It strikes me that we have been in an almost continuous state of panic this entire year. Some is real, some is media-driven. Here are a few examples:
- The withdrawal from Afghanistan, even though it had major problems only on the first day and then went pretty well, considering the circumstances.
- The Fed's panic over inflation, even though there's considerable evidence that core inflation is abating on its own and non-core inflation is outside the Fed's control to begin with.
- Monkeypox. New York City is in an uproar over monkeypox but has mostly shrugged off the latest COVID surge. This is despite the fact that over the next month it's likely that a hundred or more people in the city will die of COVID but zero people will die of monkeypox.
- Republicans, of course, have thrown their followers into a panic over the supposed takeover of our public school system by CRT.
- Democrats, by contrast, are currently panicking over President Biden's response to Dobbs, even though everyone knows perfectly well that there's very little he can do about abortion laws.
- Basically, Dems are in a perpetual panic about losing various fights—over abortion, over BBB, over cancel culture and guns and how to teach about racism—while Republicans are in a perpetual panic about whatever Fox News is outraging them about.
The really aggravating thing about this list is that almost none of this panic has any good reason. But it does accomplish one thing: it makes it a lot easier to hide the stuff we really should be panicked about, like climate change and an ex-president leading a charge to overturn democracy.
And that's not all. Constant panic and anxiety has well-known long-term effects on human beings. It causes depression. Headaches. Bad temper. Fatigue. Loss of interest in sex. Stomach distress. Insomnia. Bad judgment. Faster aging. Overuse of drugs and alcohol. Increased risk of suicide.
We are a country where half the population seems to be at risk of all this. And for very little reason since, at a concrete level, things are going pretty well. Not everything. There are always problems, both personal and political. But the past two decades really haven't been that bad compared to most decades before them.
The easiest way to ruin a life—or a country—is to constantly panic about things. That does little except lead to a constant string of bad decisions. This is bad enough when the panic is justified, but genuinely appalling when it's not.
Now that I am retired, I have time to watch the evening network news, and a day never goes by without some bit of news being described as stunning or shocking or "raising new questions" and some aspect of the country described as skyrocketing or soaring in a bad way. Personally, I am rarely stunned or shocked, and I think we might all be better off if journalists had a bit harder bark on them.
+1
But it's a winning business model for the advertising/media/entertainment complex that really runs the American economy.
Bingo.
The problem is the market model of the media, and as it turns out pushing such buttons is profitable. Unhealthy both at personal and national levels, damaging.
How one fixes that.... escapes
It's hard to imagine a legal solution that wouldn't devolve into the even worse pitfalls of "state run media".
Sadly the only likely remedy is for psycho vigilantes to make it as uncomfortable to be a media propagandist in America as it currently is to be an abortion doctor. Sooooo yea.
There's a difference between "state run media", which would never fly, and "independent state funded media", which could.
Alternatively, repeal the free speech part of the first amendment and start over.
> The easiest way to ruin a life or a country is to constantly panic about things.
That's obviously the goal of the Fox side.
I am, of course, more sympathetic to those who just lost bodily autonomy and have no realistic recourse, and those who fear a fascist takeover, and those who note those things and wonder what our geriatric overlords are doing about it when not otherwise nodding off or praising Mcconnell.
I guess cooler heads can disagree about the urgency of those concerns, and throwing in a "both sides" frame to level the moral frame between those promoting authoritarianism and those worried about it is just about as American as apple pie, so good on ya, mate.
What pushed me over the edge is that CRT became a thing, even giving VA's gov to the Rs. That our country is so racist still, wow. I mean, I knew it from Tangerine Palpatine's election, but CRT is having us seriously researching work visas to Germany. If / when Rs retake everything in DC, it is all over.
Virginia's governorship almost always swings opposite the presidential election the year before, as the winners from the year before get really complacent about voting, especially in odd-numbered years. I wouldn't put too much faith into the whole "CRT won it for Youngkin" argument. And besides, Youngkin is guaranteed to be gone by 2025... Virginia doesn't allow any sitting governor to immediately run for re-election.
The fact that any Virginian without a preexisting condition as a republican would vote for Republican leadership almost immediately after Jan 6 and everything before and after, is disturbing. The Republicans paid zero political price for what's arguably the worst act of political corruption in US history. This was a green light to continue or even ramp it up.
