Vox has an amazing series they started where they are talking about “doomerism”, what it is and how to fight it. I was so excited to see it as it’s been our mission here at the Good News Roundup for years, and Vox is doing a great job at it.
First they define what they mean:
Against doomerism
From climate change to politics, a sense of pessimism about the direction of the world takes hold. To take just one example, according to one major international poll, a majority of young people agreed with the statement that “humanity is doomed.”
That pessimism is understandable given the chaotic state of the world as we see it presented to us. But it badly understates both the amazing material and political progress humanity has made over the past couple of centuries, and especially in the last few decades; and the realistic hope we should have for a future that won’t simply continue, but continue to get better.
That spirit — grounded in facts and realism, energized by what contributor Hannah Ritchie calls “changeable optimism”
and then they talk about why doomers are not presenting an accurate view of the past or the future.
The doomers are wrong about humanity’s future — and its past
If I wanted to convince you of the reality of human progress, of the fact that we as a species have advanced materially, morally, and politically over our time on this planet, I could quote you chapter and verse from a thick stack of development statistics.
I could tell you that a little more than 200 years ago, nearly half of all children born died before they reached their 15th birthday, and that today it’s less than 5 percent globally. I could tell you that in pre-industrial times, starvation was a constant specter and life expectancy was in the 30s at best. I could tell you that at the dawn of the 19th century, barely more than one person in 10 was literate, while today that ratio has been nearly reversed. I could tell you that today is, on average, the best time to be alive in human history.
but people don’t see the world this way:
In one 2017 Pew poll, a plurality of Americans — people who, perhaps more than anywhere else, are heirs to the benefits of centuries of material and political progress — reported that life was better 50 years ago than it is today. A 2015 survey of thousands of adults in nine rich countries found that 10 percent or fewer believed that the world was getting better. On the internet, a strange nostalgia persists for the supposedly better times before industrialization, when ordinary people supposedly worked less and life was allegedly simpler and healthier. (They didn’t and it wasn’t.)
So it’s boom times for doom times.
what does it mean?
The biggest danger we face today, if we care about actually making the future a more perfect place, isn’t that industrial civilization will choke on its own exhaust or that democracy will crumble or that AI will rise up and overthrow us all. It’s that we will cease believing in the one force that raised humanity out of tens of thousands of years of general misery: the very idea of progress.
What about the fall of democracy?
In 1800, according to Our World in Data, zero — none, nada, zip — people lived in what we would now classify as a liberal democracy. Just 22 million people — about 2 percent of the global population — lived in what the site classifies as “electoral autocracies,” meaning that what democracy they had was limited, and limited to a subset of the population.
One hundred years later, things weren’t much better — there were actual liberal democracies, but fewer than 1 percent of the world’s population lived in them.
and human rights?
But all you have to do is roll the clock back a few decades to see the way that rights, on the whole, have been extended wider and wider: to LGBTQ citizens, to people of color, to women. The fundamental fact is that as much as the technological and economic world of 2023 would be unrecognizable to people in 1800, the same is true of the political world.
and climate change? (which, of course, is real and awful and urgent action is needed) But is it already DOOMED as many people would have you believe?
As the lead researcher for Our World in Data, an organization that aims to make data on the world’s biggest problems accessible and understandable, I’ve written extensively on the reasons to be optimistic about the future. The prices of solar and wind power, as well as of batteries for storing low-carbon energy, have all plunged. Global deforestation peaked decades ago and has been slowly declining. Sales of new gas and diesel cars are now falling. Coal is starting to die in many countries. Government commitments are getting closer to limiting global warming to 2°C. Deaths from natural disasters — despite what news about climate change-related fires and hurricanes might appear to suggest — are a fraction of what they used to be. The list goes on.
But here, I don’t want to talk about whether pessimism is accurate. I want to focus on whether it’s useful. People might defend doomsday scenarios as the wake-up call that society needs. If they’re exaggerated, so what? They might be the crucial catalyst that gets us to act on climate change.
Setting aside the moral problem of stretching the truth, this claim is wrong. Scaring people into action doesn’t work. That’s true not just for climate change, air pollution, and biodiversity loss, but for almost any issue we can think of. We need optimism to make progress — yet that alone isn’t enough. To contend with environmental crises and make life better for everyone, we need the right kind of optimists: those who recognize that the world will only improve if we fight for it.
