Have many of us have become the useful idiots of the corporate media overloads?
I know it's fashionable to blame Facebook for the divisiveness, but I'm old enough to recall Obama's 2004 DNC speech that got him his first national attention. Before there was Facebook, Obama was talking about divisiveness.
I firmly believe anger and anxiety is constantly injected into the mainstream corporate media to increase eyeballs and stickiness. One of the side effects of this content strategy is the divisiveness we see now.
Yes, Facebook (or twitter) amplifies these, but that's because Facebook provides every one of us a platform to exhale the frustrations we accumulate consuming these anger-laden content.
Ingeniously, the corporate media blamed all these on Facebook and whoever is/was advising Zuck really failed to come up with a solid strategy to counter this narrative beyond rebranding FB app icon and some color scheme changes.
It's well known that foreign intelligence services are active on social media trying to foment divisiveness. They're not even necessarily pushing a specific political goal, just getting Americans to hate each other. The Russians appear to be the most active but other countries play the same game. So before you get drawn into an online argument, ask yourself am I dealing with an authentic person or a paid foreign troll?
This isn't even a new phenomenon. Back during the Cold War before there was a real Internet the Soviet intelligence services did similar things by infiltrating political action groups and paying off journalists to write stories calculated to stoke dissent.
The problem is it's not an argument that manipulates you, it's passive reporting and it only has to be echoed by one other real person before it becomes "the rumor on the twittersphere" or whatever.
Even the act of people writing debunking articles like "Is shocking X actually true? No." is still doing a little bit of work to inject that idea into your psyche.
>Even the act of people writing debunking articles like "Is shocking X actually true? No." is still doing a little bit of work to inject that idea into your psyche.
I get a chuckle every time I see a social media post about <subject> that's some minor mishap and OP is pretending to be repentant ("if only I had <virtue singling trope that applies to that subject> this wouldn't have happend") and all the commenters virtue signaling to each other along those same lines.
Little do they know they're making it seem more normal for people to do whatever sin they're all hating on.
It's interesting that you put it that way. I see the term "virtue signaling" as one aspect of the culture war. It's a blanket ad hominem attack: "They don't really believe X. They just want everybody else to believe that they believe X. X is actually so bad that nobody really believes it." Thus allowing them to sidestep any discussion of the validity of X; they just assume it's false and attack the person.
In practice, I find that the term is mostly just used as "vice signalling". It's not really an argument at all, but rather a call to other subscribers to their ideology that they're all in this together, as indicated by the use of the common buzzword.
The term is used only along ideological lines, and I do believe that those ideological lines are turning increasingly hostile. Calling it a "war" is always going to have weird connotations, but the terminology used for hostility is always subject to escalation.
I do believe the divisions are growing louder and more angry, if not always violent (though there's a good case to be made that they have gotten more violent over the last 40 years or so). Is that where your disagreement is, or is it elsewhere?
Russia and China have to deal with this too (through different mechanisms), so it's not unexpected that they'd do it back.
They are also at much higher risk of fragmentation. Russia with the far east, etc. China with Xinjiang, etc.
I wouldn't expect them to stop unilaterally. It would require a treaty like SALT, which the US has shown zero appetite for - likely coz it sees fragmentation of rival states as a bigger prize than preventing political arguments at thanksgiving.
Well before even the Cold War. The USSR was pumping lots of propaganda into the US as far back as the Red Scares of the 1920s.
A Clockwork Orange uses Russian slang ("nadsat") based on the aggressive propaganda that was blasted at the West. There are some uncomfortable comparisons to be made with modern times there, e.g. Q-Anon and aggressive propaganda aimed at the survivalist types...
It's well known that foreign intelligence services are active on social media trying to foment divisiveness. They're not even necessarily pushing a specific political goal, just getting Americans to hate each other.
I see the same behavior in some users here on HN. You could replace "social media" with "Hacker News" and your comment would read the same.
I don't know if you include HN as under the umbrella of "social media" or not, but I just thought I'd point this out. I see lots of people "culture warring" about Facebook and "Big Tech"... on HN.
I wonder if the same thing happens within/between companies. Industrial espionage is a thing. When billions of dollars are at stake, why not "cultural activities" too?
Isn't this effectively what is happening when a major media outlet writes a piece about how $SocialMediaCompany has a racist/sexist "bro" culture or allows racist/sexist $SocialMediaCeleb on their platform? As much as I dislike social media, a lot of these attacks have been made with only minimal substantive claims, so it seems like the real goal is to delegitimize (sabotage) the upcoming/ competing businesses.
It's a thing between teenage girls (and boys), it's not some new tactic. If you read about Ben Franklin, he was huge into the idea of secret societies of a small number of people. The primary reason was that they were immune to this type of dissent building and outside opinion influencing.
