26 ms·

The case against crisis-mongering

135 points by cjbest 5y ago

disposable1312 5y ago
>Some of the most potent images produced by the political right in the 2020 cycle featured looters and rioters smashing stores and burning buildings in major American cities. Donald Trump and congressional Republicans, these ads warned, were the only thing standing between these rioters and your home. Acting like things happening under his rule were a problem detached from his responsibility. If only every leader could get away with this.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  I am not even an American, but in a huge federal country like the US, not everything can be attributed to the presidency - negative or positive. Governors, state senators etc. have a responsibility too, and they should not be able to shirk it by screaming "look at the bad guy above me!" It is actually similar in the EU. The EU and the Commission has a lot of power, but not enough to pin everything on them. Local politicians love to point towards Brussels, though, everytime they fsck something up.
  - mberning 5y ago
    Most of those cities being razed over the summer have been under complete democrat control for years.
    - inglor_cz 5y ago
      So the police departments that should be defunded according to some Democrat activists were/are under control of Democrat politicians? 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.)
    - AntiWFH 5y ago
      No cities were razed you dumbass.
  - OrvalWintermute 5y ago
    > Local politicians love to point towards Brussels, though, everytime they fsck something up. 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.
    - inglor_cz 5y ago
      There are some quotes by former EK chairman Juncker that touch on this: "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.
      - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
        He said a lot of other things which put a much more humane gloss on your selective compendium. https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/jean-claude-juncker-quotes 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.
  - jrgoff 5y ago
    I agree with your general point, but not as a response to the gp. If the president and congressmen who were in power and were then running for re-election have no responsibility for the unrest than what was the point of them being re-elected to stop it? Either they can do something about it and didn't, or they can't do anything about it but for some reason are campaigning as though they can.
- mberning 5y ago
  Every administration in my lifetime has done this. Taking credit for certain things and shifting blame for others is not unusual. The state of the economy is the most shining example.
thewarrior 5y ago
So a summary of this essay: 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.
- zzzeek 5y ago
  If it helps the inevitable greying of your post on HN, I mostly agree with your assessment of this article. The argument and particularly graphics showing how GWB was compared to nazism were trying to make a comparison that I feel is not apt at all, I protested the GWB iraq war and I remember the comparisons made of GWB's presidency to facism. My personal experience is that era, while scary for what the future held, was nothing like what the Trump presidency was and what in many ways continues to be as we are no way out of the woods on this one yet. Not the least of which was the quite widespread semi-concerted effort by both non-elected and elected members of local, state, and national government to overturn the actual election, culminating in an attempted violent overthrow of the government. There was not a word of that in this article's attempt to compare today to the GWOT era. 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.
blagie 5y ago
What I would more like is The Case for Resilience. 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.
- noahtallen 5y ago
  This is a fantastic point. I personally agree with the climate outlook, but also agree that most things end up being different in some way when they happen. (Could be better, could be worse.) Resiliency helps us avoid squabbling about what might or might not happen and instead focus on being prepared regardless.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  That's a fantasy of resilience, not a case for resilience. You only get that kind of resilience when you have a political system capable of planning ahead on extended time scales, and which is explicitly committed to looking after its people more than than its leaders. 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.
Guthur 5y ago
Honestly it seems no one really understands what fascism actually is. 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.
- roenxi 5y ago
  I'm not sure people care. The median pundit seems to have an unshakeable belief that they aren't going to bear the big-picture consequences for bringing back failed 1900s political ideologies. 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.
  - DenisM 5y ago
    > I don't even know what the whipping boy was before facism. Possibly Bonapartism 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.
  - FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
    There's a throwaway line somewhere in Kenneth Clark's Civilization, where he says that railing against "tyranny" (sort of gesturing back to the Roman Republic) was the rhetorical go-to of the pre-Marxist revolutionary.
- planet-and-halo 5y ago
  Orwell wrote this way back in the 1940s. He said by then the word "fascism" already meant "something we don't like," whereas "democracy" meant "a system we like." EDIT: Figured I'd go pull the full quote. --- 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.
hiddencache 5y ago
Regardless of what Tyler Durden said: > "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?
- wittycardio 5y ago
  But we aren't the middle children of history. I'd argue that we are amongst the first few generations where humans have become too powerful for their own good. That era started with the nuclear bomb when we first had the ability to destroy ourselves. Thankfully very small groups of people have ever had to take responsibility for that and they've mostly managed to do okay so far. However now with mass industrialization and the spectre of climate change we've reached a point where every single human is responsible for our collective future. We have to fight our evolutionary and historical instincts to preserve the planet for ourselves and all other life. So there is a crisis upon us, it may be different in nature to the ones before but its certainly no less challenging. For a far better argued view on this I would recommend "The precipice" by Toby Or
