.
Some excellent advice from Stephen M. Walt, in Foreign Policy — “Chill Out, America“:
These days, prominent experts and politicians seem determined to keep the American people in a perpetual state of trembling fear. Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations thinks “the question is not whether the world will continue to unravel but how fast and how far.” The outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Martin Dempsey, told Congress last year that “[the world is] more dangerous than it has ever been.” (Someone really ought to tell the general about the Cold War, the Cuban missile crisis, and a little episode known as World War II.) Not to be outdone, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger believes the United States “has not faced a more diverse and complex array of crises since the end of the Second World War.” And then there’s CNN and Fox News, which seem to think that most news stories should be a variation on Fear Factor…
We exaggerate external dangers in part because violent events are vivid and dramatic, and they seem scary even when they are rare and when they are taking place tens of thousands of miles away. (The Islamic State understands this, by the way, which is why they use beheadings instead of something more “civilized” and discreet, such as a drone strike.) As Steven Pinker and Andrew Mack have noted, global news coverage and the 24/7 news cycle have led many people to conclude the world is becoming more violent and dangerous, when the actual long-term trend has been going in the other direction. Durable peace is a boring “non-event” in which nothing much happens, so nobody bothers to report it. And that means most people don’t appreciate how safe they really are.
But the main reason so many people stay afraid is that fear is good for the people who purvey it, and so they work hard to instill fear in the rest of us. Fear is what keeps the United States spending more on defense than the next dozen states combined. Fear is what gets politicians elected, fear is what justifies preventive wars, excessive government secrecy, covert surveillance, and targeted killings. And fear is what keeps people watching CNN and Fox News, and running out to buy the New York Times or the Washington Post. As both democratic and authoritarian leaders have long known, you can get people to do a lot of foolish things if they are sufficiently scared.
Unfortunately, this enduring exaggeration of external dangers can blind us to real problems. In fact, if you look at the past 25 years or so, it is abundantly clear that external enemies have done far less damage to the United States than we have done to ourselves…
…[W]hat ought to worry most Americans is not that we face a powerful, cunning, and hostile set of foreign rivals… The real worry should be America’s demonstrated talent for shooting itself in the foot and then pretending that was where it was aiming all along. If you want to something to worry about, you should ponder our inability or unwillingness to learn from past mistakes, the ability of special interests to warp key elements of U.S. foreign policy, the bipartisan tendency to recycle failed policies and the people who devised them, and our habitual surprise when we meddle in places we don’t understand and discover that some of the people we’ve been pushing around don’t like it, want us out, and are willing to do nasty things to achieve that goal. Unless and until these features of U.S. foreign policy are altered, even those of us who are lucky to be living here in the relative security of the United States have something to worry about.
***********
Apart from trying to pull our socks up, what’s on the agenda as we start another week?
raven
It won’t be long till people wake up and tell us all the thing THEY fear.
OzarkHillbilly
@raven: “We have met the enemy…”
$400 is no where near enough to cover most emergencies these days. Blow an engine? $2000. Need a new tranny? $3500. A new water heater will cost $400, never mind the plumber to install it.
When it comes to ISIS, call me when they get a boat.
raven
Joe is shocked Rand would say “some Senators” want us to be attacked!
Mustang Bobby
@raven: Last Wednesday Joe was shocked that the IRS computer system got hacked. “How can that happen?” he pondered/ranted. Some nameless centrist pundit on the panel said, “Well, it is the government and it doesn’t work like a corporation, and also their computers are out of date and need upgrading,” which was greeted with gales of laughter from Joe: “Oh, that’s always the solution! Throw more money at it!” Yeah, as if Windows XP will be around forever.
raven
@Mustang Bobby: And Mika reports that a broken femur is not life threatening!
PurpleGirl
Rant Alert: I have been trying to link a bank account to my PayPal account for several days. Now my bank seems to be disabled in Paypal. And the PayPal offices don’t open until 6 AM CENTRAL STANDARD TIME but you don’t hear that CST until you’re well into the damned recording. What you hear is the offices open at 6 AM…
I could easily put money in through Green Dot, but they stopped that method. Right now, after trying to deal with problem several times of the weekend, I am fit to hurt someone. (PayPal said they’d make a deposit in m y account to confirm the account. They did, I can see the deposit. When I return to the PayPal page, they don’t recognize that I’m trying to confirm the account. And they ask for a pin, which they claim is optional but the process comes to an end when I have no pin. What pin to they want, they don’t explain. And I can’t get a human to talk to because the offices are closed, call back during business hours… seems like I’m going round in circles… I hate this.