He structured secret societies like an MLM, where you only know you're direct downline, and your recruiters direct downline. Each secret society had 6 members, and each of the 6 members would create another one with 6 members, but never sharing the identities across the groups and instruct each of the six to replicate the structure and so on. Each group of 6 would meet, discuss topics, come to a group consensu, and pass this up and down. This is how the revolution and much more was fomented.
> The Russians appear to be the most active but other countries play the same game.
Russia is bombarded incessantly by US propaganda from US troll factories.
Ever since I'm on Internet, I'm reading that Russians are drunkards, barbarians, that our past (even going 1000 years back) is all history of mutual killings, yadda yadda.
It's so disgusting that I guess it even somewhat stopped to work because people are tired of this shit.
But nevertheless: any time on any social network there's a post like: "Look, there's a new undeground station opened in city N", there would be thousands of comments like:
- Built on money stolen from us! We don't need no stinking underground, better give this money to starving retired people
- 100500 millions of rubles were stolen during construction by Putins' cronies
- I'm a construction engineer and I assure you it was built in the wrong place by worthless dumb Russian engineers and this will cause the city N to collapse in 10 years
- City N doesn't need new underground stations, it needs more cars, nobody uses underground, what a useless project!
- 10 opposition activists supporting Navalny were buried during construction of this station. Wake up sheeple! You can become the next victim of the regime!
- Putin destroyed education in Russia! Russian engineers can't design anything. The blueprints for the station were stolen from glorious US engineers. Elon Musk designed the station and Petrov and Boshirov stolen them from him! They also attempted to poison him with Novichok but failed again, the dose was too small!
....
Literally hundreds of such comments under every video on YouTube in Russian, every post in Facebook, Vk, Pikabu, just anywhere it is possible to write comments.
And I guess it's even open information that at least 10-15 well funded organizations in US exist to publish this sort of comments. At least I remember reading how some US president assign funds for several such organizations.
It started to happen when the first Internet link came to Russia and it intensifies with every year. We don't have resources to publish as much bullshit as US organizations and organizations sponsored by the US (e.g. in former USSR republics that has cheap labor, high levels of unemployment and almost 100% of the population are good Russian speakers).
Ever since I'm on Internet, I'm reading that Russians are drunkards, barbarians, that our past (even going 1000 years back) is all history of mutual killings, yadda yadda.
As an American on the Internet since 1990, I didn't realize that Russians are like that.
As an American on the Internet since 1990, I didn't realize that Russians are like that.
You mean you don't believe me? When you watch Hollywood movies if there's Russian in the movie, would it be a good person? Or most Russians in the movies are blood thirsty villains that love to kill people as a hobby?..
Or have you watched the famous HBO series Chernobyl? Do you think that we really drink warm vodka from the bottle any time of the day? Or that all engineers, managers and government officials in Russia/USSR are clueless psycopaths like they're in Chernobyl and other movies and series about Russia/USSR?
Is this propaganda written in English or Russian?
In Russian. This propaganda is for creating dissent in Russian population, no sense to publish it in English. Besides, you can hire lots of people in poor former USSR republics to publish comments in Russian literally for the price of a bowl of rice. Such expenses are negligible for the US budget, why waste the opportunity.
Conversely, where Russia will take that much money and that many English-speaking people to create the same amount of propaganda? It's impossible. We're losing the war of comments and fake news and we never could win it. I'm really doubtful that we even tried to fight back.
You won't find many people capable of writing texts in English in Russia. And usually those people already have a good job and they're usually on the side of the West, it's very unlikely they would agree to work against the West.
I'm not sure corporate media had much choice in the matter if they wanted to survive. Almost all are for profit companies that lost heavily when eyeballs shifted to social media. Social media companies make money off of ads, so they optimized viewership without being concerned with the consequences. In order for corporate media to stay alive and stop hemorrhaging viewers, they needed to play by the new rules. It's a shit snowball that is growing as it rolls down hill and it doesn't seem like there is anyway to slow it down or stop it. Or maybe it's more feedback loop like, like a closed loop toilet where no plumber is brave enough to confront it.
Yes, individuals can flee to get out of the path of said shit snowball, but their descendants, family, friends, and neighbors are directly down hill from it.
I'm not too optimistic that its possible to have enough people willingly boycott these news delivery pipelines to the point where it changes the ad dollar calculus for these corporations. They have been pretty great at cultivating addiction in a large proportion of the population, it seems like an extremely tough battle.
Do you mean all people? Or a small portion of those people? Maybe building a shit snowball bomb shelter aka cutting internet to a household might be able to save a small portion of those people, but I'm not sure how anyone outside of elected representatives could ever hope to stop it for the wider population when the thing has so incredibly much inertia.
They were going this way before the internet threatened them. Newspaper reporting (and journalism generally) was becoming increasingly emotion-based rather than fact-based.
The rise of the tabloids in the UK is a good example: highly-partisan papers that appealed to specific demographics with stories that aimed to evoke an emotional response (usually a negative emotion).
