Random Blogging – Page 82

About That Dead Horse….

America faces a raft of very serious problems. This blog routinely pontificates about them–usually by citing from various media resources that have highlighted them. Over the past several years I have become increasingly convinced that it is the state of that media–especially its fragmented nature–that has exacerbated all of them.

That conviction won’t come as a surprise to longtime readers of this blog–it’s the “dead horse” I’ve been flogging for years.

The Pew Research Center recently issued a report on the current nature of what we like to call traditional media–primarily newspapers and broadcast (radio and television). For the first time, newspapers made more money from individual subscriptions than from advertising. That looks superficially like good news, but is really a reflection of the extent to which the business model that sustained those newspapers over the years has collapsed.

That collapse is why more than 2000 local newspapers have ceased publication during the past decade, and one of the reasons (along with their acquisition by greedy national companies) why so many of those that remain have been able to maintain only skeletal reporting staffs.

Yes, national papers like the New York Times and the Washington Post have been able to maintain and even grow both their reporting staffs and their subscribers, but in the cities and towns where citizens depend upon the press for the incredibly important watchdog function, these “ghost” papers no longer have the capacity to do so.

I’ve ranted about all of this in previous posts–flogging that “dead horse”–and noting the multiple consequences, but I keep coming back to what is, in my view, the most significant problem created by our current media environment: the facilitation of informational silos. Bubbles enable us to confirm our pre-existing biases, and–perhaps even worse– to avoid recognizing what we don’t know.

As I used to tell my students, even newspapers that were never particularly good–the Indianapolis Star comes to mind–served one very important function: they provided the citizens of a community with a common description of their local reality. Even if you only picked up the newspaper to see sports scores, you saw the same headlines your neighbors saw. The local school board was embroiled in a debate. Local crime rates had increased. The city was issuing bonds for a new library, and that might affect your property tax rate.

Whatever.

Today, good luck scanning the Indianapolis Star for education news– reporters will cover school board meetings only when enraged racists descend on board meetings to demand that schools stop teaching something they don’t teach anyway. If you want to know anything else about education policy, you need to go to sources like Chalkbeat, an online media resource covering education.

And that’s the problem.

In various conversations, I’ve asked people if they have ever heard of Chalkbeat–or a few of the other specialized sources that cover discrete areas of our common life. Very few have. We are at a point where the information we need in order to be minimally-informed citizens is “out there,” but only available to those who know enough–and are motivated enough–to search for it.

You may not have children in school, but what the local school board does affects your property values. You may be disinterested in the proceedings of your local department of transportation, but those proceedings will determine the condition of the streets you drive on. You may not care about the financial woes of a local hospital, but if you have a health emergency, those woes will suddenly become relevant.

Etcetera, etcetera.

Look–I’m not one of those people who looks back fondly at a past that never existed. I know that most people, even those who subscribed to local papers, tended to skim over the articles that didn’t interest them. For that matter, a lot of folks didn’t even subscribe–at best, they tuned in to the local TV news at dinnertime to hear brief summaries that the stations had usually gotten from the local newspapers. The point is, they saw the same headlines. They heard the same summaries.

They might argue over the accuracy of the reporting, or what it meant, but they shared a common starting-point.

The absence of local, in-depth news contributes to American polarization by nationalizing news consumption. Pew found that in 2020, Fox News’ prime time average audience increased by 61%, CNN’s increased by 72% and MSNBC’s grew by 28%.

Perhaps what we need are local versions of aggregators like the Huffington Post–one-stop “entry points” with short blurbs and links to the specialized sites that are doing credible, professional reporting on particular slices of what should be our common civic concerns.

National news is important–but so is verifiable, credible scrutiny of local governments and civic organizations.

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Just…Wow…

Update #3: With thanks to Carol, here’s the link.

Update #2: Here’s a Twitter thread from the company that produces and markets “We the People” wine…

Update: for some reason, the original link has “migrated,” and I cannot now find the original ad. It began with a clip of Ronald Reagan talking about “real Americans” and was followed by various clips that were barely veiled racist/misogynst.

Sorry for the mistaken link. See you all tomorrow.

Now I’ve seen everything–at least, everything I don’t want to see.

This is one of those times when a picture (or video) really is worth a thousand words. You absolutely need to click on this link and watch this commercial for a new, “conservative” wine for “real, freedom-loving Americans.”.

Presumably, the target market is composed of America’s newly “out and proud” culture warriors.

Words fail…..

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Positive/Negative

Retirement has given me way too much time to think about questions that have no answers. I find myself waking up at odd hours to mull over issues I am clearly incompetent to resolve–something I rarely did when work-related tasks occupied my thoughts.

Earlier this week, I woke up in the middle of the night and returned to one such question–a question that has frequently bedeviled me: what do we humans owe each other? That is, what are our basic, unavoidable obligations to our fellow humans?

I suspect that the people refusing to be vaccinated against COVID triggered this particular visit to that question, but the question itself is considerably broader. It seems to implicate the Golden Rules. Note plural.

