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>existential panic in the US public that made them willing to accept several new things in the name of safety against a threat model they did not understand I'

>existential panic in the US public that made them willing to accept several new things in the name of safety against a threat model they did not understand I'm old enough to have watched the change happen. There was no existential panic, but a straight up propaganda campaign waged by a collaborative media and government to ensure that this would be accepted, and that dissenters would be seen as "the other" to be feared and reviled, and potentially targeted for law enforcement action. Seems very familiar, but history rhymes.

shadowgovt 4y ago
It's both. There's no doubt the ruling party invested time and effort selling their solutions to the public, but the public was also buying because all of a sudden, men armed with automatic rifles standing in the airport security lines was a comforting sight, not a terrifying one, for many, many Americans. ETA: Regarding effects on the American psyche, https://www.webmd.com/balance/features/american-psyche-post-911 https://www.webmd.com/balance/features/american-psyche-post-... summarizes some of the post-9/11 research. Probably most of interest is that 21% of Americans studied by a researcher at Carnegie Mellon believed they would be the victim of a terrorist attack within a year. That number proved to be a way-outsized overestimate, but I think it's easy to see how people accept new curtailments to freedoms (especially someone else's freedoms) if 1-in-5 of them believe they'll be personally attacked.
- mindslight 4y ago
  > all of a sudden, men armed with automatic rifles standing in the airport security lines was a comforting sight, not a terrifying one, for many, many Americans. Once again, because of the media amplifying the terrorism over and over, repeatedly playing it on every screen and telling everyone that they were under attack. Just as you're arguing that popular opinion shouldn't be ignored, neither should the centralized actors driving that opinion. They feed into each other, and downplaying the involvement of one category of actors only serves to hide their share of the blame.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    No disagreement. When Americans panic, they look for people to explain the problem, even if those explainers are ignorant, and for people offering solutions, even if the solutions are bad. It's a recurring historical pattern. It's worth noting that since the American news model is fundamentally capitalist, one can assume, once a panic starts, that cognitively-dissonant news will be downsampled. I don't know how to disambiguate "the media caused / fed a panic" from "people weren't interested in hearing 'everything's okay and nothing has fundamentally changed' when there was a crater where two skyscrapers used to be." Did the media feed a panic, or did the public tune out cool heads?
    - slackfan 4y ago
      Socialist media is no better in this regard.
    - mindslight 4y ago
      The same way we disambiguate what's right versus what's commercially expedient across the whole gradient of (soulless, dodgy, unethical, malpractice, fraudulent). It does not matter that people want to hear garbage that reaffirms their lazy beliefs - if you are in a position of power and take the easy/lucrative road of base affirmation, rather than the harder route of actually leading people somewhere productive, you are a bad person and you should feel bad. And people that know better should condemn you for that, rather than tacitly accepting your sold out self interest. Also if I'm reading your comment correctly, characterizing potential leadership as "cognitively-dissonant news" is a bit weird, especially with "cognitive dissonance" commonly referring to the rejection of criticism in the larger run up to the war on Iraq. With both points it feels like you're nominally agreeing, but still trying to push this framework that the news media and other leadership is inherently blameless.
