#Panicmonger

[qqueenofhades]

fwiw: a lot of people follow @roach-works who just reblogged yo ur comments on history, books, and authoritarian regimes' inability to indoctrinate entire populations.

I'm an ex classics major with a lot of history under my belt, who knows Rome sutmr under a corrupt oligarchy even when it coughed up a hairball like Nero or Commodus. (Of course, it helped that Rome worked on the pragmatic principle, "How can we keep society and infrastructure functioning, given that positions of power tend to be occupied by the rich & corrupt?" I like to joke that Western Rome never fell; it just became the mafia.)

At any rate, my tendency to see the US through the lens of Rome makes me a pessimist: I assume we'll manage even in a dystopia.

I'm working on expanding my knowledge of world history to counteract that, but it's great to check in with a sane historian who will help me resist crowdsourced panicmongering.

Look, as I have said, I 0% blame anyone for being scared. I'm scared. With no exaggeration or hyperbole, Shit Real Bad, and it's undoubtedly going to get worse, at least in some ways, before we have a chance to make it better. It was completely avoidable, but half of America decided they didn't want to avoid it, so here we are.

Nonetheless, as my last reblog also pointed out, there are still basic historical and critical-thinking skills that we can use here, and to acknowledge that even if it is obviously unprecedented to us, it is not unprecedented to others, and we can study those lessons and think about how to apply them to our own situation. Rome is the obvious model for a world empire brought down by corruption, oligarchy, imperialism, endless foreign wars, income inequality, economic upheaval, excessive militarism, etc etc, but it's not the only one, and the "fall of Rome and start of the Dark Ages" is one of those narratives that gets my premodern-historian rant especially exercised. By the time Rome "fell" in 476, the city of Rome wasn't even the capital of the Empire; the western capital was in Ravenna, northern Italy, and the eastern capital was in Constantinople, where it endured for another thousand years. Roman successor kingdoms were founded in Visigothic Spain, Merovingian Francia, etc., and often imported Roman law, religion, bureaucracy/administration, and nobility relatively unchanged, which is why Latin was the legal, ecclesiastical, and educational language of western Europe until as late as 1962 and Vatican II. The "Dark Ages" are likewise at best an extreme simplification and at worst exceedingly misleading imperial-nostalgia propaganda. Etc etc. I will restrain myself.

Rome dominated the (European/Near Eastern/north African) world in the way that the 19th-century British Empire dominated the actual world and American empire dominates now, at least for the moment, and thus we have to recognize that similar dynamics are at play here in a late-stage imperial decline. However, Rome did not just up and vanish in a puff of smoke one day and never appear again, and we also have to recognize that the end of empires is generally a good thing, historically speaking. Yes, absolutely a turbulent, dangerous, and traumatizing time, especially for those living within the imperial core, but still. There's also the blunt fact that America itself has been responsible for a lot (a LOT) of violent regime change, coups, overthrows, bombings, and other disastrous foreign policy interventions for almost the entirety of its existence, and we can't pretend that we are just the shining beacon of unproblematic truth, freedom, and faith that most conservatives, and a lot of saccharine American-exceptionalism liberals, tend to think. If that comes back to bite us and we have to experience the kind of political and social upheaval that we have arrantly and unrepentantly inflicted on other places in the name of our Superior Right... well.

As for the post about history books (here), that was another attempt to push back against the kind of broad-strokes fearmongering that is often prevalent right now. Again: for completely understandable reasons, but still. There is literally no way on earth that the practice of academic history, or the procession of human events, is going to be destroyed because an orange dumbass and his idiot followers took power in America for eight nonconsecutive years. Even if by some miracle he managed to do it in America and the only thing ever officially published was Heritage Foundation balderdash, a) historians in countries other than America would still be writing books about it, and b) again, literally impossible. To return to the history of Soviet totalitarianism that I was addressing in that post, I suggest that people look into the samizdat, the contraband news and literature widely shared in the USSR. They faced far more stringent conditions than we ever will: the KGB controlled access to all word processors and copiers, precisely because they could be used to spread non-regime-approved information, and dissidents had to write and circulate it by hand. If they were caught, they could be disappeared, sent to the gulag, confined in a psychiatric hospital, subject to intensive "state education," etc. But they still managed to pass it around and read it, and it would be literally impossible for this collection of Trumpster chucklefucks to exert even a fraction of this logistical and physical control, when every citizen already owns a laptop and a smartphone. The history books aren't going anywhere.

That all said, of course we are all hyper-alert and anxious and afraid, and we don't want to miss anything that might be important or dangerous or anything else. I get that, I completely do. But we still have to pace ourselves, we still have to apply critical thought and learn how to educate ourselves when something seems huge and scary and unstoppable, and I am attempting to do a small part of that on a niche blue hellsite that won the social media competition by literally doing nothing while its peers all fell face first into being corporate Nazis. The bar is low. But hey, I'm here, and you're here and you're reading it, and we will get through it. I promise.

Courage, etc.