It's the same mechanic, though: competition for eyeballs. Social media became the super-competitor, but the ad-based model would have got there eventually even without the internet.
> They were going this way before the internet threatened them. Newspaper reporting (and journalism generally) was becoming increasingly emotion-based rather than fact-based.
"Yellow Journalism" was a thing as long as we had newspapers and a free press. The term was coined in the 1890s, but was almost certainly around long before then. William Randolph Hurst did what Rupert Murdoch does now, just with slower turnaround time. If you assume Fox News help make Iraq happen, then they've both caused the same amount of wars.
> It's the same mechanic, though: competition for eyeballs. Social media became the super-competitor, but the ad-based model would have got there eventually even without the internet.
It was already there, by a long shot. Internet social media just made it omnipresent, automated, and responsive.
Yea, they were definitely ahead of the curve. The rest of the industry still had some soul and dignity for a while there. The hacker news links to news sites with sliding bars for left or right bias are nice and all, but I'm not sure they're doing anything but preaching to the anti tribe choir. Not sure how we go about uniting or at least going the other direction without some horrible disasterous tragedy like a world war or an alien invasion. Would have thought maybe a global pandemic would have done the trick, but not bad enough I guess.
People actively self-select for this type of tribalism. Be it sports or politics, it gives average people the feeling of identity and purpose.
There was a brief period in the mid 20th century when centralized communication was far superior to decentralized communication, and the populous hadn't had much time to apply selective pressure toward more divisive media, but even then, you had McCarthyism, Jim Crow, pro-war/anti-war, etc.
Humans are a tribal species and hate comes easy. You can't blame any single player or small groups of players. It's more of a species level problem. And I'm not convinced the current levels of divisiveness are historically unprecedented, albeit high.
Buried in this otherwise mediocre article posted a few weeks back is a visual called "Ideological positions of the major parties" [0]. It can be a proxy for relative internal divisiveness in the country (note that the lowest periods of divisiveness had high international divisiveness).
The media didn't create divisiveness, although significant parts of it exploit the divisiveness for commercial purposes. We have objective evidence of severe legislative polarization at the federal level going back to the 1980s: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
"We have objective evidence of severe legislative polarization at the federal level going back to the 1980s"
Political divisiveness in the US goes back much further than that.
In the "you think it's bad now" department, I remember reading about the case of, I think it was in the 1800's, of a congressman assaulting another congressman with a cane over some political issue.
Of course the most infamous case of political divisiveness in the US was the Civil War.. which, judging by the Confederate flags man conservatives/Republicans proudly fly and the reactions they get from more liberal parts of the political spectrum, and the incomplete desegregation of many parts of the country, discrimination against minorities, vilification/adulation of Confederate statues, etc, still hasn't been fully resolved in many people's minds.
Getting to more recent, but still older than 1980's, political events.. it's not like the country was united during the Vietnam era or during that of the 60's counterculture.
Or look at the socialist/anarchist unrest and workers strikes (and police/corporate violence against them) or suffragettes of the early part of the 20th Century.
Plenty of times in America's history when the country was very divided, and today's divisiveness is nothing new.
As long as there's rapid change it's likely to continue, as some people will want to slam on the brakes while others want to go full steam ahead.
I remember reading about the case of, I think it was in the 1800's, of a congressman assaulting another congressman with a cane over some political issue.
And yes, you and the grandparent comment are exactly right - this has been going on for ages, precisely because the economic incentives of media have been to create strife and discord for the eyeballs (and now clicks). Even in the days before 24-cable news, I remember thinking it would be nice that if when the nightly news came on, they would just say "All is well today. Have a good night!". And close the program.
But they can't - imagine the reaction from their advertising customers? "We paid you for these slots, you jolly well better produce the eyeballs on it!".
The mainstream mass media has been a weapon for as long as it's been around. In previous generations the elites and government kept quiet about it, because it served their purpose of cohesiveness and national unity, especially after WWII. (Never mind the consistent denigration of the Russians externally, I'm referring to internal Anglo Western societies).
But at some point in recent history, it switched instead from being more profitable to have national unity, to being more profitable with national DISunity. And so all and sundry have become "issues of the day", feeding the beast of the content and advertising machine.
True, but there is a reason most human societies (excluding the West in the past 10 years) have had strong restrictions on the excesses of human behaviour. Just because the animal can do something, doesn't mean it should, precisely because society as a whole doesn't benefit when individuals do that.
In most societies, you still can't drink to excess and drive, nor advertise cigarettes, nor sell them to minors, nor do all manner of narcotics or have polygamous relationships willy-nilly. All these things are certainly what people would like to if possible, but social norms and laws put a lid on it. There is certainly screeching about some or all of those issues (like by some parties here on HN, Reddit and elsewhere), but by and large those restrictions are good for the functioning of a healthy society.