- sharikous 5y ago
  Definitely rose tinted glasses. I don't know where you live but it depends on that. For example they were the years of slaughters in former Yugoslavia, terrorist attacks in Israel, various wars in Africa
  - lixtra 5y ago
    Or the Rwandan genocide https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide
    - cblconfederate 5y ago
echopurity 5y ago
> privately owned business corporations (“capitalism”) have done a great job bringing down the cost of photovoltaic panels, developing electric vehicles that people want to drive, creating promising fake meat substitutes, and otherwise creating the building blocks of a sustainable economy. 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.
black6 5y ago
Equating the orange man with fascism while ignoring the collusion between the pharmaceuticals industry and the current US administration is disingenuous at best, and malicious lying-by-omission at worst.
- joelbondurant 5y ago
  You're allowed to have this opinion, just not on the USA communist Internet.
h2odragon 5y ago
Humans are built to survive adversity. We got so good at it, we took over the planet. Now there's lots of humans who haven't ever faced serious challenges (by previous standards of everyday survival), and they need to feel the drama and triumph humans are programmed for even without the actual life threatening events that used to prompt those feelings. 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.
- tvirosi 5y ago
  I don't believe in this perspective. I think most people are sick of it (and would live healthier lives if they were allowed to focus more attention on their immediate surroundings) but that it keeps being refueled by profit desperate news corporations.
  - spamizbad 5y ago
    I agree. How much not-for-profit, non-state media, non-clout chasing fear mongering content is there? It does exist but the scale is small.
    - thinkharderdev 5y ago
      Honestly I think that there is quite a lot of non-fearmongering media out there. The Economist strikes me as a good example. And in general I think if you read any "respectable" (Economist, NYT, WSJ, WaPo, La Monde, etc.) newspaper as a whole on a day-to-day basis you wouldn't come away from the experience being especially scared or fearful. The problem is that it all gets dumped into the social media slurry and what a lot of people consume (in practice) is a sort of curated selection of the most sensationalist individual stories across the entire media ecosystem.
      - spamizbad 5y ago
        The Economist does a fair bit of fearmongering when it comes to China and inflation.
VictorPath 5y ago
Strange no mention of Covid as a crisis the US would struggle to handle. The most popular news network in the US is Fox News, and it is (although not uniformly) skeptical of vaccines, masks, lockdowns or even if Covid is real and killing the people its killing. We can look at the rising delta variant infections and deaths to see how the US handles this. Also missing is the threat of a full-scale war between nuclear-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.
magwa101 5y ago
As in all things, what is the goal? Human population growth and well being? Or is it a thriving diverse planet? Or are they one and the same? If we survive and end up with a lifeless urban planet that feeds us is that success?
gdubs 5y ago
The author’s point seems to be that everyone exaggerates in a direction that best serves their desired political outcome. What he misses is the obvious — he exaggerates as well, in the direction of “moderation.” His desired outcome is that we all take a moderate approach, and the rhetorical device used to get there is that ‘crises are all exaggerated.’
- thinkharderdev 5y ago
  I'm not sure that is a fair characterization of his preferences. This is a guy who just wrote a book called "One Billion Americans" which argues that we should quadruple the US population through both pro-natalist policies and more immigration. I wouldn't really consider that a "moderate" position. 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.
  - buu700 5y ago
    It's an interesting idea. So much of the US is just uninhabited land. I could see such policies not leading to overcrowding, but rather to increased development and economic growth across the country, particularly if combined with something like the Homestead Act.
- XorNot 5y ago
  Your point is "people try to make compelling arguments". Well duh, but it's not an actual rebuttal.
joelbondurant 5y ago
I'm old enough to remember when liberal didn't mean liberal police state social authoritarian.
SavantIdiot 5y ago
I had a man in an nazi costume point a gun at me during a Portland protest. How could I possibly be "over-exaggerating"? Do I need to be dead? Would that make the author approve of my experience? OP can stuff his privilege. This is yet another of example of "Well, everything is fine for -ME-, why doesn't everyone else just relax since you're all the same anyway..."
- exolymph 5y ago
  Don't attend LARP event if you don't want to encounter LARPers.
  - SavantIdiot 5y ago
    So to you a social justice protest that is met with armed LARPer counterprotestors becomes a LARP event. Got it.
- Seattle3503 5y ago
  That man isn't generally representative. If you reactive the world is full of people like him, you will over react.
- thinkharderdev 5y ago
  I doubt he would claim you are over-exaggerating your particular experience, nor do I think he is insisting that no terrible things happen at all (which would be an obviously insane thing to say). But is it actually *worse* now than in the past? 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/ 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-massacre/ 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.
zzyzxxz 5y ago
The abusive tactic known as DARVO begins with downplaying, denying or deflecting. I sure read a lot of those things in this article. I hope the author learns more rhetorical techniques, the one they used here made them come across as abusive.
