"Do Something" Porn

The action is the point, the outcome is irrelevant

At this point, it’s trite to talk about human’s Darwinian “fight or flight” response because it’s been discussed ad nauseam. But I’d like to point out that it shows animals (humans included) are predisposed to action. We run away, or we take direct action against our adversary. The axiom is not “fight, flight or stand there with a stupid look on your face…” but should it be?

Even in times of imminent danger, there is a “stand there” phase to determine our options, no matter how instantaneously that mode may occur. Maybe it’s not part of the axiom because it is an intermediary state. But we should also be aware that fight/flight is a binary choice in a world where binary choices don’t exist, and that fight/flight is simply shorthand and the result of many prior decisions that occur during the “stand there” phase. Simply answering the question “will you fight or run” doesn’t help us because the more accurate question is “what will you fight with?” Or “Where will you run to?”

Let’s consider an example: you are camping in the woods, and see a grizzly bear charging at you, what should you do? Well, that wholly depends on how you assess the situation. Let’s demonstrate this in an extremely simplified decision tree.

So as we can see, before we get to fight/flight there are a variety of assessments made, based on our current circumstances.

The broader point is that simply “doing something” is a great recipe to get mauled by a bear…more careful consideration is required.

So what’s the point of taking you through all this inane nonsense? Because I want to address a fetish that is endemic throughout our political class today, something I call “Do Something Porn” (DSP). What is DSP? It is the belief that when we face a political or societal problem we have to just do something. What that is, doesn’t matter, we just need to prove we can do something. We see calls for DSP so frequently, I can find examples of it nearly every day, from all sides of the political spectrum.

Here is an example of AOC on the MSNBC show “All in with Chris Hayes” discussing Climate Change:

The entire United States government knew climate change was real and human cause in 1989 the year I was born. So the initial response was threat market handle it. They will do it. 40 years and three market solutions have not changed our position. This does not mean — this does not mean that we change our entire structure of government. But what it means is that we need to do something, something and that is what this solution is about [emphasis added].

Here is Joe Biden after the recent Uvalde school shooting:

We stood at such a place just 12 days before, across from a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, memorializing 10 fellow Americans — a spouse, a parent, a grandparent, a sibling, gone forever. At both places, we spent hours with hundreds of family members who were broken, and whose lives will never be the same. They had one message for all of us: Do something, just do something; for God’s sake, do something [emphasis added].

Or Chuck Schumer during Covid, talking about the rumor that President Trump was going to disband the Covid taskforce

“I don’t know, I didn’t hear about that, but they really haven’t had anyone in charge except the President who every day has a different — he spends half his time on whims, medicines that don’t work. He spends half his time on blaming other people or other issues. You know, he’s now blaming China. Well, guess what, Mr. President? It doesn’t — even if it came from China, and even if it came from China only, why didn’t you do something about it [emphasis added]?

How about Dr. Deborah Birx of Covid fame? As pointed out by Alex Berenson, in Silent Invasion, Birx’s reminiscences about her time during covid, she writes “I prefer doing things rather than talking about them”. What better example could I possibly find of DSP than the fanatics that ran the government covid response, and destroyed millions of lives in the process? But Dr. Brix can always say…wait for it…she did something.

So we can see, again, and again, and again, people calling for action. What action, they don’t know, but they want something done. Anything done! But, of course, we know this is a cheap political ploy. It’s farcical because they are constantly rejecting ideas to address those issues, but that’s not what they mean anyway. We know, that the only ideas which constitute something are their preferred policies.

So why is DSP so popular that Pornhub should have its own category dedicated to it? Because DSP has three distinct advantages, which make the powerful particularly hot and bothered by it:

1. They can claim the other side is lazy, or not interested in solving the problem

2. They don’t need to put forth any policies in the public sphere that could be openly debated before a law is passed (remember Nancy Pelosi’s “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it” position on the Obamacare bill?)