It is the affect of sensationalizing EVERYTHING
And after everything has been sensationalized we accept those "bad things" as being "normal"
Monkeypox is a great example
It looks hideous so it did make the news. Very few will die from it but now that its been shown to spread by non-sexual exchange of fluids some of the hyperbole surrounding it has died off because FOX can't blame it on gay men.
Gun violence, "mass murders" have been so sensationalized as to have become the norm here. "Ho-hum" and "thoughts and prayers" have replaced outrage. Even sensible legislation will not reduce gun violence for a very long time.
When Texas froze from a poorly maintained electrical grid they were driven to do better. Now we have tolling blackouts due to a poor grid in Texas and Abbott's lies are not even questioned.
There are many MANY other examples of course.
Our media needs better adjectives that imply seriousness of their stories without making every story out to be a disaster. Of course our media needs to separate news from political influence but that time has past.
The over-hyping of everything has lead to acceptance of many things we wouldn't normally accept
I'm not sure how you put together that list of examples, but I know in my case I haven't forgotten about climate change or the threat to democracy. I'm panicked about them all the time, and particularly in the case of climate change, the fact that no one with any power seems willing to do anything about it.
And excuse me, the millions of women's lives thrown into disarray and in some cases bodily harm by repealing Roe is "no good reason" for panic? And for my part, one of the top politicians in my state has announced he wants to start re-enforcing sodomy laws and try to take gay rights back to the 1950s and take that battle to this SCOTUS. Pardon me for being a bit on edge.
I think what Kevin is referring to about Roe is the panic that Biden is not instantly taking some miraculous action that would counteract the Supreme Court decision. There are things that Biden can do immediately and he is doing some of them. Even organizing such things takes some time. But since Democrats don't have a working majority in the Senate the main thing is to channel the reaction into votes in November. This doesn't have to be done instantly, nor can it be. What is needed to be done about abortion is good organization, not panic.
The Horror that some how real world does not respond in the ease and speed of the Twitterati Commentariat making grand pronouncements of Just Do X...
He's not doing them immediately. It's been 2 weeks and beyond that much longer since the leak and admin was STILL caught completely unprepared. Their initial response was "we can't do anything, vote.
You say "Alito is illegitimate. Kav is illegitimate. Amy B is illegitimate. Gorsuch is illegitimate. Thomas is illegitimate. I need 2-3,-4 senate seats and we'll codify Roe." In the mean time you bring it to the floor and watch it die. Then you say "You all saw exactly what we wanted! Then [name names] are why it didn't happen. But if we have the power we will do it! I NEED YOU TO GIVE ME THE POWER! YOU SAW THAT I WILL USE IT! CAN I COUNT ON YOUR VOTE!?" A true call to arms.
Then you push for those seats. You pass it and SCOTUS strikes it down. You give the addresses of the justices as public information, you illegitimize them further and use it as a spring board to build support for court reform. It could take years decade more. But you have to build it.
Instead they have handled it like everything except Ukraine: incoherent flailing for 2 weeks then they start addressing the issue. But it's too late because everyone has seem Biden be useless in the moment. This I actually do largely attribute to age. Biden likes foreign policy he is not into domestic policy. As such he just has trouble mustering the energy to move on it like with UA.
Oh also there's the Chad Meredith debacle too.
Chad Meredith's ascension to the Federal Bench is in reality what the alt-left wanted Cornpop & Chinedu to be.
It's not real. It's an op, just like Tara Reade's crotchless nylons.
Absolutely agree with Mr. Drum.
The media in all its forms is really working on optimizing this.
There must be something in our nature that makes us such easy targets for these strategies. I fear we’re not going to be able to change the dynamic. It’s addictive.
Is it like the thrill we get from a righteous war, or pointing out our opponents’ sins? We wanna be martyrs, to have been wronged, so that our EVERY thought and deed is justified and celebrated? Idk
Lots of cultures and movements and people hang into this idea of having been wronged, look for slights, amplify them and revel in their righteousness.
People acted like Trump was such an abomination, was so depressing, but I think many liberals were thrilled by their self-righteousness. Giddy with it. That’s what it looked like to me.
Apparently self-righteousness is a drug, feels like the media and politics is dominated by this fast food of emotion, light on logic, almost pure pathos.
Personally I’m absolutely susceptible to this too, I’m a junkie!