- tqi 5y ago
  Please list some examples.
  - OrvalWintermute 5y ago
    Here [1] is an example of DARVO according to the Chicago Tribune, and one [2] from NewsweekPakistan both involving sexual assaults. [1] https://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/sc-fam-kelly-interview-denial-response-0312-story.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/sc-fam-kelly-inter... [2] https://www.newsweekpakistan.com/reversing-blame/ https://www.newsweekpakistan.com/reversing-blame/ Didn't know what DARVO meant so had to look it up and find good examples
buu700 5y ago
Both sides have a tendency to cry wolf. Bush was awful, but he wasn't Hitler. Romney was treated particularly unfairly during his presidential run. Regardless of one's feelings on Trump, it's clear that he wasn't treated entirely fairly by the media from the start. Sure, for a while they would tiptoe around calling him out for outright lies, but I also saw how his words and actions would at times be twisted and 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.
- klyrs 5y ago
  Trump was treated more than fairly by the press. He thrives on and encourages controversy. They played directly into his hand at every step of the way. When he plays the victim, that too is an act. He's a reality TV star, he's a heel, and people on both sides gobbled it up.
  - buu700 5y ago
    I'm not disagreeing with most of that, quite the opposite. What I take issue with is the media being brazenly unfair in select instances, which needlessly gives Q cultists ammunition to help radicalize "normies". It's something I would take note of every once in a while, but I would have to think and/or research to come up with more than one or two examples offhand. The biggest one that immediately comes to mind is the infamous "very fine people on both sides" quote. I've watched and read the full context[1]. He's not saying that all people on the neo-Nazi side are good, but that some of them were there only to peacefully protest in support of the legacy of Robert E. Lee. It's like the difference between Archie Bunker (a bigoted goofball, but mostly just an earnest guy struggling to deal with changes in society) and a literal militant Klansman/neo-Nazi. That sentiment may be distasteful in itself to many people (I personally think Lee is just as undeservingly venerated as Rommel), but it's far less extreme than what he's been presented as having said. I'm not even saying that Trump's statement was necessarily correct; I'm saying that if he misrepresented the facts on the ground, and/or if what he (actually) said was arguably a dog whistle, that's what he should have been criticized for. I'm a huge fan of Joe Biden these days, and it still leaves a sour taste in my mouth that during the campaign he cited that out-of-context quote as his motivation for running. --- 1: https://www.politifact.com/article/2019/apr/26/context-trumps-very-fine-people-both-sides-remarks https://www.politifact.com/article/2019/apr/26/context-trump...
AlbertCory 5y ago
There's an old, old saying in the news business, which predates 9/11 and almost everything else: "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.
DoreenMichele 5y ago
I've been saying stuff like this for years. "News" is always bad news and they almost never follow up with similar levels of celebration for resolving a problem. The Kuwaiti oil fires were supposed to burns for years and be a global environmental catastrophe. They were put out in six months. We did not dance in the streets about this miracle. We were on to wringing our hands about something else. Disaster response is generally better than it used to be. We aren't grateful or amazed. We take it for granted and complain about it failing to live up to our expectations. That doesn't mean we don't have real problems. That's not me being in denial or uninformed.
Animats 5y ago
In the US, we can look back at 1975-2000 as a period when nothing really bad happened. 1900-1950 was far worse. "There’s a big tradition on the left ... insisting that building a zero-carbon future requires the adoption of radical anti-capitalist politics. But it’s completely absurd." Yes. We're in a good position on energy. As the fossil fuel sources are running out, we now have good alternatives. That wasn't true 20 years ago. 20 years ago, solar panels cost too much, and wind turbines were not big enough. 2022 will probably be the year that perception of this turns around in the US. That's when all the good electric work vehicles ship. The electric Ford F-150, the electric Ford Transit, and the big electric Freightliner trucks are all starting volume production. A year from now, most American blue-collar workers will have ridden in an electric vehicle at least once.
ttonkytonk 5y ago
There’s a big tradition on the left dating back at least to Naomi Klein’s “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs, the Climate” of insisting that building a zero-carbon future requires the adoption of radical anti-capitalist politics. And I think that people who insist that liberalism can’t reckon with contemporary crises are from that school of thought. 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.
oofabz 5y ago
This is a well-written and insightful article, but I don't think it's good for HN. Divisive political and culture war issues are thoroughly covered elsewhere. I would prefer HN to focus on its unique niche and show me new ideas I have not encountered before.
rdiddly 5y ago
While nothing lately has made me "doubt the basic tenets of liberalism," quite a bit of public speech has made me doubt that the given speaker understands said tenets. Not necessarily this writer, but then again he doesn't state them either, so there is at least room for doubt. "There oughtta be a law" that anybody who uses the word 'liberal' or 'conservative' must take a quick detour to define what they mean by that. Suddenly we would all know what we were talking about. I think it would be eye-opening. Deception thrives in an environment of code-words, shorthand and oversimplification. That's what Newspeak was supposed to be all about, right?
Barrin92 5y ago
There's two claims in this piece I think. 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.