      - shadowgovt 4y ago
        I don't think either the federal government or the media are blameless (that's a federal government that authorized torture; they're obviously not blameless). But I also think we like to pretend the American public got duped or are blameless when it's (a) Americans who elect the government and (b) Americans who buy the newspapers (especially in that era, when online advertising hadn't yet eaten the printed word). There's a certain minimum "citizen's responsibility" that nobody gets away with just dodging in a country where they're obligated to choose their leadership and hold their own press accountable. > Also if I'm reading your comment correctly, characterizing potential leadership as "cognitively-dissonant news" is a bit weird Because Americans elect their leadership, they have the advantage that many (ideally, most) voted for them and so are inclined to follow them. But they also have the disadvantage that Presidents are not thought of as infallible rulers with any kind of mandate from heaven, so when things get tough their position is a lot more fragile than many would assume. You can easily see this play out in how an untrusted executive failed to handle a pandemic recently; it didn't matter whether they were right or wrong, much of America had that President and his administration pegged as "nominally and legally in charge, but too stupid to follow" and discarded federal guidance the minute it inconvenienced them unless force of law (often and mostly: state law) prevented them from doing so. In the run-up to the Iraq War, the cognitively-dissonant news was media suggesting Saddam Hussein's administration was not involved in global terror. True or false, it didn't fly because Americans wanted someone to blame that they were confident they could kill (as opposed to the guy who'd successfully evaded capture in Afghanistan) and Hussein was a very easy-to-believe target because he was already one generation's default bad-guy. (But to be clear: the executive in charge during 9/11 did orchestrate a hell of a lie to get the US into another war in Iraq; that scenario is well-documented and involved multiple overt fabrications of information. I may assert that a more skeptical public that wasn't having a panic may not have bought those lies, but that's not intended to downplay the responsibility of the liars). I think the takeaway from this sub-thread is "Scared Americans and power-hungry leadership make for a bad combination." But the larger point I wanted to emphasize is that the consequences of those changes to American law aren't as reversible as just declaring "Well those guys were monsters;" bits like the no-fly list are sticky even if the people who implemented them were bad-faith actors.
triyambakam 4y ago
I'm not sure if you're alluding to this, but I think much of the same has happened during coronavirus
p_j_w 4y ago
>There was no existential panic, but a straight up propaganda campaign waged by a collaborative media and government to ensure that this would be accepted, and that dissenters would be seen as "the other" to be feared and reviled, and potentially targeted for law enforcement action. I'm also old enough to have seen the change happen, and maybe it's just that you and I lived in separate bubbles, but I really don't agree with this. I absolutely did see an existential panic in the general population, we were in an insane frenzy, and I don't get the sense that the media or government needed a propaganda campaign to get this sort of shit passed. Aside from a very small number of dissenters (including myself), we were all out for blood and there was no such thing as too far. Hate crimes against People Who Look Vaguely Like They Might Be Muslims shot through the roof, in spite of the government trying to quell that sort of thing. Giant flags the size of New York City were being flown on peoples' cars left and right. Normal Americans were absolutely NOT acting normal and didn't need any push towards supporting insane policy ideas.

