Fear is America’s top-selling consumer product
laphamsquarterly.org
laphamsquarterly.org
That leaves HN and my little local papers, Mountain View Voice and its ilk. Great for local stories and tech news, but I feel like I'm missing out on what's going on in the world. Every time I dip my feet in global news, it's screamed at me, dripping in panic: "Trump DID A THING!!!" "Cops Shoot a Guy AGAIN WHY DID THEY DO THAT?!!"
Are there any good general global news sources that don't try to manipulate my emotions as I read them? Paid or free.
It also pays to put out dishonest hit pieces against competitors, or dishonest reviews of your own products to make them seem better than they really are.
Really good, cheap or free info about the present and future tends to lie not in a consumer paper but in dense, wordy PDFs that are cast offs of internal researchers at major multinationals and government bureaus. Those documents are often released to tell investors and taxpayers "here is how we view the situation and why" and their structural mission is to get the assessment right so that they make correct moves. There is little storytelling or human interest to these documents, but they are valuable for the same reason that knowing about the weather is valuable.
Within the industry there is a herd tendency.
Results of models which are far off from others get tweaked. Once data is sufficiently in line, only then does it get reported.
I agree to this though, there's going to be a dense PDF somewhere.
Indeed these tend to be more data oriented but they are still not without their great faults.
Case and point: the echo chamber of 2008 that culminated from the reports of the ratings agencies, academics, financial analysts, government regulators et al who were all pushing the same false narrative to the detriment of the investors and tax payers
edit: classic anti-left liberal, not "american progressive" liberal
That sounds like an awesome goal! Why the negative tone?
(by the way, "anti-Left" isn't a complete description of classical liberalism, since the Right is tainted by authoritarianisms such as cronyism, drug prohibition, social conservatism, etc.)
> The Economist is not, therefore, an honest examiner of the facts. It is constantly at pains not to risk conclusions that may hurt the case for unregulated markets. This tendency reached its absurd apotheosis in the magazine’s infamous 2014 review of Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. The magazine objected to Baptist’s brutal depiction of the slave trade, saying the book did not qualify as “an objective history of slavery” because “almost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains.” When outraged readers pointed out that this is because, well, the victims of slavery tended to be black, The Economist retracted the review. But as Baptist observed in response, there was a reason why the magazine felt the need to mitigate the evils of slavery. Baptist’s book portrayed slavery as an integral part of the history of capitalism. As he wrote: “If slavery was profitable—and it was—then it creates an unforgiving paradox for the moral authority of markets—and market fundamentalists. What else, today, might be immoral and yet profitable?” The implications of Baptist’s work would have unsettling implications for The Economist. They would damn the foundations of the very Western free enterprise system that the magazine is devoted to championing. Thus The Economist needed to find a way to soften its verdict on slavery. (It was not the first time they had done so, either. In a tepid review of Greg Grandin’s The Empire of Necessity with the hilariously offensive title of “Slavery: Not Black or White,” the magazine lamented that “the horrors in Mr Grandin’s history are unrelenting.” And the magazine’ long tradition of defending misery stretches back to the 19th century, when it blamed the Irish potato famine on irresponsible decisions made by destitute peasants.)
In a world of two echo chambers (The Right-wingers and The Left-wingers), it's up to you to make up your mind. You have to visit all sites and KNOW that you are getting the one sided alternative facts that best support their specific agenda. Then you MUST realize the world is never really Black and White, and MUST come to your own informed conclusions.
Every site has their own goodness. I find interesting articles in each of CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, Braitbart, The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Geographic, etc. etc., but you have to sift through 99% of one-sided junk.
Fox doesn't try to push the tradcon agenda on every show, so you can just choose not to watch the O'reillys and such. Then there are things that they can't really mess up, like uncut interviews with specific people. I think Tucker Carlson, regardless of his opinions and how they jive with you, does a great job of giving his interviewees enough rope to hang themselves.
These days I tune in to Dave Rubin's Rubin Report for neutral interviews with people of widely varying opinions. For pop culture style "news" with less fear-mongering, there's always Phillip DeFranco. There are quite a few interesting political commentators with various viewpoints on YouTube. I've been watching styxhexenhammer666 recently, he seems to have a good predictive grasp on global politics centered around the U.S., he's often right.
Fox News is not a news channel. They have one or two news programs mixed in with "entertainment". Sean Hannity is not news, but entertainment pretending to be news[^1].
[^1]: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/1/14/1620475/-Fox-News...
> Every site has their own goodness. I find interesting articles in each of CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, Braitbart, The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Geographic, etc. etc., but you have to sift through 99% of one-sided junk.
FoxNews is basically tabloid media, shark attack and child abduction stories and all.
NPR just does a terrible job of explaining other points of view. In some ways that's more dangerous. It is this kind of journalistic failure (a failure to earnestly explain people) that lets tabloid media seem relatively credible to people who feel like they're not being explained well.
The bias isn't necessarily in the sourcing or the facts, it's in the selective coverage and the constructed narratives and the overt bias in what kind of people and perspectives they choose to give a platform to.
I'm honestly surprised that anybody would expect NPR to be neutral or defend it as such. Their entire staff is extremely liberal. The idea that there would be a media organization staffed almost exclusively by liberals that put out totally unbiased journalism sounds like pure fantasy to me.
I think journalism in general will always tend to have a liberal bias, because the type of person who ends up in that career tends to be a liberal. It's similar to what's happening in academics. For whatever reason, liberals are just more likely to end up as teachers and TAs and professors and deans etc. Academics and journalism are both, to a certain extent and to varying degrees, nation-wide liberal echo-chambers.
NPR is a news station that leans left - and you're right, most people that seek the truth also lean left for some reason.
But the left has nothing like "Fox News". There are no liberal infotainment channels that spread propaganda so blindly and unashamedly as Fox News.
Drawing parallels between any news station and "Fox News" is an insult.
When they slant something what they will do is either pick someone on the opposite side of something who is off the rails or ineloquent. Or, when the opposition has an argument, they often will challenge the argument. When they have the side they agree with on, rather than challenge they tend to ask supporting questions.
That said, Greene and another do make an attempt at being fair while still showing their side, as opposed to Hinohosa or McEvers, for example.
This is the modus operandi of NPR and Fox News (and increasingly, every news source). These tactics allow them to masquerade as journalism and maintain a patina of credibility, because they can engage in it without ever exposing a compact-enough unit of dishonesty that people can point to and discredit them with.
