{"id":5191,"date":"2017-03-30T13:13:49","date_gmt":"2017-03-30T18:13:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=5191"},"modified":"2017-03-30T13:13:49","modified_gmt":"2017-03-30T18:13:49","slug":"chicken-littles-of-straw","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=5191","title":{"rendered":"Chicken Littles of Straw"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Chicken Little freaked out when hit on the head with an acorn, and called out, “The Sky is Falling! The Sky is Falling!<\/em>“\u00c2\u00a0 Everyone goes berserk, then they see it’s just an acorn.\u00c2\u00a0 Chicken Little then retires to being an overreacting chicken, and things return to normal.\u00c2\u00a0 The end.<\/p>\n

Calling someone a ‘Chicken Little,’ then, works as a form of analogy.\u00c2\u00a0 One sees someone reacting strongly to something, perhaps that it forebodes something worse, and one then points out that they are overreacting or don’t see the situation clearly.<\/p>\n

It’s a pretty common feature of contemporary American political culture for folks to think and say that Donald Trump is a danger not just to this country’s prosperity and safety, but to the world’s.\u00c2\u00a0 He’s an authoritarian, he seems to have (or at least there’s the accusation that he’s) colluded with another state to secure his election, and he seems to be a general nincompoop who surrounds himself with avaricious doofuses.\u00c2\u00a0 That makes him dangerous as the President of the United States.<\/p>\n

Well, Heather Wilhelm at NRO<\/a> has had it with the doom-saying chicken littles out there.<\/p>\n

\n

The unprecedented volume of apocalyptic media pronouncements that Trump has inspired is unhealthy. . . .\u00c2\u00a0 How many times can one presidential administration end life as we know it?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The coverage of the Trump administration is “crazed and breathless” and bent on spurring your outrage or stoking your fears with predictions of doom.\u00c2\u00a0 Chicken Little apocalyptic journalists.\u00c2\u00a0 But Wilhelm has a counter to this:<\/p>\n

\n

[C]ongratulations! If you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re reading this, it means you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re still alive, and have survived the approximately 5,000 world-ending decisions that the Trump administration has supposedly made thus far this year.<\/strong> The Russians, at least as far as I know, have not yet taken over. Faced with budget challenges and various logistical challenges, including the fact more than 1,000 miles of our border with Mexico is actually a river, it seems that Trump\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s much-decried Great Wall of America could be slowly shuffled off into the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153it seemed like a good idea at the time, but maybe not really\u00e2\u20ac\u009d pile. When it comes to health care, congressional Republicans seem to be in the political equivalent of that one unlucky bumper car that gets stuck in the corner, no matter which way you steer. As Francis Fukuyama addressed the panic in Politico this week: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Trump\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a dictator? He can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t even repeal Obamacare.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The last line’s funny, I’ll give Fukuyama and Wilhelm that.\u00c2\u00a0 But how is this a reply to the worries people actually had about the Trump administration?<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Seriously, the evidence here is that things aren’t SOOOO bad, so what’s with all the hand-wringing?\u00c2\u00a0 Moreover, it’s not that people were predicting that the world would end<\/em>, or that it’ll be like RED DAWN <\/a><\/em>up in here.\u00c2\u00a0 The worries were that he’s an authoritarian dingus, who will either<\/em> do something belligerent or <\/em>something stupid.\u00c2\u00a0 That he hasn’t done something mindbogglingly belligerent<\/em> or incomprehesibly stupid<\/em> YET isn’t reason that people who had worries that he will do something belligerent or stupid were wrong or had no basis.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chicken Little freaked out when hit on the head with an acorn, and called out, “The Sky is Falling! The Sky is Falling!“\u00c2\u00a0 Everyone goes berserk, then they see it’s just an acorn.\u00c2\u00a0 Chicken Little then retires to being an overreacting chicken, and things return to normal.\u00c2\u00a0 The end. Calling someone a ‘Chicken Little,’ then, … Continue reading Chicken Littles of Straw<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,23],"tags":[2155,733,1964,1358],"class_list":["post-5191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-straw-man","category-weak-analogy","tag-chicken-little","tag-false-analogy","tag-straw-man","tag-weak-analogies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5191"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5191\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5193,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5191\/revisions\/5193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}