Ok so people see things as terrible and they aren’t really as terrible. Isn’t that partly because people only see bad news? Yup. That sure is part of it:
Why the news is so negative — and what we can do about it
Journalists have always been a fairly morose bunch, and the news they produce reflects that. Communications scholars have found that across many years and countries, coverage of political topics tends to more often be conveyed in a negative or cynical tone rather than a positive one; one study in the mid-2000s found that about half of US, German, Italian, and Austrian campaign coverage conveyed bad news, while as little as 6 percent conveyed good news. By some measures, the situation is deteriorating; a recent study found that the “proportion of headlines denoting anger, fear, disgust and sadness” grew markedly in the US between 2000 and 2019.
Is that the only reason that the news is so negative? Nope. It is a cycle that starts with the negativity bias:
Humans, it turns out, have what social psychologists call a “negativity bias”: We tend to pay more attention to bad-seeming information than good-seeming information. That could be a root factor for why the news is so goddamned depressing. That’s what we’re looking for.
He analogizes the current situation to an algorithmically run airline, which decides to only serve the meals people most want in the moment. That airline would start by offering people either, say, potato chips or baby carrots; when almost everyone chose the potato chips, maybe they’d move on to asking “potato chips or brownies,” then “brownies or ice cream,” and before long the whole menu is sugar. That satisfies people’s immediate preferences, but in the long run it makes them miserable.
That’s the tricky task, for news outlets as well as social networks, in thinking about negativity bias. We can give the people what they want right now. But in doing so, we might be feeding them empty calories that will only make them sick in the future.
It is great news that Vox, a news organization, is pushing back on this! And we are doing that here to.
And in that spirit, let’s get to the good news!
Democrats are Great
Biden designates area sacred to tribes as largest national monument of his presidency
President Joe Biden on Tuesday officially designated a new national monument in Southern Nevada while speaking at a conservation event at the Interior Department.
At more than 506,000 acres, the Avi Kwa Ame National Monument is one of the largest tracts of land to come under federal protection so far during Biden’s presidency, preserving Nevada’s Spirit Mountain and the desert around it.
“It’s a place of reverence, a place of spirituality, a place of healing,” Biden said Tuesday. “It will now be recognized for the significance it holds and be preserved forever.”
Biden issues his first veto on retirement investment resolution
President Joe Biden issued the first veto of his presidency Monday on a resolution to overturn a retirement investment rule that allows managers of retirement funds to consider the impact of climate change and other environmental, social and governance factors when picking investments.
Biden moves to undo Trump’s political play on the Space Command
The aftershocks from Donald Trump’s presidency reach even to outer space, but the Biden administration is quietly moving to repair one piece of the damage that could affect national security.
The White House appears ready to reverse a Trump administration plan to relocate the U.S. Space Command from Colorado Springs to Huntsville, Ala., because it fears the transfer would disrupt operations at a time when space is increasingly important to the military.
The Space Command siting decision has been a political football for the past four years. Trump made the decision on Jan. 11, 2021, five days after the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. He had said earlier that he wouldn’t decide until he knew the 2020 election results, “to see how it turns out.” Colorado voted against him, while Alabama gave him strong support and its representatives backed his false claim he had won.
Senior military officials argued from the start for remaining in Colorado Springs, where the Space Command and its predecessors have been based for decades, and the Biden administration seems finally to be nearing the same conclusion. “We share the concerns of some military leaders about potential disruption of space operations at a critical moment for our national security,” a White House official said this week.
The era of impossible subscription cancellations is nearing an end
Everything is a subscription these days. And sometimes, those subscriptions are really hard to cancel — intentionally so. Sneaky companies know that the harder it is to stop paying for their services, the more money they’ll get from people who either didn’t know they were signing up for a paid service in the first place or don’t have the time to cancel it.
The Federal Trade Commission announced Thursday that it’s proposing a “click to cancel” rule, which would force businesses to make it just as easy to sign off as it was to sign up.