135 points by cjbest 5y ago

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

inglor_cz 5y ago
I am not even an American, but in a huge federal country like the US, not everything can be attributed to the presidency - negative or positive. Governors, state senators etc. have a responsibility too, and they should not be able to shirk it by screaming "look at the bad guy above me!" It is actually similar in the EU. The EU and the Commission has a lot of power, but not enough to pin everything on them. Local politicians love to point towards Brussels, though, everytime they fsck something up.
- mberning 5y ago
  Most of those cities being razed over the summer have been under complete democrat control for years.
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    So the police departments that should be defunded according to some Democrat activists were/are under control of Democrat politicians? 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.)
  - AntiWFH 5y ago
    No cities were razed you dumbass.
- OrvalWintermute 5y ago
  > Local politicians love to point towards Brussels, though, everytime they fsck something up. 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.
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    There are some quotes by former EK chairman Juncker that touch on this: "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.
    - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
      He said a lot of other things which put a much more humane gloss on your selective compendium. https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/jean-claude-juncker-quotes 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.
- jrgoff 5y ago
  I agree with your general point, but not as a response to the gp. If the president and congressmen who were in power and were then running for re-election have no responsibility for the unrest than what was the point of them being re-elected to stop it? Either they can do something about it and didn't, or they can't do anything about it but for some reason are campaigning as though they can.
mberning 5y ago
Every administration in my lifetime has done this. Taking credit for certain things and shifting blame for others is not unusual. The state of the economy is the most shining example.

