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This meme is peak liberal and not just because it’s Lisa Simpson
Thanks tankie
Sure. And to the meme’s credit, at least it prefaces the alt-history with “maybe”, like even lisa simpson doubts a third-way politician was going to change the logic of capital.
We can also imagine a reality where Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were collectively not elected and global neoliberalism failed to crystallize.
But this is just day dreaming. The reality is those things didn’t happen and here we are.
It’s also the old story, the same that many governments faced during COVID, if you do a lot and actually stop something from happening, people say it was a waste of time, nothing happened, you over reacted etc.
If you don’t do anything and it all goes badly, people say you didn’t do enough etc.
So theoretically even if Gore did start to fix climate change, if he had real impact, there’s a chance the world would’ve turned against climate change as a hoax and waste of time.
The sad part is, we’d still probably be better off overall.
Mmm yes but Gore winning wouldn’t provide Cheney with lots of lucrative no-bid Halliburton contracts.
Oh c’mon it’s not like they passed a law making it okay to profiteer off of war so they could gouge the taxpayers for - checks earpeice ohhh. That’s right, they did.
The resolution to illegally attack Iraq purposefully left out the war profiteering.
Still though. Both sides bad, let’s all listen to the FSB and not vote.
It is befuddling reading the sentiment for the majority of the comments on this post.
Having a chief executive in office in 2000 who was super concerned about climate change would have made a big difference.
But hey that’s just like my opinion man
Cool, then explain what he could have done that Obama and Biden didn’t do already. You’re massively overrating the impact one president has. It’s not like he even campaigned on climate change in the first place. He didn’t pull that schtick until after he lost the election.
There’s no chance whatsoever that an Al Gore presidency would have averted the climate crisis. Absolutely none. I’m actually shocked that any adult could be this naive.
Especially considering it’s a GLOBAL phenomenon lol.
Progress is cumulative, and it happens slowly.
Even if he didn’t accomplish anything other than preventing the regression that happened under Bush, it would have allowed Obama and Biden to make more progress than they did.
If he did manage to accomplish anything, no matter how small, then Obama and Biden could have made even more progress.
As someone who’s guilty of thinking ‘both sides are the same’ I think you’re definitely right.
For context I am Australian and while I still think our labor party is better than our liberal party the differences are small, which is why I always vote for our further left party whose votes ultimately go to labor anyway.
Australia has ranked choice voting, does it not? I’d vote for the farthest left option too if the US had RCV.
Yeah, that’s why I don’t understand people voting labor here.
It works pretty well, too. Sure there’s still a two party situation going on, but recently the amount of votes not going to either is making it clear they’re slowly losing voter confidence as the older generation fade out.
I think younger voters actually understand how important the senate is too and how powerful ranking it with some detail can be.
I’m voting every single far left party before I even hit labour. If you have ranked choice voting may as well use it.
Would the world have been different with Al Gore? Probably. But it’s easy to make up perfect hypotheticals. Look at what the Democrats actually did in the years after. They basically all voted for the Iraq war, and then when they had a filibuster proof majority in 08, they did practically nothing on climate change.
Except that the Republicans would shit-can any legislative initiatives - because they controlled both chambers - and would hamstring any executive actions. Hell, they’d probably have impeached Gore for it.
Our system of government is simply incapable of dealing with a problem on the scale of climate change.
The EPA is part of the executive branch. They could have regulated carbon emissions like they regulate other emissions.
They could have done that under Obama or Biden too then. So why haven’t they?
There were things like this
And it di pd go forward, until repealed by Trump
Do you think a Republican Congress would allow that? Do you think industry won’t tie the change up in the courts for decades?
Yes, the executive can attempt these things but with two coequal branches, one of which swings between the parties pretty regularly every couple years, it wouldn’t stick.
My first thought. Oh no! The oil industry had to double its lobbying budget while still making record profits.
Yeah. Seeing them come out of the woodwork to say “Yeah Gore was just another rich white blah blah Lieberman blah blah center-right, all the same” really throws it into sharp relief how little connection there is to reality there.
It would literally have changed the world.
I get the same message that people think capitalism under Biden is the same as capitalism under Trump. It’s honestly bizarre.
Defeatism and cynicism are very effective defense mechanisms, and the internet has made some people absolute experts at both.
All we can do is keep loudly pointing out how daft and counter-productive these behaviors are. Even if it’s true, saying “x is useless” is also useless unless you propose to do y instead.
Foresight is often mistaken for cycicism by those that lack it.
Who said cynical opinions are always factually incorrect? You’re making up an argument.
