The case against crisis-mongering
slowboring.com
slowboring.com
> "We’re the middle children of history. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war, our Great Depression is our lives."
The 90s were a pretty fortunate decade. The threat of nuclear war had passed with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the economy was chugging along fine, and terrorism hadn't yet taken centre stage. Certainly that's the way I remember it - maybe through rose-tinted glasses (?)
But nevertheless, maybe a quiet life without crises isn't such a bad thing?
the direction of the 90s was pointing at was, cosmopolitanism, techno-utopianism, radical secularism. I can't help to think that the decades that followed were a big regression from that with human tribes forming around the most ancient, base anxieties of the species. Unfortunately this decline was not captured in the the arts which became significantly less significant
So for many, there's always going to be an imminent apocalypse thats more interesting and urgent than any of their actual day to day problems.
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.
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.
People are also “allowed” to focus their attention on whatever they want. It seems like you’re saying we are powerless to ignore the news, although I am curious if you mean something else.
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.
Even if there isn't a huge difference, I feel like the relationship is more like that of an alcoholic or other addict. Do addicts really "like" their drug? Surely most of them know at some level that it's really unhealthy, and there's diminishing pleasurable returns even in the short term, but they still crave it as a release from their short term anxieties and problems.
But the emergencies in the media don't work that way. It doesn't matter how much you recycle, the media will keep screaming about catastrophe. It doesn't matter how many solar cells adorn your roof, the media will keep screaming. It doesn't how careful you are with your children, the media will keep screaming about child abductions. It doesn't matter if you pour hundreds of hours into organizing your neighborhood and fighting local crime, the media will keep screaming about crime.
It's the nature of this particular beast.
Consequently, you're never able to escape the "crisis" atmosphere, and stay stressed full time. That's not normal, especially in the absence of real, proximal crisis of that degree.
I can conclude that the only sane things for an individual to do is not to counter these issues with individual actions, but to instead organize for a societal response strong enough to change the media narratives, or switch off the media completely and live life as best as one can.
This is what I do. And I am confident that no matter what choices I make individually, they have no impact whatsoever on a global scale.
No, we aren't. Adversity from other humans, but not adversity from nature.
Natural disasters routinely kill huge numbers of people, because we don't know how to deal with them.
It seems pretty good at what it does! :)
Anyway It's not necessarily the surviving the immediate disaster that's evolutionarily selected for. No adaptation is going to make a human volcano or tsunami proof. It's the survivors piecing a viable way of life back together in the aftermath that matters.
C. Elegans would like a word!
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.
His other shtick though is "popularism" which is just that politicians should focusing on doing things that are broadly popular. It is (on my reading at least) not so much that this is "desirable" in a normative sense, but just that it is the only way to actually make progress.
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..."
Got it.
I think we have a way of remembering the past as much rosier than it actually was which leads us to think the present is much worse than it actually is. We tend to think of last summer as a particularly volatile time in the United States but as a point of comparison during periods in the 1970s we averaged 5 bombings a day in the US (https://time.com/4501670/bombings-of-america-burrough/). At various periods between the 1960s and the 1990s we had riots in American cities orders of magnitude more destructive than anything that happened during the summer of 2020. Not to mention the long and sordid history of pervasive racist violence from Reconstruction onward (see https://www.tulsahistory.org/exhibit/1921-tulsa-race-massacr...).
That is, the point is not that everything is great now so nobody should complain about anything but it is also a bit ahistorical to think that we are in some sort of unprecedentedly dangerous moment of history.
There is a boarder point as well which I think that we not only see this moment in aggregate as some moment of catastrophic danger but each *individual* issue is something of transcendent importance and we will all be doomed if we don't fix it right this moment. It leads to a sort of paralysis where you can't actually solve anything because you can't make tradeoffs when EVERYTHING is an emergency.
I agree. You can only have one #1 priority, by definition, but it is possible to address multiple emergencies.
The problem is "clog the channels with shit" people like Bannon obscure the true emergencies. He does it intentionally. I agree there are lots of people out there with lots of valid complaints, but I don't think they are all done intentionally to numb people to real emergencies like Bannon.