The rule as I learned it was in the negative: if it pisses you off, don’t do it to someone else. (Okay, okay–the text actually reads “What you yourself hate, do to no man.” Or, presumably, to no woman.) The rule as it is commonly recited in the U.S., however, is framed as a positive: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

So–what’s our basic obligation to other people? To refrain from behaviors that are hurtful or damaging to them? (Doesn’t that require some awareness of their specific fears and/or challenges?) Or are we obliged to do affirmative things to help others, based upon what we would want those others to do for us? (And if that is indeed our obligation, what if the things I would like to have done to or for me are things that would royally piss you off?)

It’s a puzzlement….

And what about government? America’s founders knew what they didn’t want their new government to do–in the Bill of Rights, they crafted a system of negative liberty. Government was supposed to butt out of our moral and intellectual decision-making and respect our personal autonomy–our right to self-govern. (Well, it was a right of White Male property owners, anyway….) When the Great Depression came along, however, Americans decided that government has some positive obligations as well.

Americans have been arguing about all of that–about what government should and shouldn’t do– pretty much forever. It’s a central preoccupation of this blog.

Legally, at least, we start with “live and let live.” So long as your behavior isn’t harming me, you are entitled to do your own thing. Sounds simple and straightforward– but then we realize that the definition of “harm” is very hotly contested.

I don’t think your decision to read that dirty book affects me, but the guy down the street is convinced that by both your willingness to read it and your support for the publisher by purchasing it, you are, in fact, committing social harm–that you are polluting the culture and that affects us all.

I believe that having to inhale your passive smoke in my favorite bar is a tangible, demonstrable harm, but you believe the decision to smoke and endanger your own health is entirely yours to make, and you further believe the bar owner has the right to decide who does what in his establishment.

And don’t get me started on vaccinations….

My middle-of-the-night (why can’t I just go back to sleep?) conversation with myself recognized that modern realities have altered the obligations we owe to each other–we are more densely packed into our cities and towns, more connected to each other by virtue of communication and transportation technologies, and immensely more interdependent in a multitude of ways thanks to the operation of all contemporary economic systems. (Jeffersonian agrarianism was something of a fantasy even in his time, and it’s even more untenable now.)

Even if we leave government out of the equation, and just concentrate on personal responsibility, both of those Golden Rule formulations require a certain degree of judgmentalism. How do I identify the less obvious harmful behaviors I need to avoid?(Other than the more obvious stuff–don’t lie, cheat or steal, don’t injure or kill–the whole question gets very slippery)…On the positive side, what if am I doing unto you something I think is positive, but it’s something you don’t want done unto you? (I can’t help thinking of the moral scolds who want to control and direct my most intimate behaviors and beliefs “for my own good…”)

My apologies for sharing my stream-of-consciousness internal debate. Mark it down to retirement-related dementia. I’ll return to more concrete and timely concerns tomorrow.

Other people who wake up in the night read a book, or have fantasies about sex or money. Obviously, there’s something very wrong with me….

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Diagnosis And Treatment

Pointing out that a doctor cannot treat an illness successfully if that illness isn’t correctly identified/diagnosed is to state the glaringly obvious. I would suggest that the same caution should be applied when we attempt to address the ills of society.

Charles Blow–in my estimation–has offered precisely that insight in a recent opinion piece the New York Times.

Blow begins with what is now a depressingly familiar litany of the sins of the party that calls itself Republican–a cult that bears less and less resemblance to what used to be the mainstream of that party. As he asks, what do you call members of a party who are invested in an obvious lie–not to mention a liar “determined to undermine, corrupt and even destroy our democracy?” What about that party’s leaders, who feel entitled to use that lie “as a pretext to suppress the votes and voices of Americans with whom they disagree?”

What do you call a party where many of its members have worked against a lifesaving, society-freeing vaccine in the middle of a pandemic, exposing many of their own followers to the deadly virus, all for the sake of being contrarian, anti-establishment and anti-science?

Those accusations–that litany–is, or should be, stupefyingly familiar by now. The contribution Blow makes in this column is his insistence that this is anything but “politics as usual,” and that we need to recognize that fact if we are to summon the will and wit to overcome the threat these people pose to democracy and the rule of law.

I have heard all the things that the moderates and neutralists have to say: Overheated language helps nothing and alienates people who could otherwise be converted. Don’t cast as evil someone with whom you simply have a disagreement. Build bridges, don’t burn them.

I could understand and appreciate all of that in another time. I can recall being impressed by how well a conservative argument was asserted, even if I disagreed with it. I can remember when conservatism was just as intellectual as liberalism, and compromises could be made to feel like the combining of the best of both…

But we should also not underplay or sugarcoat the darkness of the current season.

I don’t see how we continue to pretend that this is politics as usual, that it’s normal squabbling between ideological opposites. No, something is deeply, dangerously wrong here. This is not the same as it has always been.