3. They can hide their true desires in 10,000-page legislation which .0001% of the population will ever read or even hear about

As I have been on the lookout for DSP over the past several years, it has become clear that those who use it are reactionaries. In fact, the very nature of the tactic is reactionary…all emotion, no logic. But it is worse than that because it leads to “do anything” policies, aka “we did something so now that issue can go on the back burner because we racked up our political points”. Let’s use the recent “Bipartisan Safer Communities Act” the US federal government passed in response to the Uvalde shooting as an example.

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The main points of the legislation were, federal funding for mental health programs and school security upgrades, tougher background checks for buyers younger than 21, funding to encourage states to implement "red flag" laws to remove firearms from people considered a threat, and closing the so-called "boyfriend loophole" by blocking gun sales to those convicted of abusing unmarried intimate partners.

While I am against “red flag” laws due to their circumvention of Constitutional rights and have serious questions about the extent and type of background checks on those under 21, I want to hit on the funding for the mental health and school security piece in particular, because this shows the horrific perniciousness of DSP.

First the mental health portion:

Let me start by saying that, the US clearly has a severe mental health crisis in general, and specifically among our children. I won’t bother to cite all the studies that show massive increases in rates of depression, self-harm, and suicidal ideation among our youth, but it is not just a crisis, it is THE crisis. It should be the #1 issue on everyone’s minds.

According to the CBO estimates, covering the decade of 2022-2032, the bill provides just under $9B for things like community block grants, mental health awareness and training, and the National Suidice Hotline. To use round numbers, let’s call it $1B annually. Great right? Think again.

Based on a report from the Mental Illness Policy Organization, in 1955, there were 340 psychiatric beds available per 100,000 people. According to the experts interviewed in their report, that put the US safely above the minimum threshold of 50 beds per 100,000. However, by 2005, the bed count dropped to 17 per 100,000…or a 95% reduction and far below the minimum acceptable threshold. Put another way, the US currently has approximately 56,000 psychiatric beds available when we need a minimum of 165,000 (based on the current population of 330M)…109,000 beds short of minimum acceptable levels.

Further, according to a 2012 study, the cost for treatment ranged from approximately $1,100 - $767/day depending on the funding source and condition under treatment. To provide for the most generous scenario, I will use the lower range figure and assume a 75% occupancy rate which means operating one of these beds costs $210,000 annually.

According to that math, in order to make up the gap to the LOWEST acceptable number of beds, it will cost the US nearly 23 billion dollars, annually.

How are we feeling about our annual $1B in total incremental mental health funding now?

Now let’s turn our attention to school security:

The CBO estimates there is ~$4.6B in total spending for this aspect of the bill, with ~$2B of that, between 2022 - 2026 going to “School Improvement Programs” and “Safe Schools and Citizenship Education.” Again, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that all that $2B is going towards making schools more secure.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, there were just under 100,000 public schools in the US in 2018 (98,469, to be exact), which means each school will receive ~$4,000 in annual funding over the course of the next four years to make schools safer. Does that seem sufficient?

To put this in perspective, just doing a quick search for “how much is a bulletproof window”, pulls up a company called Total Security Solutions. TSS quotes a price of $7,000-$10,000 for a minimal bulletproof glass system, which is a “straight-forward system—something suitable for a stand-alone ticket window, small retail setting, or after-hours transactions.“““So, the federal funding wouldn’t even cover a single bulletproof window for a school.

Now I am by no means a security expert, but a two-minute web search by a dummy like me (along with common sense) indicates that $4k doesn’t do shit for protecting schools.

I chose this example because it’s in instances like these where the damage of a DSP attitude is worse than doing nothing because it takes the pressure off those in power by giving them the excuse that they did something (when they didn’t do a f!@#$ing thing).

So, when you see a DSP tactic deployed, make sure to give it no legitimacy because those who heed its call will have their faces ripped off by a grizzly.