Thread by @PalmerReport

To those of you who say that I’m the only thing keeping you sane when I poke holes in the media’s doomsday hysteria: why are you listening to all that doomsday hysteria to begin with? Stop listening to it, and you won’t need me to keep you sane 🙂

If you know you’re just going to come to me so I can disprove the doomsday stuff, then you already know that the doomsday stuff is easily disproven manipulative nonsense. So why expose to it yourself to begin with? Don’t let yourself be manipulated like that.

The doomsday pundits don’t care if you keep figuring out that they’re full of it. They only care that you keep tuning in, so they can keep getting the exposure and ratings. Until you turn them off, they’re still getting the only thing they care about.

Repeatedly tuning in for the doomsday hysteria does not make you “vigilant.”

It means you’re being emotionally manipulated for ratings.

And it means the media will keep feeding you doomsday hysteria as long as it keeps resulting in ratings.

Turn it off.

“But I need to hear both sides!”

No you don’t. Not when one side is “we’re all doomed no matter what.” That’s not a side, it’s a sick punchline.

Then you force me to spend most of my time disproving that defeatist horse shit, leaving me less time for straight up analysis.

You don’t see this absurd doomsday nonsense outside of political punditry. There aren’t a bunch of sports pundits insisting that the team that won the game actually lost the game, or that the first place team is in worse shape than the last place team.

Yet in politics there’s this deranged notion (on the left at least) that says you’re only being “vigilant” if you spend at least half your time listening to pundits who tell you that you’re losing even if you’re winning, and that you’re going to lose no matter what.

Ironically, in sports you can be defeatist about your team and it doesn’t matter, because you’re just a fan and you play no role in the outcome anyway.

But in political activism you’re a participant, so if you’re a defeatist, you can cause your own very good team to lose.

But it is disturbing that sports, which frankly doesn’t matter beyond entertainment value, has far more honest punditry than any punditry you’ll find in politics, which is life and death. You’d think it would be the opposite.

Most followers of sports mistakenly think they’re playing a role in the outcome.

Most followers of politics mistakenly think they’re NOT playing a role in the outcome.