How Do You Take Shelter From a Shit Storm?

I like to stay informed. I like to stay educated. I listen to people with differing opinions. When I see something online that seems kind of fishy, I look for sources that will confirm or debunk. Heck, when I see something that I very much want to be true, I seek out sources that will confirm or debunk. Not everything that I agree with turns out to be true and not everything that I disagree with turns out to be a lie. But lately it seems like there is just to much to keep up with. Of course, this is a feature, not a bug, of our political conversation. Steve Bannon, who, as repugnant as he is, is refreshingly honest about his malign intentions, called it "flooding the zone". So much misinformation and disinformation is churned out that you barely have time to figure out what the true story really is before you're hit with something else. The targeted undermining of mainstream media, especially over the last six years or so, has contributed to this problem. 

I'm not going to pretend that any media source is perfect. I'm also not going to pretend that there is a monolithic entity called "The Media". Every media outlet, from the long established to the newly sprung up, has its biases. It's not that difficult to determine what that bias consists of and allow for it. For the big kids, like The New York Times, or The Washington Post, the bias generally reveals itself in the opinion pages - editorials and columnists, as well as in what events and issues that they choose to cover and what to highlight. Very seldom, and by very seldom I mean "almost never" are the specific facts that one of these papers report on proved to be wrong. Then we have "fact checkers", who are also maligned by the people who subscribe to alternative facts. Most fact checking sources do more than just declare something true or false, they back up their pronouncements with checkable sources. If a politician says "ABC" and a fact checker declares it false, it usually presents evidence to debunk "ABC"; you can follow the breadcrumb trail yourself to verify. With both the fact checkers and most mainstream media reporting, they are not making unsupported assertions. 

With low confidence in the mainstream media, it's easy for anyone to spread disinformation, as long as it supports a narrative that people are predisposed to believe. There's no credible counterweight. 

The world of politics is one where the people in charge have to make tough decisions on a regular basis, and sometimes...a lot of the time...those decisions don't turn out the way they were envisioned. There's unintended consequences, there's unbelievable complexity. Look at two huge decisions that had to be made in the last few years: how to handle the Covid pandemic and what to do about our involvement in Afghanistan. When it first hit, Covid deaths were spiraling out of control. The transmissibility and lethality were both largely unknown. What we did know changed as time went on. What do you do about it? There was a variety of ways in which was handled across the country. Some methods of control turned out to be less effective than thought at first. There were, indeed, unintended consequences. Would there have been fewer deaths if controls had been tighter? Would fewer businesses have gone under if controls had been looser? We can guess, but we really don't know. By 2021 we have been embroiled in a seemingly endless, fruitless war in Afghanistan for 20 years. Presidents Obama and Trump elected to keep us there, utilizing different strategies. President Biden got us out. There was chaos and more than a dozen troops were killed in a terrorist attack on our way out. What would have happened if we had stayed? Was the a better way to handle the withdrawal? We can speculate, but we really don't know. It's pretty easy, however, to look back and pontificate about how it should have been handled differently. 

Which brings me to the zone that's flooded with shit. Social media, television interviews, partisan rallies, are all spewing out lies and distortions on a daily basis. We're still treated to assertions that the 2020 presidential election was won (by "a lot", by a landslide) as well as the more recent insistence by the loser of the Arizona governor's election that the courts should "declare her the winner", accompanied by accusations that the real winner, Governor Hobbs, is laundering money for Mexican drug cartels. Every action, and I mean every action by President Biden is attacked as evidence that he hates America, or that he is suffering from dementia, even if those same actions would have been mainstream Republican positions only recently. 

It's exhausting.