> Not to mention the long and sordid history of pervasive racist violence from Reconstruction onward
Sure. Please, please look at in context. Don't you think a few years before the civil war no one probably expected a civil war? To claim that things were worse in the past is to, frankly, be glib because you are ignoring the trajectory where things were headed. That is quite alarmingly similar: congress splitting irreconcilably.
In fact, your claim is almost a tautology: It isn't as bad because it isn't as bad. But once it IS as bad, then you've got a new datapoint to use in the future to say "things aren't so bad". It is circular logic.
IMHO: I think white supremacists storming the capital is a big red flag. If you think I'm being too extreme by calling them white supremacists and saying this is a dire situation, then I'm unreachable. It's a hard limit for me. A huge crowd of Trump supporters stormed the capital to overturn an election with the backing of half of congress. Yet you have Fox News, OANN and Newsmax trying to make Cancel Culture a bigger deal. I can't. I just can't. If in the OP's eyes I'm the problem because I put this in the top-10 emergencies, then I guess we have a insurmountable disconnect in this country.
I won't even argue about whether Tucker Carlson is valid to claim Cancel Culture a valid #1 emergency compared to my list, because they just aren't even on the same page, and if you can't see that, refer to my earlier point: insurmountable disconnect.
Perhaps that is how new countries & societies are formed: when one group wants to be Christian Theocracy with Biblical Law, and the other wants to strive be a liberal, flexible, socially just society. Those two viewpoints cannot by definition be reconciled, and one side is armed to the teeth and taking half of the political system with it, so what do you do?
"If it bleeds, it leads."
There was always an incentive to lead with disaster. I'm probably mangling this quote, but someone (British?) said about the media:
"They can't tell the difference between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization."
To which the response was "Actually, a veteran newsman knows perfectly well which one is the better story."
That kind of sensationalism seems almost quaint now. Everything is the collapse of civilization.
What fascism used to be was ultra nationalistic, non democratic, centralised control of people's lives and the economy for the greater good of the state. And I means these to the most extreme you can possibly take these ideas, that's fascism.
The word has no meaning when you throw it around against anyone with slightly conservative view points.
Given the absolutely absurd number of real-world experiments run over the last 2,000 years the ultra-short-term view people have of political history is a bit silly. Eg, I don't even know what the whipping boy was before facism. Possibly Bonapartism. We've tried everything at least thrice by this point and it is clear most people don't want to learn from the past and aren't particularly interested in having a clear language to discuss politics with.
It depends on the time and place. The favorite boogeyman of the Bolsheviks were the bourgeoisie at first, followed by the Mensheviks (communists of slightly wrong persuasion), and then counterrevolutionaries. The boogeyman for the royal regimes of the 19th century Europe was the French revolution, anything not sufficiently orthodox was automatically suspect.
EDIT: Figured I'd go pull the full quote.
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When one critic writes, “The outstanding feature of Mr. X’s work is its living quality,” while another writes, “The immediately striking thing about Mr. X’s work is its peculiar deadness,” the reader accepts this as a simple difference of opinion. If words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way. Many political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies “something not desirable.” The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of régime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Pétain was a true patriot, The Soviet Press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive. Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality.
That's not entirely true.
As Umberto Eco says[1]:
> Eco grew up under Mussolini’s fascist regime, which “was certainly a dictatorship, but it was not totally totalitarian, not because of its mildness but rather because of the philosophical weakness of its ideology. Contrary to common opinion, fascism in Italy had no special philosophy.” It did, however, have style, “a way of dressing—far more influential, with its black shirts, than Armani, Benetton, or Versace would ever be.”
And he identifies 14 typical features of fascism:
> 1. The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”
> 2. The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”
> 3. The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”
> 4. Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”
> 5. Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”
> 6. Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”
> 7. The obsession with a plot. “Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged.”
> 8. The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
> 9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”
> 10. Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
> 11. Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”
> 12. Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”
> 13. Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”
> 14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”
Many of which absolutely apply to the previous US presidency.