Media consumption, and in fact media production, was regulated, initially by technology (you couldn't broadcast widely before radio) and then by law (The Hays code in the US and its subsequent incarnations).
Cable defanged that, and the internet has destroyed it.
I'm not for censorship, but harmful media production and consumption should certainly be contained and punished if done with malicious intent. It's not easy though - we all agree that online recordings from certain Middle East groups are inflammatory and can radicalise innocent people into doing foolish things, but we can't see as a society that the same radicalisation has been happening in the Western press as well. The targets are just different.
> Media consumption, and in fact media production, was regulated, initially by technology (you couldn't broadcast widely before radio) and then by law (The Hays code in the US and its subsequent incarnations).
Written media origin however are very inflammatory and divisive writings. Well before corporate media.
Yes but in the 1880's punching someone wasn't that big of a deal. They could have gone to the bar later and got drunk together and made legislation the next day.
Underneath the House of Commons (and I believe somewhere in US Congress) was a bar, and after arguing in the Commons, everyone would go downstairs and get wasted. The 1st PM of Canada drank 12 ounces a day minimum. Imagine that. 12 hard drinks a day (!).
What definitely has increased is the use of procedural tactics and such manoeuvring, the filibusterer, executive statements, congressman never taking the position of the other side. Also, the Republican/Democrat situation was not divided into urban/rural camps so much until recently, and that's a big kind of divide. 'Everyone' (quotation marks) used to be Christian, at least nominally. The Catholic/Protestant divide was big, but largely due to culture (i.e. Italian vs. English). I feel that the 'Evangelical / Atheist' divide even much wider. African Americans have a voice now (thankfully) and their presence as an active piece on the board can very easily be inflamed either in good faith or sometimes not. The Latino community is massive and they seem to be a 'behind the scenes', silent force, a the MSM doesn't give them the time of day, but they are voting, although pragmatically I don't their presence adds to any negative confrontational dynamic. But those are new vectors for division.
So we are in a new divisive situation there's no doubt about it.
> Yes but in the 1880's punching someone wasn't that big of a deal. They could have gone to the bar later and got drunk together and made legislation the next day.
Bollocks. Charles Sumner gettin whupped with a cane WAS a big deal and made national and international headlines.
It was a direct response to Sumner criticizing slavery, and helped cement opinions in the South that they'd need to take drastic action to preserve that institution.
Obama's speech was about hope and change, "yes we can". Yes we can elect a black man as President but yes we can change and do better. This was on the back of Bush's destruction of the economy.
The divisiveness happened when the tea party took off in 2009 after Obama was elected and the tea party dialed up the oldest trope in the book, race. It was also the only part of the republican party that could oppose the ACA. The ACA was modeled on Romney care after all who was a popular Republican. The republican party reeling from the loss to Democrats basically had to double down on the tea party to have any chance of sucess at the 2010 midterms. So it became about race, death panels and socialism.
you're right of course, this entire thread seems like trumps "both sides" thing.
the video has some merit, but one of the mistakes in the video (in my opinion) is telling us to "politely explain our side", but I've had much more success being deeply curious about the other side and its been very enlightening. If a friend feels differently about politics than I do, I want to be the sort of person to converse about the differences while keeping the friend. Its never too late for me to learn something and learn I have!
I believe the cultural wars focus the population's attention on issues that divide us, rather than issues that would unite: concentration of power, gutting of main street, etc.
The detachment of our news and media from local civics denies our population practice working together, with real problems, with real consensus. Instead the polarization is on more abstract, national, and intractable concerns -- political sport with little hope of amicable resolution.
As technologists, how can we work to rebuild regional and local political and economic sovereignty? Sustainable power comes from the bottom up, not the top down.
"Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."
Inflammatory news and memes very clearly propagate in communities sharing the same language. They can overcome the language barrier (e.g. English to Hungarian), but they usually lose quite a lot of their original potency in the process.
The more people speak English on a proficient enough level, the bigger the pond through which the ripples go. I do not really believe that anyone can carve this pond back into small puddles. Not in the time of the Internet.
"As technologists, how can we work to rebuild regional and local political and economic sovereignty?"
I always thought it fascinating how "technologists" thought themselves somehow able to solve social issues. SV is a glaring example of this - Mark Zuckerberg anyone?
Anecdotally, I know many people in the MMO game industry. Wonderful people, but none have more than average EQ. Most are extremely awkward and/or have social anxiety (which, in part, is what drove them to become gamers in the first place). It is really interesting to watch them struggle with trying to figure out what "social" features to add, but cannot grok what actually makes something social. Trying and failing over and over -- sometimes on the most obvious things.
Why would you think you could solve social problems when you, yourself, aren't a social animal?
Zuckerberg is on record disparaging his users with regard to their blind trust in him. He is an astounding demonstration of market failure.