People seem to understand that there's a difference between a news article and an opinion piece, but not enough people understand that the curation and editorial process itself is another opportunity for an opinion piece (and one that doesn't necessarily produce opinion pieces or factual inaccuracies as its output).
exposing a compact-enough unit of dishonesty
I used to rotate right, left and centerist papers back in the day, but the insanity you're peddling is clearly just trying to undermine journalism itself, rather than attack a particular point of view.
This is just the same crap the Trump's doing, dressed up in big words. Tar it all with the same brush, undermine it all, leave everyone believing there's no truth anywhere. Where today's left-leaning news is calm and fairly unbiased and today's right-leaning news is proper loony. And that hasn't always been the way, in case you're wondering, the roles have reversed.
All, unsurprisingly, from a green account.
But that choice in coverage does not compare to calling editorial entertainment news, or flat out lying to their listeners.
The big difference is when I really think NPR screws up a story, or is too far left, I write them and feel like someone might listen on the other end. Good luck with that on Fox.
There's just no right wing counter to NPR, and to compare it to Fox News or Breitbart is complete nonesense.
I'd love to find a media outlet with real journalistic integrity that draws the narrative from a right wing perspective but it just doesn't seem to exist. They seem to either go the route of tabloid style news coverage or indulge way too many conspiracy theories to even take serious.
Basically every right wing magazine and journal had a podcast of some sort. Usually several. Find worthwhile writers for The National Review, The Weekly Standard, The Federalist Society, and Ricochet. Then find them on podcasts, either as hosts or guests.
Also, this entire conversation is really ignoring how networks like Fox News and NPR work. When they play to their audiences they're not really concerned with biases, they're concerned with playing to their audiences. Each network will probably guarantee its listeners/viewers 2-3 hours of solid reporting per day. For Fox News its when Brett Baier and Shep Smith come on. For NPR its Morning Edition and All Things Considered.
The websites on the other hand do traffic in pushing stories they believe their audience wants to hear, but that's a whole 'nother can of worms and I think all sides of this argument need to acknowledge that hard news happens only a minority of the time and the rest of the time is spent on soft news (infotainment, talk shows, etc.). I think its also important for us to be able to recognize that soft news is almost always going to be biased because its main purpose is to entertain you with information rather than inform you.
Also, NPR sits somewhere between cable and broadcast news. I say that because NPR, like broadcast news channels, has local affiliates all over the country that raise their own funding and do their own reporting. If I'm not mistaken its your local affiliate who chooses what you listen to for news and who buys programs throughout the day.
(++): And, I'm not even sure what the colloquial definition of liberal means anymore. It seems like it's a word used to thought-shame people with whom one disagrees.
Liberal bias is thrown at media outlets that basically do no economic or deep policy coverage in the first place. How do you detect CNNs liberal bias between two pieces on shark week??
And it's total overton window BS too. Loads of NPR listeners will be like "yeeeeees of course there's liberal bias on NPR" but Fox News / Breitbartsters treat their stuff as some sort of objective truth.
/Rant
Trite answer to your question: younger people living in cities tend to be Democrats. Those people end up being reporters in places like DC (95% Democrats).
Why would the nation's capital end up being so democratic? One has to wonder
And it isn't hard to see the direct effects this is having, now. When the governor of Texas calls out the national guard to keep an eye on the US Army doing training exercises, because of right-wing conspiracy insanity that has hit the mainstream, we are having problems. When President Trump can claim that Obama is the founder of Isis and people just eat it up, we are having problems. For God's sake, the man had his press secretary go out on Day One of his presidency and lie about crowd sizes. He spouts bullshit about crime statistics in Sweden and for months, Breitbart suddenly has constant articles about how immigrants are causing everything wrong in Sweden ever (I particularly remember an article with an image of a mangled child, with the claim this was caused by immigrants, only for word to come out later it was a dog attack).
The "mainstream media" (and I use the term in quotes because all the biggest radio shows are right-wing, fox is the biggest cable channel and the WSJ is the biggest paper aside from USA Today) is like a dog chasing a car, towing a pro-business line and chasing after whatever will give them the most eyeballs at the moment. But at least they aren't a goddamn propaganda force for the left, marching in lock-step and feeding off each other the way the right media does.
We see this in Australian media too, and I'm guessing everywhere else in the world is seeing it becoming more prevalent too. There's a real elitism around "what you are allowed to say"...
For a large number of people, truth is in the eye of the beholder. If a story confirms your preconceived biases, the journalist got it right and is telling the truth. If it opposes your beliefs, it's factually wrong. Truth is like relativity: There is no aether, no privileged reference frame.
When one believes, for example, with all of their soul and being, that climate change isn't happening, or that vaccines are good for you, then any reporting on the "facts" is ridiculous conspiracy, no matter how measurable it is. It's those greedy ivory tower elite, at it again! Reports about the falseness of climate change and the dangers of vaccinations are the lone voice of truth shining through.
You could write a report that you believe has zero bias. All observable facts. It will be seen as ridiculous, biased conspiracy by some people out there.
But what happens when you have two competing truths?
Which one do you act on today?
Those are the type of discussions people in decision making roles are wrestling with, which may be a different perspective than that of arm-chair decision making like the one we do here in this thread.
You don't need to decide between them. They're both true, regardless of your policy choices.
> Which one do you act on today?
The two competing options seem to be:
(1) both, or (2) neither, using denial of the second as a empty gesture toward addressing the first.
Doesn't really seem to be a fundamental conflict between them.
That because of expectations. Everyone knows Breitbart is hard right. Even conservatives will admit that. Even Breitbart will admit that.
CNN like to position itself as the news. You know, the straight shit. When they go off the rails people get pissed because they don't expect CNN to do that.
In defense of CNN, Democratic consultant James Carville was the first person on any of those shows - I was scanning pretty heavily - to acknowledge that Hillary Clinton was really hosed. Nobody else, even on Fox, seemed to believe it.
Marc Andreessen (whom I consider one of the smartest people I like to learn from) touches on this media issue here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZhBVBBBNs0
Even Marc is deeply conflicted when it comes to this particular issue. I think Marc is a partially closeted rightist and it's understandable because he works in California which is largely leftist. If you've followed Marc on Twitter(when he used to post) and on is interviews, you'll notice he'll be deeply inclined towards rightist views (he'll mention Venezuela as a cautionary tale) but not even he had the courage to support the republican party during the last election. The only person I know who had the chutzpah to come out, so to speak, was Peter Thiel and I respect him deeply for this.
That said, even Thiel is human after all; he was supposed to attend the PFS(a conference led by one of the best right leaning economists of our times - Hans-Hermann Hoppe) last year but cancelled as it had begun to draw unwanted attention.
