What Connects Isis, Sharks And The Radical Left?
It was December 26th 1975 and I was stood in line at my local movie theatre waiting to see Jaws.
Even though it was released in the summer in the US this was the first showing in the UK and I was pumped.
And a bit scared.
Because I’d already read the book and sharks are scary, right? Even big plastic two-dimensional ones.
With that movie, Steven Speilberg created fear in the hearts of hundreds of thousands of people who ventured into the ocean over the following years after watching the film.
People who had previously never given sharks a second thought were all of a sudden having an extra look around before getting in the water and being extra vigilant once submerged.
A few weeks ago I was chatting with a friend via email about the rise of radical liberalism.
He said he was getting as frustrated with the far left as he was with the far right.
I had to agree.
Extremism in any form is not a good thing.
It polarizes people, stifles debate, removes any semblance of trust and serves no purpose.
I pointed out that the far left are just a tiny, but very vocal minority, just like the far right.
He disagreed.
I’m a liberal and I have lots of liberal friends.
I’d go as far as to say that of all the people I know at least 75% are left-leaning. And that includes clients because that is the kind of person who hires me.
I’m not sure how many people I know, but it’s a lot, and yet I don’t know a single person who I would describe as a radical leftist.
I know one who is far right, but none far left that I can think of.
Wouldn’t that be weird, if there were so many people with extreme left views and I didn’t know any of them?
We Need To Build A Stronger Military
Congress recently approved a 2019 US defense budget of $716 billion.
That’s approximately two billion dollars per day spent on defending this country.
You can fund a lot of hospitals and pretty much eradicate poverty in this country with that kind of money.
The US Military is larger than the next nine in the world combined.
It outspends China (which has almost 1,000,000 more soldiers) by 3:1 and Russian by about 8:1.
Yet very few people bat an eyelid about military spending.
We must support our troops because they are defending our country and keeping us safe goes the refrain.
And to question that is to open yourself up for ridicule as being unpatriotic (if you’re American) and/or some sort of commie weirdo.
Smoking kills more people in the US in a couple of hours than ISIS has done since its inception.
Admittedly, it would take tobacco two days to surpass the deaths from Al Qaeda and 9/11, but that’s all.
Where’s the fear?
Where’s the outrage?
Where are the politicians demanding billions of dollars be poured into halting this genocide?
Crickets and tumbleweed.
There’s something that links sharks, the radical left and concern about ISIS attacks.
It’s the availability heuristic.
The Incredible Power of the Availability Heuristic
It is the cognitive bias that makes us believe that the more we hear about something ‘dangerous’ the more prevalent it is and the more we must fear it.
A person dying from smoking never makes the news unless they are famous. It’s not newsworthy, it’s old hat
As such we rarely stop to contemplate that smoking kills more Americans every 18-months or so than the following wars combined:
- The American War of Independence
- The American Civil War
- World War I
- World War II
- The Korean War
- Vietnam
- Iraq
- Afghanistan
A sobering thought.
But an American tourist getting murdered in an ISIS attack in some European city is very newsworthy and gets extensive coverage.
And so the fear and handwringing get amped up.
We have all seen the blanket coverage on news channels after atrocities in London, Manchester, Paris, Nice, Brussels and many more.
It’s horrific and an affront to humanity, but the likelihood of it happening to you is minuscule.
Unless that is if you live in certain areas of Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan or India where such attacks are an almost daily occurrence and thousands upon thousands die every year.
That’s the availability heuristic in reverse. The media doesn’t cover it, we don’t hear about it, so we don’t realize the very real danger for people living there.
Somebody dying from a shark attack will always make the local news and sometimes even national news.
A guy was killed recently by a shark off the coast of Cape Cod and that story was covered on the TV here in Orlando.
And do you know why it was covered?
Because there is on average only one death every two years in all the US waters and almost none of those fatalities are at the hands, or rather the teeth, of the legendary Great White.
New Smyrna Beach here in Florida is the shark capital of the world and since records began there have been about 500 attacks (that rises to about 800 when you include all of Florida), well more than anywhere else.
But only 11 were fatal as most ‘attacks’ are nothing more than the shark having a bite out of curiosity.