I presume that, to affect the world in a positive way, it's done though collaboration with those able to articulate real problems and form a coalition of those working to address them. In this regard, technical expertise is a necessary element, but one should not confuse our part of the effort with the entire work. We should not be seeing ourselves as building "the solution" to social challenges, so much as we may better equip a community that tackles those problems.
> As technologists, how can we work to rebuild regional and local political and economic sovereignty?
I think you hit the nail on the head. Unfortunately, technologists are naturally focused on scaling solutions up to the entire world. We want to use technology to push hard real world problems behind a screen, behind keyboards, and behind servers. This creates a contradiction in our thinking that cannot be resolved. It cannot be resolved because the political climate is created by exactly that phenomenon of scale, by pushing people and their problems behind screens and servers and making them dance at the touch of our keyboards.
You really want to fix things? Stop thinking about technology and making money and help out in your local community.
Don't take this to mean you, personally. Just someone else. Someone else should work in their local community. We can still write code and make money.
It reminds me of an Australian 60 Minutes episode that was about the energy crisis in the country. I don't know if its been resolved yet, but at the time of the filming, which wasn't too long ago, Australia was facing a severe energy issue in which the cost of electricity became astronomical. A significant portion of people's income was being spent on energy alone. And this seems to be a highly contentious issue in the country. A significant portion of the episode was about solving the problem by utilizing Solar Energy technology from Elon Musk. This bothered me, because it was emblematic of the silicon valley mindset. Which is to obsess over solving the world's problems with technology. Many problems can be solved with good policy alone. Having the right laws, the right incentives, the right talent, and the right balance of power is the most effective way to solve issues. The discussion about technology should come after not before a discussion about proper policy takes place. Sure, maybe the solar tech in this case will help lower costs. But that's probably only because it is an efficiency appended to something that shouldn't be inefficient in the first place. Another way to frame this is: there are many other countries out there with similar infrastructure to Australia that do not have the same issues thanks to better policy.
> You really want to fix things? Stop thinking about technology and making money and help out in your local community.
These are not mutually exclusive; on the contrary, they are complementary. Moreover, with the notion of "calm companies" who move deliberately and fix things, it's though local economic engagement that social problems are resolved though mutual interdependence and individual prosperity.
Unfortunately, the very idea of locality and federation of power is itself one of the dividing lines - clever, that, really. The people who believe all things must be fixed from the top down, and the people who believe things can only be fixed from the bottom up.
I'm not sure that line cleaves along political affiliation, but I'm willing to be convinced. I know both Democratic party insiders who have pivoted to local political activism following the presidential election, and Republican businessmen who are adamant that taking a stand in local politics is the way forward for their movement.
I know I am very pessimistic on this but I honestly believe if someone started to succeed in doing this the political & economic establishment would crush them by any means necessary.
It can be both, can't it? If you reduce the power of the federal government, you increase local power. In some places, that'll mean more worker ownership, in others it'll mean more libertarian power etc. But by allowing both to exist separately, you're not forcing them to fight over the country.
A decade ago the activists were occupying Wall Street. Now they’re all aligned with the mega corps and the fighting is about semantics of how we say that lives matter. I believe this was deliberate. That doesn’t mean I necessarily believe some evil people twirled their mustaches to plot evil in secret, but is rather the result of many organizations working unison towards common goals without the necessity of central planning.
"A decade ago the activists were occupying Wall Street. Now they’re all aligned with the mega corps and the fighting is about semantics of how we say that lives matter"
Completely different issues.
They are aligned against discrimination, but divided on economic inequality.
It the same issue but with a slight of hand to shift blame.
There is a sentiment that at a macro level the economic system is geared to advantage those at the top.
What I see mega corps are doing now is try to shift that frustration from a discussion of class to a discussion of race.
Suddenly the white working class outside of major economic centers, the same ones who have seen their economic prospects erode over a generation due to deindustrialization can be painted as the villain and racists.
No, its not. The racial justics movement predates OWS, and was active when OWS was a thing. Its true that BLM was, triggered, or coincided with a reenergization of that movement, but it wasn’t grounded in OWS’s complaints. (There was a big-money sponsored grouo which coopted some OWS complaints but shifted the focus go better serve particular institutiobal interests; but it was the Tea Party Patriots, not BLM.)
> What I see mega corps are doing now is try to shift that frustration from a discussion of class to a discussion of race.
At the time BLM emerged, much less when theie efforts started bringing corporations around, its not like there was a widely salient class-based but race-free narrative that institutions paying lip service to BLM werr marginalizing.
> Suddenly the white working class outside of major economic centers, the same ones who have seen their economic prospects erode over a generation due to deindustrialization can be painted as the villain and racists
The BLM movement is about powerful institutions and the lack of unequal lack of accountability and concern they exhibit by race.
As a class, the “white working class outsidd of major economic centers” is not a focus, positive or negative of BLM activism, and are only really relevant, in any negative sense, to the extent they actively or passively support or participate inbthe racist institutions and actions BLM addresses.