[1]: https://www.openculture.com/2016/11/umberto-eco-makes-a-list...
Most of the things on the list are actively bad in any political system. Half of them are inexcusable. A few are essentially descriptions of populism being acted upon, and a few are typical reactionary features.
For example, current Polish governing party fits: 1, 7, 8, 11, 12, 13, 14.
In the Marxist sense, we are a synthesis . Our competition is most likely the Chinese Communists which have broadly adopted capitalism, but retain the oligarchic power structures at the top, and state control of enterprises. They represent a different synthesis
Oh, like "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country" - Kennedy.
Fascism goes beyond that. "The Fascist conception of the State is all-embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value." - Mussolini. The core concept is a single all-encompassing authority. Not just a dictatorship or ruling party, but no other centers of power at all. It's top down military organization of the non-military parts of society.
Or, are we talking about someone that believes in controlled/regulated speech, a controlled press, speech codes, reductions in private property, Law as a living construct, supports cancel-culture, thinks of the State as the Church, wants massive wealth redistribution, supports violence as a means to change govt, and does not support the constitution?
At the time (1794), this was resolved by amending the constitution to make the desired change. If the same unintended wording had gone unnoticed until today, it is very likely that the supreme court would simply decide that the outcome as written was not desirable and throw out the suits.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law#/media/File:Map_of_...
In using the Constitution as a living document which can be interpreted by an activist judge, rather than the constitution as written [2], as passed by the states/amendment (originalism), interpreted by precedents from the collection of rulings, and caselaw.
[1] https://www.lawteacher.net/free-law-essays/constitutional-la...
[2] https://www.swindlelaw.com/2017/10/originalism-living-consti...
Free speech, reduction of private property, dissolution of centralized state and wealth redistribution are all very classic bottom left (anarchist) principles for instance.
I would think anyone below the center line vertically (so anarchists to free market libertarians) would support what you call “cancel culture” since is a powerful form of direct action.
No liberal is the other alike, but some would argue that privacy is a prerequisite of freedom. Calling out someone with intent of harm is a violation of their privacy and civil rights. This can have a chilling effect and promote homogeneous thought and expression, which is inconsistent with basic liberal values. Maybe a distinction between anarchism and liberalism is that the former want no regulation at all, while the latter embrace legislation that protect civil and human rights.
Words (like this one) can change their meaning in their popular use and that's fine but probably better to use better terms, especially with emotionally loaded ones.
1. We're not in a 'special' point of history, crises happens all the time
2. this is validation for some sort of liberal technocratic, moderate program, systematic critique is misplaced.
The first one is true. Crises do indeed happen all the time. The entire problem is just that this is not an argument for the second claim. Nations collapse, people go to wars, the WW I trenches were certainly worse than Donald Trump's presidency, what have you.
The big problem is just that the fact that carnage is normal doesn't make the carnage any better. It's not a validation of the system as it is, it's a testament to the constant brutality and chaos and cycle of violence that is normal throughout history, and I don't want to live through anything that's even just a tenth as bad as the second world war. This is what Adam Curtis called hypernormalization, the numbness to complete and utter destruction, rationalized as a sort of ordinary state of affairs. Just look at it this way, this is a blog post warning of crisis mongering, while, in the US as an example where the author is from, over half a million people died of a pandemic. He's right that in two years everyone will have forgotten it. He's wrong in that he doesn't recognize how insane and terrifying that fact is.
Someone made the observation that in the last two thousand years, no empire has lasted more than 300, I'm pretty sure plenty of moderate reformers had the exact same attitude in any of them as the author. It's true that people throughout history have loved doomsday scenarios. The problem is just that most of the time, they were right.
We have a crisis every so often. As a society, we ought to be able to survive it. That might be a pandemic, war, climate change (whether man-made, or from a volcano/asteroid/etc.), nukes, or what-not.
Being resilient means:
* Some level of economic isolation. Each region ought to be able to produce the bare necessities for themselves, and supply chains shouldn't be brittle. This has less economic impact than one might predict, since limiting the flow of some goods doesn't limit the flow of information, and the limits can be pretty mild.