Argh!
fuckwit
Some 70 million people killed in WWII. Since then? Nowhere near that, and getting to be less and less each year.
Even one death from war or violence or poverty is too many. But that’s not something to be scared of, it’s something to work towards eliminating. By not being so damned afraid.
The huge supermajority of normal, non-sociopaths can’t kill other people UNLESS they’re deathly terrified of them first– then the murder can be justified as self-defense (or pre-emptive self defense!). Obligatory Godwin: this was Goebbels’ whole point in his famous rant about wars being so easy to sell.
Fear is not just the mind-killer; fear is the other-people-killer.
PurpleGirl
@Mustang Bobby:
@raven:
These people are such Idiots. Of course the mood I’m in right now, I could damage them physically with much glee.
Mustang Bobby
@PurpleGirl: I wouldn’t last five minutes as a guest on Morning Joe. “Yes, of course it costs money to upgrade computers, you big dumb white thing. Your daughter wants a new iPad and you tell her that a Walkman was good enough for you and see how far that gets you, asshole.”
I have to deal with government computers — I’m running Windows XP in my office — and the federal government websites are so buggy that submitting a grant via grants (dot) gov. is a crapshoot in all senses of the word. As it is, when I log on, I’m surprised it doesn’t auto-play something from Devo.
Baud
@PurpleGirl:
Aren’t you glad those aren’t government computers?
OzarkHillbilly
For the “Start the week with a Smile” file:A $100,000 check is waiting for a mystery woman who donated a rare Apple 1 computer to a Silicon Valley recycling firm.
….
“We thought it was fake. It was real,” CleanBayArea Vice president Victor Gichun told NBC news. He said he remembers what the donor looked like and all she had to do is show up.
“Tell this lady to please come over to our warehouse in Milpitas again,” Gichun said. “And we’ll give her a check for $100,000.”
NotMax
Nothing like a “water is wet” essay to start a week.
Mr. Walt was on autopilot for this one.
Wise Up is a more efficacious prescription than is Chill Out.
Mustang Bobby
@OzarkHillbilly: According to E-bay, I’d get $300 for the Apple IIc still in the original boxes that I have stored in my garage. Talk about an upgrade…
PurpleGirl
@Mustang Bobby: Back when I was still at the non-profit (Hell, I should use their name, the place was Learning Leaders, formerly the New York City School Volunteer Program) we were still running Windows XP. Now, who knows what they are using, it was budget busting to change programs since we needed 50-odd licenses.
@Baud: If you’re referring to my PayPal problem…it’s their business model of doing as much as possible via computer when their model doesn’t foresee the problem a person may be having.
Gonna go a find a play ground that’s open and burn off some of this anger. Even the kitten cams aren’t doing ti this morning.
Be back later.
danielx
Hey, fear sells. And the theory of the Big Lie is alive and well, particularly since many people have made a very good living from the expansion of the national security state since 2001. In order to maintain said national security state, enemies must be found or manufactured one way or another.
Technology changes daily, but human nature and the manipulation thereof remains the same.
Keith G
Not only are there very few signs of increasing stability in the world, but indications of the rise of increasing trouble are seeming more common.
Worries on the home front. My wonderful girl kitty, Izzy has developed signs of urinary blockage over the night. I am waiting the 3 hours until 9 AM CST for the vet to open so I can get her looked after.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Mustang Bobby: Never have had any fruit computers in my house.
JPL
Good morning! I hope Rand Paul knows that Fox News will now label him as a democrat. They’ve been hinting at it for weeks but after last night, he’ll get the full fox treatment.
ThresherK
@Mustang Bobby: “I wouldn’t last five minutes as a guest on Morning Joe.”
That is the proper response, isn’t it?
I remember SCTV’s first “Sammy Maudlin Show” ever. I can’t find video, but:
Mustang Bobby
@BillinGlendaleCA: That was my last one. My first PC was a Gateway in 1995 because that’s what we had at work, and in 2002 went to a Toshiba laptop, acquired slightly used from my mom. I’m on my third laptop that is rigged up like a PC with a big monitor and wireless keyboard and rodent. It’s Windows 7 and so far so good.
My brother is another story. He worked for Microsoft, rose up through the ranks to be able to retire at the ripe old age of 44. As soon as he was out he sold all his MSFT stock and went the Apple route.
MattF
It’s a logical progression from “Never let a crisis go to waste.” Sounds clever, but some wiseguy hears it and thinks, “Guess we need a crisis.” Paging, paging… Lindsay Graham and all the neocons.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Mustang Bobby: I started out with an original IBM PC(with cassette port) in 1983. Right now I’m updating 2 virtual machines and my $200 tablet/laptop to the latest build of Windows 10. I do have OSX on a virtual machine.