Closeted?
It just feels like people on the right have made liberal mean anti-Trump.... Which seems like a bad definition to stake your own ideology on.
https://www.google.com/amp/nypost.com/2016/08/21/american-jo...
And then there's unreasonable people. They don't want to think, or consider options.
In the USA, if you are unreasonable, you're most likely on the right. Most reasonable people are clustered with the left. And a minority of unreasonable people are also on the left, with another minority of reasonable people clustered on the right.
Effectively, the right averages to be unreasonable, and the left to be reasonable. I find the media reflect that quite well. Maybe CNN forgot to consider an option, so they reconsider. Fox news doesn't, they're not trying to be reasonable.
So what's happening currently is all reasonable people on the left is trying to give a chance to the minority of reasonable people on the right. While the bigger chunk of unreasonable people on the right are trying to avoid all reasoning about alternative options.
In that sense, its normal for most reasonable news source to appear tied to the left. And most unreasonable news source to appear tied to the right.
I don't think it's fair to generalize 330 million people like this.
Certainly it feels like there are more reality-denying theories peddled by right wing media, but that could be for a variety of reasons, not limited to:
1. Right wing media is louder in their publicizing of these issues
2. Your media sources are more liberal and you view right wing media outlets as "unreasonable"
I am not American, but I have American friends. You cannot generalize political beliefs into who is reasonable or unreasonable in all their beliefs. Politics is a spectrum, and right now in America you have the loudest people screaming from the extreme right and (IMHO) the centre left. If you identify as more liberal, you're far more inclined to view this coverage as "reasonable" compared to more right leaning coverage.
> Effectively, the right averages to be unreasonable, and the left to be reasonable. I find the media reflect that quite well.
No, this is the current media situation in America. In other countries this kind of propaganda from both sides of the political spectrum is not as prominent, and it's far easier to have a rational and reasonable debate about political issues.
You can draw your own conclusions about America, but please do not come away with the impression that all right-leaning people are unreasonable. It's a big world, and this most certainly is not the case in other countries.
I'd argue it's also not the case in America. American media has just been hijacked by the most loud, extreme group of people (from both sides) because the executives have figured out this style of coverage earns more money.
From an outside view, American news media has basically turned into The Jerry Springer Show. It's trashy and devoid of almost any meaningful content, but people watch it to be entertained.
Nor that even MOST right leaning people are unreasonable. It's all a matter of vantage point.
Edit: grammar
I don't even know what right or left leaning imply. That whole categorization is a joke. Tell me what you want, why you want it and how you believe will work best to get it. Only after that's been cleared up can we start discussing meaningfully.
What I do know though is that in the media, in the USA, in 2017 (it hasn't always been this way), most unreasonable people making noise associsate themselves with the right and like to associate reasonable people with the left.
It's a very serious distinction. One which wars have been fought over many times over (from the french revolution to the cold war). To trivialize it is more than naive.
> Tell me what you want, why you want it and how you believe will work best to get it
There are many things I personally want but underlying it all is the idea of non-egalitarianism. I want structure in any society where merit and hard-work are given the utmost priority. Why do I want it? Because it is the most natural and most proven way to create proper incentive structures for the best outcome for other humans and myself.
How will I get it? First of all, remove most, if not all, government involvement in citizens' affairs. Allow for free markets to prevail and for the best ideas and the best people to rise to the top. I will take aristocracy over democracy any day. Democracy has become a tool that's been used to take away the liberties of individuals in the guise of freedom and equality.
From what you said, we could have a reasonable conversation, but you sound more libertarian then the current American right. Here lies the issue of affiliation. You sound reasonable, but if you affiliate yourself with breitbart, fox news, and the rest of the leading right, you're associating yourself with a lot of unreasonable people in position of power. And since you've mentioned soviet communism and german fascism before, you might know that's exactly how reasonable people got tricked in the past also.
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/26029/what-is-th...
I'd point you to that and say I'd only support your statement in so far as saying part of the American right is not as pro-liberty as it ought to be - this is in reference to neoconservatism and similar ideologies.
> They've lost meaning, and serve only to avoid talking details
They're shorthand and I think they're useful when you're genuine about discussion but want a quick way to understand where an argument is coming from. If you're disingenuous about conversation, it doesn't matter whether labels are used or not, you simply cannot self-regulate your bias to give room for discourse is all I'm saying.
This applies to people on the left and the right. Choosing not to compromise on anything is as aspect of someone's personality which is independent of their political beliefs. You cannot unequivocally state that this mentality only applies to people on the right.
> I don't even know what right or left leaning imply. That whole categorization is a joke.
It's mostly because America has a two party system that you get a massive amount of political spectrum concentrated under the categories of "Democrat" and "Republican"
Go abroad and look at how many parties other countries have in politics:
Canada: Liberal, Conservative, NDP, Green, Bloc Québécois
UK: Conservative, Labour, LibDem, SNP, DUP, Green
France: En Marche!, National Front, Republicans, La France Insoumise, Socialist Party, ...
Germany: CDU/CSU, SPD, Die Linke, Green, FDP, AfD
Certain countries have vastly different distributions, with most unreasonable people on the left instead. Others have an equal split, etc.
Oh, and I actually feel like you can very easilly model politics with two categories of reasonable and unreasonable. It's a much better model then the right vs left one.
It's tempting to pull out "both sides" rhetoric because reasonable people sympathize with others and try to see things from their point of view and assume since they believe something, there must be a grain of truth to it so they always feel like they should compromise. The problem is unreasonable people (or simply malicious ones) will take advantage of this impulse every single time and have been for decades. "But both sides!" is the climate that guarantees it's going to be impossible to have a rational or reasonable debate about political issues -- approaching a political debate assuming a compromise is inevitable and the other side is just as reasonable as you are is just accepting defeat before a single word is spoken. In this context, if both parties approach it with good faith debate can happen, but if not (as is our current situation) whoever is the most extreme always wins.
I hope you realize there's nothing reasonable about this statement. IMO, most times when the right has been considered to be unreasonable, so to speak, it has been a response to the left taking things too far. And yes, this includes WWII; there is no Hitler without communism.
This is not to validate nor justify any extremists' actions but rather to illustrate that even when you are supposedly trying to appear centrist, you really aren't and what's worse is that you don't realize it. When this type of thing happens, you end up with bad outcomes. If you're going to be reasonable, also realize you're biased as I am (rightist).
