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The case against crisis-mongering

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Re: The case against crisis-mongering

#81

Post by bko »

zamfi wrote: post #60
bko wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's partly true, but it's also true young people look out for adventure and meaning. They've been fed the story that they can delay starting a family until well into your 30s. Dating apps don't help. They're overeducated and underemployed. So you have young people in their 20s with no sense of purpose. Why not LARP on twitter and pretend you're saving the world by trying to ruin the lives of people you don't agree…

> So you have young people in their 20s with no sense of purpose. Why not LARP on twitter and pretend you're saving the world by trying to ruin the lives of people you don't agree with? I’m not sure if you’re suggesting this, but I think it’s more about attention and feelings of social acceptance, than it is about purpose.

Maybe. The reason I think it's more about purpose than attention and social acceptance is that Twitter is probably the platform with the most vocal social activism and its relatively pseudonymous. So your Twitter profile doesn't really carry any weight in real life social interactions, so it's less signaling than something like Instagram. And twitter is pretty ephemeral as well, so attention doesn't stay. I've seen someone with 15 followers dunk on some popular figure on Twitter, get mentioned in the NY Times (which is pretty weird) and they gain maybe 5 or 10 followers. I'm not even exaggerating. So it's not even 15 minutes of fame. It's nothing

People find purpose in dunking on others and they do it almost as a job. They even give up other social obligations and post regularly between certain hours.

Re: The case against crisis-mongering

#82

Post by _ykl9 »

klyrs wrote: post #73
_ykl9 wrote: post #55

Both sides have a tendency to cry wolf. Bush was awful, but he wasn't Hitler. Romney was treated particularly unfairly during his presidential run. Regardless of one's feelings on Trump, it's clear that he wasn't treated entirely fairly by the media from the start. Sure, for a while they would tiptoe around calling him out for outright lies, but I also saw how his words and actions would at times be twisted and prese…

Trump was treated more than fairly by the press. He thrives on and encourages controversy. They played directly into his hand at every step of the way. When he plays the victim, that too is an act. He's a reality TV star, he's a heel, and people on both sides gobbled it up.

I'm not disagreeing with most of that, quite the opposite. What I take issue with is the media being brazenly unfair in select instances, which needlessly gives Q cultists ammunition to help radicalize "normies".

It's something I would take note of every once in a while, but I would have to think and/or research to come up with more than one or two examples offhand. The biggest one that immediately comes to mind is the infamous "very fine people on both sides" quote.

I've watched and read the full context[1]. He's not saying that all people on the neo-Nazi side are good, but that some of them were there only to peacefully protest in support of the legacy of Robert E. Lee. It's like the difference between Archie Bunker (a bigoted goofball, but mostly just an earnest guy struggling to deal with changes in society) and a literal militant Klansman/neo-Nazi.

That sentiment may be distasteful in itself to many people (I personally think Lee is just as undeservingly venerated as Rommel), but it's far less extreme than what he's been presented as having said. I'm not even saying that Trump's statement was necessarily correct; I'm saying that if he misrepresented the facts on the ground, and/or if what he (actually) said was arguably a dog whistle, that's what he should have been criticized for.

I'm a huge fan of Joe Biden these days, and it still leaves a sour taste in my mouth that during the campaign he cited that out-of-context quote as his motivation for running.

---

1: https://www.politifact.com/article/2019/apr/26/context-trump...

Re: The case against crisis-mongering

#83

Post by gizmo385 »

OrvalWintermute wrote: post #34
VictorPath wrote: post #22

Strange no mention of Covid as a crisis the US would struggle to handle. The most popular news network in the US is Fox News, and it is (although not uniformly) skeptical of vaccines, masks, lockdowns or even if Covid is real and killing the people its killing. We can look at the rising delta variant infections and deaths to see how the US handles this. Also missing is the threat of a full-scale war between nuclear-a…

> One sign of a sea shift - liberal is an old word, and speech codes, measures against hate speech, blocking presidents on platforms like Twitter, canceling and the like are departures from liberalism. The groups and institutions which formerly supported freedom of speech are now in favor of different things. There may or may not be good reasons for this but it is a departure from liberalism. That these institutions…

"Defunding the police" is often bandied around and characterized as though the most common position amongst progressives is a full defunding of the police and a society without any law enforcement. Are their progressives that advocate for that? Absolutely! But I don't believe that belief represents the majority (or even really a significant percentage) of progressives.

I consider myself a progressive and I simply believe that we have, over the decades, thrust the management and resolution of societies ills onto law enforcement. At the same time, we haven't also invested in the kind of training for officers that would help them effectively occupy that role. So instead of having them occupying that role while also thrusting billions of dollars to militarize them at the same time, how about we talk a large portion of that money and use it to fund the communities that are struggling? Let's fund mental health counseling and other social programs that can help address some of the root causes of criminal activity instead of pushing all of that money into enforcement, which merely seeks to crush the problem after the fact with overwhelming force instead of addressing the underlying systemic issues.

