ADVANTAGE HARARI: Rhodes Scholar ignores the Green New Deal!

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2019

Prefers to keep locking them up: Could climate change destroy the human race? That what David Wallace-Wells has now rather plainly said.

It's time to panic, Wallace-Wells says, at the start of the lengthy essay which dominated the front page of the New York Times Sunday Review this past weekend.

It's time to panic, Wallace-Wells says. Indeed, his essay about our planet's ongoing crisis appeared beneath these headlines:

Time to Panic
The planet is getting warmer in catastrophic ways. And fear may be the only thing that saves us.

It's time to panic, Wallace-Wells says. He develops this basic concept in his new book, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. He developed the same concept in July 2017, in this cover essay for New York magazine, a cover essay which ran beneath the same basic title as his new book—The Uninhabitable Earth.

For the record, "uninhabitable" means that children and their parents won't be able to live here in the future. According to Susan Matthews in Slate, that cover essay by Wallace-Wells "went on to become the most widely read story in New York’s 50-plus-year history."

Now, that widely-read essay has re-emerged in the shape of a book—a book in which Wallace-Wells explains, in graphic detail, how much is currently at stake, though only if you actually care about the lives of actual people who aren't you.

That said, lucky us, over here in our liberal/progressive tents! Just as the Wallace-Wells book is appearing—just as the New York Times is showcasing the book from its highest platform—just as these events are occurring, Ed Markey and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have released their new proposals for climate policy.

You might not know this from watching "cable news," but the new proposal has been dubbed The Green New Deal.

How sensible is the Green New Deal? How can the public be made aware of the problem it seeks to address? How can citizens who have been deceived for years, while being insulted by the Tomaskys among us, be made aware of the dangers?

Those are deeply important, existential questions. Unless you've been watching the massively overpaid corporate children who parade about on MSNBC, Rachel Maddow most prominent among them.

The Green New Deal was released by Markey and Ocasio-Cortez on Thursday, February 7. How much play has this proposal received on The One True Liberal Channel?

With that, you're asking a very good question! Let's start with the Maddow Show:

Sorry! At present, Maddow is wholly consumed with mugging and clowning in support of her crowd-pleasing attempts to "hang them high"—to bathe herself nightly in the joys of locking The Others up.

On the Maddow Show, other topics are not allowed to intrude on the pleasures of this tribal pursuit. For that reason, Rachel Maddow—Our Own Rhodes Scholar—didn't mention the Green New Deal on the day it was unveiled.

Maddow ignored the Green New Deal on the day it was brought forward. Nor has the proposal been mentioned on her popular, revenue-generating program at any time since the day it was unveiled!

With apologies, you read that correctly! Maddow didn't mention the Green New Deal on Thursday evening, February 7. Nor did she mention the Green New Deal on Friday, February 8.

A rapturous weekend came and went, after which Maddow was back in the saddle again. That said, she didn't mention the Green New Deal on Monday evening, February 11, or on any other program last week, right on through the ludicrous program she presented on Friday evening, February 15, when she spent her entire evening trying to hang 'em high.

Last Friday's show was fully devoted to the joys of locking them up. Before the week is done, we'll explore a few of the brainless excesses we liberals were encouraged to enjoy on that ridiculous evening.

That said, the joy of locking them up wasn't permitted to die there. Last night, Maddow skipped the Green New Deal again. Predictably enough, she opened her program with this ode to the joys of conquest:

MADDOW (2/18/19): And thanks to you at home for joining us this hour. Happy Monday. Happy Presidents Day.

On Friday night, you may recall we got the sentencing submission from special counsel Robert Mueller for Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. And it was kind of a stunner, right?

This was Friday night. The prosecutors argued for no mitigating factors that might encourage the judge to be more lenient with Manafort, and they argued for lots of aggravating factors that should cause the judge to be harsher in sentencing Manafort. Mueller's prosecutors advised that judge on Friday night in Manafort's case in Virginia that they would not object to a 19-1/2 year to 24-1/2 year prison sentence for Paul Manafort. Plus, fines and restitution that ranged from millions of dollars to tens of millions of dollars.

Now keep in mind though that sentencing recommendation Friday night was just for the one judge, just for the one judge who is hearing the Paul Manafort case in Virginia. That is not the only federal case against Paul Manafort. By the end of this week, we are expecting Robert Mueller and his prosecutors to also make their case for the sentence that they believe Manafort should get from the other federal judge who is hearing the other federal criminal case against Paul Manafort in the neighboring jurisdiction of Washington, D.C.

And that fairly dire circumstance, the fact that 69 1/2-year-old Paul Manafort is now looking down the twin barrels of a sentence from the federal judge in Virginia and then another sentence from this federal judge in D.C., that obviously is a crisis of his own making. Because it was Manafort and his defense team who elected to not combine the two sets of felony charges against him into one single case in one jurisdiction before one judge.

So Manafort is now facing sentencing in two different jurisdictions by two different federal judges on two different sets of crimes, and, yes, he does face the prospect that the sentences in each of those jurisdictions might run consecutively, might run one after the other rather than concurrently, both at the same time.

So we know as of Friday night what prosecutors have advised the judge in the Virginia case, 19-1/2 to 24-1/2 years in prison. That came out on Friday. By the end of this week, we will see what the prosecutors are advising the other judge in his other case. Then it will be up to those two judges in each of those two jurisdictions to decide Paul Manafort's fate.

The second judge, the one in D.C., who will get a prosecutor sentencing submission this week, within the next few days, she is the judge who has already ruled against Paul Manafort in some very materially significant ways. On Friday night, we might remember we also got the unsealed transcript of the hearing in which that judge ruled that Manafort had repeatedly and intentionally lied to prosecutors, even after he pled guilty and agreed he would become a cooperator, in that ruling, that judge in D.C. was blunt and direct about Manafort's lies. Her ruling that his lies had been intentional and what she described as the implications of his lies.

