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"Needs to be told locally." Someone with a national platform (MSNBC... heck, The Daily Show) hammering this for a couple of weeks could make a real difference.

By the losses, like the US no longer having any disease to report to WHO. The problem is that the rebuilding from the wreckage will be the work of a decade or more.

Seems like that's how bad governments get thrown out at the polls - the accumulation of visible consequences of bad policy

(By the way, that goes for other stuff too – find someone on the border with Ukraine who's scared about Putin aggression. Or have @johngreensbluesky.bsky.social hook you up with someone working in the developing world fight against TB.)

Destruction sells papers

See the Measles epidemic in Texas. Medical "Freedom" at work.

@nmalhotra.bsky.social and Alexander Healy have a fascinating (and underappreciated) piece on just this issue: pols get points for disaster response but not prevention/resilience: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Risk mitigation, one of many things the Government spends a lot of resources on.. The current administration doesn't care about the public and it's quite obvious. Where we see risks, they see opportunity, and so do our adversaries, who love this fiasco and are quite intent on taking advantage.

I love this take

In a sense, focusing on “heroic” data rather than…”ordinary” data?

Quite agree. This dynamic has been true since the 80s when Reagan first proposed the "govt always = failure" narrative. You'd think we'd have come up with a counter narrative by now.

I'm reminded of a talk I once saw about CGI and how hard it is to show how good your work is when the point of the work is to be undetectable.

Re: decimating the fragile safety net for older people and frail people, I tell my friends how *great* it will be when we can step around the throngs older and frail people hanging around dying on the sidewalk.

This does explain why the Christo-Fascist pro-natalists hate government...

Sadly, the people that you need to reach don't care about how their government functions until it affects them personally. They don't care about clean air until they can't breathe. Or water until they can't drink from the tap. I don't mean to be pessimistic. I think that I am being honest.

As one public health expert said at the beginning of the COVID pandemic: We will have succeeded if you think we overreacted. The prevention of a greater disaster makes most people think either that the government did too much or that the government didn’t do anything.

📌

I think we should at least try the past of avoidable loss.

Then change the way you tell the story. You know how inconvenient - or dangerous - it is when the power goes out? Or talk about how government impacts your day - that your toaster oven didn't catch on fire and your clothes have care tags, that you have clean water from the tap.

Sometimes “how would this be covered in another country” is a helpful exercise, but perhaps the field of journalism with the most experience generating this kind of content is…sports. I’d be interested to see how good sports journalists would approach covering government like this.

These morons, Trump and Musk, actually think the Gov't should be run like a business. The level of ignorance and stupidity in that belief is off the charts..

But this information asymmetry has allowed cynical corporate aligned politicians to develop a false narrative that the government is a failing “deep state” that must be destroyed. That is not true. The proof is obvious: People want to move here. And it’s not just because of our great shopping.

I posted about this issue a few weeks ago: Imagine if we thought of taxes as investments in our collective future success, and reported on it accordingly. "10 year investment in schools and hospitals to pays dividends as successful healthy students enter workforce."

They are also allowed to lose, repeatedly, without consequence or condemnation.

Govt wins don’t tend to fit Q1-4 or annual windows in terms of being evident. It’s really testing me trying to figure out where/when a loss would be evident

And of course not just the rate but the *type* and *reason*. A change in the rate of commercial air crashes would be a bigger deal than a change in the rate of GA crashes. A change in how often ATC or other systems are a factor, also interesting (if again hard to do if they stop investigating).

Show charts of all the dangers in the past that decreased. Show the counts of saved lives. Show the charts with unchanged risks plotted and how much damage and life lists that would lead to. How many of their own friends would be lost to disease, everything they'd lose.

Unfortunately, the story will be told by bad things not averted after the firing of those who keep us safe.

"Don't it always seen to go, that you don't know what you've got until it's gone."

Brilliant. "The deep state": pre-emptive, risk-avoidance infrastructure - stupid people like Musk think "that's not productive therefore it's a waste of money". Counterfactual thinking is hard. "The deep state": making sure your kids don't get smallpox. #Causalsky #Causality #Counterfactuals

Heres a start: www.amazon.com/Assault-Stat...