If the rule gets approved, that means no more in-person visits, handwritten letters, or waiting on hold for hours to cancel. No more manipulative designs that trick consumers into paying for services. No more being forced to endure various sales pitches and pleas before you can finally cancel your subscription or membership. These are some of the most common complaints the FTC gets, the agency said, and what it hopes the click to cancel rule will fix.
“I’m sure this is an experience that all of you can relate to, where you tried to cancel a subscription and the company has made you jump through an endless number of hoops,” FTC Chair Lina Khan said in a call with reporters. “Companies should not be able to manipulate consumers into paying for subscriptions that they don’t want.”
Bad News for Bad Guys
A week ago, I assumed that I’d be filling this section with stuff about the former guy getting indicted. Honestly, there was so much OTHER bad news for bad guys, I don’t even know if I could have made it fit (who am I kidding, I would have made it fit.
Until we get that good news, here is a TON of other stuff to keep you hopeful:
Thanks, Obama! The hilarious reason why a judge just blocked Wyoming’s abortion ban.
On Wednesday, a judge in the deep-red state of Wyoming temporarily blocked a state law that would make performing nearly any abortion in that state a felony. She relied on a 2012 amendment to the state constitution that was intended to spite then-President Barack Obama.
Obama’s early years in office were marred by a scorched-earth political campaign Republicans wielded to try to thwart what became the Affordable Care Act. Obamacare’s opponents warned of a “government takeover of health care” that would strip many Americans of their ability to make their own health decisions.
These attacks did not succeed. The bill became law, and Obamacare is popular now that it has been in full effect for nearly a decade without anyone being forced to stand before a death panel. But there is at least one lasting legacy of these attempts to characterize the Affordable Care Act as an attack on patients’ right to decide whether and when to seek health treatments.
In many states, opponents of Obamacare effectively took the GOP’s talking points and turned them into state constitutional amendments protecting patients’ ability to obtain health care that the government might not want them to have. Wyoming’s amendment, for example, provides that “each competent adult shall have the right to make his or her own health care decisions.”
According to Quinn Yeargain, a law professor at Widener University, similar amendments are on the books in several other states.
Judge says several Trump aides, including former chief of staff, must testify to Jan. 6 grand jury
A federal judge has ordered several former Donald Trump aides, including Mark Meadows, to testify before a grand jury as part of the criminal investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election, rejecting the former president’s claims of executive privilege, multiple sources confirmed to CNN.
Trump’s legal team had challenged subpoenas issued by special counsel Jack Smith demanding testimony and documents from Meadows, the former president’s White House chief of staff, as well as several others by asserting executive privilege.
In a sealed decision last week, then-Chief Judge Beryl Howell rejected the Trump team’s claims of privilege for Meadows and other top Trump administration officials who were subpoenaed by Smith, including former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, former national security adviser Robert O’Brien and former Department of Homeland Security official Ken Cuccinelli, sources told CNN.
Trump’s privilege claims for other former White House aides, including Stephen Miller and Dan Scavino, also were rejected, the sources said.
Trump left Georgia’s GOP in ruins – and now faces the consequences
CNN reported that the Fulton County investigation is focusing on potential racketeering and conspiracy charges in connection with Trump’s effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election, charges that are more often associated with TV crime dramas like “The Sopranos” than a former president of the United States.
The reaction from Republicans is telling. As the world braced for breaking news in Gotham City, most members of the GOP, from reliable allies like House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to potential presidential rivals, rushed to Trump’s defense. House Republicans denounced, “the unprecedented abuse of prosecutorial authority” and called for investigations into Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.
The story could not be any more different in Georgia, where Trump’s legal team has been the prominent voice leading the counteroffensive against Willis. With very little exception, the state’s leading Republicans, including Gov. Brian Kemp, have remained out of the fray and have been conspicuously silent.
A telling under-told detail is that many of the 75 witnesses interviewed by Willis’ special grand jury — including this author — are Republicans who had voted for Trump in 2020. They had seen his antics first-hand. Many had been on the receiving end of his wrath in his desperate unrealistic attempt to cling to power.
So effective were Trump’s efforts undermining election integrity that enough dazed and confused Georgia Republican voters stayed home for the January 2021 US Senate special runoff elections, handing the seats to a pair of Democrats.
