Al Gore: 'The rich have subverted all reason'

> i.e. monoculture, expecting a full crop every year, with no fallow periods for recovery

It's my understanding that at least in the US, crop rotation is required in order to earn farm subsidies. For example, near my parents there is a lot of corn grown, many fields will be left fallow for a year and then planted with soy to impart nitrogen into the soil.

I agree with your general sentiment, though.

I think the left is not inclusive enough. Though perhaps a better way to describe it is that the left is increasingly unwelcoming, remarkably to the people whose votes we need. As an extremely liberal person who also happens to be from the south, I am horrified by my Facebook feed where everyday posts by liberal friends proudly mock conservatives as being stupid or bigoted. Being from the south, I know many conservative people with great hearts. These are the people we are trying to convince to join our side, and we are shitting all over them.

In these articles, one can sense a true disdain for many conservative points of view on topics like abortion, the role of religion in our society, and gun control. It is rare to find articles that I would feel comfortable sharing with conservative friends or family, as their tone is so contemptuous of conservatives. If it were not for the acerbic tone, many of these articles might become powerful tools of persuasion. But I guess it is just too much fun to taunt the "basket of deplorables."

To quote an article that nicely summarizes a Lincoln speech:

> When Abraham Lincoln was 33 years old, he gave a speech inside a Presbyterian church to a temperance society. His message: The assembled ought to be nicer to drinkers and sellers of alcohol, rather than shunning them, or denouncing them as moral pestilences. Indeed, they ought to use “kindly persuasion,” even if a man’s drunkenness had caused misery to his wife, or left his children hungry and naked with want.

> For people are never less likely to change, to convert to new ways of thinking or acting, than when it means joining the ranks of their denouncers.

> To expect otherwise, “to have expected them not to meet denunciation with denunciation ... and anathema with anathema, was to expect a reversal of human nature,” Lincoln explained.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/05/why-can...

To take a direct example, in the during 70s-90s some left-leaning families tried to avoid gender specific clothes and toys in order to avoid that the children would fall into typical gender roles. Today the left want gender specific toys, but that toys designed for girls and toys designed for boys should both include professions that are currently popular so that both boys and girls have role models in those. The goal of the first is the remove the group thinking (a very explicit goal, if one read the politics of that time), while the modern left has as a goal that the groups stay distinct and strongly different but that both are included in society in a equal way.

An other example would be collage kids. 30-40 years ago we had the political debate around private gender segregated college vs communal gender mixed college. The argument was that by mixing genders people will be more inclusive and less rigid in their group thinking. In modern left politics we instead see a lot of talk about women only school as an effective way to protect women and get more women into professions that is dominated by men. The idea is that they society should include them by giving them an exclusive safe space.

On the topic of religions I can also see a similar change in theme. Old left were more atheism leaning (through possible less so in the US) and regarded what people did in private as private and not part of group identity. Modern left is more focused in giving each religion equal space and promoting the different groups that self-identify as belong to one. It consider it especially important that society give each group the unique consideration that they need/demand.

The general theme here is that the old left either explicit or indirectly downplayed self-identified groups (gender, religions, and sexual orientation) by simply welcoming in everyone to join in the greater common goal (mostly against money/power in some version or other), and the group that did get promoted was the left movement itself. The right during this time acted in direct opposite by highlighted the multiple "others" in order to strengthen the self-group. Both the old and modern left movement focus on inclusion, but its the method used here and the side effects of those that is in stark contrast between new and old.

Releasing movies keeps him in the public eye which probably doesn't hurt his speaking fees any.

It seems his other activities have been more beneficial though, he made a lot of money selling Current TV and also lots of money sitting on the board of Apple.

But, most congress people are already wealthy: the average senator has a net worth of $14 million, and the average representative in the house has a net worth of nearly $7 million [0]. There are of course outliers, with some having hundreds of millions and some having negative net worth.

[0] https://ballotpedia.org/Net_worth_of_United_States_Senators_...