People losing their damn minds: Perception and emotion are horrible guides to making rational decisions

U.S. violent and property crime rates have plunged since 1990s, regardless of data source/Pew Research Center

Okay, I'm not a fan of the man but I'm glad he's all right. Of course, the grazed ear thing could just as well have been a full blast to the chest, but lo! The MAGA Lord is immortal. That's really all I care to say about the matter. The pundits and peanut galleries will continue their cant and cavil ad nauseam and the press will do whatever the hell it does. 

To that last point, I've been wondering why people lose their shit over debates, why we have them, and how damn dumb are folks - looking at you, Democrats - anyway.

Debates are performative and viewers are told what they've seen by analysts who figure you're too stupid to figure out for yourself what you watched. In some cases, that might be necessary. If I listened to a debate or discussion between two neuroscientists or abstract mathematicians, I'd need someone to translate what I was hearing into layman's terms.

But the idea of pulling your lead candidate from the presidential campaign because he put in a terrible debate performance and the ensuing media frenzy over what the White House may not be telling the public about said candidate's mental acuity is nonsense. 

So, Dems, you dumb, pearl-clutching idiots, once again, you want to roll over on your backs, panicked and cowardly because - what - your man was steamrolled by a lunatic pathological liar and crook? You sad bastards. 

Does Biden have issues with mental stamina or acuity? Yes, maybe, I don't know; and neither do any of us, most likely, but what if we were to vote based on what his administration has accomplished? What if, instead of basing decisions on what we saw or have seen in performance (or worse, what the talking meatballs tell us we've seen), we took legitimate stock of what has been accomplished over the past three and a half years.

Don't have time to do the researh? Here's a short list.

I used a Politico and Bloomberg as just-off-the-cuff "sources off my Google Search for Biden administration accomplishments". The following is a combined list of some of their data. I suggest reading the articles for fuller description and greater nuance (1, 2).

Expanded overtime guarantees for millions

First over-the-counter birth control pill to hit U.S. stores in 2024

Established the Office of Gun Violence Prevention, and in 2023 schools were awarded $286 million in federal dollars to support student wellness and school mental health professionals

Renewable power is the No. 2 source of electricity in the U.S. — and climbing

Preventing discriminatory mortgage lending

Making airlines pay up when flights are delayed or canceled

Forcing Chinese companies to open their books

Established the Cyber Safety Review Board to investigate cyberattacks

The Inflation Reduction Act

Fixing bridges, building tunnels and expanding broadband by “clinching” an infrastructure deal that opened the spigot for $1.2 trillion of investment into the nation’s roads, waterlines, broadband networks, airports and much more

Salary increases are outpacing inflation (Bloomberg)

The cost of living is going down (Bloomberg)

Green spending is booming (but it’s still not enough) (Bloomberg)

Inequality is narrowing - A rise in real wages for lower-income workers is bridging the gap (Bloomberg)

Violent crimes, especially homicides, have fallen - Biden has encouraged states to use stimulus money on law enforcement (Bloomberg)

These are positives and not even the full story. My point in publishing this isn't to be a rah-rah guy for the administration. It's to highlight that there is fundamental difference between what this administration has done already vis-à-vis the stated goals of what the opponent has stated his administration will bring.

An additional point that I need to make is that both the Democratic Party and the mainstream press have done an outstanding job of either ignoring or downplaying these and other accomplishments and leveraging that to promote a (relatively) progressive reformation government. Instead, the Democrats do what they do best; hand over the keys to their opponents, bend over and say "thankyouverymuch." The press doesn't care, by the way; whatever gets clicks is what counts and only what counts. Sure, the Inflation Reduction Act passed, but the media would rather focus on Trump's strong words for what he's going to do when he gets re-elected and how great the country was under his first term. 

Biden's media profile should have nothing to do with what he's gotten done while in office nor why he should step down (or not). IF he's as feeble as the press and apparently his own party thinks (dumbasses...just because you got elected to office doesn't mean you're very bright), it begs the question of how so much has gotten done in such a relatively short amount of time and with a Congressional minority of Democrats. Granted, more could be done if everyone was on board, but they're obviously not. And that's a shame.