But it does. That's exactly the point. It's a pendulum of sorts. A symbiosis where one cannot exist without the other in equal proportion. For any 'reasonable' discourse to happen there must be the acknowledgement of this fact; right or left, you come to the table biased. The one-sided blame game won't work because all it does is exacerbate the situation.
> very, very rich people who have the most to lose will support to protect their wealth.
Here's a fallacy that was debunked in the election. If the very rich are 1%-ers then how is it that so many sound-minded individuals chose Trump? The math doesn't support your statement.
Seriously ?
Love your HN bio BTW. Too funny.
The death toll for the Iraq war was about a million dead for example, and likely only happened due to the influences described in the article, taking advantage of 9/11 (e.g. the surveys showing that Fox News viewers were more likely to believe Iraq perpetrated 9/11 than people who watched no news at all).
They can be forgiven that considering that W perpetuated that lie as readily as the news outlets.
When Don Jr. tweeted out the emails specifically inviting him and other Trump campaign staff to a meeting in Trump Tower (fairly good chance Don Sr. was there too) with a Russian government connected lawyer to get dirt on the Clinton campaign.
> compromised servers
I think you're only talking about the DNC hacks? Where this is now a much wider scope and context due to their own admittances.
And yes, I was referring to the DNC hacks.
Even if you want to claim that's all that happened, that is -still- collusion ("secret or illegal cooperation or conspiracy in order to deceive others") in the midst of a presidential campaign.
> there's more evidence of the Clinton campaign colluding
Oh please.
HN is one of those places where everyone thinks that there are plenty of "the other side" here. There are plenty of fiscal and social conservatives on this site. Probably the only sector of the conservative world that isn't well-represented here are war hawks.
You can catch a few in this thread.
Yes, I jest. Sorta. That's what I love about HN, typically. It has a very diverse community that typically leaves religion and politics at the door. And even if we all met, we may kill each other, we get along here in the sake of tech and interesting sciences.
The fact that it leaves religion at the door means it's not as inclusive as it thinks it is.
Just because a discussion contains a religious component doesn't mean it's argumentative or something.
> ...we get along here in the sake of tech and interesting sciences.
Honestly, the earnest religious are a minority in this kind of context. They're explicitly encouraged to keep that part of them closeted in this context (and, frankly, most other contexts too). I think "we get along" isn't exactly accurate with that in mind.
People are, on a small scale, afraid of religious people. Especially "unrelated, unnecessary" controversy spawning from religious points of view.
I could say that the growth is fear correlates (as described in the article) with decreased engagement in organized religion. How would that go over? Would people appreciate a new kind of thought and a new diverse perspective? Or would they groan and roll their eyes?
There are many religious people here. I won't name names, though I do remember them. Mostly proud Christians, as identified by their bios and or websites.
> I could say that the growth is fear correlates (as described in the article) with decreased engagement in organized religion. How would that go over? Would people appreciate a new kind of thought and a new diverse perspective? Or would they groan and roll their eyes?
Well, you're begging the question there by framing that concept as 'new diverse perspective'. It's not that at all, but a tired, conservative perspective. The idea that people have lost their way because they've lost their faith and are now suffering for it is not even remotely new or diverse. So you would get groans and eye-rolls, which you would interpret as being against 'new, diverse', but which was actually against beating a tired old nag.
What a sad state of affairs when we've legitimized a publication that identifies itself as central to the political movement that's brought together the xenophobes of our society.
Thanks for your honest comment. I did think about your point before including it.
Edit: and i am sorry for offending you.
I'll argue that there are "xenophobes" on the left, it's just that they consider middle America the foreign land. They identify more closely with formally educated people from other countries than Americans who enjoy hunting, processed food, revival churches, etc. The bitter clingers, deplorables, etc.
Fox News: "We report, you decide."
aka gossip. Not to be confused with journalism.
If you think Koch funded NPR is liberal, Democracy Now! and Thom Hartmann will make your head explode.
Science: We discover great things, you get smarter.
The default answer to most every question is No, aka status quo. Change occurs when a temporary coalition of Yes is formed around a hot issue. aka the Politics of Attention. Looks like punctuated equilibrium from the outside. Sometimes that change is progress, eg extending the franchise, more fairness, better accountability.
The partisanship in media, culture, politics, etc. maps very loosely to Yes and No, if at all.
Those are separate things.
Yeah they sell the wire service and its not really publicly available.
The closest free equivalent is:
For example, they did a segment [0] on brown coal strip-mining in Germany. The reporter examined the stark human and environmental toll of the mining, but failed to address why such a dirty form of energy was in demand in the first place. I had to do my own research to find out.
What I found, in part because I knew some of the background already and was confused by the Vice report, was that Germans chose to abandon nuclear power - a cleaner, safer form of energy - in the wake of the Fukushima disaster [1]. This boosted their dependence on coal, and was a direct cause of the increase in strip mining portrayed in the Vice report. The devastation caused by mining to the landscape and nearby villages took on a different meaning for me with this information.
Overall, I enjoy and appreciate the out-there, unfiltered style of journalism that Vice sells. However, I'd encourage you to do your own research and not rely on their reporting to capture the bigger picture.
[0] https://youtu.be/xCrVYd3aKcA [1] https://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/10/26/green-germa...
The Greens are generally socially progressive (though not by any means socialist) but their core messages are similar to those of NGOs like Greenpeace. By virtue of being represented in numerous coalition governments over the years, on communal, federal and national levels, there has been a very consistent and vocal opposition to nuclear power in German politics.
Fukushima was ultimately the straw that broke the camel's back, forcing Angela Merkel (who's actually part of the conservative party, CDU) to officially disavow nuclear power, even though it meant violating some contracts.
The origin of the underlying anti-nuclear sentiment likely lies in the peace movements of the 60s/70s because there is a still a strong connection between nuclear power and nuclear weapons in most people's minds and being caught between the US and the Soviet Union there was a lot of awareness how horrible nuclear weapons actually are.
Political processes in determining long-term storage sites for nuclear waste regularly make tabloid headlines, as do the protests around the transport. Chernobyl was likely what made nuclear power a mainstream concern, the constant protests, reporting and debates eroded the support further, Fukushima just was the final nail in the coffin.
Germans as a group tend to be rather risk-averse. The harm of coal power is imminent and obvious but predictable. The harm of nuclear power is delayed and much less predictable but potentially much more disastrous -- it's essentially a gamble (although I'd argue that the odds are pretty darn good and the risks are greatly exaggerated).
That said, Germans ultimately want green energy, not coal power. Coal is just seen as the necessary evil while the gap is being bridged.