thewarrior 5y ago

So a summary of this essay: 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.

zzzeek 5y ago
If it helps the inevitable greying of your post on HN, I mostly agree with your assessment of this article. The argument and particularly graphics showing how GWB was compared to nazism were trying to make a comparison that I feel is not apt at all, I protested the GWB iraq war and I remember the comparisons made of GWB's presidency to facism. My personal experience is that era, while scary for what the future held, was nothing like what the Trump presidency was and what in many ways continues to be as we are no way out of the woods on this one yet. Not the least of which was the quite widespread semi-concerted effort by both non-elected and elected members of local, state, and national government to overturn the actual election, culminating in an attempted violent overthrow of the government. There was not a word of that in this article's attempt to compare today to the GWOT era. 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.

blagie 5y ago

What I would more like is The Case for Resilience. 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.

noahtallen 5y ago
This is a fantastic point. I personally agree with the climate outlook, but also agree that most things end up being different in some way when they happen. (Could be better, could be worse.) Resiliency helps us avoid squabbling about what might or might not happen and instead focus on being prepared regardless.
TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
That's a fantasy of resilience, not a case for resilience. You only get that kind of resilience when you have a political system capable of planning ahead on extended time scales, and which is explicitly committed to looking after its people more than than its leaders. 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.

Guthur 5y ago

Honestly it seems no one really understands what fascism actually is. 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.

roenxi 5y ago
I'm not sure people care. The median pundit seems to have an unshakeable belief that they aren't going to bear the big-picture consequences for bringing back failed 1900s political ideologies. 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.
- DenisM 5y ago
  > I don't even know what the whipping boy was before facism. Possibly Bonapartism 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.
- FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
  There's a throwaway line somewhere in Kenneth Clark's Civilization, where he says that railing against "tyranny" (sort of gesturing back to the Roman Republic) was the rhetorical go-to of the pre-Marxist revolutionary.
planet-and-halo 5y ago
Orwell wrote this way back in the 1940s. He said by then the word "fascism" already meant "something we don't like," whereas "democracy" meant "a system we like." EDIT: Figured I'd go pull the full quote. --- 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.

hiddencache 5y ago

Regardless of what Tyler Durden said: > "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?

wittycardio 5y ago
But we aren't the middle children of history. I'd argue that we are amongst the first few generations where humans have become too powerful for their own good. That era started with the nuclear bomb when we first had the ability to destroy ourselves. Thankfully very small groups of people have ever had to take responsibility for that and they've mostly managed to do okay so far. However now with mass industrialization and the spectre of climate change we've reached a point where every single human is responsible for our collective future. We have to fight our evolutionary and historical instincts to preserve the planet for ourselves and all other life. So there is a crisis upon us, it may be different in nature to the ones before but its certainly no less challenging. For a far better argued view on this I would recommend "The precipice" by Toby Or
sharikous 5y ago
Definitely rose tinted glasses. I don't know where you live but it depends on that. For example they were the years of slaughters in former Yugoslavia, terrorist attacks in Israel, various wars in Africa
- lixtra 5y ago
  Or the Rwandan genocide https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide
  - cblconfederate 5y ago

echopurity 5y ago

> privately owned business corporations (“capitalism”) have done a great job bringing down the cost of photovoltaic panels, developing electric vehicles that people want to drive, creating promising fake meat substitutes, and otherwise creating the building blocks of a sustainable economy. 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.

black6 5y ago

Equating the orange man with fascism while ignoring the collusion between the pharmaceuticals industry and the current US administration is disingenuous at best, and malicious lying-by-omission at worst.

joelbondurant 5y ago
You're allowed to have this opinion, just not on the USA communist Internet.