> Suddenly the white working class outside of major economic centers, the same ones who have seen their economic prospects erode over a generation due to deindustrialization can be painted as the villain and racists.
May you please expand on this, because I am not following how white working class outsiders are involved. To my knowledge, corps & MLB have commented on specific actions by organizations such as the police or legislatures.
There have been countless corporations that are openly supporting BLM and pushing the "everything is about race" narrative because it is a distraction from the increasing wealth inequality that has led to rising economic popularism, which has in the past helped candidates like donald trump or bernie sanders who the powers-to-be want to keep out of office.
> There have been countless corporations that are openly supporting BLM and pushing the "everything is about race"
I'm afraid that still doesn't answer my question. Corporations supporting BLM does not does not make "white working working class the villain and racists" unless you assume supporting black activists automatically pits you against white working class folk - and I disagree with this unstated assumption (if I'm parsing you correctly). I apologize if this is not the implied logic - and I ask that you break it down for me so I can understand, as briefly as you possibly can.
Thank you for making this explicit. Thus we come full circle to culture wars - that's the only reason for this perception, IMO. From where I stand, culture wars are all about short-circuiting critical thinking and logical analysis, aiming straight to the emotional core - that is how sound-bytes like "kneeling is disrespecting the military/veterans" comes from - there's no sound logic, but it gets people going (I'm sure you can come up with examples used by the left).
> One of the core ideas of BLM is that we live in a systematic racist society. If that is true who are the perpetrators?
The system? It's paradoxic how a group can feel "left behind" or feel like "the forgotten" and simultaneously identify as part the system.
Completely different issues, maybe. Notice that the major media outlets started pumping stories about racism right about the time of the occupy protests. This is how politically motivated segregation works in general - make the commoners fight each other instead of against their oppressors.
But why are the aligned on this issue now when they never were before? Because after the Great Recession people were beginning to align against them outside of their predetermined demographic categories. These narratives and the way we talk about them don’t arise organically, they’re constructed and pushed out intentionally to serve a political purpose.
Less than 20 years ago the same people unanimously told us that the war in Iraq was good and necessary. I don’t think these institutions and in many cases the exact same people have suddenly become interested in doing the right thing.
> But why are the aligned on this issue now when they never were before?
Major institutions were brought around by activist pressure to pay lip service to racial justics issues before by thr Civil Rights Movement; BLM isn’t unique in that.
> Less than 20 years ago the same people unanimously told us that the war in Iraq was good and necessary.
No, the people positions of influence supporting BLM do bot consist exclusively of people who were Iraq war supporters.
Why would it have to be exclusively? That doesn’t even make any sense, nothing works that way. There’s still a HUGE overlap.
Regardless, if you actually quantify it over time, there is a sharp uptick in discussion of race and identity politics in general shortly after Occupy Wall Street. The same rhetoric was used to attack Bernie Sanders and his supporters despite from the 2016 primary onward.
Is it technically a “conspiracy theory” to suggest this is intentional? Sure. But that doesn’t mean it’s not true, or that this is purely a coincidence.
Because “the same people” isn’t the same thing as “a group that includes some of the same people”
> There’s still a HUGE overlap.
I see no evidence of that.
> Regardless, if you actually quantify it over time, there is a sharp uptick in discussion of race and identity politics in general shortly after Occupy Wall Street.
I see no evidence of that.
That’s very much not my memory, and doing a review of the easily verifiable facts (like Google Trends), I can see that various racial justice issues saw a turn from a preceding long gradual decline to gradual increasing interest about a year before OWS which continued long past (some dropping off a bit after 2016), and then took a sharp uptick around the beginning of 2020.
> The same rhetoric was used to attack Bernie Sanders and his supporters despite from the 2016 primary onward.
So was anti-gun rhetoric and lots of other things pertaining to core Democratic constituencies that other candidates had better relationships with. That's... kinda normal politics.
They are aligned with anything that lets them continue to make money. And they are more than happy to keep your finite attention on topics that don’t affect them. One hits the bottom line and the other is some execs go on a retreat and they hang a few signs up.
> A decade ago the activists were occupying Wall Street. Now they’re all aligned with the mega corps and the fighting is about semantics of how we say that lives matter.
It is a mistake to equate these two unrelated movements, with “the activists”. I mean, you might as well say that “the activists” took a break from BLM on Jan 6 to storm the Capitol.
BLM isn’t a cosmetic rebrand of OWS.
It is also misleading to suggest BLM “is aligned with megacorps”; the institutions which have been brought around by pressure (public, employee, and otherwise) to at least paying lip service to BLM were largely indifferent and in some cases hostile when the movement started, and for some time after, much as occurred with the earlier Civil Rights movement. That’s kind of the point of activist movements, though some are successful and most are not.