Personally I would rather see coal and gas power plants be shut down ASAP and new nuclear power plants to be built to bridge the gap but c'est la vie.
They're all skewed of course, but they don't try to incite panic.
They frequently also use European (France 24 and Deutsche Welle) and Asian (like CCTV) to contrast the news in the U.S. They also include RT and compare.
They call themselves "media analysts" so by definition they only talk about whatever nonsense the media is spewing this week.
By that very nature they focus on the things you mention. That's they're goal.
So for those who would like to see current events (i.e. through lens of the media) for what they truly are. May be useful for a subset of people who view the mainstream as largely chasing dollars. Which the OP certainly falls into.
Yes, they frequently joke about chemtrails, but it is within a context of a joke, or as a punchline.
Yes, they mock scientists that advocate for global climate change- not because of the actual phenomena, but because of the low quality of the papers that promote it, the corrupt method by which grants are only given to those that agree with the hypothesis, and the near fanatical following that people have created around it.
Is climate change real? Of course, they aren't doubting that. Is there a lot of hokum surrounding it? Absolutely. People become fear mongers to turn a quick buck.
No Agenda is, as many fans of the show put it "a twice weekly dose of sanity". When people were freaking out about "Russia hacking the DNC", they scoured the news and put all the evidence on the table, which turns out there wasn't much. Other news just took the headline and ran. Same deal on the other side of the conspiracy-isle with pizzagate: they scoured and put all the evidence on the table. Turns out there wasn't much. They are fantastic for calming you down when the news winds you up about something.
Why would this be surprising for a covert operation? Does this make the story a fabrication?
A "debunking" style of news is interesting provided it's not the only mode of reporting. But if you are always looking for holes in the story, you may miss out on what's actually there.
http://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/show/unfilter/
They admitted being directly inspired by No Agenda but they're less prone to conspiracies and try to point out when they're entertaining them.
I feel they have a bit of a (US) libertarian bias, which as a German makes them feel too conservative for my taste, but their reporting seems somewhat more objective at times than going straight for CNN.
That said, I found their reporting more interesting in the beginning when they were heavily focused on the fallout from the Snowden revelations. It feels like they've started going more in the radio show host entertainment direction lately with Patreon mailbags and such, plus there's a lot of reporting on the cannabis situation in the US (though they usually leave that out of the main show).
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Unfortunately, I can't look to local news, because that's either "goose removed from river Cam after attacking cyclist" or "parking in car park now more expensive than fine for parking illegally". And those are both genuine stories.
"Leaving the EU" is a valid political worldview/goal, whether you agree with it or not, however the specific "implementation" known as Brexit has proven to be a scam, because it's not an implementation at all: politicians manipulated and lied their way to victory, and once the referendum was over they made no effort to hide that their plan was "by the way, we have no plan". Because there was no responsible preliminary assessment of the cost and outcome of Brexit, let alone any roadmap, people on both side of the issue are realizing their politicians are navigating on sight, with no map or compass, during a process critical for the future of their country. A process they triggered. In that situation, isn't outrage warranted?
As for Trump, well, it's not a UK thing. The whole world is laughing at the US.
Given the tone of discourse, I am increasingly concerned about the possibility of a literal civil war in the UK — although not sufficiently concerned to think it unavoidable at this stage.
RT can be independent, but you have to know when they're pushing something, and when they're not. I don't have enough time for that.
Süddeutsche Zeitung is good in Germany space, although it may do a bit too much of normal and national news.
The Economist's ideology has become pretty mundane, they have drifted left over the years, and while they still defend free markets, they do it from a technocratic almost social-democratic point of view.
It should all be very much in line with what blue-state American's already believe, though perhaps from a perspective that is a bit eye-opening.
Reddit made sure idiotic pro-Trump subreddits were left off the front page. It didn't do the same for idiotic anti-Trump subreddits.
r/TwoXChromosomes, also regularly appearing on the front page, is about as liberal and pro-choice as you can get.
I don't like Trump at all. All the things going down right now were easy to see coming. But he got well over 40% of the popular vote in the election and still has millions and millions of supporters. Absence of pro-Trump viewpoints on the reddit front page is conspicuous, in my opinion. Likewise any number of other relatively popular viewpoints.
That sub used to just be a cynical but funny place to comment on the general degradation of morality, then it swung to extremism like seemingly every Reddit sub.
Populist answers that get in early and are digestable get upvoted heavily. Long, wordy answers that don't give an easy answer are not voted up as heavily as they take longer for people to read, or worse yet, sometimes they state their point early, provide their argument later and people dont read the justification and just upvote the top part as it aligns with their point of view.
Reactionary posts get a lot of traction because people get caught up in emotion and upvote. A placid answer saying "guys lets calm this down and wait" will not garner many upvotes because its not particularly polarising. Nuanced answers tend not to be as popular as ones that give a clear bad/good guy answer.
Worse than that, almost nobody reads the articles linked, its mostly people reading a headline, going to the comments and finding the first comment that falls into their world view. Too often you find an article that is quite good, with a highly upvoted comment rebutting the article in a way that makes no sense - because people aren't reading the article, they are just assuming and then finding the comment they -believe- counters the article.
I browse reddit constantly, but I don't think it represents issues well at all, it basically is a bandwagon simulator.
I'm looking for a high-level semi-realtime tool; it doesn't need to do sentiment analysis or anything like that.
- Dan Carlin's Common Sense podcast is a relatively unbiased source for US politics.
His Hardcore History stuff, on the other hand, is mind-blowingly awesome!!! And not repetitive.
Just a side note for Reddit - cat and dog pictures are overrunning the community.
Editorial independence in the current US environment is simply not possible using traditional models. Disruption has been taking place, but it's not all constructive. Bezos buying the Washington Post was one marker, and Thiel helping destroy garbage Gawker is at the other end of the spectrum. Hanging in the balance are tens of millions of people trying to find the truth.
Honestly, the only website I can mention in confidence is Medium, and it still suffers from signal-to-noise ratio and present models of information / emotion distribution.
This can be changed, but it will take somebody planting a flag so far out on the scale of TRUTH like Hunter S. Thompson railing against Richard Nixon and in spite of his own significant issues. The dialogue has changed, the methods have changed, and they have surpassed our adaptation capability timing in my opinion.
There is an opportunity for Journalists and Writers in the United States to re-ignite the fire that the First Amendment was designed to protect. It's the natural order of things, we're witnessing evolution, and also participating in it. I have hope that one day a team can come together to build on what ProPublica and The Intercept aimed to achieve, but do it in a fashion like Kurt Cobain when Nirvana's songs and messages suddenly turned people's attention from junk-food-Hair-Metal toward something worth giving thought.
