People stop listening and don't vote.......

That's how

Fuck. 2020 got more people voting than any other presidential election in recent history and it STILL didn't break 50% of legal voters.

Because the people voting are dumber than these fucktards.

One can only guess that there is a large and chronically uninformed body of people that only get their information from the bad guys' personal propaganda machine.

It would make the Biden administration look good

I'm tired of paying for those welfare queens