h2odragon 5y ago

Humans are built to survive adversity. We got so good at it, we took over the planet. Now there's lots of humans who haven't ever faced serious challenges (by previous standards of everyday survival), and they need to feel the drama and triumph humans are programmed for even without the actual life threatening events that used to prompt those feelings. 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.

tvirosi 5y ago
I don't believe in this perspective. I think most people are sick of it (and would live healthier lives if they were allowed to focus more attention on their immediate surroundings) but that it keeps being refueled by profit desperate news corporations.
- spamizbad 5y ago
  I agree. How much not-for-profit, non-state media, non-clout chasing fear mongering content is there? It does exist but the scale is small.
  - thinkharderdev 5y ago
    Honestly I think that there is quite a lot of non-fearmongering media out there. The Economist strikes me as a good example. And in general I think if you read any "respectable" (Economist, NYT, WSJ, WaPo, La Monde, etc.) newspaper as a whole on a day-to-day basis you wouldn't come away from the experience being especially scared or fearful. The problem is that it all gets dumped into the social media slurry and what a lot of people consume (in practice) is a sort of curated selection of the most sensationalist individual stories across the entire media ecosystem.
    - spamizbad 5y ago
      The Economist does a fair bit of fearmongering when it comes to China and inflation.

VictorPath 5y ago

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

magwa101 5y ago

As in all things, what is the goal? Human population growth and well being? Or is it a thriving diverse planet? Or are they one and the same? If we survive and end up with a lifeless urban planet that feeds us is that success?

gdubs 5y ago

The author’s point seems to be that everyone exaggerates in a direction that best serves their desired political outcome. What he misses is the obvious — he exaggerates as well, in the direction of “moderation.” His desired outcome is that we all take a moderate approach, and the rhetorical device used to get there is that ‘crises are all exaggerated.’

thinkharderdev 5y ago
I'm not sure that is a fair characterization of his preferences. This is a guy who just wrote a book called "One Billion Americans" which argues that we should quadruple the US population through both pro-natalist policies and more immigration. I wouldn't really consider that a "moderate" position. 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.
- buu700 5y ago
  It's an interesting idea. So much of the US is just uninhabited land. I could see such policies not leading to overcrowding, but rather to increased development and economic growth across the country, particularly if combined with something like the Homestead Act.
XorNot 5y ago
Your point is "people try to make compelling arguments". Well duh, but it's not an actual rebuttal.

joelbondurant 5y ago

I'm old enough to remember when liberal didn't mean liberal police state social authoritarian.

SavantIdiot 5y ago

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

exolymph 5y ago
Don't attend LARP event if you don't want to encounter LARPers.
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  So to you a social justice protest that is met with armed LARPer counterprotestors becomes a LARP event. Got it.
Seattle3503 5y ago
That man isn't generally representative. If you reactive the world is full of people like him, you will over react.
thinkharderdev 5y ago
I doubt he would claim you are over-exaggerating your particular experience, nor do I think he is insisting that no terrible things happen at all (which would be an obviously insane thing to say). But is it actually *worse* now than in the past? 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/ 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-massacre/ 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.

zzyzxxz 5y ago

The abusive tactic known as DARVO begins with downplaying, denying or deflecting. I sure read a lot of those things in this article. I hope the author learns more rhetorical techniques, the one they used here made them come across as abusive.

tqi 5y ago
Please list some examples.
- OrvalWintermute 5y ago
  Here [1] is an example of DARVO according to the Chicago Tribune, and one [2] from NewsweekPakistan both involving sexual assaults. [1] https://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/sc-fam-kelly-interview-denial-response-0312-story.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/sc-fam-kelly-inter... [2] https://www.newsweekpakistan.com/reversing-blame/ https://www.newsweekpakistan.com/reversing-blame/ Didn't know what DARVO meant so had to look it up and find good examples