I'm optimistic.
No joke.
Someone a while back asked here, where are all the leftist conspiracy theories?
We know the right wing ones - the contrails, lizard people, Obama is a secret Muslim etc. How come the left doesn't have any? And my idea was that in a bubble environment where all the news is filtered through narrow ideological framework, the party that lost the election, is forced to come up with conspiracy theories to explain their loss. So they all watched Fox News, read Alex Jones or whatever news channel and well America is pure and good, they are the good guys but those evil Lizards from Outer Space came messed everything up at the last minute.
Then I predicted then that we will have just as vibrant and colorful leftist conspiracy theories after the election, and we kinda do.
The Russians in the bushes hacking elections, is one such thing. This is a massive PR campaign, it was very well done at first. And it makes the Tea Party look like a joke. It's got people in Congress on it. Journalists talking about it night and day. Though lately I think it's finally running out of steam.
Or the other was the "dossier" - Trump hired hookers to pee on the bed where Obama slept. And of course it's called a "dossier" because that makes it look official and important.
Impeaching Trump. If you happen to read /r/politics, which I do sometimes, you'd get the impression that in just a few days Trump will finally be impeached. I think they have an idea of impeachment that's more like someone walks into his office and tells him he's fired and then escorts him outside. I remember getting excited watching the Comey's testimony in Congress. Someone on /r/politics convinced that "Thursday he is going down, finally!" so Thursday came and nothing really happened. Comey said Trump was mean to him. Which is unfortunate, but that was about it.
He had 2 scoops of ice-cream. He shook Macron's hand for too long. He made secret coded gestures toward Putin during their G20 summit dinner. It just doesn't end.
These conspiracy theories and "news" are an important narrative because they explain why the election was lost. We have all been in a bubble, watching the main news channels, saw the poll results, explained as "Trump has only a 5% chance of winning" by the "experts" and "analysts" and so on. Then all of the sudden he did win and wah! instead of Lizard people it has to be the Russians or whatever.
As for what news sources to look, it's really hard to find any. You might try a something like Al Jazeera, although they are biased when it comes to Middle East, especially Qatar. Usually if a country or news channel doesn't have a stake in the game, they might as well report something more fairly. But yeah I haven't really found anything reliable. Things like CNN, NBC, Washington Post, NYT have turned into what Fox used to be pretty much.
Good lord America, you are so confusing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_pyramid_(nutrition)#Contr...
It was hardly science-based.
https://stallman.org/archives/2017-may-aug.html
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_eventsThe only difference is that Reddit threads tend to be so huge that less popular comments get buried easily.
I believe the issue has more to do with the subreddit structure and user moderation, which make really easy to create one-sided echo chambers.
Have a jab at Canadian news, its like an in-between in quality.
It basically says be mindful of the time you spend concerning yourself with things you can't do anything about. Spend your brain cycles on things you can influence in the world.
E.g. Trump. Reading about him is a waste of your brain cycles. What productive thing are you actually doing with this information?
I enjoy the Economist. There is some delay as it's a weekly publication but to me that's only a bonus. I'm not an investor or a public policy figure. I can wait for a few days for my news if it means it's higher quality.
That said, Economist has a pretty strong political voice - but they don't try to hide it in any way. Generally they voice their opinion in clear tones, get their facts correct, and publish dissenting views to their own in the 'Letters to the editor' section.
High quality articles about economics, politics and business related.
Interviews with interesting belgian people, good investigation. It's weird, but i can't relate to much of the online papers with their sometimes hyped articles.
PS. I have the paper subscription, not an online subscription, which is also possible.
I'd agree only with the default front page/subreddits. There are still a plethora of smaller community subs in Reddit that are thriving and useful.
Unfortunately it takes a lot of informed curating to know which subs to ditch.
I also read BBC and Deutche Welle, as well as scrabbling through bits of Le Monde and the francosphere.
generally if it's free, you're getting what you paid for.
An example I like to use is minimum wage. The very term "minimum wage" on it's own pulls you towards a certain conclusions. Who the heck doesn't want minimum wage? But what if I asked you "Should it be against the law for low skilled workers to get jobs?" you would likely say something like "Hell no!", but they are both the same policy but presented through a different lens. If you're only getting your news from left wing sources, then you would almost have to conclude that conservatives are heartless. But if you read from both sides, you might conclude that maybe there should be a minimum wage, but we have to be careful not to exclude too many people at the margins, or find a way to help those at the margins.
Unfortunately two pieces I found most relevant for HN crowd from this issue so far aren't available on Lapham's Quarterly website. They are a moralistic Japanese 17th century account of an entrepreneur in "All the goodness gone from tea"[3] and Joseph Heller's bit on "Corporate Welfare" in "Something Happened"[4]. Hope you enjoy reading them as much as I have.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14589087
[2] http://laphamsquarterly.org/fear
[3] https://books.google.com/books?id=ux89AAAAIAAJ&lpg=PA93&ots=...
[4] https://books.google.com/books?id=b2AiWB98p5sC&lpg=PT14&ots=...
Nice to see it get around some more. It really is a high quality site and one I look forward to each update with real anticipation.
Interesting thought.
Or, that what people consume and what they desire aren't always the same things.
* What people buy * What people want * What people say they want * What people would actually enjoy * ...
Is it though? And is it just harder in our current configuration or absolutely harder no matter how resources are allocated?
I'd argue that Joy is easier/cheaper to produce, we just haven't optimized for it (yet).
Manufacturing joy is easy, yes. Tie a counter to a semi-random process that's semi-controlled by a human and they experience joy when the counter goes up. The so called slot machine. THis is how HackerNews karma, Facebook notifications, your email inbox, and other addictive activities are designed.
You experience momentary joy.
But fear, fear is forever. How many fears have you been dragging on since childhood that never seem to go away no matter how irrational they are? Could've been from a single event like watching a scary movie about a clown, or a case of near-drowning, or ... well there's a lot of common phobias. The list can go on forever.
You always need to make a new slot machine. You rarely need to make a new fear.
Everyone's afraid of random unexpected death that's out of their control right? Well most of us on some level at least.
So media spends a lot of time reminding us that we could die any moment. Terrorists, natural disasters, wars, car crashes, shootings, all these things that have a low chance of happening to you in particular but that nonetheless happen every day and could happen to you.
Or take social exclusion. We all fear being cast out of society. So media keeps reminding us of all these things the cool people are doing that wr arent. Potentially things we can pay to do.
