When I see populist cranks getting traction in the culture and in politics, I find myself being as angry at the establishment for this as I am at the cranks or perhaps even more.
I feel like our main establishment entities like the FDA, NIH, major universities, pharma companies, etc. still aren't willing to take any responsibility for why people don't trust them anymore.
Cranks are filling the vacuum, but the cranks didn't create the vacuum.
It’s always funny to me when I see institutions publish reports in the credibility crisis, because their solution is always to do more media operations. But the lack of trust comes from the behavior of these institutions and their use of the media to cover up their mistakes in the first place!
Broadcast transmissions have always been regulated world over, not cuz the Regulators are great or act fast or are trusted, but cuz the Cost to Mass Broadcast, whatever shit occurs to a 3 inch chimp brain, is much greater than 0.
The cost to multiply has always been the real barrier to prevent cancer from spreading faster than the immune system can react.
Whether it is setting up a printing press and distributing newspapers/books or radio/tv station, movie studio broadcasts, it used to cost a lot. Even with chat/email/phone/sms there is a high cost. The email list of everyone on the planet is easy to assemble these days. But try emailing everyone on the list every few minutes.
The whole story breaks down when Youtube/Facebook/TikTok made Cost to Broadcast 0 for everyone.
Cranks are filling the vacuum, but the cranks didn't create the vacuum.
lol, really? The former president (still lying about the 2020 election), Fox News (paid near $1B settlement for lying), and the Republican party repeatedly saying all the Federal institutions can't be trusted because they're run by the Deep State or crooked liberals.
Fox and 45 are just suppliers meeting demand. They say what their audience expects. They’re the symptom, not the disease. Distrust is deeply rooted in tens of millions of places around the US, for a constellation of reasons. These representatives aren’t innocent, but they’re no more the cause of the widespread distrust than a cough is the cause of leukemia. And in both cases, you have far more important things to worry about than the loud mouth.
The Trump lies didn't cause an entire region to collapse in war and cause hundreds of thousands of deaths. The only way to think of bush as being better than Trump is if you are completely neck deep into American partisan politics. Lying about elections is not worse than a war that ruined entire generations in the middle east. Not even close actually.
That's rationalization. The middle east wasn't on the verge of collapse, that's ludicrous. even if it was, it doesn't justify the invasion! Again, those deaths are squarely americas fault. It would be like arguing that eh, Putin isnt so bad since Ukraine was in a state of quasi civil war anyways. But the civil war was caused in huge part due to Russian meddling in Ukraine, just like the instability in the middle east in 2003 was due to the war on terror and the decades of playing king makers by the US.
In any case, Trump still led to an order of magnitude less deaths than Bush. As a non American (and a Muslim) that's all that matters. Everything else is irrelevant outside of the US. And arguing that lying is worse than killing is again, quite extreme partisanship.
It's weird to see the rhetoric shifting to "well the Iraq war was acshually not that bad because... We need to rehabilitate bush and we need Trump to be the worse like, ever!". No, Iraq did not deserve an invasion based on lies. No matter how bad Saddam was, the most affected were the Iraqis.
It literally was, Saddam Hussein started 2 wars, 1 genocide alone - he was during the 90s the biggest risk for stability in the Middle east.
Syria was still trying to do pan-arabism by destabilizing any country it deemed going against this ambition.
Lebanon had JUST stopped it's 25 year civil war,
countless terrorist organizations springing up and the list goes on and on.
I never stated it justified the invasion, I'm just pointing out that proclaiming that the USA with 1 war caused the entire middle east to implode is not true.
The only truth to the instability of the middle east is a mixture of the Cold war and political movement such as pan-arabism and Islamism, these caused the biggest political instability and thus decadent and stagnant power structure in those countries (effectively that of typical power over everything).
You said it yourself, as a non-american, of course, I never said "globally speaking", I specifically said for Americans.
The Iraq war would have been a different story if there was an actual understand by the Bush administration of what actually was the fundamental issues with Iraq beyond the maniac decision making of Saddam Hussein.
The fact that the Bush administration in it's arrogance believed the naive belief of bringing democracy & freedom to Iraqis was all would be required to ensure stability in the region was and still is a painful lesson for the western world on how to create stability in an unstable nation.
From what I know people are nostalgic towards Bush because he seems more diplomatic, compromising and composed than what Trump does - while defiantly not true while Bush was in office, people like putting on rose tinted glasses when presented with the bleak present.
I feel like our main establishment entities like the FDA, NIH, major universities, pharma companies, etc. still aren't willing to take any responsibility for why people don't trust them anymore.
Cranks are filling the vacuum, but the cranks didn't create the vacuum.