Baud
@BillinGlendaleCA:
How is Win 10? It’s supposed to be released at the end on July. I’m hoping it improves my laptop’s performance.
MattF
@BillinGlendaleCA: I’ve never heard of OS X being virtualized. Have I missed something basic?
OzarkHillbilly
@Mustang Bobby: I will never be the one to have that rare first of anything, because I never buy the first of anything. I am from MO after all, and you do have to show me that this latest geegaw gadget really is worth all the hassle of having and the upkeep and not just another Pet Rock.
That and the fact that I never keep anything I am not actually using.
Kay
@JPL:
I was listening to a local radio station on Saturday. They buy the Fox news “hourly update” on national news. It was a couple sentences about Denny Hastert (no identification of Party) and then a clip of Durbin who was identified as the “Democrat from Illinois.”
I bet 50% of the people listening to that think the Democrat from Illinois is in trouble. It’s really slick how they do it- leave one piece out, add another, put all the focus on the second part. This is someone’s job, making news misleading. They have to work at it.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: It’s pretty good, we’ll see if any of the rough edges in the last build have been filed down. On my actual machines, I got a notification to reserve my FREE copy of Win10.
@MattF: Virtual box or VMware will handle OSX.
OzarkHillbilly
@ThresherK:
Ida Know…. I always kind of thought “Joe wouldn’t last 5 mins if I was a guest on his show.” would be better.
Baud
@BillinGlendaleCA:
Free is good. I have a Win 7 laptop and a Win 8 tablet, so it’ll be nice to have them on the same OS.
Iowa Old Lady
@Kay: A news agency has to be tryint to ID Hastert as a D. He’s not ancient history. Boener still invokes the Hastert rule, for pity sake.
Valdivia
@Kay:
And they work so hard at it and been so successful with it that when news gets reported how it should the GOP now complains that it’s unfair to have their own words, statements actions reported, used against them. So it works at a number of levels, not just by misleading but also lowering the standard of ‘news’ and how you report things. The really get their money’s worth :)
ThresherK
@OzarkHillbilly: Good point.
Let’s say George Snuffleupagus leaves. We just saw Bob Schieffer take his victory lap. Will anything change with these programs? Probably not; “MTP” didn’t get any better from Dancin’ Dave to Chuck Todd.
But Morning Joe and The Meat Puppet might be different. And the nihilist in me has always idly wondered about someone like him getting “reverse Howard Bealed”, dispatched on live TV because he’s the becoming the wrong kind of dangerous and influential to us viewers, not the network.
weaselone
Rall’s comic is overly optimistic. It assumes that that the 35% of people who think they are not doing well financially are all included in the group of people unable to cough up $400 without selling a kidney or taking out a payday loan. It’s likely that a fair chunk of the crowd that believes they are doing poorly financially is actually part of the group that is better off. The intersection of near destitution and total cluelessness is almost certainly greater than 12%, possible significantly so.
raven
@ThresherK: Barney is on and he’s great!
OzarkHillbilly
@Iowa Old Lady: Low information voters.
NotMax
@raven
Now have a disturbing mental image of the entire dais of dweebs singing “I love you. You love me.…” in unison.
forked tongue
I live in fear of seeing Ted Rall comics.
Matt McIrvin
Rall is so much smarter than the rest of us dopes. Like when he wrote that whole long essay crowing about how Hillary Clinton was finished a couple of months ago.
Kay
@Valdivia:
People always say Fox News doesn’t have that big a reach, because the cable tv news audience is (relatively) small and the Fox local stations are genrally straight news and I agree with that, but I wonder how many smaller markets buy their “national news updates”? I hadn’t considered that.
A dose of misleading for one minute every hour is a pretty powerful tool. Durbin may have to go out and defend himself :)
debbie
@Mustang Bobby:
Like Target?
Baud
@Kay:
You can’t just determine reach by primary audience, because bad information spreads like osmosis. Same with anti-Democratic liberals, whose primary audience is tiny, but who have outsized influence because they reinforce conservative talking points.
Patricia Kayden
@JPL: Hasn’t Fox already pushed Rand out of its first televised debate for Republican candidates?
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/fox-news-explains-why-rand-paul-was-left-out-of-2016-poll-graphic/
The shunning has commenced.
Kay
@Iowa Old Lady:
I don’t mean to be unkind and maybe people in Iowa are better informed, but I run into confusion between state and federal politicians constantly, let alone Party or chamber of congress or the Hastert Rule.