Yes. We need to personalize the thousands of people who’ve been kicked out of their jobs! Kicked out of making our government work and out of protecting the citizens of our country. Please.

Those that do this work—or were doing it—need to speak out. Dems need to provide platforms: hearings, set up press interviews for them. “Fired” employees shouldn’t walk away; they should sit down w/ colleagues in their offices. Stay. Protest. Call media. Get friend to protest outside. Etc

Point out that DOGE is the very corrupt, elitist, deep state government they feared. Dems/media need to stop being so afraid of discussing our system as reverse Robin Hoodism. MAGA is angry about being ripped off and rightfully so. Discuss in plain language who it is that is actually robbing them.

I was thinking of the flip side of this when I read this: lite.cnn.com/2025/02/21/h... Low sepsis rates were taken for granted because hospital staff would work to reduce that. Now with the threat of jail time, hospital staff's inaction results in a rise of sepsis.

One approach is to use a heat map like the chronological ones for vaccines or the grounding of flights during 9/11. It won’t convince conspiracy theorists but a strong image can make a strong argument even to low information voters.

I can only help you to begin. Tell the listener how the Body Politic, both sides of the Aisle, failed to hold Trump Admin responsible for the Pandemic death toll and then failed completely in holding the Jan 6 Insurrectionists to account. This is because your system of govt is diseased.

Sadly, body counts

For one, we need to start talking about the progress we've achieved. Clean air, safe water, childhood health outcomes, food and consumer goods safety. We are a culture of airing grievances, not thankfulness and grace. We have created the personal vibes that have led to our political climate.

Exactly right

I was trying to explain the parallels between 1933 Germany and current events and the person couldn’t understand that the Holocaust hadn’t yet happened.

stories also cut both ways: when you assert that you're cutting waste but then find no waste and kill people instead, the story you're telling loses its power. no one believed the official story told by the Soviet government for the final decades of its existence, which is why it finally collapsed

Of course they've been used publicly. GHW Bush tried to convince ppl with numbers and even had a good name for it: Voodoo Economics. Reagan crushed him with charm and stories, then coopted him as his VP candidate. By making the stories of individuals hurt more famous Musk becomes more infamous.

It is being used to count things that count differently: investment, savings, opportunity costs, income, wealth, etm. IMHO the usefulness of one currency unit for such cross-purposes is a core fault in the way we do things. That's also due to market dogma pervading Western thinking for fifty years.

however it's done, I think it's more important to tell it soon than to get it completely right; "this absence of government resulted in this broken thing happening to a person" only works as long as people remember it used to NOT be like that, and boy are people good at rationalizing

There's another part to consider: the parts of the government that the people DO interact with and benefit from are managed by states. So unless you look beyond the surface, removing those federal programs doesn't hurt you, because your Medicaid is called MediCal. Your ACA is called Kynect.

Brilliantly said.

The people who vote for this sort of stuff are not convinced by facts. So when matter if you told them that the problem was there? They have a problem with object permanents. Other people and other things don't exist unless they are affected personally.

I think it's also important that pre-WW2 imperialism was driven by economic elites who saw their growth as limited by well-functioning nation states. These people saw the avoidance of loss very differently than the rest of their countries.

In my view, it’s about so much infrastructure we take for granted

A good analogy is software testing. Companies don’t like spending money hiring testers…but they don’t understand how much money it saves them…until they don’t do software testing. A defect found early on in development costs xxx times less than if gets to production.

And I just opened WAPO and saw this on top. All advanced govts, whether democracies or dictatorships, evaluate this type of move, except, now, ours. Trump’s global funding freeze leaves anti-terror programs in limbo www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/0...

If the risk is extremely high, like say a nuclear reactor meltdown, your investment goes up accordingly. No reason Joe Plumber can't understand this.

You can look at likelihood of failures with and without the quality investments. You can put numbers on it. I like the examples I've seen of childhood illness and death before and after vaccination, for example. Very clear.

"Cost of Quality" type assessments. You can make a list of costs like investments in people, better materials, inspections, training, and on the other side, costs of internal failures (scrap, rework) and external failures (product failures, injury & death).