Sharks much prefer seals to humans.
So unless you bathe in fish guts and then go swimming in the aptly named Coffin Bay off the coast of South Australia with your best mate Sam the Seal, you’re probably okay.
The Real Killers In The Animal Kingdom
If you want to be afraid of another living thing, then fear mosquitoes because they kill hundreds of thousands of people every year by spreading disease.
Or maybe snakes?
Those skinny fuckers are responsible for about 100,000 deaths per annum, although almost all happen in remote areas of Asia and Africa.
A far left politician making some asinine comment about health care paying for itself without any supporting evidence is newsworthy too.
But it’s not common and it’s not the consensus.
Most liberals, like myself, were shaking their heads in disbelief and wishing she would shut up. I think you know who I’m referring to.
Similarly, do we really don’t need to be spending obscene amounts of money on arms to defeat a foe that is making bombs in their kitchens?
If we want to see things as they really are, then we must challenge our thinking.
Our brains want to take the easy way out and the availability heuristic (a heuristic is literally a shortcut in thinking) is one of the ways it does this.
Just because a few people make a lot of noise, it doesn’t necessarily mean there are a lot of them.
Just because the five friends you last spoke to all think Trump is a lying sack of shit, it (sadly) doesn’t necessarily mean everybody thinks that.
And just because you keep being told that we need to spend more money on the Military doesn’t necessarily mean we need to spend more money on the Military.
Thank you so much for sharing and to keep your point in post.
I would like to know the definition of “the radical far left”. I mean, how can one define cats for instance. Having been around all kinds of people for many, many years, well. I have learned never to presume.
Hi, I come from Hungary, and my family has some real experience about communism and also nazism. Please send people to me, who would like to know what real communism was like.
I don’t see any point in comparing far left to far right, or how many deaths they are responsible for. Due to lots of mistakes in history books, we might never know how many tens of millions of deaths Stalin was responsible for.
What I see is that radicalism and populism is able to create horrible situations worldwide, and people should be taught how to recognize it. Far right is supposed to be racist, but the communists in this part of the world were against everyone. They hated farmers, they hated aristocrats and they hated anyone, and they eliminated many of these groups, so that they could stay in power. People used to disappear in the middle of the night in big black cars, and taken to labour camps, to be tortured, just because they owned 30 pigs.
It was a typical way of rule and divide, to make a group of people into public enemy. And unfortunately this works up to today. Right now our government has been campaigning against migrants for the past 3 years, and it brought them extra votes. 90 year old grandmothers are scared to go to sleep at night, afraid that they will be raped by migrants. The country’s economy is going down, but 50% of the people don’t pay attention, cause they are told to be afraid. And this government is not far right.
I recently saw a movie with Sandra Bullock: Our brand is crisis. There is a sentence in that movie, which seems to work in politics, and Jaws as well: “when people want hope, they will choose the new, unknown leader. But when they are afraid, they will choose the strong, powerful leader, who will promise to protect them.”
So when politicans put FEAR in their campaigns, people will be afraid, and will choose populism over low taxes, education or health services.
And as a scuba diver, I’m all for protecting sharks, and most accidents occur because of man’s mistakes, not the shark’s. :)
Eva
Hi Tim – You did say that verbatim in one of the comments. It made me so excited I had to reply :)
I think you’re excitement is getting the better of you!
Of course I said, “I don’t trust our Governments to exercise good judgment that isn’t influenced by the greed for power and personal financial gain.” but that doesn’t say nor imply I was only referring to them dealing with the Military. In fact it implies a general distrust.
Lenin was in charge during the “Red Terror” and his kill count is estimated around 3.7 million civilians. Now I’m typically sympathetic to looking at the whole picture of a person because we’ve all done good and bad, but I’m going to draw the line at pointing out someone’s good qualities once you are responsible for ordering the executions of more than, I dunno, let me pull a number out of my ass and say 100,000 of your own country’s civilians.
Now let’s address Kent State, which is even a thing not entirely because of the students, but rather the reason it is a tragedy and known about is more because the national guard went and used lethal measures against the protestors. Nonetheless, you don’t think a crowd of liberal students nowadays could equal the protests there?
