The media has an incentive to produce emotion inducing content and politician will naturally leverage those emotions because American politics are pure pathos.
If you cannot see how that leads to gloom and doom oriented media and politicians that lean on eschatological themes, you aren’t woke.
> The media has an incentive to produce emotion inducing content and politician will naturally leverage those emotions because American politics are pure pathos.
Yeah, that's true, but it doesn't contradict my point. This is a hard problem, because there isn't some malevolent agent acting consciously at the center of it. It's a bunch of different people acting naturally and responding to their environment and incentives.
This sibling comment probably has it part right (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31355482). The true cause of this overprotective hypervigilance is probably weakened communities, which itself is most likely an unintended side effect of a bunch of different things.
>> they certainly didn't create the phenomenon of hyper-vigalent school paraprofessionals.
> "they" probably contributed to the culture that produced the current school paraprofessionals.
The point I'm making is that it's not politicians who are driving this. They certainly participate, but they're responding to the incentives and concerns of their constituents. "Think of the children" implies they consciously created this and/or are the main drivers, which is false.