You forgot to add "hordes of brown illegals pouring over the southern border to replace white people."
Brought in by the Republican religious and business groups.. Scabs are scabs. Get rid of the capitalist mindset changes how you see the world. You can't replace something that does not exist.
My personal theory is that this phenomenon, and to a large extent the great awokening before it, is essentially a product of the pandemic. If you want to spontaneously generate a bunch of sturm and drang over nothing, just make everyone sit at home and surf the internet all day.
Getting rid of media would be a start. 24 hour media should be ordered to shutdown. Internet politics abolished. Stuff like Twitter is censored to only cover main business commercial activity.
Living in constant crisis is a symptom of an addictive system, according to Anne Wilson Schaef's When Society Becomes an Addict and the Addictive Organization, two books which explain USAmerican society in many ways.
There are also Guy DeBord's books, Society of the Spectacle and Some Notes on the Society of the Spectacle, which explain how media work.
You're fooling yourself if you think this is a "product of the pandemic." The business model of late stage capitalism is addiction and the business model of the major media is building from one big spectacle to an even bigger one, ad infinitum.
Bill W. has a lot to answer for.
In fact, he'll never get past step 9.
You also have the loss of local news and the sensationalism of reports from across the country being put on local news.
Residential fires are down, as are deaths (wild fires don't count), but that's nothing to report.
Disasters are hitting us harder, but even there, deaths are way down--that's not conveyed
Gun violence is way up everywhere--but it is routinely presented as a "big city"/"gang" problem--not the local problem that it really is.
and oh...
There is one party trying to destroy governance--and that is normalized.
Because it is a gang problem idiot. Blacks make up 2/3s of the increase idiot.
The great Dean Smith summarized this many years ago:
If you make every game a life and death proposition, you're going to have problems. For one thing, you'll be dead a lot.
"And for very little reason since, at a concrete level, things are going pretty well. "
You really are a rich white old fool aren't you?
I've had my quarrels with Kevin over a number of issues. But not this article. I don't know how rich Kevin is, but he is no fool. Now you.......?
I've know him to be foolish on a number of things since the Calpundit days. He's pretty well off. He lives a childless life in Orange County and just went off to Europe. Before starting his blogging career he was in IT doing technical writing and reached the level of a marketing executive before becoming a freelance consultant until he started blogging full time. This ignores income from the spouse.
I'd call it upper middle class.
And hey I'm not above being wrong on things but not about this.
Yup.
With a slightly different chain of events, maybe still working at RadioShack during the tech bubble of 1998-01, Kevin "Warren Democrat" Drum likely fully embraces the Revolution & becomes a proponent of the Black Block Rampage thru Seattle during November 1999 WTO War Crimes Planning Session in Seattle.
As it is, he's much closer to the bogstandard white Warrenista (Lyz Lenz) or Berner (Matt "Bobby Hill gone to seed" & Liz Bruenig) in being an upperclass twit who thinks the situation is pretty good, but some free stuff for him would be cool.
Why do we feel that we need to panic about so many things? I guess it is human nature. The human desire to inflict mental suffering on ourselves when other reasons to suffer are absent.
There are no shortages of people and media who take advantage of this tendency by supplying and monetizing reasons for dissatisfaction.
The distinction is that Republicans want to be in a panic.
They think it gives them motivation and authority and absolves them of anything they might do, the rationale of the rioting mob.
I'd say that people are very justified in ending reproductive rights. People who warned for years/decades that this was going to happen have been proven right. If Drum's argument is that, now that reproductive rights and just general healthcare for millions of women have been taken away, there is no reason to freak out anymore, then, well, that's a point of view. Pretty sure that isn't the point he's trying to make.
Also, the Biden's response so far has been very lackluster and very tone deaf for where the country is today.
I know Drum really likes to scold the left as having reactions that are just the same as the right, but reproductive rights aren't the best example of bothsidesing.
What no one is sensationalizing or getting into a panic about is that Donald Trump and his enablers organized an armed force to attack the Capital and overthrow the government to install him as dictator-for-life, an act that leaves them plainly exposed to being charged with treason.
You'd think that would cause talk, but no one dare mention the t-word.
I just caught some of the ABC news wrap up of today's committee hearing and it was deplorable, they just kept going on about the terrible toll it's taken on the poor saps who did it.