Ok, how about this: https://www.foxnews.com/us/uc-berkeley-braces-for-riots-over-conservative-ben-shapiros-speech-on-campus
Or this: https://www.cnn.com/2017/02/01/us/milo-yiannopoulos-berkeley/index.html
This is not because of bombing another country, this is literally just because someone with conservative views was going to speak publicly on campus.
Or, off campus and maybe not entirely students, this: https://www.dailywire.com/news/39089/antifa-went-protest-fascists-they-targeted-wrong-andy-ngo
That last one includes a leftist man who was bashed in the head with a baseball bat for carrying an American flag.
Or, hell, let’s talk about how Bret Weinstein (a dude who voted for Bernie Sanders) literally couldn’t go back to the campus of Evergreen College, where he worked because students were walking around with baseball bats looking for him – because he didn’t believe that he should be forced off campus as a white person.
I wasn’t around in the 60s and 70s and would be happy to change my position with examples of other incidents from that time that surpass what I’m linking to here, but in general I don’t know if it is fair to say that just because radical liberal college kids are upset over stupid stuff compared to more important things in the past that they are any less radical or dangerous. Even adjusted for inflation, is there any instance where students did 6 figures in damage just over the mere thought of a conservative ass clown showing up to speak?
I will agree with you that people become more conservative over time – I can definitely say that has been the case for myself. However, to say “the extreme left will never take over” when you can easily point to numerous times and instances that radicals on both sides took over in just the past 100 years is befuddling.
Lenin’s rise to power and the overthrow of an oppressive regime helped millions. And yes, he then became a murderous dictator.
There were several mini-Kent States after including one in New Mexico where students were bayoneted ffs.
Chris, if a story about a guy being hit over the head with a baseball bat is an indication of anything other than a guy got hit over the head with a baseball bat, then go and check what the fascist National Front and BNP were up to in the UK in the 80’s.
Blacks, Jews, and Muslims were regularly getting a good kicking with the Police often turning a blind eye
Similarly, there were riots with the ultra far left Militant Tendency and they were beating up people on the far right including burning down houses in Liverpool.
The miner’s strike under Scargill saw fights breaking out all over the country between left and right. Even at soccer games when teams from striking towns met teams from ‘scab’ towns where they had broken the picket line.
From the early 70’s to the end of the 80’s it swung back and forth with lots of violence and not a damn thing changed
In and of itself the baseball bat is an example of the availability heuristic as meanwhile tens of millions of patriots didn’t meet an angry mob with a baseball bat.
Attacks of Jews and ethnic minorities are sharply up since Trump took power, but very few get reported on. I suppose they did cover the one in Portland that ended up in the deaths of two people.
More people have died at the hands of far-right wingers in this country then leftists. And I bet it’s not even remotely close.
The worldwide rise of the far right makes the idiot students wrecking property look like the amateurs they are.
And feel free to point me toward the last far left US Government because I’m certainly not talking about anywhere else.
Even the UK has never had a far left Government so I’m not sure what you mean.
The conditions in this country will not allow for a Marxist government to ever come to power in our lifetime.
If you want to take this to email that’s fine, but I’m not sure it’s adding any value to the post.
And anyway, I think your somewhat sharkist in the way you have totally ignored our aquatic friends.
“I don’t trust our Governments to exercise good judgment that isn’t influenced by the greed for power and personal financial gain.”
I could not agree more!! But this seems to apply only to beefing up the military? Why do you trust it to create jobs or do anything else when it is typically filled with the incompetent and corrupt?
I never said that, nor implied that. I don’t trust them with a fat lot, to be honest.
The Military was just an example to demonstrate the availability heuristic because the threat of terrorism is infinitesimal to the threat of smoking, or getting the flu or a thousand other things.
The post isn’t about Military spending per se, or at least it wasn’t until the comments took that turn.
I’ve seen estimates that the radical left consists of around 5% of the population, and a similar figure for the far right. Most people consider themselves to be part of the (mostly silent) majority who sit somewhere in the middle and have more sensible, moderate views.
