Trolling liberals is an evil sport. It’s like teasing a chained dog. He may be absolutely vicious and bark like hell, but he’s totally ineffectual. Liberals are like that. They may be mostly evil, but they are ignorant. And, in their echo chambers, unaware even of their ignorance.
Thomas Pierce tells me that I should be a bigger man than to bait them. Sorry, Thomas, but I am weak. Here goes.
This recent email exchange with a liberal I have know for decades is too precious not to share. In the first email I forward an article claiming that the coral reefs are not dying. His daughter is studying marine biology. I innocently (not!) asked him if he could recommend a book supporting the thesis that the coral reefs are dying out.
I know that he has never in his adult life read a book on science. But I also know that he is so convinced of his liberal superiority that he will never admit it. That’s what makes trolling him so fun! Though the topic I raised, and attempted to stick with, is books about coral reefs, he managed to slur me at every turn. You will see the terms race and racist seven or eight times. Ditto white and supremacy. He makes vicious personal attacks. His writing is full of inappropriate usages, spellings and capitalizations. He is too self-assured to use a spell-checker.
This should be a cautionary note to Democrats. This is how conservatives view your fellow travelers. They should be an absolute embarrassment, but you do not disavow them. Bill Maher is right.
It seems from these- https://www.amnh.org/explore/videos/scicafe--lectures/bright-future-oceans-jeremy-jackson and https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/oceans/331861/revaluing-the-oceans - that climate change is only one of three major factors. The big factors are overfishing and fertilizer runoff and marine pollution - the author of the two pieces above, Jeremy B. C. Jackson has written a book about this - see https://www.amazon.com/Breakpoint-Reckoning-Americas-Environmental-Crises/dp/0300179391/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0 (note that the hardcover version is by far the cheapest).
In what I assume to be Ridd's chart, there seems to be a decreasing trend in coral cover running from 1985 to about 2012, followed by an increasing trend running from 2013 to about 2024, with the sharpest rise occurring from 2020 to 2021, when aircraft flights at >20,000 ft were largely curtailed - and in the last year there appears to be a decrease in coral cover. It's nearly impossible to draw any conclusions from this, I'd want to see correlations with other data before attempting to do so.
Invective and rhetoric aren't arguing, although they all too often pass for it nowadays. You might run this by your over-emotional liberal friend. Your friend should heed Jefferson's maxim: "Before speaking, count to ten if angry, if very angry, count to one hundred." He ought to calm down, and have another go at it, this time controlled by reason, rather than emotion.
My grown kids used it twenty or thirty years ago. Lots of slang sits badly with me. "Gimme five" is one from the sixties that I hate.