Thank you for illustrating my point brilliantly; you have contributed nothing of worth, but your feeling of superiority.
It’s just a simple piece of advice, no need to get spikey.
Whose to say that the Gore Timeline would have brought us to anything better than what we have now?
I’d like to think that in that timeline, we never got past the point of TFG sticking to his shitty ass TV shows.
Doubt.
No Iraq War, “No Child Left Behind” never becomes a thing, Bin Laden gets caught in Afghanistan if the 9/11 plot even manages to happen since Bush is known to have ignored a report containing a warning about the attacks being planned.
You really wanna tell me that a world without the war on terror would be exactly as bad as the one we live in today? Especially one without the war on terror where the century kicks off with a president who takes the climate crisis seriously?
Fuck, even just excluding the war in Iraq makes a huge fucking difference.
You’re taking quite a bit of a leap there about 9/11 being foiled because Gore was in office. I really don’t think that it would have been sunshine and lollipops like what has been suggested. He’s one man. I have a hard time believing one man would have made the difference in terms of 9/11.
I was 17 during that election, otherwise I would have voted for him. I think he could have done some great things, but I’m not so sure those great things would have made massive waves that would change today.
🤷🏻♀️
Edit: format more better next time.
Even if that terrorist attack wasn’t foiled, there were many possible ways to respond to it. It’s naive to think that would have unfolded the same way
Bush ignored an attack imminent report that basically spelled out the intent of Al Qaeda to launch an attack via the hijacking of airplanes. Gore likely would not have, as gore is not as dumb as Bush is well known to be.
One of the key findings was that poor transition because of the election mess led to lack of intelligence briefings, etc and thus lack of decisions.
Whose to say that the Gore Timeline would have brought us to anything better than what we have now?
I mean, this is just kinda dummy thiccc reasoning. Looks good from the outside, but vapid and lacking substance.
It absolutely, 100% no-doubt, are-you-even-joking would have been better. But my idiot friends all voted Nader to register their displeasure. Stupid fucks.
I disagree. There’s only so much one man would have been able to do. After 9/11, he would have lost all buy-in from the public as the War on Terror started. Who would care about saving the planet if they are worried about terrorist attacks?
The Kyoto Protocol would have been ratified. Could you imagine if we had an international agreement with legally-binding emissions reductions in place in 2000? The Paris Agreement is the best we have, and it’s simply not as strong as Kyoto would have been
We can do two things at the same time you know. And the way industry and electrical grid changes work is over a long period of time. You move the needle at the start and the path change is dramatic.
Yeah I was one of those, was young and edgy, still feel bad about it sometimes but then remember AlGore was a pretty different dude then too. Like, he picked Joe fucking Lieberman as his running mate ffs, so I harbor no illusions that he would have been anything other than status quo. Better than GWB? Oh fuck yeah, in retrospect it’s not close, but their campaigns they were basically trying to out-center the other, and both seemed like just slightly different versions of each other. Assuming he would have been a major disruptor in terms of climate initiatives is naive I think.
were basically trying to out-center the other
I mean that is and has been the post Reagan political paradigm. It worked once for Democrats (Clinton), every other election before and after (at least as far back as Carter), Democrats win when they step to the left. Yet they still think they should be fighting for some imagined center.
Oh for sure, he was following Clinton’s lead, so that’s why it’s somewhat funny to hear people talking about him like he was some kind of super environmental progressive, when that just wasn’t the case, or it at least isn’t how he ran, which was really quite the opposite.
Yes, I agree. I’m also not sure that running as a super environmental progressive would have been possible at the time. We were just coming out of the timber wars, where the timber industry had spent millions convincing the US that a few hippies chained to trees trying to prevent the last bits of old-growth redwoods from destruction were the problem.
It was a different time and we were very desensitized to the concept of hippy punching etc.
How high do you have to be to erase everything al gore did to prove he wanted to do something about climate change? Why are you rewriting history like this? It’s preposterous
You’re the one rewriting history. Al Gore didn’t run on climate change. No have a single shot about climate change in 2000. There was never any chance he was going to spend his political capital on climate change legislation.
The most we would have gotten from him is more incrementslism on the topic, like we got from Obama and Biden. The op is completely detached from reality.
Yeah this - people tout Al Gore today as if he was the same back then. He learned from what happened, and became better, but it was that failure that caused that process… or something like that, maybe?