Part of the problem is that radical activists tend to be much more vocal than more moderate people. Also, as traditional media is in a death spiral, it focusses more and more on the extremes in order to catch people’s attention.
However, it’s a mistake to think of the radical left as harmless. Considering they are just 5% of the general public, their ideology has wholly captured the Universities and most of the media. And in recent decades we have seen the corrosive influence of radical left ideologies leaking into mainstream business.
Nonsensical yet harmful ideas are affecting important parts of people’s lives. For example, in some industries, straight white men are explicitly at a disadvantage. And as the influence of radical left grows, we’re sure to see more insidious bullshit ideas get implemented, both by government and business.
This is clearly not just a small problem. And it’s not just a theoretical or inconsequential issue either.
Part of the problem is that like a frog in boiling water, we have seen these dangerous leftist policies very slowly leak into public life in ways which on the face of it don’t seem that frightening. This is part of their insidious nature.
Whereas on the far right, it’s dead easy to spot a Nazi and to immediately see the harm they can do, it requires some careful thought and analysis to understand why certain leftist policies such as equity (equality of outcome) are just as harmful as Nazis.
TL;DR – don’t be too quick to dismiss concerns about what the radical left can achieve if given full reign over public life. That is, unless you think the gulags in communist Russia under Stalin were a wonderful idea, along with the millions of people killed in the name of radical left ideology.
‘Part of the problem is that radical activists tend to be much more vocal than more moderate people.’
Yes, that was the entire point of the post.
I’m sure there are industries where straight white men are explicitly at a disadvantage.
I doubt there is a demographic group that isn’t at a disadvantage in some role or other.
But you cannot sensibly compare white disadvantage to black.
There are very few unarmed white men being shot by cops and the prisons aren’t disproportionately full of white men.
Even to this day, white men are exponentially more likely to walk free from a court compared to a black dude who has committed the same crime.
Anyway, we’re way of topic, the point was that the radical left are less in number and have less real power than many people think.
I certainly understand the point you make. I am not qualified to say whether the amount spent on the military should be slightly more or slightly less than it actually is but the first duty of every government is the defence of its people. If we trust our governments to exercise good judgement in balancing what we can afford with what we need to do to achieve this aim then maybe that is as good as it gets. War nowadays can take so many different forms, armies versus armies, terrorists and, increasingly, cyber attacks so governments/countries have to be prepared on many fronts. There is also the point that having very powerful forces – of all kinds – can deter attacks without a shot being fired.
I don’t trust our Governments to exercise good judgment that isn’t influenced by the greed for power and personal financial gain.
Too many super wealthy politicians, too many lobbyists and too much at stake for big business to allow something as ‘doing what is right for the people’ to get in the way.
Same goes for Big Pharm and the insurance industry. The only time they give a shit about doing the right things is when that intersects with making the most amount of profit.
As for the first duty of a government. I think keeping the people healthy is equally, if not more, important. But that doesn’t stop more people going bankrupt due to medical bills than for any other reason in the US.
Before reading more than the headline, my guess was that all 3 didn’t have a sense of humor :)
With that said, I’d like to challenge this a bit. I’ll start with the premise that you only need 10% for an idea to eventually overtake the majority of the population: https://wagingnonviolence.org/feature/you-only-need-10-percent-the-science-behind-tipping-points/
As of just over a year ago, 40% preferred socialism to capitalism: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-09-05/40-percent-americans-now-prefer-socialism-capitalism
The issue is *not* the 80% of Boomers or 91% of elderly Americans who believe communism was and still is a problem: http://thefederalist.com/2016/10/17/survey-finds-high-support-communism-among-millennials/
It’s the 45% of millenials who *don’t* think communism is a problem, or the 1 in 4 Americans who think of Lenin favorably… I’m guessing that 25% includes those individuals who might espouse that gulags were compassionate, fun places with theater nights (despite this particular person being from the UK):
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/media/2018/09/compassionate-non-violent-course-action-goldsmiths-university-students-defend
Neither you nor I are hanging around on college campuses listening to the majority of students who are being repeatedly told the patriarchy/capitalism/Western world are evil, and communism/women/anything besides white men are good, and then run around espousing these ideas. That trend isn’t slowing down, but the elderly and boomers still holding the line against radical leftist forms of government are in the process of going away.
