Thursday, September 05, 2019

“Making news out of nothing at all.”

Bookworm makes some excellent points today. Here are some.
It would be an excellent thing if Trump would make 10-15 minute videos in which he explains in simple, but serious, language the rationales behind his policies. He needs to explain why he won’t jump on board the anthropogenic climate change bandwagon; why he believes illegal immigration is bad for America and for Latin America; why Israel is our ally; why socialism is bad; why the Second Amendment matters; why 3rd trimester abortions are wrong; etc.

Trump does reference all or most of those issues at his rallies. However, even though the rallies are lots of fun, the really important policy ideas or factual statements tend to get lost. Sometimes they’re awkwardly phrased, which diminishes their power; or they’re buried in a mountain of issues so no one notices them; or they’re broken up, so that the whole picture only shows if you listen to every rally speech he’s given. That’s not good enough.

Thinking about it, I would love it if whoever does the PragerU videos would go to the White House and give President Trump’s staff a primer in doing similar videos to those PragerU produces: short, honest, incredibly clear, pointed, and informative. It would be hugely helpful to political discourse in this country if serious Americans had a little more to hang on to than tweets and disjointed campaign speeches. I know we have a short attention span in modern America, but surely we can handle an intelligent 5-10 minute video from our president explaining important matters of public policy.

She also makes some good points about our knowledge of weather history. For example,
The reality is that we have no idea what the worst weather events are in history because our knowledge of history when it comes to weather is so minute as to be useless for purposes of ranking weather events. So it really gets my goat to see media outlets try to terrify people with historically illiterate claims.

Two other points she makes effectively concern children's medical records and making news out of nothing at all.
Read them and more here.

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