Look, not everything Biden's done has tickled my fancy or made me jump with joy. Yes, under Biden, great strides in renewable sources of energy have been made, but this administration has done striking little to impose the regulations on the oil industry both supporters hoped for and the industry feared. Indeed, oil production has increased under this administration and is likely to go up again next year.

Immigration reform remains a mess and I am sometimes of the mind that's by design. For every substantive proposal put forward, the GOP idiots in Congress vote it down or add their own risible pork to the bills and when, as it appeared might happen a while back, the administration supported Republican proposals for border control couched in some of the vilest language ever seen in legislation, Congress said "nah". Why? Because they don't want a non-Trump administration for taking credit. That "nah" came from pressure from the former guy, by the way.

And that leads us to just how stupid are we? I don't know that it's stupidity, but it certainly is ignorance; sometimes manufactured by media and incompetence, but often self-generated. We are a nation of silos that don't talk to each other and when they do, are often misinformed and blather out of emotion. Or we argue from our perception of what little we know or - and while this is understandable - from our own experience. Let's look at that last one for a minute.

Families are wealthier now than in previous years. See also, the Inflation Reduction Act and ancillary legislation. However, tell that to the un- or under-employed or the individual working multiple jobs to make ends meet. It doesn't do any good to wave statistics in a person's face and it sure doesn't do any good to say that if they're poor, it's their fault. There are myriad factors at work at more granular levels that stats do not and cannot address. 

That said, it does mean that there may be a lack of services available in that community where a person struggles to get by; it might be a lack of resources, or yes, working jobs that don't pay enough (and we know how difficult it to be to go looking for greener pastures when you just don't have the time or energy to do so.) 

Or take crime. Even though law enforcement statistics have been touting that crime across the board is down, why are so many Americans so virulent that it's a major problem? In some cases, sure, people just don't believe the data. In others, it's from whatever leadership is saying and who one listens to on that count, and then, rather like our person who doesn't see any boost in the economy because of his personal experience, a person who has been violently assaulted is likely to believe that crime is far worse than someone who hasn't been and that person's voice is going to have more influence with their friends and associates than any statistic.(3, 4)

I don't know what's going to happen in the fall. I don't think anyone does. If the Democrats had a brain, they'd do what the Republicans do and rally 'round their guy. But let's face it, the Dems have rarely ever been ralliers because so many of them just seem to run on fear, like hamsters in one of those little wheels. 

For the record, I do tend to vote Democrat because the values the espouse and frequently, their policies align more with my values and the kind of legislation I'd like to see, and also, because I find a crazy kind of consistency in their platform. The Democrats are hardly leftists in the stricter sense of the word and that I am, but given out two-party system, they are less inhumane in their worldview and policies than the other people.

There's nothing much to say about what to do about the situation, the landscape of a media conglomerates that long ago vouchsafed insight for clicks or a hellscape of people who will hit the polls out of hatred of their fellow citizens and their ardor for a criminal and pathological liar while another group hits the polls and votes for either the incumbent or his replacement out of utter terror. 

Both sets of voters are likely ill-informed, both sets of voters will do whatever they'll do for purely emotional reasons and that part of the process could have been avoided if we had a media that would inform instead of inflame...or politicians who would serve instead of dictate. 

References

1. Bloomberg Opinion Columnists. "What Has Biden Accomplished? Look at These 10 Metrics, Not the Polls" Bloomberg. https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-opinion-biden-accomplishment-data/ (retrieved July 18, 2024)

2. Politico Magazine. "30 Things Joe Biden Did as President You Might Have Missed". Politico. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/02/02/joe-biden-30-policy-things-you-might-have-missed-00139046. February 2, 2024 (retrieved July 18, 2024)

3. Gramlich, John. "What the data says about crime in the U.S." Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/24/what-the-data-says-about-crime-in-the-us/. April 24, 2024 (retrieved July 18, 2024)

4. Hutchinson, Bill. "US stats show violent crime dramatically falling, so why is there a rising clash with perception?" ABC News. https://abcnews.go.com/US/us-stats-show-violent-crime-dramatically-falling-rising/story?id=108042096. March 22, 2024 (retrieved July 18, 2024)