When my eldest was in high school he had a government reacher who gave a lot of quizzes. It was her method to make sure they knew what she was talking about, so she quizzed them almost daily. She got two kinds of complaints-her quizzes were too easy or too hard. . She did a smart thing at parent/teacher night. She gave the parents one of the quizzes. It was like “who is the Secretary of State?” It was Bush so it was Rice. Four questions like that. 3/4s of them got it wrong or left it blank.
Valdivia
@Kay: there is also how ubiqituos Fox is at hospital waiting rooms, doctor’s offices, gyms etc. I think@Baud: is right that there is a kind of contagion far wider than its core audience. Not only does it play pretty much everywhere you have to wait and there is a tv but it sets the tone for other journalists who actually watch it.
And yes, I absolutely hate how far down the rabbit hole of Fox talking points and frames we are that even those on the left with issues use their language when they are unhappy with Obama.
Patricia Kayden
Britt Hume is already questioning Paul’s Republicanness.
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/brit-hume-paul-seems-confused-about-which-party-hes-running-in/
Baud
LOL Newsmax. This is what the GOP has come to.
Germy Shoemangler
ATLANTA (AP) — Doctors say a waitress at a Georgia Hooters and a longtime regular customer at the restaurant are both doing well after a successful kidney transplant.
WXIA-TV (http://on.11alive.com/1I0pENe ) reports that 22-year-old Mariana Villareal gave one of her kidneys to 72-year-old Donald Thomas on Friday at the Piedmont Transplant Institute.
Villareal was released from the hospital late Saturday. Doctors involved in the kidney donation said the donor and recipient surgeries went well and Thomas is expected to be home by Tuesday.
The television station reports that Villareal hardly knew Thomas but was inspired to help him because she recently lost her grandmother to kidney failure.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Kay:
I think that’s how Hastert got in trouble in the first place.
Germy Shoemangler
@Valdivia:
Many of the arguments and logic we hear from the conservative Supreme Court judges are fox news talking points.
Mitt’s “47%” remark was inspired by fox news talking points. (Thank you Roger!)
And even those folks without cable can still hear the talking points on their car (and truck, of course) radios. While libruls had their weird satellite radio subscription-only shows, any conservative with good am or fm reception in their vehicle could hear the jockeys repeat the talking points.
Iowa Old Lady
@Kay: That is scary.
Still, I hold news organizations to a higher standard. Or really, I guess I assume they know better so the misidentifications are deliberate.
So scary in a different way.
ThresherK
@Kay: “the Fox local stations are generally straight news and I agree with that”
Except that the Fox local news also has national and international news reports.
I watch our Fox affiliate for local stuff and weather. They lose me on any story on that happens more than 50 miles away from Hartford. That’s my signal to not bother.
If it weren’t that the Fox local wasn’t the only 10pm news in my market (as opposed to New Haven, 30 whole miles away), I wouldn’t bother.
Kay
@Valdivia:
We have a business owner here who went from Republican to Democrat after Bush. He’s a big employer- the second largest. It’s a family company so privately held. He told me the employees keep Fox News on in the break room. He has changed the channel and when he walks back thru they’ve changed it back.
So, it’s hard :)
Germy Shoemangler
@Kay: Well, he won’t have to worry about them trying to unionize.
Valdivia
@Kay: I play this game in hospital waiting rooms. I change the channel while I am there, and later someone else changes it back. It is hard! :)
@Germy Shoemangler: hearing those talking points in the SC drives me batty. Ugh.
satby
@PurpleGirl: Email them. I had a huge problem with a vendor’s non delivery of some soap molds and they took care of it in 36 hours (the vendor was in Taiwan, so some of that was business hour displacement) I had been fighting with the guy for a month. Handled the entire thing through Pay Pal email..
satby
@Keith G: Hoping Izzy gets well soon!
gvg
The excess fear annoys me. I have been burning since Cheney made comments about the high level of danger and how unacceptable even one % of a chance of attack was so we would attack anywhere we deemed to be a 1% threat to the US.
Cheney is older than I am which means he lived through the Cold War and the threat of nuclear was and total planet death. We carried on. Did some dufous stuff like hiding under the desk drills but got on with life without fear/torture and loss of civil liberties. OBL just wasn’t in the same universe of threat and we should not have lost our way over such a relatively minor threat.
Lots of groups and countries are at least a 1% threat to the US and the military war games a bunch but I am pretty sure they don’t waste time on 1% threats which actually would mean Iraq never needed to be invaded because they couldn’t project their supposed chemical weapons into the US. It takes serious technology and a easily detectable support structure to get a weapon that many 1000’s of mile away. England is probably at least a 1% threat to us and COULD get weapons here but I don’t think we are going to invade them. Cheney was just so full of it.