I'm afraid you are incorrect. This is neuropsychology.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/24/your-money/why-people-reme...
On a more local scale, in the 80s in Australia there was a huge fear of European Wasps - you could even buy little plastic protectors for your drink cans to prevent them crawling inside.
On a personal scale, when I was young I was scared of being different, now I don't really care whether I'm different or not.
Fear is not forever. We shed fears left, right, and center. Yes, if someone is putting energy into maintaining a fear, it will sustain, but it's just not true that once we fear something, we always will.
People also want reasons for things. They don't want complex reasons for high rent, terrorism, racial injustice, mass murder, low employment, stagnant wages, the lack of community support, etc. They want clarity. And "it's complicated" doesn't satisfy emotionally.
So we take a half truth (to be generous) and make it the whole truth. Someone is to blame. Therefore they must be powerful enough to be to blame. Therefore they must be dangerous. And dangerous now, not later. Otherwise we won't do anything about it.
So we can blame boredom or chemical responses for the desire for fear, but there are higher brain functions mixed up in this as well.
What I'd argue is that is all twisted for idiotic reasons. For example, it would be good to have fear of death used to push society towards things like cures for cancers. And anxiety used to push ourselves to reach our potential instead of seeking validation in superficial things expressed in Instagram pictures.
But we humans like the quick fix and the advertising lobby delivers. We have 50% of the blame here. Same with the unhealthy foods and drinks we take all the time.
To improve our behaviour we need incentives like most animals.
That assumption that a russian bomb was merely a copy of the the American effort, spying helped it speed up, but mostly prevented costly mistakes for the soviets is just another example of american exceptionalism.
Would rather watch Adam Curtis' Power of Nightmares again, blaming the culture of fear rightly and mostly on the rise of neoconservatives.
Conservative? Can trigger warning exist without fearing something? I think the author describes evolution of fear.
The motivation, as I understand it, is actually to enable and prepare more people reading things they would be otherwise afraid of, so quite the opposite of fear.
Besides some right wing people seeing this as one of the horsemen of the end of free speech, this relatively obscure and confined practice simply doesn't warrant mentioning it on level akin with national doctrines like MAD.
I do take issue with pulling trigger warnings in here (though, in fairness, that was a minor part in the article), just because it's re-enforcing a very negative trend.
Trigger is a term of art in psychology, related to post-traumatic stress disorder. It specifically refers to a stimulus triggering a fight-or-flight response in a situation where it would not be called for in someone without PTSD. We should be giving this clinical issue the respect it deserves, and not conflating it with the things we are more abstractly afraid of.
The sad thing about the FT is how expensive it is.
Investors tend to care about facts more than feelings, so objectivity becomes a worthwhile pursuit. When you're investing in a commodity, foreign currency and so forth, you're going to read everything with squinted eyes, looking for the facts.
Real journalism costs money, and ad revenues aren't what they used to be.
The reason to want to know fear, why fearful subjects are even discussed, is the quite natural rational thirst for information about uncertainty. Thus, you would expect them to purchase services that provide information about and that mitigate uncertainty. Much of the financial economy is purposed as a mitigation to uncertainty, because uncertainty causes an inherent inefficient allocation in resources in order to prepare for the uncertain event. If there is uncertainty, the rational agent is forced to prepare for it with capital (be it financial or physical). This causes there to be an unused buffer of resources that cannot be allocated to more pressing utilizations. Instead, the rational agent is obliged to maintain a buffer, and even incur more transactional costs in maintaining that very buffer. Uncertainty is expensive, and the rational agent thus seeks to understand all disturbances to mitigate the cost of uncertainty.
tl;dr The author is actually engaging in the cheap literary trope where the general population lacks rationality and the author is the exception for pointing it out.
Fear of terrorist attacks is a great example. If you live in the US, that means that over the past 15 years you have been more likely to be killed by a lightning strike than a foreign terrorist attack. Yet a lot of people shit their pants with regards to, say, Islamic terrorism.
Consider in the light of this discussion that rural voters appear (by inference) to be more concerned about terrorism than urban ones, despite the actual impact of terrorism falling far more heavily on the latter group (unsurprisingly, given the lack of meaningful targets in rural areas).
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/are-rural-voters-most-conc...
You are not disagreeing with me.
Which is ironic that the Americans who appear to be the most fearful of terrorism are the ones who live in places where it will most likely never happen.
http://www.idahostatesman.com/news/local/crime/article536103...
Can we agree that the conditions for lightning are fairly predictable, and staying safe is pretty straightforward? Whereas "just don't be where all the people are" is by definition advice that most people can't or won't follow.
Honestly I don't think this point is really debatable. Unpredictability is a core characteristic of terrorism. If tomorrow all Americans decided to spread homogeneously across the country and never congregate in large groups, terrorists would think of something else. If it were predictable and avoidable it wouldn't be as scary, which is the whole point of this conversation.
"The analysis measured not whether a city would make an attractive target to a terrorist but rather how well it could withstand an attack, Piegorsch said."
In other words, Boise is ill-prepared to handle an attack, but no statement is made on the likelihood that it would be a target. That likelihood is, of course, quite low.
For the second, the goals of an individual nut who couldn't even make his plan work aren't all that interesting.
Characterizing my advice as "just don't be where all the people are" is super misleading. There are a small number of likely terrorist targets, and my advice is not to be there. If you're worried about terrorism, then you should probably avoid Manhattan, downtown Boston, major airports, etc. And most people paranoid about terrorism probably already avoid these places. Chicago or Miami or Seattle are probably fine. Places away from the centers of likely target cities are probably fine. "Don't visit New York" is perfectly viable advice for a fearful person in Iowa.
You can easily reduce your risk of being killed by lightning, but remaining perfectly safe is hard. Taking shelter isn't necessarily sufficient. Lightning can conduct into buildings, and it can also start fires.
I don't think the fear of terrorism is down to its unpredictability and unavoidability. The same is true of car crashes (someone else's mistake or malevolence can easily end your life on the road, and avoiding the roads is not an option for the vast majority of people) and yet people give little thought to those.
As for people's motivations to seek out fear-inducing information, you are quite right that some of that is motivated by rsk management but a great deal more of it cannot be explained on utilitarian grounds. freud theorized the existence of a death drive in humans as a correlate of consciousness, suggesting that infants dealt with their anxiety about the intermittent unavailability of their mothers by modeling their anxiety through play so as to assert control over its manifestations.
Seems pretty apt.
I tell my friends to monitor and severely cut their intake of news. Ingesting news today is a profoundly emotionally unhealthy thing to do, and to the degree people ingest it, they are usually over-the-top in their fear of various things, the vast majority of which are no threat to much of anybody.