I think moving away from First Past the Post voting systems is a good thing, but it is not the panacea people are hoping it will be. Just because people can vote for viable third parties does not mean that polarization will go down. It’s possible that more parties may increase divisions.
But if no party has the majority, they will be forced to form coalitions on issues to get anything done. As it is now, whatever congress does is basically up to one person, the majority leader/speaker.
Germany pretty much always has coalition governments. We have 5-6 parties in parliament regularly. We have general blocs, though alliances might shift on topics, but generally you had the somewhat-far-left party, the social democrats and the greens being allied, and the then conservative CDU/CSU (now conservative-leaning centrist) and the financially conservative, socially liberal FDP on the other side.
You'd still have coalitions, e.g. right now it's CDU + SPD (social democrats), but the (published) split is there as much as it ever was. It's changing now, as a new conservative/far-right party has emerged, and the green party gets lots of love from the media and has won some state elections (on a conservative platform, ironically), so it's hard to say where we'll go from here.
I don't think more parties necessarily break it up. During the cold war, we had a Soviet bloc and a Western bloc, even though you had individual countries in each.
No, they're suggesting that the people who vote for either party don't have to hate each other with absolute hatred. They're saying that people should remember that they still have a lot in common. You can be against the other party because you disagree with their policies and still not think that they are evil that must be destroyed.
What you’re saying is certainly possible but I think an important question is whether or not it is more likely than the current situation? I ask this given the nature of humanity and the forces and incentives at play.
If the incentives in a democracy naturally tend towards outcomes where it has destroyed itself, either democracy is a bad idea or it requires regulation and oversight. As a liberal myself I believe democracy is an inherent good and requires care just like anything else.
Poland with a proportional system seems to be exactly as polarized as the US, and they do not even have enough ethnic diversity to serve as an ersatz explanation. The dividing lines run through families and neighborhoods of people who, to the outsider, look perfectly alike.
Isn't this normal for US politics? This clip could as well have applied to the 60s and 70s. For example:
> The late 1960s, early 1970s saw a dramatic shift in the American political matrix, a redefinition of competing political ideologies or belief systems. War, urban riots, campus protests and student alienation, assassinations, inter-generational mistrust, monetary inflation, the growth of the welfare-warfare state, and the “Sexual Revolution,” were the background sociopolitical issues driving this sea change.
So all the violence, riots, and corrupt politics (on both sides) seems to be we are going through another cycle of warring political parties and movements?
The reality is that the US has always been tribal. There's been religious tribalism, racial tribalism (non-Irish v Irish, Black v White, etc), and even regional tribalism despite the rising national consciousness during and after the American Civil War. I'm not saying it's good but I'm just wanting to state it's always been there. Today, the Internet makes it just easier to see. Instead of having to hear it at the local hardware store or diner you can just go on facebook or some other social media site and see it in near real time. Also, the pseudo-anonymity of the Internet just gives it a sharper edge than normal (the person on the other side doesn't feel like they're reacting to another person but just another blip on the screen). Heck, as a mutualist anarchist I've gotten into spats with ancoms and other anarchists over silly issues (think of the whole ancap spats over NAP and proportionality or 'thickism' if you're a right libertarian). So to me this isn't new. Maybe to talking heads who aren't as 'online' as me and others this seems odd but I'm just surprised how clueless traditional media can be on these issues. It's not the 90s anymore folks, just about everyone is online and probably more than they should be (myself included).
The difference now is the risk of tribalism becoming sectarianism, which is where anyone who doesn't agree with you is an enemy not to be trusted. The transition between those two is the determining factor on if civil war and widespread violence becomes likely. Sectarianism isn't common and hasn't happened en masse since the 1860s.
The civil rights was full of people begging for unity, and asking Black leaders to just calm down and wait.
All the calls for calm today are exactly the calls for calm they've always been in America -- calls from folks who are not suffering to those who are to just deal with it.
In my opinion, calling for unity and calling for calm are dismissive of very real concerns people have.
"All the calls for calm today are exactly the calls for calm they've always been in America -- calls from folks who are not suffering to those who are to just deal with it."
Martin Luther King Jr. and the rest of the non-violent Civil Rights movement during the 1960's were calling for calm as they were being beaten, firehosed, attacked with dogs, imprisoned, assasinated and lynched. So I guess you must think they didn't suffer?
King did not call for calm, in fact often the opposite. Here's a quote from him:
“Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. . . . I must confess that I am not afraid of the word ‘tension.’”
King was non-violent, but he did not avoid conflict. King regularly called on people to break laws because they were unjust. He specifically called for increasing tensions. And he was called an 'agitator'. He specifically chose not to condemn riots:
“But it is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard.”
And he famously objected to calls for calm and order:
“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice”
Edit: Removed my judgement of the parent poster's understanding of King from the comment.
