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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 b

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.

SavantIdiot 5y ago
> you can't make tradeoffs when EVERYTHING is an emergency. I agree. You can only have one #1 priority, by definition, but it is possible to address multiple emergencies. The problem is "clog the channels with shit" people like Bannon obscure the true emergencies. He does it intentionally. I agree there are lots of people out there with lots of valid complaints, but I don't think they are all done intentionally to numb people to real emergencies like Bannon. > Not to mention the long and sordid history of pervasive racist violence from Reconstruction onward Sure. Please, please look at in context. Don't you think a few years before the civil war no one probably expected a civil war? To claim that things were worse in the past is to, frankly, be glib because you are ignoring the trajectory where things were headed. That is quite alarmingly similar: congress splitting irreconcilably. In fact, your claim is almost a tautology: It isn't as bad because it isn't as bad. But once it IS as bad, then you've got a new datapoint to use in the future to say "things aren't so bad". It is circular logic. IMHO: I think white supremacists storming the capital is a big red flag. If you think I'm being too extreme by calling them white supremacists and saying this is a dire situation, then I'm unreachable. It's a hard limit for me. A huge crowd of Trump supporters stormed the capital to overturn an election with the backing of half of congress. Yet you have Fox News, OANN and Newsmax trying to make Cancel Culture a bigger deal. I can't. I just can't. If in the OP's eyes I'm the problem because I put this in the top-10 emergencies, then I guess we have a insurmountable disconnect in this country. I won't even argue about whether Tucker Carlson is valid to claim Cancel Culture a valid #1 emergency compared to my list, because they just aren't even on the same page, and if you can't see that, refer to my earlier point: insurmountable disconnect. Perhaps that is how new countries & societies are formed: when one group wants to be Christian Theocracy with Biblical Law, and the other wants to strive be a liberal, flexible, socially just society. Those two viewpoints cannot by definition be reconciled, and one side is armed to the teeth and taking half of the political system with it, so what do you do?

SavantIdiot 5y ago

> you can't make tradeoffs when EVERYTHING is an emergency. I agree. You can only have one #1 priority, by definition, but it is possible to address multiple emergencies. The problem is "clog the channels with shit" people like Bannon obscure the true emergencies. He does it intentionally. I agree there are lots of people out there with lots of valid complaints, but I don't think they are all done intentionally to numb people to real emergencies like Bannon. > Not to mention the long and sordid history of pervasive racist violence from Reconstruction onward Sure. Please, please look at in context. Don't you think a few years before the civil war no one probably expected a civil war? To claim that things were worse in the past is to, frankly, be glib because you are ignoring the trajectory where things were headed. That is quite alarmingly similar: congress splitting irreconcilably. In fact, your claim is almost a tautology: It isn't as bad because it isn't as bad. But once it IS as bad, then you've got a new datapoint to use in the future to say "things aren't so bad". It is circular logic. IMHO: I think white supremacists storming the capital is a big red flag. If you think I'm being too extreme by calling them white supremacists and saying this is a dire situation, then I'm unreachable. It's a hard limit for me. A huge crowd of Trump supporters stormed the capital to overturn an election with the backing of half of congress. Yet you have Fox News, OANN and Newsmax trying to make Cancel Culture a bigger deal. I can't. I just can't. If in the OP's eyes I'm the problem because I put this in the top-10 emergencies, then I guess we have a insurmountable disconnect in this country. I won't even argue about whether Tucker Carlson is valid to claim Cancel Culture a valid #1 emergency compared to my list, because they just aren't even on the same page, and if you can't see that, refer to my earlier point: insurmountable disconnect. Perhaps that is how new countries & societies are formed: when one group wants to be Christian Theocracy with Biblical Law, and the other wants to strive be a liberal, flexible, socially just society. Those two viewpoints cannot by definition be reconciled, and one side is armed to the teeth and taking half of the political system with it, so what do you do?