Trump’s actions left the Georgia GOP in ruins. The untold damage will outlive any news cycle about his legal peril. History will not be kind to anyone involved in undermining and overturning a fairly decided election.
A lot is coming at Trump
Trump is not just confronting a single case of potentially criminal vulnerability. New developments on multiple fronts suggest it’s possible he could be indicted in several separate investigations that are all apparently moving forward in a long-delayed crescendo of possible accountability.
On Wednesday, his problems deepened when an appeals court ruled that Trump’s defense attorney, Evan Corcoran, must testify before a grand jury in the case surrounding classified documents that Trump ferreted away at his resort at Mar-a-Lago. The ruling, which came with surprising speed and thwarted Trump’s typical monthslong delaying tactics, was so significant because the Justice Department had to convince the court there was sufficient evidence to show Trump committed a crime in order to puncture the convention of attorney-client privilege.
Norm Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and CNN legal analyst, said the piercing of this bedrock legal protection was highly unusual and an ill omen for Trump, since Corcoran’s testimony could be used to suggest he committed a crime. This could involve not just the mishandling of classified documents but also possible obstruction of justice. “It considerably worsens what was probably Trump’s most federal legal peril,” Eisen told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on “The Situation Room” on Wednesday.
Fox Producer Says She Was Set Up in Dominion Case
A Fox News producer who has worked with the hosts Maria Bartiromo and Tucker Carlson filed lawsuits against the company in New York and Delaware on Monday, accusing Fox lawyers of coercing her into giving misleading testimony in the continuing legal battle around the network’s coverage of unfounded claims about election fraud.
The producer, Abby Grossberg, said in a pair of lawsuits that the effort to place blame on her and Maria Bartiromo, the Fox Business host, was rooted in rampant misogyny and discrimination at the company.
Trump loses last bid to keep key evidence out of rape trial
Former President Donald Trump’s effort to keep key evidence out of his civil rape trial next month was rejected by a federal judge Monday.
Judge Lewis A. Kaplan in Manhattan ruled that key witnesses will be allowed to testify and misogynistic remarks Trump made about women in 2005 when he apparently didn’t realize he was being recorded can be played for a jury that will hear quarter-century-old rape allegations made by a former magazine columnist.
A trial in the case filed by E. Jean Carroll is scheduled to start April 25. Carroll and Trump are expected to testify.
Though it may be tempting to do so, it is a mistake to assess the Manhattan district attorney’s investigation of Donald Trump by comparing its relative severity with those of myriad other crimes possibly committed by him. That is not how state and federal prosecutors will — or should — be thinking about the issue of charging Mr. Trump or, for that matter, any other defendant.
This case is just one of a few ongoing criminal investigations into Mr. Trump’s conduct — including potentially a much larger financial investigation by the Manhattan district attorney — and the hush-money scheme is no doubt the least serious of the crimes. It does not involve insurrection and undermining the peaceful transfer of power fundamental to our democracy or the retention of highly classified documents and obstruction of a national security investigation.
But does that mean the Manhattan criminal case is an example of selective prosecution — in other words, going after a political enemy for a crime that no one else would be charged with? Not by a long shot. To begin with, Mr. Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen, who was instrumental in the scheme, has already pleaded guilty to a federal crime emanating from this conduct and served time for it and other crimes. Federal prosecutors told the court that Mr. Cohen “acted in coordination with and at the direction of” Mr. Trump (identified as “Individual 1”). It would be anathema to the rule of law not to prosecute the principal for the crime when a lower-level conspirator has been prosecuted.
Stormy Daniels Says Her Phone Records Are ‘Gonna Hurt’ Trump
Stormy Daniels said her phone records are “gonna hurt” Donald Trump after she’d handed them over to her attorney on Wednesday. The porn star is at the center of a possible criminal indictment heading the former president’s way over alleged payments made by him and his one-time lawyer Michael Cohen to Daniels to hush up an affair. On Wednesday, a Twitter user asked Daniels—real name Stephanie Clifford—if she was “still laughing.” “You seem to have stopped tweeting obsessively about Trump but I’m sure you’re having the last laugh,” they wrote. “I’m sure I will,” Daniels replied. “I’ve been handing over phone records to my attorney today (they're gonna hurt!)