* Some level of excess capacity. Free market capitalism wants everything to be just-in-time and as close to 100% capacity as possible. Machines sitting around idle are bad. Resilience demands we can quickly reallocate resources in response to change.
* Having some amount of stuff stockpiled, be that N95 masks or food.
* Having something like FEMA or the military, only competent.
* Proactively addressing potential threats. If something has a 5% chance of wiping out mankind or sending us back to the stone age, we should deal with it. We only get an expected 20 tries.
I don't believe a lot of the climate change predictions. I don't think we have any idea as to what will happen; it's a chaotic system. Academic incentive structures don't support honest publications either. Things may turn out far better, worse, or most likely, just different than predicted, and reasonable people can disagree.
I think if we can agree to aggressively and proactively deal with potential threats, though, exact estimates on odds of all of those outcomes don't matter so much. And if we can deal with those 5%-odds threats, the need for fear-mongering goes away.
Resiliency helps us avoid squabbling about what might or might not happen and instead focus on being prepared regardless.
With a few debatable exceptions, that's not true of any country on Earth.
And it's certainly not true of the planet as a whole. Which is the level at which it would need to operate to deal with planetary challenges.
Given your stated distrust of research, how exactly do you propose to be proactive? This isn’t a choice between 5% odds, pulling a number from thin air and framing it that way makes it seem like there are easy choices. What if the choices are closer to between six million wildly different possibilities of one in a billion odds?
I think where scientists went wrong -- and what contributed to doubt and fueled our inaction and inability to prepare to date -- was exactly from the type of manipulation you described. In the nineties, scientists correctly believed we should do something about the climate, but to affect change, they politicized science.
In the case of climate change, if you read right-wing media, they'll point to failed prediction after prediction expressed with great confidence 10 or 20 years ago, and use that to discount the whole concept of climate change. If that same data had been presented with confidence intervals -- and /real/ confidence intervals, not just based on statistical measurement error but on the possibility of models being wrong -- I think we'd actually be a lot further along.
If the choices were "six million wildly different possibilities of one in a billion odds", the risk would be 0.6%, and the case for acting wouldn't exist. As it is, I'd give perhaps 75% odds for the need to act on climate change. Precision is important.
But no, a lot of possibilities aren't hard to model or a reason not to act. We assign probabilities, and give a distribution. We have major wars perhaps every 50-100 years in most parts of the world. Recent past has been stable, but we've had windows of stability. Pandemics are on the rise, due to growing population and more commute. We can come up with likely scenarios, and they all have a lot in common.
The reason everything went wrong is that scientists haven’t used confidence intervals? Hehehe, I don’t think that has anything to do with it. Please be more specific, which papers, which predictions are you talking about? Who made them, and when exactly? Right-wing media has a tendency to misquote people and frame truth as failures too, and has been systematically trying to erode public trust in science and truth. I don’t think right-wing media’s political claims have any bearing on what we should do. Adding confidence intervals wouldn’t help anything; they’re opposed to regulation and to change of entrenched big business, it doesn’t matter what the science says, they’re against it because it affects somebody’s profit.
One big mistake you’re making here is suggesting that all science is making predictions, which is false. Most science, and much of the best science, doesn’t make any predictions at all, and doesn’t need confidence intervals, because it’s identifying and explaining past history, not the future. We don’t need science to predict that the temperature will go up, because we can see the trend over the last 10 or 50 years. Scientists aren’t telling us the climate is going to change, they’re telling us it already has changed. Adding a confidence interval won’t make that any more convincing to climate change deniers.
Hard disagree that the best science isn’t good, and that’s another hell of an armchair claim to make. I’m sure, like everything, some of it isn’t very good. See Sturgeon’s Law. But some of it is great. Watching Fox News will not help you identify the good stuff.