Blow doesn’t offer a strategy for dealing with the situation that he has accurately described, and I certainly don’t have a solution, or even a proposed intervention. But I do know that you cannot solve a problem you are unwilling to recognize. A doctor cannot cure someone’s cancer if she continues to insist that what ails the patient is just a common cold.

Let’s be honest: A significant minority of the American public is dangerously mentally ill. (Mental illness, as Mitch recently reminded us in a comment to a previous post, is ” a state of mind which prevents normal perception, behavior, or social interaction”) A troubling number of those who have been drinking this generation’s Kool Aid are acting out their fantasies–shooting up pizza parlors, staging an insurrection, denying the reality of a pandemic…Failure to recognize the extent to which the moment we occupy differs from the ideological or political disagreements most of us formerly experienced will make it impossible to fashion an effective response.

I wish I knew what that “effective response” might look like. Other than a massive GOTV effort, I don’t. But I do know–and yesterday’s blog highlighted– that we aren’t dealing with the common cold.

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Social Media, Tribalism, And Craziness

If we are ever going to emerge from pandemic hell or semi-hell, we have to get a handle on two of the most dangerous aspects of contemporary life: the use of social media to spread disinformation, and the politicization of science–including, especially now, medical science.

Talking Points Memo recently ran a column (behind the paywall, so no link–sorry) from an expert in social media. That column made several points:

fake news spreads faster than verified and validated news from credible sources. We also know that items and articles connecting vaccines and death are among the content people engage with most.
The algorithms used by social media platforms are primed for engagement, creating a “rabbit-hole effect”–it pushes users who click on anti-vaccine messages toward more anti-vaccine content. The people spreading medical misinformation know this, and know how to exploit the weaknesses of the engagement-driven systems on social media platforms.
“Social media is being manipulated on an industrial scale, including by a Russian campaign pushing disinformation about COVID-19 vaccines.” Research tells us that people who rely on Facebook for their news about the coronavirus are less likely to be vaccinated than people who get their coronavirus news from any other source.

According to the column, the problem is exacerbated by the way in which vaccine-related misinformation fits into people’s preexisting beliefs.

I was struck by the observation that acceptance of wild and seemingly obvious inaccuracies requires a certain “pre-existing” belief system. That, not surprisingly, gets us to America’s current, extreme political tribalism.

Let me share some very troubling data: To date, some 86% of Democrats have received at least one COVID-19 vaccine shot–compared with only 45% of Republicans. A Washington Post survey found that only 6% of Democratic respondents reported an intent to decline the vaccine, while 47% of Republicans said they would refuse to be inoculated.

Not to put too fine a point on it, this is insane.

Aside from people with genuine medical conditions that make vaccination unwise, the various justifications offered for denying the vaccine range from hypocritical (“pro-life” politicians suddenly defending the right of individuals to control of their own bodies) to legally inaccurate (“freedom” has never included the right to endanger others—if it did, we’d have the “freedom” to drive drunk and ignore red lights), to conspiratorial (COVID is a “hoax” perpetrated by those hated liberals).

Now, America has always had citizens willing to make decisions that endanger others; what is truly mystifying, however, is why such people overwhelmingly inhabit red states— including Indiana.

Every state with large numbers of people who have refused vaccination is predominantly Republican. In several of those states, hospitalizations of unvaccinated COVID patients threatens to overwhelm health care systems. New York, a blue state, has five Covid patients hospitalized per 100,000 people, while red state Florida, where Governor Ron DeSantis has actually barred businesses from requiring patrons to show proof of vaccination, has 34 per100,000.

DeSantis’ Trumpian approach is an excellent example of just how dramatically the GOP has departed from the positions that used to define it. Whatever happened to the Republican insistence that business owners have the right to determine the rules for their own employees and patrons? (They still give lip service to those rules when the issue is whether to serve LGBTQ customers, but happily abandon them when the decision involves the health and safety of those same patrons.)

And what happened to the GOP’s former insistence on patriotism? Surely protecting others in one’s community from a debilitating and frequently deadly disease is patriotic.

Tribalism has clearly triumphed over logic and self-interest. As Amanda Marcotte recently wrote in Salon,

getting the vaccine would be an admission for conservatives that they were wrong about COVID-19 in the first place, and that liberals were right. And for much of red-state America, that’s apparently a far worse fate than death.

Making vaccine refusal a badge of political affiliation makes absolutely no sense. It does, however, correspond to the precipitous decline of rationality in what was once the “Grand Old Party”—a party now characterized by the anti-science, anti-logic, anti-intellectualism of officials like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Jim Jordan, Paul Gosar, and Louie Gohmert (who was memorably described by Charlie Savage as “the dumbest mammal to enter a legislative chamber since Caligula’s horse”).

These mental giants (cough, cough) are insisting that vaccination will “magnetize” the body and make keys stick to you, and that Bill Gates is sneaking “tracking chips” into the vaccine doses. (As a friend recently queried, don’t most of those people warning against “tracking devices” own cell phones?? Talk about tracking…)

Talk about buffoonery.

The problem is, these sad, deranged people are endangering the rest of us.

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