So, the issue is being vigilant and catching all of this -now- as social justice warriors are being pumped out of universities left and right which is leading to the current insanity going on in the world, rather than 10 or 20 years from now when we’re suddenly installing dictators. Maybe mosquitos kill more people per year *now*, but dictators can and often do kill more than mosquitos depending on just how big the country is that they take over. And while we may not be able to have a chat with all mosquitos and ask kindly that they focus on all other mammals besides humans, we do have some say over politics.
Hell, the left within Western democracies are enacting laws that not only limit free speech, but compel speech -today-, so forget 10 to 20 years… we have things to pay attention to right now.
Perhaps the availability heuristic of immediate surroundings/people – “I don’t know any radical leftists and this still looks like the same Western world I know, so this must not be a problem right now” is in play here in the opposite direction too? I’m not judging because it might be completely applicable to me too blowing the situation out of proportion, and overall it’s a good point that it is worth all of us trying to be on guard to challenge what we read and see and get as close to the truth of a situation as best we can.
Firstly, I read quite a lot about Lenin in my youth/early twenties. He did a lot of good as well as bad. The problem is that he gets lumped together with Stalin who was a homicidal maniac.
Secondly and more importantly, if you think the Universities are more radical now than they were in the 60s and early 70s during Vietnam, then you’re sadly mistaken.
I cannot imagine a scene like Kent State happening because students want people to address them by their preferred pronoun.
The difference now is that they are radical about different less important shit.
If they were really radical, then they’d be kicking off about American intervention overseas not about language
I don’t care that 25% of people are not anti-communist because they soon would be if you sat them down and explained it carefully. Or if it started to be implemented.
And I don’t care that it’s millennials and not baby-boomers. Back in the day it was baby-boomers who were radical and not whatever the generation that came before them was called.
We tend to be a lot more ideological when we are younger and then shift toward the center as we get older. Not everybody, but the preponderance of people and this will be no different.
Most of these radical students are so because they think it’s cool and they will grow out of it, as every generation does.
In the UK we were veering crazily to the left in the early 70’s with the trade unions running the country, not the Labour Party.
It fizzled out and things moved back to the center.
Then in the 80’s it went even further to the left with Militant Tendency taking control of Liverpool. Derek Hatton was presiding over Trotskyite rebellion.
That too fizzled out.
And so did the rise of the National Front and BNP. Super extreme right-wing groups that now are barely noticeable on the UK scene.
The social conditions simply do not exist now that existed in place like the Soviet Union to allow that to happen.
Similarly, too many people know what is happening so you cannot keep them in the dark like was possible under Stalin and Hitler.
As for dictators killing more people than mosquitos, well twas ever thus. Whether they were/are on the right or left, that has always been the case and this new radical left will never gain real power in this country. Never. So you can sleep well.
And that’s it big bucks.
Fuck the big bucks, because the vast majority of the big bucks are going to the super wealthy.
We’re sucking up to a murderous regime in Saudi Arabia because of money. It’s disgusting.
The job element is important I agree, but you can create a lot of jobs with $2 billion per day.
However, development of new technologies that may or may not benefit people at some time down the road is not as important as doing things to benefit people who are suffering NOW.
And let’s not forget how many people have died around the world because of US intervention and/or supplying arms.
Can you imagine if Yemeni weapons had wiped out a bus full of American school kids?
And btw, the UK is complicit too, so this isn’t a holier than thou thing.
Undeclared reasons and benefits of US defense spending are:
Manufacturing and technical jobs in the USA in key sectors of the economy
Development of new technologies that will become commercialized
Development of new products and materials that will become commercialized
Creating jobs in specific parts of the USA under political pressure or payback (Porkbarrel)
Cash flow benefits from exports of the above products to allies and also provide customer feedback for product improvement
Military Bases provide market and job opportunities for the surrounding civilian businesses
How many Congressmen support cutting government funding to DOD projects in their own districts? Very rare.
The above are probably not accurately quantifiable but probably really big bucks
The extremes of the Right and Left always kill a lot of people. Power does that to people.