Like, didn’t he say that he invented the internet? Actually, supposedly he never said that, only that he played a key role in it (which he did), but that is the kind of thing that a “modern” politician simply cannot ever do: give comedians a reason to make fun of him, like Biden’s “then you ain’t black” comment. Obama understood this well: the President is mostly a face on television (these days, the internet), so portrayal is the main part of the job.
Unfortunately, Trump used that same feature to his own benefit. i.e., Trump understood this one feature better than Gore. Before everyone downvotes me to oblivion, I invite people to think about how it is correct, no matter how desperately we wish it were not, or how disgusted it makes all of us feel:-(.
He never said he invented the Internet. You saying that kinda shows how much you know.
didn’t he say that he invented the internet?
No, he didn’t say he invented the Internet. What he did say was that as a young congressman he took the initiative to create the Internet, by providing the funding to expand the military’s Arpanet for civilian usage - a perfectly true and reasonable statement for him to make since that is actually what he did. Literally months after Gore made this perfectly true and unremarkable statement, Bush advisor Karl Rove twisted it into “I invented the Internet”. There is no “supposedly” about this.
that is the kind of thing that a “modern” politician simply cannot ever do
Gore simply talked about one of his biggest accomplishments (perhaps the biggest accomplishment) of his long career as a politician. It is not reasonable to expect a Democrat to never mention the best parts of his record out of fear that the Republicans will twist his words - that will happen regardless.
Gore was one of the senators who saw early on the potential of the internet and fought for funding for it. Vint Cerf said that Gore’s actual statement (which, of course, was not that he “invented the internet”) was completely accurate in terms of taking credit for what he’d accomplished and the value of it. It’s the same quality he had that put him ahead of the curve on climate change (he would actually still be ahead of the curve today, in terms of the woeful bullshit people in Washington consider “the curve”).
If your goal is to live your political life in such a way that no one can twist your words around and make you look bad, you’re not going to succeed. I think a better approach would be uprooting and demolishing as much as possible of the powerful media systems that are engineered and funded to take good politicians’ words and twist them around to produce malevolent results and make those politicians artificially look bad. How to get that done, I wish I knew.
If your goal is to live your political life in such a way that no one can twist your words around and make you look bad, you’re not going to succeed.
You’re not going to succeed, nor will you ever care about anything that matters
I think Obama’s approach was to bypass the media, and reach out directly to the people themselves, even if through them. That way, the media dared not make fun of him. Ofc they did anyway, but quite often, it did not stick as a result.
Here I have to ignore Faux News b/c they just ruthlessly tried to tear him apart - e.g. a black kid dies by violence, and Obama sheds a tear in sympathy, and they accuse him of it being faked. Which even if so, so what? We should have, and demonstrate, sympathy to people - imagine if that were a competition, and he was winning it, rather than the exact opposite of that which is the reality that we had:-(.
So the more mainstream media made fun of Obama’s pauses, and how white his hair had turned while in office. Obama himself played along, especially in the White House Correspondents speeches. Those were great relations:-D.
Somehow Gore never managed to do that. I imagine him more like an engineer (which I am myself), who might be technically quite proficient, but struggle at the more “people” aspects of the job. Nixon too in a fashion. The people want a JFK/Bill Clinton/Obama/Trump, they don’t want someone who will actually get the job done, more’s the pity:-(.
And now we have Biden, who similarly is quietly getting things done, though the media is eating him alive whenever/however they can. After that, whether in this upcoming election or the one after that, it’ll be a GQP member - you just know that, b/c of Dems never winning successive elections in history. Rinse & Repeat.
UNLESS libs learn this lesson, finally, and put forward someone who is electable? It very much IS a popularity contest, no matter how much we may wish, demand, expect, or hope otherwise:-|.
The attitude of the Greek Stoics impresses me: we cannot impose our views upon the entire world, we can only change what WE can manage to change ourselves. Maybe that means skirting the government at the federal level - like individual states right now could pass protections against future anti-abortion laws, so why don’t they? Or coalitions among cities could accomplish a lot - e.g. we can’t force people to take vaccines, but we can work to make them cheap, effective, and available to anyone that will.
Navel-gazing back into the past does serve a purpose, but only to the extent that we learn from our mistakes as we move forward.
Congress existed at the time
And was controlled entirely by Republicans.
I would rather have 50 states that agree on a plan of action than one guy fighting against the entirety of the federal government.
Good luck with that. I doubt there’s one single thing for which that is possible besides maybe “George Washington was the first president”.
Biden is president and emissions are even worse since he started
That’s pretty disingenuous given his term started in the middle of covid. US carbon emissions are still well below what they were in 2019.
We’re also drilling more oil than ever before.