What gets cited most is Al Gore's summary of science in Inconvenient Truth. He quoted a bunch of predictions. He streamed those off. Within 15 years, there will be no more glaciers in Glacier National Park. Etc. Many of those didn't come to pass. Fox News is pretty honest when it quotes those. Selective, but honest.
He expressed complete confidence throughout: "There's not a single fact, or date, or number that's been used to make this up that's in any controversy"
Well, guess what? It's a chaotic system. We knew the predictions weren't great; we missed most of the effects of ocean acidification. Every number was in controversy. We missed a bunch of effects, underestimated some, and overestimated others. It's easy to point to place where people were untruthful. Fox News rarely lies, but it often quotes the places where things didn't come to pass. Liberal media quotes the places where things did, or where things were worse than predicted. Neither side is particularly truthful.
> You didn’t answer the question. How can we prioritize funding and actions?
Well, there are two hypotheses:
1) We're going to lie and convince everyone.
2) We'll be honest and count on people to be reasonable.
We tried #1. It didn't work. How about trying #2? It's painfully hard, calling people on lying when we agree with them, but it's critical, on both sides of the isle. Right now, we have a race to the bottom. Republicans lie. Democrats lie harder. Republicans lie harder. And so on.
> A lot of people already agree with you that we should prepare, and still we haven’t prepared. Why?
A lot of people disagree, and can point to good evidence that the side advocating for change was lying. The conclusion was correct, but when the logic along the way is dishonest, that's not how it's received.
> The reason everything went wrong is that scientists haven’t used confidence intervals?
I don't think that's quite what I said. I said the political left -- including and especially the scientific establishment -- expressed 100% certainty in predictions which (1) didn't come to pass (2) clearly had enough assumptions that a sane scientist could have predicted that (and many, in private conversations, did).
> Right-wing media...
Do you read right-wing media, or merely read about right-wing media? I haven't found media on either side of the isle to be more or less truthful. I read both.
> One big mistake you’re making here is suggesting that all science is making predictions, which is false.
No, I'm suggesting that this is the part of "science" which has the greatest problems with truthiness, and makes it hard to trust the best science.
> Most science, and much of the best science, doesn’t make any predictions at all, and doesn’t need confidence intervals, because it’s identifying and explaining past history, not the future. We don’t need science to predict that the temperature will go up, because we can see the trend over the last 10 or 50 years. Scientists aren’t telling us the climate is going to change, they’re telling us it already has changed.
And if this is all that was being presented, I think we'd have acted sooner.
> Adding a confidence interval won’t make that any more convincing to climate change deniers.
It's not about adding, it's about taking out.
> Watching Fox News will not help you identify the good stuff.
It actually will. Try it. Treat it (and all other media) as a primary source. You'd be surprised at how often an outsider perspective will do that. Mostly, it will help identify a blind spot around bad science you agree with. Chinese media too, actually. It's pretty easy to read critically past the propaganda. Does NY Times have better scientific coverage? Indubitably. But it comes with the same blindspot. In science, you're trying to make a good faith effort to disprove the hypothesis, and people who disagree with you do that much better than people who agree.
"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.
[1] https://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/sc-fam-kelly-inter...
[2] https://www.newsweekpakistan.com/reversing-blame/
Didn't know what DARVO meant so had to look it up and find good examples
1. Donald Trumps presidency in no way justifies the claim that the United States is drifting towards fascism
2. BLM protests have stopped happening so this is probably not so much of an issue now.
3. The US and EU economies grew with a small drop in emissions so global warming will be fixed. Have these been adjusted for the fact that a lot of the activities that support a first world lifestyle have emissions outside of it ?
It’s difficult to take any of these claims seriously. The idea of social mobility is now dead for most Americans , the citizens of the richest country to ever exist. People are putting off getting married or having children as a result. Life expectancy for white men in rural areas has been decreasing for the first time ever. Half the country no longer trusts the election results or vaccines.Unless emissions drop to zero by 2050 we are looking at 4 degrees of warming by 2100. Even This relies on the invention of as yet unknown carbon capture technology.