buu700 5y ago

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

klyrs 5y ago
Trump was treated more than fairly by the press. He thrives on and encourages controversy. They played directly into his hand at every step of the way. When he plays the victim, that too is an act. He's a reality TV star, he's a heel, and people on both sides gobbled it up.
- buu700 5y ago
  I'm not disagreeing with most of that, quite the opposite. What I take issue with is the media being brazenly unfair in select instances, which needlessly gives Q cultists ammunition to help radicalize "normies". It's something I would take note of every once in a while, but I would have to think and/or research to come up with more than one or two examples offhand. The biggest one that immediately comes to mind is the infamous "very fine people on both sides" quote. I've watched and read the full context[1]. He's not saying that all people on the neo-Nazi side are good, but that some of them were there only to peacefully protest in support of the legacy of Robert E. Lee. It's like the difference between Archie Bunker (a bigoted goofball, but mostly just an earnest guy struggling to deal with changes in society) and a literal militant Klansman/neo-Nazi. That sentiment may be distasteful in itself to many people (I personally think Lee is just as undeservingly venerated as Rommel), but it's far less extreme than what he's been presented as having said. I'm not even saying that Trump's statement was necessarily correct; I'm saying that if he misrepresented the facts on the ground, and/or if what he (actually) said was arguably a dog whistle, that's what he should have been criticized for. I'm a huge fan of Joe Biden these days, and it still leaves a sour taste in my mouth that during the campaign he cited that out-of-context quote as his motivation for running. --- 1: https://www.politifact.com/article/2019/apr/26/context-trumps-very-fine-people-both-sides-remarks https://www.politifact.com/article/2019/apr/26/context-trump...

AlbertCory 5y ago

There's an old, old saying in the news business, which predates 9/11 and almost everything else: "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.

DoreenMichele 5y ago

I've been saying stuff like this for years. "News" is always bad news and they almost never follow up with similar levels of celebration for resolving a problem. The Kuwaiti oil fires were supposed to burns for years and be a global environmental catastrophe. They were put out in six months. We did not dance in the streets about this miracle. We were on to wringing our hands about something else. Disaster response is generally better than it used to be. We aren't grateful or amazed. We take it for granted and complain about it failing to live up to our expectations. That doesn't mean we don't have real problems. That's not me being in denial or uninformed.

Animats 5y ago

In the US, we can look back at 1975-2000 as a period when nothing really bad happened. 1900-1950 was far worse. "There’s a big tradition on the left ... insisting that building a zero-carbon future requires the adoption of radical anti-capitalist politics. But it’s completely absurd." Yes. We're in a good position on energy. As the fossil fuel sources are running out, we now have good alternatives. That wasn't true 20 years ago. 20 years ago, solar panels cost too much, and wind turbines were not big enough. 2022 will probably be the year that perception of this turns around in the US. That's when all the good electric work vehicles ship. The electric Ford F-150, the electric Ford Transit, and the big electric Freightliner trucks are all starting volume production. A year from now, most American blue-collar workers will have ridden in an electric vehicle at least once.

ttonkytonk 5y ago

There’s a big tradition on the left dating back at least to Naomi Klein’s “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs, the Climate” of insisting that building a zero-carbon future requires the adoption of radical anti-capitalist politics. And I think that people who insist that liberalism can’t reckon with contemporary crises are from that school of thought. 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.

oofabz 5y ago

This is a well-written and insightful article, but I don't think it's good for HN. Divisive political and culture war issues are thoroughly covered elsewhere. I would prefer HN to focus on its unique niche and show me new ideas I have not encountered before.

rdiddly 5y ago

While nothing lately has made me "doubt the basic tenets of liberalism," quite a bit of public speech has made me doubt that the given speaker understands said tenets. Not necessarily this writer, but then again he doesn't state them either, so there is at least room for doubt. "There oughtta be a law" that anybody who uses the word 'liberal' or 'conservative' must take a quick detour to define what they mean by that. Suddenly we would all know what we were talking about. I think it would be eye-opening. Deception thrives in an environment of code-words, shorthand and oversimplification. That's what Newspeak was supposed to be all about, right?

Barrin92 5y ago

There's two claims in this piece I think. 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.