Almost like a war broke out that cut America’s allies off from their usual stocks of oil and raising prices globally including on non-oil-product goods or something!
Wanna gripe? Gripe in context.
I wasn’t griping and understand the context.
But that just underscores the idea that even if Al Gore had taken office there’s no telling what his climate legacy would have been.
You think Al Gore winning would have prompted Putin to invade Ukraine twenty years early?
That is not at all what they said and you should be fucking embarrassed. They were saying that electing gore in 2000 wouldn’t have (necessarily) prevented Putin from invading Ukraine. But I think you probably understand that. You’re just being a piece of shit.
My point is that even while pretending to acknowledge context they’re trying to throw it in the bin.
Not my fault that there’s only so nice a way to point out that what someone’s trying to base their argument on is horseshit.
You’re needlessly antagonistic.
Gore would have had to respond to events, including drilling more oil which would undermine his climate efforts.
What I’m saying is presidents live in the real world like the rest of us and make decisions they don’t want.
You do understand things take time right?
Its like watching a train speeding towards a barrier, steadily accelerating faster and faster, full throttle, and saying well it takes time to come to a full stop. No brakes applied, no taking the foot off the gas. Im not even accusing him of doing nothing, he’s actively worsening climate change.
Except the foot is being taken off the gas, or in the analogy coal is beyond fed in slower, or some coal is beyond replaced with renewables, but you’re amazed the train is still going. Like Geez industrial and power momentum is freaking hard to change, we’re not going to turn off all the fossil power plants, ice cars, and change every industrial process in a measly 3 years.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-u-s-oil-production-reached-an-all-time-high-in-2023
You’re blinded by the D next to his name, never in the history of the world have we been worsening climate change faster.
Taking foot off the gas is emissions peaking, remaining steady, not being higher than the previous year. Hitting the brakes is reducing emissions to less than the previous year. We have to do that for a long time before we stop contributing to climate change, as it’s all cumulative.
I think you, like many, expect the entire freaking world to change in a couple of years. You have no idea how much there is to do and how much industry there is out there. You have to keep voting it in for decades. It’s not one and done. Sorry but you have no idea how the world works. But go ahead and don’t vote in stupid protest and we can start again from scratch in 8-16 years (remember it’s been 23 years since we could have started with Gore, but go ahead and don’t vote.)
And BTW I didn’t say hitting the brakes, I said less coal being put in. Momentum is a bitch. That’s what the world is. Buut you don’t seem to realize that and just want to complain. Chow.
PS you’re the one actually blinded by a D next to the name because you expect everything to change because of that D in 2 freaking years (when he had control of the house).
And this is the reason it’s a crisis. Climate change is a long process, as is changing the entire world economy to face it. It’s not a crisis because of disruptive weather this year, but because we’ve already set in motion changes to the atmosphere that will inexorably make much more serious changes for at least the next century. Even changing just one small sector of emissions, changing internal combustion to battery electric vehicles, will take a couple decades, and is facing constant resistance by conservatives. One small sector. We have to change the entire world economy. There is so much work ahead and we’re already out of time to prevent serious climat consequences. Starting a couple decades earlier would have made a huge difference (although EV technology wasn’t up to it, so we’d focus on other things).
People can’t seem to look at a graph and internalize what it means when the line keeps going steeply up into the future, but Al Gore clearly could. People can’t seem to conceptualize that some actions have long term results, but Al Gore clearly could
Agreed. On batteries this is where I go back to the 70s. When the oil embargo happened they should have been R&Ding hard for better batteries (and solar and nuclear and fusion). If they started some serious battery R&D back then we would be incredibly better off.
And we should have gone off coal in the 80s. AFAIK there was enough NG to replace it, at least in North America.
Gore won, but lost to a judicial coup.
One thing that I learned from that election is the small perforated dot in the ballot that is punched out with the little pokey thing is called a chad.
Some ballots were thrown out because of the “hanging chad”; meaning the chad was still attached to the back of the ballot. Pretty sure all those ballots were for Gore.
as a non american, I learned that from how I met your mother
And the butterfly voting machine where candidates were on the left and right side of a centre column of buttons. Causing many people that intended to vote for Gore to vote for someone else
Supposedly he lost because he asked for recounts only in counties where he was polling well, but then they should have ordered a general recount.
SYSK just did an episode
[Stuff You Should Know] The 2000 Presidential Election: A Real Cluster https://podcastaddict.com/stuff-you-should-know/episode/169274063
He shouldn’t have to ask for recounts when the initial counts are suspect. Was never a real democracy to begin with.
