> What's with all the doomslinging in modern discourse?
Because public trust in the ability of governments to manage a crisis has gone completely fucking downhill, worldwide:
- the US couldn't even manage to beat a gang of cave-living Islamist terrorists using kalashnikovs in 20 years, and had to flee the country in shame
- we went through three years of a worldwide pandemic, then panicked governments acted like it was all over due to pressure by the far right - and yet, despite mounting evidence of millions of cases of long covid and almost all nation leaders silently insisting on covid tests prior to meetings, for the citizens it's a free for all for the virus, at the risk of disabled people and other at-risk groups. Governments didn't do anything to meaningfully curb the onslaught of propaganda as well.
- compared to prior environmental threats such as CFC coolants or lead, no one is doing anything meaningful (i.e. something that actually costs Big Money some wealth) against climate change. Instead, again, climate change denial runs rampant.
- we've got Russia invading Ukraine in a land-grab and it took us a year of brutal slaughter, rape and terrorism to send a handful of fucking tanks, and fighter jets are still many months away. I'm not advocating to glass the Kremlin, but NATO could do way way WAY more to stop this shit.
- China has been stealing Western IP for decades and used obvious price dumping to destroy our economies, and yet our politicians and companies keep kneeling before Xi despite the constant Chinese saber rattling against Taiwan
- housing prices and cost of living have been exploding for years and no one cares, despite tent cities of homeless in every major warm US city and people defecating on the streets because they don't have any safe place.
- on top of all of that (literal) shit, Nazis and other authoritarian politicians are back worldwide, to a large degree financed by the Kremlin, and guess what, politicians aren't taking care about that either, instead they let their parties be taken over by them or refuse to fight and go under in elections.
- ETA: And in the US, people will probably have the choice come next election between someone who should have retired from politics decades ago on the Democrat side and on the Republican side either someone who has incited a putsch, stole top-secret documents and hid them in a fucking toilet or someone who thinks it's a good idea to take on Disney of all companies or to fight everyone who doesn't think like him as "woke" and wants to eradicate them. JFC America what are you doing?
So yes, it's completely rational for people to assume doom when politicians don't give us any reason to hope that the situation will improve. It makes more sense to prepare for the worst case because it's increasingly more likely.