Large parts of the earth will become uninhabitable this century barring some insane technological breakthroughs and feats of international cooperation (given we can’t even give poor countries vaccines) and even if that were fixed social mobility is declining in much of the rich world. This sounds like something written by someone ensconced in a nice little bubble of privilege.
I follow Yglesias because I think he is interesting and he doesn't infuriate me the way a complete troll like Taibbi would and I do appreciate his cold, tactical look at politics. But his brand really seems to be that "hey this is OK, we can relax and this is just the same old same old", and as you mention, if you are living in a bubble of privilege, you can totally go with that and have a nice day. The kind of argument that works just great until the moment a few states decide to nullify the 2024 electoral college results, the house that was lost in 2022 due to gerrymandering goes along with it gleefully, and then that argument kind of didn't work at all. But until then, it's a super appealing message to those whose lifestyle can accommodate for it, he is trying to build up his new blog and his new name as a totally independent writer, and it's pretty interesting that he's on the front page of HN of all places.
Another important point is that the “same old same old” wasn’t actually that good for plenty of people. The point of understanding history like the world wars is to understand the ideas that led to them and hopefully learn a few lessons. Well, extreme economic distress along with xenophobic nationalist rhetoric led to the rise of Nazism. It’s hard to avoid comparisons when similar rhetoric gets used in the modern day. It led to wars in the past, so it is hugely fair to at least be cautious about it today.
While climate change is a new one, if we indeed can’t reverse the effects (even if we keep it stable from now on), we’d still be looking at big changes wrt food and water sources. It’s completely fair to be concerned that could lead to resource scarcity. We know from history that when that happens, you get total revolution (see France and Russia). So if that’s a possible outcome, it’s fair to think “ok, how do we avoid that?”
Sure, scaremongering is wrong, and media does it all the time by over-emphasizing the amount of murders compared to, say, the amount of cancer cases. But there are still loads of things that should hopefully make us concerned for our future and try to do better in the present.
Also missing is the threat of a full-scale war between nuclear-armed powers. There hasn't been a real non-proxy war between major powers for 75 years, but is there anyone who thinks tensions between NATO and Russia or China have been decreasing or even level? They have obviously been increasing, so the potential of a nuclear crisis walks alongside all of that. Former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara thought so, as do others.
He says he is in an area with as progressive and pro-climate a local government as you could want, then he says he had to fight for his own initiative to put solar panels on his roof. Every year more carbon pours into the atmosphere. His assertion that amounts to "liberalism is not preventing this, but is capable of understanding it" is not encouraging. Like Covid, major corporations at the center of the economy and hegemony are actively involved in spreading the idea that this is not even happening, which many buy into.
Insofar as fascism and events like Charlottesville, a town voted to remove a statue, a number of people came to protest, many openly calling themselves fascist. One townsperson marching to remove the statue was deliberately run over and killed by the other side. It's a manifestation of a fascist movement and it had a certain size and result. People are not wrong to notice Charlottesville or other things like that and see some level of a fascist threat, the question is how large it is - he is probably right that some reactions to such things are overblown, but they're not reacting to something that doesn't exist. I probably agree with Yglesias on the odds of the country becoming fascist in the next decades, but with Charlottesville, storming the Capitol to stop the election count and such things, it is correct to concern those on the watch for fascism, even if as Yglesias says, this can become overblown.
Also some people just have a historical perspective Yglesias doesn't get. Like an imminent collapse of the middle class would strongly portend an attempted fascist seizure of power.
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 and groups which formerly embraced liberal ideals with regards to speech have now abandoned them is a sign of changes within the institutions he discusses. Liberalism hasn't changed, the formerly liberal groups and institutions have abandoned aspects of liberalism, for good or ill.
I think the divides between progressives and liberals are becoming more stark.
I live in a deep blue area, and some of my friends proudly proclaim they are liberals and not progressive. Was talking with a neighbor recently and she mentioned her background in the Intelligence Community, and her support for law enforcement. She is friends with local LE , and helped them with a recent case. Emphasizing that she is totally against defunding, her ideas on police reform was 100% body cameras, and beefing up their training. Not a progressive.