Well, I'm glad two of them repented, but fuck these dirt bags, however lousy and unemployable they feel now they have all gotten off with the lightest possible charges. They can all go die in a ditch.
More important than their feelings is to remember that word for this episode is treason.
Joe Biden seems to remain, in some fundamental respect, a creature of the 1970s, and, like Jimmy Carter, who did many good things, he will in politically key moments move forward with a strong and noble certitude right into the most flatfooted faceplant, and that will be the only thing anyone will remember.
Expanding the Court, the fillibuster, what will he do next, commute the sentence of G. Gordon Liddy?
It's hard to get excited by Biden. He's not the most rhetorically gifted, and he often seems tone-deaf for the kind of political battle we are engaged in. He's slow to stand up for the causes he needs to trumpet. He doesn't even stand up for his own accomplishments, and lets himself be defined for the things he's failed to do.
But a good deal of what he gets blamed for is beyond his control. See: inflation, a rogue SCOTUS.
The jury is out on how he'll be remembered. Maybe the way you described, or maybe not. I think there's a solid chance that inflation will work itself out without a recession (or a short one, at worst), and his record will be good on growth and jobs. Backlash against Republicans for going too far could help Biden and Dems in elections to come. In that case, Biden could go down as a significant president who saved the country from the threat of fascism and turned the economy toward a more progressive direction.
Don't get me wrong, I think he's a great president, most of the time, except for this one giant tic.
The argument against ending the filibuster is that it is a check against unrepresentative nature of the Senate, but that's never emphasized because he, like a lot of people, will think nothing can be done about it, but this is to accept defeatism as the default state and enshrine corruption, which will only motivate corruption.
Of course something can be done about that, if you work on it, and to work on it you have to start working on it.
The Democratic leadership is against even starting to work on it.
There is no fascism. You keep misusing that word is your shame.
No, Presidential Medal of Freedom for Patty Hearst.
Which is terrible because if she'd never existed we'd never have heard of her and there would be no Patty Hearst.
Oh, I beg your pardon.
I did not see your comma there.
And for very little reason since, at a concrete level, things are going pretty well.
Well, hardly. No one can say that while democracy is under its greatest threat since at least the end of the Cold War and arguably since Hitler. The loss of abortion rights is a big effing deal and in no way equivalent to the right's panic about CRT or the media's fixation with monkeypox.
That said, is the constant panic generated by the media over-hyped and unproductive? I think so. Every news story is turned into a crisis, and every crisis a existential threat to our way of life.
It's not just news media. It's the culture in general. Imagine a big new movie in which the stakes are anything less than the fate of the earth. You can't. The big money movie people will never let it happen. The stakes (financial, for them) are just too big.
We were a healthier culture when our stories were about human beings, not civilizations. When the stakes in our stories become overwhelmingly big, we humans become increasingly small. There is too much to do, and nothing less than a superhero can get the job done.
I don't think the problem with news is recent, and it didn't start with Fox. The algorithm is an old one, and it's some changes in society and technology that now make it so extreme.
A couple of factors:
a. News once was divided between tabloid and everything else. But the days when a few news outlets (network TV, NYT, etc.) dominated the world of journalism are over. Everything is tabloid today. All TV has become local TV. All papers are chasing dollars, even the NYT, which had a near-death experience not too many years ago and now finds itself flush with cash having chosen which scandals to hype (her emails) and which to normalize (all things Trump). Bad for the country but good for business.
b. The failure of government under Republicans to address our problems. When people need help and don't get it, they yell. Next time, they yell louder. Why isn't anyone listening? Maybe the solution is to yell even louder. Pretty soon, people learn the only way to get attention is to make the problem so monumental nobody can ignore it. Except Republicans, who can veto any kind of help the government can provide and (so far) not suffer any consequences. That needs to change.
It is true, that if you unplug and turn off, your world becomes a lot more serene and your priorities change to tangible, personal, immediate needs. It's called a mental break.
That does not alter the fact that the world continues to move forward with all of the disorderly, disruptive, destructive, despoiling, despotic actions, such that you may one day wake up from your slumber to realize that your world has changed.
And regret has set in that you did not do anything about it when the opportunity was available.
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/07/13/inflation-rose-9point1percent-in-june-even-more-than-expected-as-price-pressures-intensify.html