"I've seen the best minds of my generation..." (Why the world is so much worse than it needs to be)

Our World In Data, via Hank and John Green's newsletter - the Malthusian Population Bomb Doom Dogma continues to be a lie on every single continent. (Click for larger.)
When was the last time you saw facts like these?
More good news, from Vox of all places.

Song: The Fireman (Paul McCartney) - Lovers In A Dream (from the great album Electric Arguments)

Beat poet Alan Ginsberg's 1956 "Howl" begins: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness."

Today, many of the best minds are busy destroying others' minds by driving them to madness. At companies like Facebook and Twitter, many of the smartest people spend their day figuring out how to push our rage and fear buttons. 

Human evolutionary heritage has left us with minds that are easily manipulated. So to make Zuckerberg, Musk, Trump, Murdoch et al. richer and more powerful, we are fed a steady diet of posts and stories that stoke our impotent outrage and unquenchable fear. 

And we gobble it down. Click click click like repost share forward forward forward.

"Impotent" is the key word. Musk and Trump et al. don't care if we are angry at them, as long as we are focusing on things that don't matter (GMOs, The Epstein Files, celebrity tweets, nematodes, cross-contamination, AI water use, Cecil the lion) and / or we can't do anything about (Gaza, carbon emissions, "existential" [sic] risks,  AI in general, "inequality," etc. etc. etc.). 

The example that just came across my (very limited and curated) feed is microplastics. People literally lose their minds; one person asked Fraser Cain of Universe Today if microplastics are "the great filter" - how every single technological civilization in the universe inevitably destroys itself. Even though we really can't do anything about microplastics and there is no actual evidence of real harm, many on the left spend far more time obsessing about microplastics than actually improving their health via exercise and diet!

To emphasize: Unlike the huge impacts of diet and exercise, there are no proven, significant health harms from microplastics - just the assumption that microplastics must be bad! As Vox's Dylan Scott summarizes the underlying, evidence-free assumption: "These manmade materials can’t be good for us." 

Their logic is simple: man-made = inherently poison. 

Like vaccines, stents, antibiotics, cochlear implants, statins, dental fillings, biosynthetic insulin, The Pill, folic acid, etc. 

The "terrifying" news isn't that there is smoking/cancer-level correlation of microplastics and disease (and there is definitely no microplastics signal in the mortality data over time). 

Instead, the terror comes from people mindlessly screaming "Microplastics are everywhere!" 

And now, it turns out that those "microplastics everywhere!" stories are not true! Even the (liberal) Guardian and Doom.com (i.e., Vox; more) have noted that these "microplastic are everywhere!" studies are bogus. They admit this even while they continue with the scare tactics; e.g., "plastic pollution has also soared, with 8bn tonnes now contaminating the planet from the top of Mount Everest to the deepest ocean trench." 

"Pollution" that is "contaminating the planet." 

Remember: People don't want deoxyribonucleic acid in their food. (That link is really worth clicking.)

I repeatedly bring up our futile fussing because in a world of immense unnecessary and preventable suffering, loads of liberals spend their limited time and energy impotently obsessing over and raging about minutia and distractions. This obviously leads to vastly more unhappiness. (I would bet that the health effects of the anxiety and stress that come from "Microplastics!" is worse than anything microplastics are actually doing. Another example of how we are destroying our own mental health.)

More importantly, focusing on the wrong things keeps caring individuals from doing work that can actually make the world a better place for those truly suffering.

The defining action of today's online "liberals" seems to be to ignore things over which they actually could have actual agency and impact. Every day, I wonder if it isn't simple self-sabotage, but rather the manipulation of infiltrators and enemies foreign and domestic who continue to profit from our rage and distraction. 

PS: On January 14, I logged out to work on this post. When I logged back in, I got this email:

I know this [below] is the kind of stupid shit you are talking about re: our movement. The comments of “boycott them” are even more eyeroll inducing …apparently a couple products have beeswax now. The comments (just read a few) are sort of a purity olympics. 

Our friend's commentary: 
"BREAKING NEWS 2% OF PRODUCTS ARE NOT VEGAN IN THIS STORE EVEN THOUGH 99% OF PRODUCTS IN ALL OTHER STORES ARE NOT VEGAN ALREADY. BUT LET'S FOCUS ON THIS ONE"