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).
But it’s completely absurd.
As long as capitalism is the guiding light of society, it's probably absurd to think a solution is possible.
The capitalists control the politicians, and the voting populace underestimates the degree to which they can be manipulated.
Acting like things happening under his rule were a problem detached from his responsibility. If only every leader could get away with this.
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 politicians love to point towards Brussels, though, everytime they fsck something up.
It seems that the main parties in the U.S. are really big tents. In another system, they would have split up to 6-7 smaller and more coherent parties. (That would nevertheless have to compromise on their ideas when forming coalitions, so not a dramatic difference.)
When I lived in Europe they did not point towards the EU and say, "we are going to handover much of our lawmaking power to these EU bureaucrats", but, that is exactly what has happened.
"We decide on something, leave it lying around and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don't understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back." (1999)
"If it's a Yes, we will say 'on we go', and if it's a No we will say 'we continue'." (On the 2005 French referendum on the Lisbon Treaty)
""Britain is different. Of course there will be transfers of sovereignty. But would I be intelligent to draw the attention of public opinion to this fact?" (2007)
"When it becomes serious, you have to lie." (2013)
"There can be no democratic choice against the European treaties, one cannot exit the euro without leaving the EU." (2015)
This mentality contributed a lot towards Euroscepticism. It is not as if Brussels is a confederacy of angels.
https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/jean-claude-juncker-quot...
As for Brussels not being angels - it's true it's not enough of an immigrant-hating racist and corrupt failing state for some people.
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 presented with with bad faith or the worst possible meaning taken as a presumption.
He may have been extraordinarily corrupt, and a constant embarrassment to the country on Twitter, but in terms of policy he was a relatively vanilla conservative. I've even given him credit for being the first president to enter office supporting same-sex marriage, and more broadly I don't dislike the libertarian-ish element of his base that also supports that in addition to legal weed.
None of the above negates the fact that Trump and his allies spent at least the second half of 2020 attempting to subvert our electoral process, came very close to succeeding, and then attacked the United States with intent to violently usurp control of the government. It doesn't negate that Trump-inspired white nationalist militias are currently the greatest domestic terror threat in America, while Trump continues to stoke their anger with lies. Whether his coup was "fascist" or parallels the actions of 34-year-old Adolf Hitler is irrelevant. I'll criticize the left for crying wolf as loudly as anyone; it doesn't logically follow that wolves don't exist.
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.
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1: https://www.politifact.com/article/2019/apr/26/context-trump...
That isn't what happened and is exactly the type of inaccurate and unfair characterization you mention previously.
But where do you see "intent to violently usurp" in that footage? That's inaccurate and over the top rhetoric of exactly the kind you call out earlier.
I don't believe false flag. There may (or may not) have been agitators who were other then Trump supporters, but if so it wasn't too hard to do and a large number of Trump supporters behaved criminally. No argument with that. But it was not an "attempt to violently usurp the government" by any reasonable definition.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/nancy-pelosi-...
https://www.npr.org/2021/03/19/977879589/yes-capitol-rioters...
If it's "over the top", it's because what happened was over the top. The language I used is literal and accurate.
They are grasping at straws trying to build an (unreasonable) narrative.
Where are the insurrection charges in court?
No, what happened was a bunch of people were upset about an election they perceived as fraudulent and wanted certification stopped until an investigation was performed (also not reasonable, the electors had been certified at that point and it was done deal). Also Trump didn't help matters. Once the state electors were in it was over for him, fraud or no fraud. There wasn't reasonable time to audit anything and he did no one any favors by getting the crowd whipped into a frenzy.
Even if we attribute this stuff to "capitalism" (instead of "workers" for example), I'm pretty sure none of it is actually sustainable.
>Now of course we don’t have carbon pricing, and I think we never will because it’s hideously unpopular. But that’s the essence of the climate crisis — not an ideological crisis for liberalism, but tragically a crisis of mass indifference.
So we don't have carbon tax because of mass indifference to the planet being destroyed? Otherwise carbon taxes? Whatever, lib.