You should keep in mind this isn't just what this judge said in a written ruling about the president's campaign chairman. This is what she said to his face in a court hearing where Manafort himself was present and in the room. She said, quote, "My concern is not with not answers or simply denying from Manafort, but the times he affirmatively advanced a detailed alternative story that was inconsistent with the facts."

Quote: "The record doesn't seem to reflect the confusion and the defendant didn't profess to be confused. He does appear, however, to be making a concerted effort to avoid saying what really took place."

[...]

On and on, and on and on, Our Own Rhodes Scholar went from there.

Maddow's viewers "may recall" what happened last Friday with respect to the many years Manafort may be locked up? On this badly disordered "cable news" program, the badly under-served liberal viewer is given no other choice.

More specifically, the Maddow viewer has been given no opportunity to hear about the Green New Deal. It still hasn't been mentioned, not even once, on the popular tribal program of this corporate-paid and corporate-owned multimillionaire.

It wasn't mentioned on last night's show. Neither was the high-profile essay by Wallace-Wells. This leads to a basic question:

Are we humans really "the rational animal," as sacred Aristotle is widely said to have said? If you can watch the Maddow Show and retain your faith in that ancient claim, you yourself may be so irrational as constitute a clear-cut "Advantage Harari" in the battle of paradigms which has recently broken out.

It's as we told you last week. In his best-selling book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Professor Harari paints a rather unflattering picture of us, the members of Homo sapiens, the species which somehow managed to drive all other human species into the sea.

According to Professor Harari—and yes, his views are endorsed by Bill Gates!—our flailing species' global conquest didn't result from our amazing rational skills or from anything like that.

According to Harari, our advantage emerged from our acquisition of the ability to engage in "gossip," along with the ability to formulate and promulgate sweeping group "fictions." Beyond that, our advantage may have emerged from our long-standing, hard-wired desire to parade about killing the pig:

HARARI (page 8): It’s a common fallacy to envision [prehistory's various human] species as arranged in a straight line of descent, with Ergaster begetting Erectus, Erectus begetting the Neanderthals, and the Neanderthals evolving into us. This linear model gives the mistaken impression that at any particular moment only one type of human inhabited the earth, and that all earlier species were merely older models of ourselves. The truth is that from about 2 million years ago until around 10,000 years ago, the world was home, at one and the same time, to several human species. ...The earth of a hundred millennia ago was walked by at least six different species of man. It’s our current exclusivity, not that multi-species past, that is peculiar–and perhaps incriminating. As we will shortly see, we Sapiens have good reasons to repress the memory of our siblings.

Our war-like species once shared the earth with at least five other human species. So where did the other humans go? After floating the word "incriminating," Harari limns it like this:

HARARI (page 17): But if the Neanderthals, Denisovans and other human species didn’t merge with Sapiens, why did they vanish? One possibility is that Homo sapiens drove them to extinction. Imagine a Sapiens band reaching a Balkan valley where Neanderthals had lived for hundreds of thousands of years. The newcomers began to hunt the deer and gather the nuts and berries that were the Neanderthals’ traditional staples. Sapiens were more proficient hunters and gatherers—thanks to better technology and superior social skills—so they multiplied and spread. The less resourceful Neanderthals found it increasingly difficult to feed themselves. Their population dwindled and they slowly died out, except perhaps for one or two members who joined their Sapiens neighbors.

Another possibility is that competition for resources flared up into violence and genocide. Tolerance is not a Sapiens trademark. In modern times, a small difference in skin color, dialect or religion has been enough to prompt one group of Sapiens to set about exterminating another group. Would ancient Sapiens have been more tolerant towards an entirely different human species? It may well be that when Sapiens encountered Neanderthals, the result was the first and most significant ethnic-cleansing campaign in history.

As Harari notes, "tolerance is not a trademark" of our war-like species. According to Harari, the disappearance of the other human species may have resulted from the human history's first campaigns of "killing the pig!"

That said, the primal joy of loathing The Others is now the constant theme of the brain-dead Maddow Show. Everything else must take a back seat to the pleasures of contemplating the possible length of prison sentences for the various people who are The Others, or Them.

Rachel Maddow seems to think and care about nothing else. The possible extinction of the whole human race takes a back seat on this disordered program to the disordered pleasure the disordered host takes from picturing Them In Chains.

Last Friday's program was especially daft in this regard. Last evening, the program's disorderedd host took right up with where she'd left off.

Along the way, the Green New Deal hasn't been mentioned, not even once. Neither has the prospect of an uninhabitable Earth. Nothing matters except the joy of contemplating the number of years Manafort may be required to spend in jail. Indeed, he may even die there!

Are we humans "the rational animal," as Aristotle is said to have said? When Our Own Rhodes Scholar behaves in these ridiculous ways—when the rest of the children across the career liberal world are unable to notice the strangeness of this behavior—we think the answer is all too clear, and we call it "Advantage Harari."

Aristotle is said to have said that we humans are the rational animal. In a full-throated dissent, Harari has said that our species' conquest of the planet emerged from a grisly brew of gossip, fiction and intolerant loathing.

Our own Rhodes Scholar—our brightest player!—seems to care about nothing except the pleasures of tribal loathing. We'll spend the week exploring the way this seems to support a certain unflattering portrait of our dim-witted, war-loving species.

We turned to the analysts last Friday night. "Advantage Harari," we incomparably said.

Tomorrow: The Green New Deal was widely ignored. Except, of course, at Fox!

A persistently amateur operation: If MSNBC ever gets around to posting transcripts for Maddow's programs from February 14, 15 and 18, those transcripts will presumably be posted here.