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Quote of the Day: Politics and Alarmism
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” — H. L. Mencken
Can you say global climate change, boys and girls? Or Covid 19? I knew you could. Both are overblown political crises intended to keep people scared and isolated. As this century-old quote from H. L. Menken shows, it is not a new tactic. It is the whole aim of politics. To convince you the devil is in the chimney and only government intervention can exorcise it.
It wasn’t even new when H. L. Menken wrote this. Margaret Ball, a fantasy and science fiction author, noted on a blog, “Look, I knew that attempted censorship is always with us, but I hadn’t expected the censors of late 17th century England to use exactly the same phrase with which they belabor us today.” Using fear and censorship to drive the mob the direction the leaders want them to go is age-old. Kipling was right when he wrote, “We are very little changed / From the semi-apes that ranged / India’s prehistoric clay.”
We have a choice. We do not have to fall hostage to our fears. To be driven by them like cattle by a goad. We can instead say no. To ignore the false alarms while heeding the real ones. To do so takes both judgment and courage, two virtues regularly denigrated by the fashionable in modern society. We can chose to exercise judgment and courage. We can choose not to exercise judgment and courage. While the latter path seems easier, going along to get along, at the end of it wait the Gods of the Copybook Headings, with terror and slaughter.
Published in Group Writing
Preach it!
We can, so far, refuse to be led or driven by the fear mongers, however there is a price to be paid in terms of approbation from fellow citizens and spineless employers. Freedom indeed is never free but the alternative is always more costly on the long run.
I was just getting used to saying “global warming” with the proper skeptical sneer in my voice when they changed it on me.
Climate Change is such a versatile scare word:
Drought = Climate Change.
Flooding = Climate Change.
Hot = Climate Change.
Cold = Climate Change… etc. It’s a very elastic term.
@percival I had to edit a work report in 2017 that focused on climate change but had been resurrected from a several years old draft that used global warming lingo. The vocabulary had changed in the intervening years and the people finishing the report didn’t even notice or attempt to deal with the inconsistency. I pointed it out, but it probably let them know I wasn’t one of them.
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“I once saw a photograph of a large herd of wild elephants in Central Africa seeing an airplane for the first time, and all in a state of wild collective terror… As, however, there were no journalists among them, the terror died down when the airplane was out of sight.” – Bertrand Russell
And yet, here we are.
About to face another long autumn and winter of restrictions, because “Although the latest variant is highly communicable and so it is super weak in terms of fatalities, who knows if this will change?”
I plan to say to say no. If enough others join me, that’s all it takes.
And when they finally figure out that the Climate has not changed significantly in 1,000 years, they are going to trot out the new threat – Climate Stagnation!
From wattsupwiththat.com, April 3, 2011:
That’s not the complete list. That’s just through the Gs.
“Just say no.” – Nancy Reagan
What a great ironic list! Going over it gave me time to explore the “Watts Up With That” website more deeply, something I’d been planning to do for years.
Reminds me of when the NYT and others were squawking about how family medical leave was crucial to women’s health etc, and then when Trump actually signed it into law, they flipped to how family medical leave hurts women.
And fentanyl. We’re all supposed to be afraid that we could die of a fentanyl overdose just like we were all supposed to be afraid of catching AIDS, even if you have been in a faithful marriage for 20 years. And whatever happened to those murder hornets that were sweeping the country? And we’re in another shark attack summer.
I’m sure the sharks were dropping from the sky all over Florida last week.
What’s the matter, haven’t you people seen Sharknado?
Yeah, Fentanyl is a huge problem for drug users. Not so much for the rest of us.
From the Margaret Ball link in the post, emphasis mine:
Nothing is new under the sun.