shadowgovt 4y ago

It's both. There's no doubt the ruling party invested time and effort selling their solutions to the public, but the public was also buying because all of a sudden, men armed with automatic rifles standing in the airport security lines was a comforting sight, not a terrifying one, for many, many Americans. ETA: Regarding effects on the American psyche, https://www.webmd.com/balance/features/american-psyche-post-911 https://www.webmd.com/balance/features/american-psyche-post-... summarizes some of the post-9/11 research. Probably most of interest is that 21% of Americans studied by a researcher at Carnegie Mellon believed they would be the victim of a terrorist attack within a year. That number proved to be a way-outsized overestimate, but I think it's easy to see how people accept new curtailments to freedoms (especially someone else's freedoms) if 1-in-5 of them believe they'll be personally attacked.

mindslight 4y ago
> all of a sudden, men armed with automatic rifles standing in the airport security lines was a comforting sight, not a terrifying one, for many, many Americans. Once again, because of the media amplifying the terrorism over and over, repeatedly playing it on every screen and telling everyone that they were under attack. Just as you're arguing that popular opinion shouldn't be ignored, neither should the centralized actors driving that opinion. They feed into each other, and downplaying the involvement of one category of actors only serves to hide their share of the blame.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  No disagreement. When Americans panic, they look for people to explain the problem, even if those explainers are ignorant, and for people offering solutions, even if the solutions are bad. It's a recurring historical pattern. It's worth noting that since the American news model is fundamentally capitalist, one can assume, once a panic starts, that cognitively-dissonant news will be downsampled. I don't know how to disambiguate "the media caused / fed a panic" from "people weren't interested in hearing 'everything's okay and nothing has fundamentally changed' when there was a crater where two skyscrapers used to be." Did the media feed a panic, or did the public tune out cool heads?
  - slackfan 4y ago
    Socialist media is no better in this regard.
  - mindslight 4y ago
    The same way we disambiguate what's right versus what's commercially expedient across the whole gradient of (soulless, dodgy, unethical, malpractice, fraudulent). It does not matter that people want to hear garbage that reaffirms their lazy beliefs - if you are in a position of power and take the easy/lucrative road of base affirmation, rather than the harder route of actually leading people somewhere productive, you are a bad person and you should feel bad. And people that know better should condemn you for that, rather than tacitly accepting your sold out self interest. Also if I'm reading your comment correctly, characterizing potential leadership as "cognitively-dissonant news" is a bit weird, especially with "cognitive dissonance" commonly referring to the rejection of criticism in the larger run up to the war on Iraq. With both points it feels like you're nominally agreeing, but still trying to push this framework that the news media and other leadership is inherently blameless.
    - shadowgovt 4y ago
      I don't think either the federal government or the media are blameless (that's a federal government that authorized torture; they're obviously not blameless). But I also think we like to pretend the American public got duped or are blameless when it's (a) Americans who elect the government and (b) Americans who buy the newspapers (especially in that era, when online advertising hadn't yet eaten the printed word). There's a certain minimum "citizen's responsibility" that nobody gets away with just dodging in a country where they're obligated to choose their leadership and hold their own press accountable. > Also if I'm reading your comment correctly, characterizing potential leadership as "cognitively-dissonant news" is a bit weird Because Americans elect their leadership, they have the advantage that many (ideally, most) voted for them and so are inclined to follow them. But they also have the disadvantage that Presidents are not thought of as infallible rulers with any kind of mandate from heaven, so when things get tough their position is a lot more fragile than many would assume. You can easily see this play out in how an untrusted executive failed to handle a pandemic recently; it didn't matter whether they were right or wrong, much of America had that President and his administration pegged as "nominally and legally in charge, but too stupid to follow" and discarded federal guidance the minute it inconvenienced them unless force of law (often and mostly: state law) prevented them from doing so. In the run-up to the Iraq War, the cognitively-dissonant news was media suggesting Saddam Hussein's administration was not involved in global terror. True or false, it didn't fly because Americans wanted someone to blame that they were confident they could kill (as opposed to the guy who'd successfully evaded capture in Afghanistan) and Hussein was a very easy-to-believe target because he was already one generation's default bad-guy. (But to be clear: the executive in charge during 9/11 did orchestrate a hell of a lie to get the US into another war in Iraq; that scenario is well-documented and involved multiple overt fabrications of information. I may assert that a more skeptical public that wasn't having a panic may not have bought those lies, but that's not intended to downplay the responsibility of the liars). I think the takeaway from this sub-thread is "Scared Americans and power-hungry leadership make for a bad combination." But the larger point I wanted to emphasize is that the consequences of those changes to American law aren't as reversible as just declaring "Well those guys were monsters;" bits like the no-fly list are sticky even if the people who implemented them were bad-faith actors.

triyambakam 4y ago

I'm not sure if you're alluding to this, but I think much of the same has happened during coronavirus

p_j_w 4y ago

>There was no existential panic, but a straight up propaganda campaign waged by a collaborative media and government to ensure that this would be accepted, and that dissenters would be seen as "the other" to be feared and reviled, and potentially targeted for law enforcement action. I'm also old enough to have seen the change happen, and maybe it's just that you and I lived in separate bubbles, but I really don't agree with this. I absolutely did see an existential panic in the general population, we were in an insane frenzy, and I don't get the sense that the media or government needed a propaganda campaign to get this sort of shit passed. Aside from a very small number of dissenters (including myself), we were all out for blood and there was no such thing as too far. Hate crimes against People Who Look Vaguely Like They Might Be Muslims shot through the roof, in spite of the government trying to quell that sort of thing. Giant flags the size of New York City were being flown on peoples' cars left and right. Normal Americans were absolutely NOT acting normal and didn't need any push towards supporting insane policy ideas.