I saw this ridiculous article on the front page of the New York Times: “Climate Change Enters the Therapy Room/Ten years ago, psychologists proposed that a wide range of people would suffer anxiety and grief over climate. Skepticism about that idea is gone” by Ellen Barry. I wasn’t going to post on it, though I was tempted to ask, “Why is this pathetic, paranoid women made crazy by exactly the kind of climate change hysteria propagated by the Times worthy of such attention, or any attention at all?” However, I’m buried in more useful issues already. Then Ann Althouse, for some reason, blogged about it, with a long quote including “They came wrapped in plastic, often in layers of it, that she imagined leaving her house and traveling to a landfill, where it would remain through her lifetime and the lifetime of her children. She longed, really longed, to make less of a mark on the earth. But she had also had a baby in diapers, and a full-time job, and a 5-year-old who wanted snacks. At the age of 37, these conflicting forces were slowly closing on her, like a set of jaws…”
As she often does, Althouse just teed up the thing for her commenters to swing at. Had I written about it, I would have concentrated on how the Times, like the rest of the media, takes no responsibility for its role in driving once normal people like the woman in the story nuts. The exact same phenomenon is occurring regarding the Wuhan virus. The mindless terror the news media seeded about Donald Trump–still is seeding–is another example.
Ethics Alarms 