Catoblepas

Hey guys, it’s a really good sign when judges are getting arrested, right? Very normal and functioning country? 😬

Living in a place where a tornado hit doesn’t actually reveal how you, personally, voted.

Have we backslid so far that people forgot that collective punishment is supposed to be bad?

You also don’t have to gerrymander when you’re aggressively weeding out who can vote, both by fucking with voter rolls through purges and by overpolicing (felons can’t vote in Arkansas without meeting specific conditions).

All of which is besides the main point: celebrating natural disasters hitting people is deranged.

I want to preface that I’m not trying to be argumentative about it, I just have a lot of thoughts about it after spending a month hoping rain would wash the goddamned ash away soon. The measures you’re talking about absolutely help, in normal circumstances. The fires we had were extremely abnormal. We have fire season here, we’re used to the threat of fires and anyone who lives in an interface zone and isn’t a fool will add fire hardening measures to their home. But these weren’t just homes on and in the hills that caught on fire.

Look at Altadena, so many of the homes there were nowhere near a wildland-urban interface zone. When places a mile away from the hills are are getting torched, that’s not what went wrong. The hills were dried to a crisp after 8 months of nearly no rain; climate change caused the lack of rain, and climate change caused the Santa Ana winds to blow at hurricane force. What could anyone have done to stop a spark from happening anywhere? Once a spark happened, that was it. That’s why we had something like 6 fires burning at once in LA county during that, it might have been more.

Part of the problem is that homes outside what is considered the interface zone, whose owners had no reason to believe it was urgent to take those measures, were getting showered with cinders from a mile or more away while subjected to high winds. They were basically living in the middle of town, not on the hillside.

I want to emphasize that fire hardening is absolutely something everyone should do, but that was considered kind of paranoid re: wildfires until now.

But I might want to not use this doctor for my yearly specialty visits for the first time in over a decade!

Shout out to AI slop slingers for making me feel intelligent and well adjusted 👍

Every building could have been surrounded by concrete (and some were!) without significantly impacting the spread, which was primarily wind driven. Seriously, listen to what the firefighters and other experts have said about this.

Once the houses caught on fire they became the fuel, not dry grass. Combined with the water pressure dropping from 10,000 houses going up in flames practically simultaneously, it was impossible to control. The planes they normally fly in to drop retardant couldn’t even fly in the wind, because the water they dropped would just fucking float in the air before getting scattered. Nobody can stop that until the winds die down.

Which is getting somewhat off topic, but my overall point is that these climate disasters can happen anywhere. Blue states and red states are both going to suffer, and it’s deranged to pump your fist when people in a red state get hit just because they might have voted Trump. It’s not less deranged than it is when MAGAs celebrate the fires in California.

I’m sorry but whoever told you that dry plants around houses caused it was either misinformed or a liar. Hurricane force winds carried cinders for miles to start new fires, and every fire truck in the state lining up to fight it wouldn’t have stopped it.

This is kind of a sore subject for me since I spent a week breathing in the smoke from these fires.

So maybe we can not do the same, since climate disasters don’t pick and choose who to hit.

There are also climate disasters in blue states; LA just had historic urban fires fueled by climate change. We can’t fall into the trap of thinking that weather and climate change is some kind of demonstration of the will of God, because your backyard is next. They weren’t kidding when they put the “global” in “global warming.”

Unfortunately natural disasters don’t selectively target Trump voters.

Yeah, they’re not great. Unfortunately the only other option near me that isn’t unaffordable is the Salvation Army 🤢

Goodwill Outlet/bins store, baby. You can still buy by the pound. Regular Goodwill stores are still pretty good here too if you buy the sale tags.