We've always had this situation with small publications. As a former freelance journalist, what I've seen over the past several years is that the big publications, after being brought over to Facebook and Twitter for better access to readers, are being forced to play this game too -- while they continue to lay-off staff and reduce costs. There's more than a whiff of desperation I see in the majority of headlines from most major news sources. It is a sad thing.
Tl,dr: None of these stories [the news] have relevance to my life. Reading them may be enjoyable, but it’s an enjoyable waste of time. They will have no impact on my actions one way or another.
It's essentially what our culture seems to be based on nowadays. Thanks Facebook, thanks Google.
Isn't that the point Michael Moore was making in Bowling For Columbine all those years ago? We are only rediscovering what we already knew.
-----------------
Short plain-English summary of the major things he says in the article:
People in the US are generally much safer than in the past, but they also seem to be more afraid than in the past, and it seems to be because there are powerful groups that benefit (or believe they benefit) from this state of affairs: those associated with or members of the news media, the military and its private-sector suppliers, politicians, the very rich, and the police.
This shift to having the public generally fearful seems to have started in 1949 when we in the US learned that the Soviet Union had nuclear weapons. Consensus in Washington became that the Soviet Union was a more immediate and serious threat than it probably really was, and the news media sold papers by stirring up fear of WW3. In the 1960s the news media made people afraid of the possibility of an actual armed revolution within the US by leftists. With the fall of the Berlin Wall the news media and politicians shifted to fear of drugs, and since 9/11 it has been terrorism.
-----------------
The main ideas / questions discussed, in his words:
[Motivating problem:] In no country anywhere in the history of the world has the majority of a population lived in circumstances as benign and well-lighted as those currently at home and at large within the borders of the United States of America. And yet, despite the bulk of reassuring evidence, a divided but democratically inclined body politic finds itself herded into the unifying lockdown imposed by the networked sum of its fears—sexual and racial, cultural, social, and economic, nuanced and naked, founded and unfounded.
[Main questions:] How does it happen that American society at the moment stands on constant terror alert? Why and wherefrom the trigger warnings, and whose innocence or interest are they meant to comfort, defend, and preserve? Who is afraid of whom or of what, and why do the trumpetings of doom keep rising in frequency and pitch?
-----------------
Paragraph-by-paragraph-ish main ideas (as far as I could tell), in his words:
Fear [is] the oldest and strongest of the human emotions.
[There is] real fear and neurotic fear, the former a rational and comprehensible response to the perception of clear and present danger, the latter “free-floating,” anxious expectation attachable to any something or nothing that catches the eye or the ear.
I’m old enough to remember when Americans weren’t as easily persuaded to confuse the one with the other. I was taught that looking fear straight in the face was the root meaning of courage.
[After] August 1949, when the Soviet Union successfully tested a [nuclear] bomb, my further acquaintance with fear was for the most part to take the form of the neurotic.
The Cold War with the Russians produced the doctrine of mutual assured destruction. For the everybodies whose lives were the stake on the gaming table, [this] didn’t leave much room for Teddy Roosevelt’s looking real fear straight in the face.
Expectant anxiety maybe weakens the resolve of individual persons, but it strengthens the powers of church and state.
Fear is the most wonder-working of all the world’s marketing tools. Used wisely, innovatively, and well, it sells everything in the store—the word of God and the wages of sin, the divorce papers and the marriage certificate, the face cream and the assault rifle, the grim headline news in the morning and the late-night laugh track.
[He tells a story of working as a reporter in NYC in 1962, receiving a press release from the Russians about new weapons tech, and having the editor of the paper mold it into a front-page fear-soaked story, presumably motivated by the desire to sell more papers.]
Expectant anxiety sells newspapers.
The Cold War was born in the cradle of expectant anxiety; so were the wars in Vietnam and Iraq.
The innovative and entrepreneurial consensus in Washington resurrected from the ruins [of Russia post-WW2] the evil Soviet Empire—stupendous enemy, world-class and operatic, menace for all seasons, dread destroyer of American wealth and well-being.
Fattened on the seed of openhanded military spending (upward of $15 trillion since 1950) the confederation of vested interest that President Eisenhower identified as the military-industrial complex brought forth an armed colossus the likes of which the world had never seen.
The turbulent decade in the 1960s raised the force levels of the public alarm. The always fearmongering news media projected armed revolution; the violent fantasy sold papers, boosted ratings, stimulated the demand for repressive surveillance and heavy law enforcement that blossomed into one of the country’s richest and most innovative growth industries.
The tearing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989 undermined the threat presented by the evil Soviet Empire, and without the Cold War against the Russians, how then defend, honor, and protect the cash flow of the nation’s military-industrial complex? The custodians of America’s conscience and bank balance found the solution in the war on drugs.
The stockpiling of domestic fear for all seasons is the political alchemist’s trick of changing lead into gold, the work undertaken in the 1990s by the presidential campaigns pitching their tents and slogans on the frontiers of race and class.
Like the war on drugs, the war on terror is unwinnable because [it is] waged against an unknown enemy and an abstract noun.
[The War on Terror] is a war that returns a handsome profit to the manufacturers of cruise missiles and a reassuring increase of dictatorial power for a stupefied plutocracy that associates the phrase national security not with the health and well-being of the American people but with the protection of their private wealth and privilege.
Unable to erect a secure perimeter around the life and landscape of a free society, the government departments of public safety solve the technical problem by seeing to it that society becomes less free.
The war on terror brought up to combat strength the nation’s ample reserves of xenophobic paranoia, the American people told to live in fear.
Given enough time and trouble over the last sixteen years, their collective fear and loathing collected into the cesspool from which Donald J. Trump became the president of the United States.
> Not the outcome envisioned by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but the one raising the question addressed in this issue of Lapham’s Quarterly.
Lapham’s Quarterly is highly regarded, so I would expect such non-sentences – especially at the start of a paragraph, complete with a drop-cap – to be culled by the editor (or author, who is in this case the same person). Or am I just not intelligent enough to understand this style of writing? (Even inserting a well-placed “is” does not clarify this sentence for me.)
Aside, I’m surprised the article doesn’t touch on why fear is so delectable to the American palate. I suspect it’s that humans expect fear, like how we expect work, pain, hierarchy, and other objectively unpleasant things which we seek out when lacking, to restore balance to an otherwise saccharine existence. Americans in fact have very little to rightly fear, thus our lizard brains instinctively latch on to anything to fill that void in our lives.