OzarkHillbilly
For today’s WTF file:
Kentucky police shipped mentally ill inmate to Florida by Greyhound bus — then charged him with escape
FlipYrWhig
@forked tongue: @Matt McIrvin: I still can’t fathom how a guy who isn’t funny and appears to draw with his toes decided to pursue a career in cartooning.
Kay
@Germy Shoemangler:
They are union. They’re Teamsters. The owner gave us money to rent a better headquarters for Obama in ’08 because he didn’t like our (cheap but less visible) choice. It was smart. Now we put it right on the main drag even though it costs twice as much.
Germy Shoemangler
@Kay: Possibly it’s just one employee with the fox news fetish. Maybe he loves the blonde eye candy.
Possibly the majority of employees aren’t such fans, or don’t care one way or the other.
One thing the fox news fans are good at is making it seem like their numbers are larger than they really are.
OzarkHillbilly
@Kay:
Well that explains it.
Paul in KY
@raven: In a man over 70. Maybe Mika can get one to see. First hand reporter experience.
Paul in KY
@Germy Shoemangler: Wow! What a saint!
Paul in KY
@Kay: He can have the channel blocked. Block CNN too to be ‘bipartisan’.
Paul in KY
@FlipYrWhig: I think there is humor in many of his cartoons. Sorta morbid/gallows humor, but humor nevertheless. Not the best artist, I will concede.
He also answers emails, which I like.
Chris
@Paul in KY:
That’s actually the best solution by a mile. Because while people will grudgingly accept it as the “bipartisan” solution, in reality you’re cutting off two slightly different flavored streams of the same right wing bullshit. Two birds, one stone.
Tom
@BillinGlendaleCA: My first computer was a Commodore Vic-20. It had 5K of RAM until you turned it on, then you had 3.5K to work with.
Those were the days.
Chris
@Germy Shoemangler:
That is a very true statement. Their default setting is to be as loudly and proudly and frequently conservative as they can. If the people in the room agree with them, then they can all talk about how much they hate liberals. If the people in the room disagree with them, they can Boldly Fight The Good Fight, and it’s more fodder for their persecution complex. (The liberals are taking over everywhere! Just the other day there was one in my coffee shop! Oh, and he was just so rude and insulting!)
PurpleGirl
@satby: Thank you for a response. I did a bunch of home chores and even went out for a brief swing at a local playground. I had breakfast. Then I called again and got a human. I explained the problems; he was able to look my account and saw what was/wasn’t happening and he fixed the problem. I haven’t tried to make a transfer yet but I think it’s been solved. Later I will send them feedback about the recorded message starting with the office times and tell them it should state up front that the office hours are 6 AM Central Time. I think that’s an important point. East Coast people are not necessarily East Coast centric but they need to know if they need to call someplace later than their time zone.
PurpleGirl
@Paul in KY: Actually there are other cartoonists who can’t draw and it doesn’t matter to the points they are trying to make. For example, XKCD which uses stick figures.
Paul in KY
@Chris: Dammit, you’re on to me!
Paul in KY
@PurpleGirl: They also then might not be very good artists, or could be, but just draw stick figures because it’s easier. The quality of drawing usually doesn’t matter squat to the point being made.
PurpleGirl
@Paul in KY: Exactly.
forked tongue
@Paul in KY: On the other hand, comics like XKCD don’t aggressively commit assault and battery on the eyeballs like Rall does. Or draw Obama as an ape.
Matt McIrvin
@FlipYrWhig: Rall does have an appeal to the part of me that is convinced that everything is hopeless, the world is suffused with all-consuming evil and death is the only release. So I can actually see where the attraction comes from.
Matt McIrvin
Anyway, what bothers me about this cartoon is the way he has his spokespeople-with-a-smartphone just denigrate people in financially marginal situations who think they’re doing all right as simply dumb, rather than too beaten down or exhausted to get mad, or responding out of pride in what they’ve managed to eke out.
It doesn’t seem to be a productive approach. God knows I sometimes rail about the stupidity of the population myself and it’s an easy way to get likes and +1s. But it’s lazy. Long observation has convinced me that Americans are really no stupider than anyone else on this planet. But we are creatures of the political economy we find ourselves in.
catclub
@gvg: Funny how the 1% rule does not apply to climate change.
Ruckus
@gvg:
Not looking up the stats but if I recall we have had more civilian gun deaths in this country over the last 13 yrs than US military deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. So we have things to fix at home that are actual dangers, but we refuse to even attempt that.
Paul in KY
@Matt McIrvin: If you can’t get mad at the people screwing you over, then I personally think you’re pretty sorry.