[beatrizjournal]

Hello I am trans and Hogwarts is always been my safe space. So stop the panicmongering anon 🙄🙄🙄 Beatriz my love please maybe tag harry potter posts as anti jkr so the masses don't panic and swarm your inbox. She is no way transphobic anon 🙄🙄🙄

Thank you for the advice, Hogwarts is such nostalgic place for me and a comfort story too. I'll tag it that way from now on, thank you again 🤍

[panic-monger-blog]

Dungeons & Cats

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Massive spike in young people registering to vote in the UK

The announcement of a UK General Election on Dec 12 -- the third in less than five years! -- was attended by predictable rises in the numbers of people registering to vote, but as official statistics show, the end of October saw a massive spike in voter registration among under 45s, led by under-25s and 25-34 year olds.

It's a commonplace that Labour can't possibly win this election, but that's what they said in 2017, and that election was a bloodbath for the Tories and saw Labour come within a hairsbreadth of forming the government, despite dirty tricks, panicmongering, and a smear campaign that was backed by the Labour establishment itself.

The reality is that Labour is the only party with policies that are supported by the vast majority of Britons, and while that support comes from all demographics, Labour's embrace of the Green New Deal makes it the only party on the British political stage that is aligned with the largest mass movement in recent memory, Climate Extinction, which skews younger.

All election polling is primarily a guessing game about who just won't bother to vote, and models assume very low turnout among young voters. The massive influx of young voters means that the election is truly anyone's to win.

I am a member of the British Labour Party and a donor to Jeremy Corbyn's election campaign.

https://boingboing.net/2019/11/01/hello-fellow-teens.html

[buddylistsocial]

Horowitz: More good news: Immunity rising, virulence waning

Horowitz: More good news: Immunity rising, virulence waning

As the virus appears to be slowing down in most regions, with enough people having gotten the virus to slow down the transmission, the panicmongers who are immune to good news are constantly trying to warn of reinfection. They are already building fearfor a mass outbreak during the colder months of the year. But why do they assume that this virus breaks every rule of immunity instead of looking…

[govpatrol]

Horowitz: If the panicmongers were consistent, we’d close the schools every flu season

Horowitz: If the panicmongers were consistent, we’d close the schools every flu season

On December 17, 2014, Rebecca Taylor received a call from the school nurse in her daughter Scarlet’s Tacoma, Washington, school saying that Scarlet had a fever and Rebecca should pick her up. Two days later, and after just four hours of being in the hospital from what should have been a routine flu in an otherwise healthy child, Scarlet was dead.

While this was a rare tragic story, it’s less rare…

[regina-bithyniae]

The world cannot rest while people perish for want of a jab costing as little as $4 for a two-dose course. It is hard to think of a better use of resources than vaccination. Economists’ central estimate for the direct value of a course is $2,900—if you include factors like long covid and the effect of impaired education, the total is much bigger. The benefit from an extra 1bn doses supplied by July would be worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Less circulating virus means less mutation, and so a lower chance of a new variant that reinfects the vaccinated.

Vaccine producers capturing $4 in revenue (not even profit!) out of the $2900 social value is miniscule. Anyone panicmongering about the corporations profiting off the vaccination drive is a retard.

The global economy is on the order of $100 trillion. Coronavirus vaccine manufacturers are projecting profits in the tens of billions, which is what the economy was losing in days during the height of the pandemic. That’s real money, real value, real food on the tables of real people. Vaccine manufacturers are plugging that leak, saving billions of QALYs, and our governments are paying them chump change in return. Pfizer and Moderna each should be projecting trillion-dollar profits this year. They’ve earned it.

[beatrizjournal]

first anon again, just wanted to say thank you sincerely for clarifying how you feel and that your space is welcoming; it genuinely means a lot. i’ve experienced personally having creators/artists/etc that meant a lot to me turn out to express hateful views after the rowling things came up, and it’s a big relief when i can know i’m not setting myself up for that kind of pain. i promise i wasn’t trying to “panicmonger” or “swarm [your] inbox” or call you transphobic by any means, and i appreciate your warm and understanding responses to both messages.

It’s okay! I am sorry to hear about that, but you don’t have to worry I don’t support her views. Truly believe everyone is entitled to live their life as they want as long as it doesn’t hurt others.

Hope you have a good day 🤍

[panic-monger-blog]

Parsley, tomato-karate, skeptical cutlet, sad milk and cookie-knight  ٩(◕‿◕｡)۶

[panic-monger-blog]

Zombie-potatoes

[panic-monger-blog]

Night magic! ✨

[panic-monger-blog]

[panic-monger-blog]

Evil lemon  (ﾒ` ﾛ ´)

[buddylistsocial]

Horowitz: If the panicmongers were consistent, we’d close the schools every flu season

Horowitz: If the panicmongers were consistent, we’d close the schools every flu season

On December 17, 2014, Rebecca Taylor received a call from the school nurse in her daughter Scarlet’s Tacoma, Washington, school saying that Scarlet had a fever and Rebecca should pick her up. Two days later, and after just four hours of being in the hospital from what should have been a routine flu in an otherwise healthy child, Scarlet was dead.

While this was a rare tragic story, it’s less rare…

[panic-monger-blog]