America Is Backsliding Toward Its Most Polluted Era

I've observed this weird cognitive dissonance with outdoorsmen, since I am quite fond of fishing.

They tend to be a pretty hardcore MAGA bunch, but also don't like pollution because it messes up their sport. When you ask them about stuff like this (how can you support someone who pretty openly wants to mess up your pastime?), they get mad or change the subject.

I get it - people are complicated and can care about many things at once. Nobody likes it when someone is seemingly poking at their belief systems. Still - you'd think it'd give them some kind of pause.

Why would it “give them pause”?

Your question (as phrased here) is clearly provocative rather than curious and represents your biases (eg, “openly wants to mess up your pastime”). You don’t consider the two obvious answers, in that they see it differently or they have higher priorities, and are using extreme language.

Are you really surprised people are annoyed by that behavior?

It didn’t come across as provocative to me. It would be a snowflake reaction to get indignant at such a small amount of “provocative” language.

The essence of the question is why do people who love the outdoors vote for politicians who want to repeal laws to protect the outdoors?

I presume that a reasonable person can easily answer this question and defend their position. I can think of several reasonable explanations and I’m opposed to hunting and am in favor of strong environmental regulations.

> The essence of the question is why do people who love the outdoors vote for politicians who want to repeal laws to protect the outdoors?

Because they don't believe that most of those laws are having meaningful benefits. The law of diminishing returns applies to everything, including ever-increasing regulations.

I would actually wager that benefits dont matter to them anymore. If it's government, it's bad. Full stop. Conservatives don't really have any real stances. They are obstructionists at this point. They anti-. That's it. If someone proposes something they will obstruct and disagree because they didn't come up with it.

There are clear benefits. They just refuse to see them. You can show a mountain of evidence based on peer reviewed research and they'll hand waive it away and say "Private enterprise could do it better" or some nonsense.

> I would actually wager that benefits dont matter to them anymore. If it's government, it's bad. Full stop. Conservatives don't really have any real stances. They are obstructionists at this point. They anti-. That's it. If someone proposes something they will obstruct and disagree because they didn't come up with it.

The Trump GOP has no reflexive opposition to government. Trump won the nomination in 2016 because he abandoned the GOP orthodoxy on free markets and declared there would be no cuts to Medicare or Social Security benefits. https://www.vox.com/2015/8/15/9159117/donald-trump-moderate

Tariffs are government. Border security is government. Police are government. The Trump GOP supports all those things.

On the environment, Trump is an incrementalist. He’s not proposing on repealing the Clean Air Act or Clean Water Act. But in the 50-60 years since those laws, we have adopted numerous rules and regulations that don’t provide the same level of benefit. In his first term, he was focused on rolling back those regulations.