This denialism was already very strong well before the collapse of institutional trust that you're referring to. It goes back many decades, both at an institutional level and a population level.
Two things can be true at the same time.
1) We can recognize the measurable physical reality of climate change, the likely devastating impact on life, wealth, and well-being, and the absurdity of believing that all the data around it is an elaborate century long scam, especially when even huge moneyed interests that are condemned by it (e.g. Shell) acknowledge that it's really happening.
2) We can be suspicious of our government's ability to respond to it reasonably and not take advantage of and leverage the tragedy to force unpopular and restrictive changes on their populations.
That's a lazy cop-out, because the alternative to trusting those authorities is trusting business authorities, whom you have zero democratic control over, who have done nothing to earn trust, and who are driven by incredibly powerful, self-serving profit motives to fuck you over.
Saying that the public can't fix climate change because you don't trust public institutions, while careening down the road of private institutions causing climate change is illogical nonsense.
As Churchill once famously said, public solutions are the worst kinds of solutions, except all the others that have ever been tried.
A system of oligarchic patronage would also have the properties you describe, and I cannot seriously call that one a democracy, either.
They really didn't, what was thought to be sensible policy ended up exacerbating a problem much worse: primarily because COVID thrives in spreading in confined areas and was not viable for transmission outdoors when exposed to either water or UV light; furthermore, denying people to get outside, do excercise at gyms and get natural vitamin D, converse with people in person and overall just live their lives was cause to a much larger, but rarely spoken of epidemic unless you or your loved ones are in the medical field: suicide and over-dose out paced COVID deaths by mid-summer 2020 where I was and no one wants to talk about that.
People's mental health definitely has gotten worse from the lockdowns, and in the US states where they didn't do lock-downs thrived economically but had a huge economic disparity issue and homeless populations are at alarmingly scary levels.
Some people, like myself, dealt with out PTSD with intense gym sessions that were available 24hours/day (the adrenaline and endorphins were a lifeline) and depression was creeping in and I often had bouts of it despite my best efforts to make due.
The one good thing that came from lockdowns, in my view as an environmentalist, was that it showed how the Earth was actually healing itself: you could see the Himalayas from India when they stopped burning so much outdoors, the same could be seen in DTLA where most didn't even know there were mountains in the area because of pollution/smog.
I was an essential worker during this time, I chose to be rather than stay locked down a home as I knew after my teens in public high school that my cognition and over all mental health and well being suffer when confined in one place, and it was alarming to see it from the other side. People embraced it at first, made bread recipe videos and memes online and were actually rather nice to each other as we all had a common threat, but then after the Spring time it got really dark.
I want to write a chronicle of the events one day from the POV of small chef-owners/restaurateurs who got blind-sided from the politics of COVID, but the more the I think about it the more its a reflection on how poorly Society fared during that time and its actually never gotten better.
In the UK people out of work were given 80% of their pay. Denmark paid people 75% of their income. The Netherlands gave their people 90% of their wages. All of this on top of their already strong social services and safety nets which helped make sure that people were taken care of.
In the US we got nothing until after a lot of government fighting we were reluctantly given a couple $1,000 "stimulus" checks leaving Americans with record amounts of household debt. We're still seeing the impacts in increasing rates of utility disconnections and rising numbers of evictions and homelessness which will likely continue to get worse long before they improve.
This is completely subjective to someone's values. To some, living is more important than survival. Not everyone believes in courage in the sense of loving life (life as in the virtue of living, not specifically one's own life) enough to being ready to die for it. Lockdowns were smart to some, but a tyranny to others, and we are still paying dearly for them. Even those of you in bed with the green agenda should be distraught over this, the world's coal consumption set a new record in 2022, and the lockdowns are largely to blame.
I‘d love to learn more about that interaction.
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand why people deny climate change, but it usually comes down to a few basic things: 1. Group membership. 2. Seeing is believing, and not having been impacted yet. 3. Having been impacted, but unwilling to admit it due to embarrassment/sunk cost fallacy. Honestly I expect that after this summer most people in cohort 2 will move to cohort 3.
Possibly, although that would imply that you'd see more acceptance at the state, local, and individual level, and I certainly haven't seen that.
What I have seen is people eager to latch on to any narrative that doesn't involve big changes, especially not big preemptive changes.
They would be 'legions' comprised of men like the the Qanon Shamaon I take it? If so, this would be a short fought battle and these often over-weight, out of shape diabetics wouldn't do very much. Moreover, it was Trump who advocated for lockdowns and was the first to highlight not allowing super-spreader events to take place as the Pandemic started to get serious in Asia: unlike that walking corpse Pelosi had in San Francisco for the Lunar New Year to goad her voter base into thinking she was more progressive and woke and told everyone to go out and celebrate.
Again, facts be damned, people are hardliners that justify their own cognitive dissonance.
You strike on something notable, but fail to see the facts that these people are ill-informed and much of social media has made them that way, which if we are honest is really what a place like HN should be able to do considering it's root within tech.
But hey... who says they aren't in denial and deluding themselves, either?
No, more like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, the QAnon shaman did serve as a pretty effective media distraction, though.
I'm going to be incredibly cynical and go back to my channer days for a second because you think this holds water for some reason:
I can't believe anyone thinks these cosplaying militiaman would hold their own in any real conflict, it's pathetic: look at how the bodies of even mercenaries from Wagner are piling up when former Ukrainian farmers, bakers, bank tellers, and artists are trained by and with modern Western weaponry. The fact that anyone thinks these things is why I think Social Media has irreparably damaged most people's minds.
Bubba and his buddies stack of ARs isn't going to mean a thing if they were taken seriously, it takes one drone strike at the local watering hole for this to end; what I think is a media distraction is how Jan 6th was a psyop that let these imbeciles into one of the most fortressed places on Earth in order to increase survielence and policing budgets; they let the National Guard sleep on the floor and opined how under-budgeted they were and was unpreventable when their is actual video footage of the security letting the mob into the Capital rather than doing their job and stopping them from making a mess.
Hell one guy even had a heart attack on the way to storm the Capital by tazing himself in the balls [0].
I think I've had enough of HN for today...
0: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/01/13/fac...
Americans have believed it since the country was founded, it's part of their national myth, that they began as a ragtag bunch of drunken rebels who took down the greatest empire in the world with nothing but grit and tenacity (and definitely no help from the French, Spanish and Dutch.)
Jan 6th was such a mess not because it was a psyop to increase surveillance and police budgets (Americans by and large love both of those things during Republican administrations, and the government doesn't need a pretext) but because despite American bluster about watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants, all most American gun owners know about actual combat or insurgent operations they learned from playing boomer shooters.
But yes, they absolutely believe the government's fear of the pistols they keep hidden under their pillows is the only thing keeping the US from tilting into hard Stalinist tyranny at any moment.
Probably true—I wonder what he did to earn that level of trust?
We need to make predictions for more than 30 years that are accurate before we trust scientists?
Or has it been destroyed? By what?
You talk about another completely arbitrary problem with government decision making without context as if it dismisses this entire argument without need for explanation.
You then go on to say that Trumpists trying to start a civil war do so not for comfort but due to trust.
That couldn't be further from the truth. The entire point of the far right propaganda machine is to aim for comfort. Anything wrong is the out groups fault and eliminating them will bring back your comfort is the tagline of that mindset.