[AKN #50] What do Trump supporters believe they believe?
also don't meet your heroes and understanding "wildfire season"
Sup homies?
Coming to you live after my first encounter with vandalism since moving back up to SF.
Last night, I parked my car in an unfamiliar location about three blocks from my house.
Today, as I came back to the car, I found my back right tire slashed.
I will never understand the type of person who slashes a tire. No rhyme or reason.
He wasn’t trying to get money from my glove box or anything.
I assume he simply did it because it made him happy.
But what can you do?
Thanks to the miracle of capitalism, I got the issue resolved in under 2 hours and was able to remotely log in and work.
Things could be worse.
On to the newsletter!
LIVE: Understanding Trump supporters
A huge problem I have in understanding the Trump phenomenon is the lack of an articulate explanation about what the movement itself believes that it believes.
I am well aware what everyone else thinks the Trump fan base thinks, but what does the movement itself think?
How would they describe what they believe?
Honestly, I don’t think the majority of people within the movement could describe it as well as the following Twitter thread does:
In 35 tweets, the author taught me more about what Trump supporters actually believe than any other article I have ever read.
I reckon it resonated well with the political right too because Trump himself recommended people read it and Tucker Carlson read it word for word on Fox News.
Overall, super interesting read that gave me a look into the mind of people I have struggled to understand.
Also. Listen. I don’t usually do politics.
Mainly because when I write about it, I end up in these insanely long email exchanges correcting someone’s inferences about what they assume I believe because I misplaced a comma, didn’t use an em dash, and/or did not appropriately caveat that I don’t believe verbatim what some source I shared said.
So I would like to give you the following disclaimers to hopefully avoid that:
Posting this is not an endorsement in any way, shape, or form of the comments made in the thread. For fuck sake, I just find it interesting and think others will too.
For what it is worth, I would be extremely interested in a left leaning thread that tackles each one of the points made.
I am sure it would dismantle what was presented.
I won’t get that response.
I will instead get at least one email misrepresenting my views that will have me shaking my head in disbelief.
“Did this person read anything I wrote?” I will wonder aloud to no one in particular.
No. No they didn’t. Because I triggered some tribal thing deep in their brain stem when I mentioned this subject and that sent them into digital attack mode.
My inbox is the collateral damage.
But that’s show business, baby!
LAUGH: Never meet your heroes
We warned this guy to not look a gift horse in the mouth…
LOVE: The ultimate guide to understanding California wildfires
So it is wildfire season. That wonderful time of year where smoke takes over the skyline and I learn about new areas of California…because they are ablaze.
It is a confusing “season” to explain to people.
Many non-Californians as well as Californians don’t “get it”.
Why do wildfires occur so frequently?
Is climate change about to make California unlivable?
I never had a great article to point everyone to until now.
This guide is the most comprehensive review of California wildfires I have ever read.
It is equal parts enlightening and non-partisan. Purely deals with the scientific facts and data we have about the phenomenon.
Here are 6 quick takeaways (complete with accompanying graphics sometimes!) from the piece about causes of wildfires and what to expect in the future:
1. Fires will increase, but it will be irregular
Burned acres per year in California are increasing relative to 1950. This is predicted to continue to increase, but the increase won't be linear. Some years will see very little fire and others will see 2020-scale mega fires.
2. The level of fire now is not unprecedented
This quantity of fire is not unseen in the history of California: pre-1800 there used to be more fires, and during the European colonization California saw even more fires.
Below is a plot of acres burned by year going back to just 1919 and you can see that there was a significant amount of burning back then too.
3. Humans cause the most fires, but not necessarily the most damage
The immediate cause of most (>80%) fires is attributable to humans.
However, this is not true for large fires. Lightning strikes continue to play a significant role in igniting fires and should not be disregarded.
4. Massive build up of burnable land due to how we fight fires + Climate change = Powder keg for mega fires
This may come as a surprise to you, but we are actually very good at firefighting.
A hundred years ago if something went ablaze it just burned straight through the state until it ran out of fuel.
We now have the power to stop the fire in its tracks. Which is great!
This practice is called “zero tolerance fire suppression” or “fire exclusion.”
However, this way of fighting fires actually adds to the “stockpile” of things that can burn in the future.
The idea here is while we may save lives and homes in the moment when we control fires today, we are building up a large “fire debt” in the form of many acres of burnable land.
This is tricky.
We obviously can’t let unmitigated burning happen since people’s homes and things are in the way.
We need to fight the fire.
Add climate change on top of this, which is accelerating the “fire debt” by drying out previously “wet” land faster than before, and the stage has been set for mega fires.
5. FOR THE LOVE OF SCIENCE THE RISE IN FIRES ISN’T ALL ATTRIBUTABLE TO CLIMATE CHANGE
Even in the absence of climate change, we would still see more fire than the 1950-1980 period; that is, the graphs typically used to point to the effects of climate change on the increase of wildfires overstate the magnitude of the effect of climate change and understate natural variation and human firefighting practices.
6. Fires will occur regardless of what we do. We need a plan to address this reality.
Even without climate change, fire exclusion, or weather oscillations, a lot of California is going to naturally burn.
Fire is inevitable.
But rather than deal with this reality and create a comprehensive plan to mitigate the downside risk of a megafire, we generally end up with a whole lot of nothing.
Take for example performing prescribed burns.
Unfortunately, we aren’t planning enough of these activities to make up the fire debt, nor are we even carrying out the ones that are planned (dashed line is planned, black is actual).
Unfortunately, this is not ending any time soon as the governor has been scaling back these activities…
We need to start looking at what we can do to fix this, not sticking our heads in the sand and saying “but climate change makes this problem hard.”
Thankfully, there are some other great ideas out there for making progress on this problem!
In fact, the same author of this article I summarized just came out with a second part today giving a comprehensive overview of what mitigations we can use to control the fire situation.
I will do a similar run down of the best takeaways from that article next week.
Closing time
You don’t have to go home, but you can subscribe here:
Disclaimer: Opinions expressed are strictly my own. Who else’s would they be?