"The Great Divide"
by Joel Bowman
“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere,
diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.”
~ Groucho Marx (1890-1977)
Buenos Aires, Argentina - "Today, we continue our rumination on the futility of attempting to make sense of the world through the distorting lens of politics (and why market signals offer a far clearer alternative). But first...
Newsflash for dear readers: Winter still cold, summer still hot. No joke! At least, that’s according to the intrepid journalisming from our brave colleagues in the popular press, who never met a molehill that didn’t identify as a mountain...
From AccuWeather: "Polar vortex to keep frigid pattern locked over eastern US through much of February."
The BBC: "Bomb cyclone winter storm set to bring another round of snow to eastern US."
And, as always, one from the astute headline hunters over at The Guardian: "How to dress in cold weather: 10 stylish and cosy updates for winter."
Seen and Not Heard: Many headlines ago, when your editor was a young(er) man, it was considered impolite to bring up religion or politics at the dinner table. Such talk could get one a “clip behind the ear” if one were not careful. Today, now that the civic religion is politics, nothing escapes its all-encompassing, thought-corrupting purview.
Don’t believe us? Thumb through your morning paper and witness the ink bleeding over from the politics section into every nook and cranny of “all the news worth printing” (and plenty more that is not). From Business and Finance... Sports and Entertainment... Science and Technology... even the funny pages are not immune from tribal invectives.
What used to be a story about a company’s earnings, market share, profit and loss, annual growth etc. ... has become a narrative about Fed policy, about taxes and tariffs, about ESG, DEI and the so-called “gender pay gap,” such that there ends up being more noise than actual signal.
A piece on which team won the Big Game over the weekend has morphed into a polemic about the racial make-up of the players, which athlete took a knee and for what cause, and whether the 6 foot 4 inch “person with a penis” has a right to beat-up on high-school girls... and towel off in their changing rooms afterward.
Indeed, topics as formerly bland and banal as the weather have become battlegrounds for hyper-partisan cage-fighting, with “wrongthink” punishable by banishment from the sacred in-group, excommunication from “consensus.”
Hard Cold Facts: Just to press a point, here’s a little-known fact, often misreported... if it is reported at all: Many, many more people die as a result of extreme cold weather than perish from extreme warm weather. We write “many” as in an order-of-magnitude many. It’s true.
A few years ago, The Lancet published a dubious graph in which they attempted to equalize the impact of fat tail events at either weather extreme. And they might have gotten away with it, too, were it not for… people who can read graphs. These pedantic nit-pickers – with their stubborn facts and whatnot – pointed out that the x-axis was skewed in such a way as to make it appear as though both hot and cold deaths were similar in size. Not so.
Bjorn Lomborg, the former director of the Danish government’s Environmental Assessment Institute (EAI) and a self-described “skeptical environmentalist,” showed the graphs both “before and after” correcting for the wild x-axis discrepancy, here:
Click image for larger size.
In reality, something in the order of 10x more people die of extreme cold in Europe each year than do of extreme heat. Why distort that fact? Because it doesn’t agree with the publisher’s politics, of course, in which global warming is a far greater threat than global cooling (which, after all, hasn’t been en vogue among the planet’s managerial class since the ‘70s.) In other words, the graph on the left is a politically motivated distortion. The graph on the right is corrected for that distortion.
The same phenomenon is true elsewhere, too, including in the United States. Using official data from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which apparently keep tabs on such things, we asked our underpaid (AI) interns to construct a graph of annual heat- and cold-related deaths in the US since the turn of the century.
Over a 20-year period, there were on average 3,414 deaths per year resulting from extreme heat... while the average number of fatalities due to extreme cold was 45,992... about 13.5x higher, or roughly what they are in Europe.
Click image for larger size.
(NB: If one is tempted to read anything into the slight upticks in both lines, consider that the US added some 60 million people to its population in the first two decades of the century, more than enough to account for any variability shown here.)
The Great Political Divide: We chose this “ordinary” subject not to make a point about the climate per se, but to underscore how a subject that used to be spectacularly apolitical, so much so that “the weather” was considered an island of refuge for the conversationally conflict-averse, has over time been infected with rabid bias and partisan politics. We could just as easily have chosen mask mandates… woman’s soccer/football… the Grammys… the price of uni in Japan… or a hundred other subjects to make the very same point, so ubiquitous has the blinding division become.
In 2026, political labels have become so defining, so central to one’s sense of self, that precious few will not answer when their party name is called. Indeed, parading one’s political affiliation, once seen as a rather tawdry affair, has gone from being a mere virtue signal to something of a mating call, with the number of single men and women willing to date across party lines in steady decline... along with the birthrate.
And the divide is only getting wider. A study by the Kinsey Institute showed that 30% of respondents “have never and would never date a partner with opposing political views.” And while older generations (Millennials, Gen X, Boomers) were found to be generally less inclined to make politics a primary deal-breaker, the same cannot be said of the next wave of parents-to-be (or not-to-be, as the case may be). The same polling showed, for instance, that 37% of Gen Z women entirely ruled out dating someone with different political beliefs.
No doubt legacy media has played its part in driving a wedge between its readers... just as anti-social media has amplified the effects by siloing us into our own little epistemic enclaves, all the better to pipe the outrage trash in through our appropriately named feeds.
All of which did not spring forth by accident, of course. As George Orwell wrote in his famous essay, Politics and the English Language, (1946): “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” Where do we turn, dear reader, when every facet of human life is subsumed under the dark domain of politics, when public life drives out private life, and politics itself becomes totalitarian? To the antithesis of politics, of course, which we shall unpack Friday. Stay tuned for more Notes From the End of the World..."
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