I personally don't think that is an unreasonable or radical position, and one that I think a large number of American progressives would agree with. I don't think a large number of American progressives would agree with the proposition of entirely refunding law enforcement (and neither do any Democratic senators, as shown by the vote earlier this week).

Re: The case against crisis-mongering

#84

Post by anigbrowl »

OrvalWintermute wrote: post #49
minikites wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your opinion on liberals being compared to Soviet and Chinese communists?

are we talking about someone that believes in free speech, a free press, private property, the Rule of Law, opposes cancel-culture, believes in social policies, free elections, Separation of church & State, supports a progressive taxation, abhors violence as a way to change govt, and generally supports the constitution? Or, are we talking about someone that believes in controlled/regulated speech, a controlled press,…

Ooh! 21 tropes in 2 sentences, that's very impressive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

Re: The case against crisis-mongering

#85

Post by exolymph »

SavantIdiot wrote: post #67

I had a man in an nazi costume point a gun at me during a Portland protest. How could I possibly be "over-exaggerating"? Do I need to be dead? Would that make the author approve of my experience? OP can stuff his privilege. This is yet another of example of "Well, everything is fine for -ME-, why doesn't everyone else just relax since you're all the same anyway..."

Don't attend LARP event if you don't want to encounter LARPers.

Re: The case against crisis-mongering

#86

Post by jrgoff »

inglor_cz wrote: post #3
disposable1312 wrote: post #2

>Some of the most potent images produced by the political right in the 2020 cycle featured looters and rioters smashing stores and burning buildings in major American cities. Donald Trump and congressional Republicans, these ads warned, were the only thing standing between these rioters and your home. Acting like things happening under his rule were a problem detached from his responsibility. If only every leader cou…

I am not even an American, but in a huge federal country like the US, not everything can be attributed to the presidency - negative or positive. Governors, state senators etc. have a responsibility too, and they should not be able to shirk it by screaming "look at the bad guy above me!" It is actually similar in the EU. The EU and the Commission has a lot of power, but not enough to pin everything on them. Local poli…

I agree with your general point, but not as a response to the gp. If the president and congressmen who were in power and were then running for re-election have no responsibility for the unrest than what was the point of them being re-elected to stop it? Either they can do something about it and didn't, or they can't do anything about it but for some reason are campaigning as though they can.

Re: The case against crisis-mongering

#87

Post by Supermancho »

namdnay wrote: post #64
tvirosi wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe in this perspective. I think most people are sick of it (and would live healthier lives if they were allowed to focus more attention on their immediate surroundings) but that it keeps being refueled by profit desperate news corporations.

If they were sick of it, they wouldn’t lap it up. People like drama. If they didn’t we wouldn’t have reality TV

> If they were sick of it, they wouldn’t lap it up

The evidence does not support that.

People will often ignore their own plights (from which they are tired and feel trapped or impotent) to engage in remote problems with a feeling of authority and power. Voting for a federal office is the ultimate diversion. Rather than argue and campaign for local changes where they understand exactly what impact they can make (or not make), they invest in a far away problem for which they feel like there is a different performance profile.

People are sick of some crisis mongering, they just like a change of pace.

Re: The case against crisis-mongering

#88

Post by SavantIdiot »

exolymph wrote: post #85
SavantIdiot wrote: post #67

I had a man in an nazi costume point a gun at me during a Portland protest. How could I possibly be "over-exaggerating"? Do I need to be dead? Would that make the author approve of my experience? OP can stuff his privilege. This is yet another of example of "Well, everything is fine for -ME-, why doesn't everyone else just relax since you're all the same anyway..."

Don't attend LARP event if you don't want to encounter LARPers.

So to you a social justice protest that is met with armed LARPer counterprotestors becomes a LARP event.

Got it.

Re: The case against crisis-mongering

#89

Post by DoreenMichele »

I've been saying stuff like this for years. "News" is always bad news and they almost never follow up with similar levels of celebration for resolving a problem. The Kuwaiti oil fires were supposed to burns for years and be a global environmental catastrophe. They were put out in six months.

We did not dance in the streets about this miracle. We were on to wringing our hands about something else.

Disaster response is generally better than it used to be. We aren't grateful or amazed. We take it for granted and complain about it failing to live up to our expectations.

That doesn't mean we don't have real problems. That's not me being in denial or uninformed.

Re: The case against crisis-mongering

#90

Post by Animats »

In the US, we can look back at 1975-2000 as a period when nothing really bad happened. 1900-1950 was far worse.

"There’s a big tradition on the left ... insisting that building a zero-carbon future requires the adoption of radical anti-capitalist politics. But it’s completely absurd." Yes. We're in a good position on energy. As the fossil fuel sources are running out, we now have good alternatives. That wasn't true 20 years ago. 20 years ago, solar panels cost too much, and wind turbines were not big enough.

2022 will probably be the year that perception of this turns around in the US. That's when all the good electric work vehicles ship. The electric Ford F-150, the electric Ford Transit, and the big electric Freightliner trucks are all starting volume production. A year from now, most American blue-collar workers will have ridden in an electric vehicle at least once.

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