Everyone makes mistakes, even election officials who are trying their best. It’s good that it’s possible to ask for a recount
I’d also like to complain about the electoral college again. Anything but going by popular vote is anti-democratic. The American system is so damn infuriating to me and it’s not even my country. But it affects us globally.
I’m not convinced one president of one country 24 years ago would make any difference today. This seems very America-pilled
Do you think George W. Bush did any amount of damage to the world?
I agree that GB did an insane amount of damage to our country and Trump is the same way. But for all the damage that has been done, it doesn’t feel like democrats have been able to achieve a comparable amount of good. I understand the mechanics on “why” they are unable to (a big tent coalition up against a unified party of fanatics) but it’s for that reason that I might agree that Al Gore, despite his best intentions, may have been railroaded in his efforts to establish the US as a climate leader.
I’m curious, but are you at all aware of the legislation that has passed in the last three years…?
I feel like the undertone of this question is “clearly you don’t know what the Dems have done, otherwise you’d feel differently.” Maybe I’m way off base with that, but there isn’t any legislation that Dems have passed during Biden’s term that even comes close to undoing or reversing the damage of the Trump presidency. Feel free to argue your case, but I would put special emphasis on these points:
- The repeal of Roe v Wade
- The appointment of 3 conservative justices (which additionally led to the repeal of affirmative action)
- An insurrection that has not resulted in any major convictions against Trump, his family, or his lieutenants
- The death of a million+ Americans from a deadly pandemic that was politicized because of one man’s massive ego/possible Russian ties
- Massive inflation caused by huge bailouts and tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans, followed by shrink and greedflation. American corporations haven’t shared any amount of the burden they caused. The Dems did pass a 15% minimum corporate* tax rate, but this is band aid on a much larger problem, because this tax rate will just be repealed in time. These companies need real punitive action/jail/anti-trust laws being used against them.
I’m sure I missed a couple, but it is asinine to think that anything Joe Biden has accomplished has “fixed,” or even started to fix, any of these things.
Al Gore is fine, it’s Tipper I don’t care for.
In 2000 they lost us the climate crisis, in 2016 they lost us women’s reproductive rights, and now in 24 they’re angling to lose us democracy itself all so they can feel morally superior to those of us that actually have to live the difference they can’t see.
Every 4 years is really a choice between conquest or making the economy go brrr.
The dems are definitely consistently better for the economy though.
If it makes you feel any better, they absolutely will live the difference if Trump wins. Even Trump 1 didn’t really make a life difference to most Lemmy-poster-demographic people until Covid hit; it was mostly vulnerable people inside or coming to the US. Trump 2 will hurt everyone, right away.
If only being told that were enough to finally get the idjits to pull their heads out of their asses.
Honestly, at least on Lemmy, I think a lot of the ass-headers are just a mixture of shills and edgelords. In what proportion, I have no idea.
The ratio of beliefs on the issue is very different among the people who are genuinely engaged with it, than among the people who quick post a punchy message or two and then scuttle away. There’s just a lot of people coming in for a moment to do the second activity; that’s the only thing that makes it seem like the opinion poll is as mixed as it looks like at first.
(I’ve been spending way too much time paying attention to this today.)
Yeah, it’s nice to think what could have been, but still feels like a long shot at best.
Gore won both the popular vote and the electoral college, and while a staged right-wing riot caused significant confusion, and ultimately the Democratic party decided that ‘decorum’ was more important than stopping the conservative movement.
History isn’t inevitable, but nothing has fundementally changed about how Liberals and Democrats view strategy and politics; this should cause to to strongly consider the value or wisdom of statements like Blue No Matter Who, if even when victorious, the refuse to take it.
Its not a long shot. It actually is the timeline we should be on and Gore was *impeccably clear about climate change being his priority. He won, by both the electoral college final count and the popular vote. The election was stolen from the American people but is relegated to a modern folk tale, in-spite of it actually being reality.
Gore absolutely did not make climate change his priority in 2000. That’s just a straight up lie. He campaigned almost entirely on the economy and reforming social security and Medicare. Climate change was NOT a top issue for voters or for Gore in 2000.
You all honestly deserve it. Even if I burn too.
What, are you a fucking alien that lives outside the earth?
I am someone who knows how you all act and am completely fed up with it.
You need to fucking grow up before it’s too late.
I am going to just leave the U.S. when the shit hits the fan. You are the only ones who are going to suffer. And even if I do, it won’t matter, because you brought this upon yourselves.
Good bye and good riddance, idiot
Don’t let the door hit you where the good lord split you.