No, he explicitly did. Even in the full context of the famous "language of the unheard" quote it is clear he is criticizing both riots (as being counterproductive) and the conditions that led to them.
Here's a another quote from him:
> Let me say as I’ve always said, and I will always continue to say, that riots are socially destructive and self-defeating. I’m still convinced that nonviolence is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom and justice. I feel that violence will only create more social problems than they will solve. That in a real sense it is impracticable for the Negro to even think of mounting a violent revolution in the United States. So I will continue to condemn riots, and continue to say to my brothers and sisters that this is not the way. And continue to affirm that there is another way.
The seeming national debate that one either must be pro-riot or pro-status quo/"law and order" is another instance of unnecessary "culture war" divisiveness and one that Dr. King would have disagreed with.
Edit: the sentence I was reacting to was "You do not have a good understanding of King's work." Since it has been edited out now, I'm going to mark this subthread off topic and collapse it.
The claim seems factually accurate and supported. We wouldn't consider an expert saying "you don't understand transformer ML models" with quotes supporting that claim, as being putting down the user, no?
I often read technical conversations on HN in which one user tells another they don't have an accurate understanding of some topic. Just because it's a historical or cultural matter doesn't mean it's ad hominem to state plainly and dispassionately that someone lacks understanding.
It's just the same when the topic is ML models. HN readers shouldn't be making pejorative comments about each other in those conversations either, and when we see it we moderate it the same way.
There's no need to comment pejoratively on the other person. The post is stronger without it, and the expected value of such swipes, in terms of the impact they have on subsequent discussion, is sharply negative.
> HN readers shouldn't be making pejorative comments about each other in those conversations either, and when we see it we moderate it the same way.
Moderation appears highly selective. E.g.,
"This argument is clownish and we should be embarrassed it's on the front page."[1]
That is the top comment for that post, but I don't notice your reminder there about pejorative comments.
If I had to rankly speculate, I'd say moderation happens consistently on topics where the average HN user tends to have a low level of knowledge (unionization, civil rights history), and less consistently for topics where there is a greater probability of a critical mass of participants with domain expertise (digital security).
I also rankly speculate that you don't state this outright to prevent the tinder fire that would result from making users aware of their own lack of knowledge on the topics more likely to be moderated.
The truth is far more boring than your speculation, which I suppose is a consistent problem with speculation. We moderate guideline breakage when we see it. Moderation is inconsistent because we don't see everything (as pvg already pointed out). https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
There's also some selection involved, but it's more along the lines of "do I have the energy to make a post about this one", "am I prepared to deal with howls of protest in this case", and "is it borderline enough to just let go".
Moderators can't see everything and HN doesn't operate under some 'no negative comments, ever, at all' ruleset. It's one thing to point out, in some detail, that the argument in a particular article is very poor, it's a completely different thing to directly attack another user. Just like anyone is free to write clownish, provocative invective on their blog, people can point out its nature when it pops up on HN - especially when the main reason it does is its clownish provocativeness in the first place.
You could always flag and/or email the moderators if you think something needs a further look, though.
Saying "you don't understand transformer ML models" is also not a productive form of discussion.
Discuss what is wrong with what they are saying. You don't need to make inferences about what personal failings might be leading them to make an incorrect statement.
Use "I" phrasings. Instead of "You think X, where X is wrong", say, "I think Y." Describe Y in detail, contrasting it with X where necessary but not making the wrongness of X the point.
The original poster may well see that as talking about them and reply in the usual flamebait way -- possibly with an extra dig for failing to engage them or trying to hide it. That's the risk you take when arguing on the Internet.
But if everybody really is interested in discussion rather than arguing, it sets up a reply more along the lines of trying to merge X and Y, or even changing their minds, or other constructive behavior. It starts with making it about the issues and a clear understanding of how different viewpoints lead to different conclusions based on the same facts -- all of the facts, not just the ones that support your arguments and diminish theirs.
The ideal way would be to simply omit that sentence. If the comment began with the sentence "King did not [etc.]", it would have exactly the same information content and would not contain a personal swipe at the other user. Win-win.
It's not offensive, but it's a subtle bit of rhetorical judo to rile somebody up. And in a political thread that's probably going to get locked in 10 minutes anyway because it's got other flame wars going on.
I don't know if there a good way to add value and insight to this topic because even insight is going to be zero sum and partisan, but here's a shot.
Sectarianism is something I've talked to acquaintences about for a few years, as I was thinking about how to make predictions on how current events were playing out, and the precdents I thought would be useful as a model to anticipate were an environment like the Troubles in Ireland, or the Years of Lead in Italy, and to a lesser extent, a re-run of the 1968-1970s U.S. era Weathermen type conflicts, but I think this emerging conflict will be even more of a melee.
It's still just skirmishes between very small physical groups that will probably move into terrorism and assasinations over the summer, and with tacit or direct approval and funding from within institutions to keep it going. Over a decade or more it reduces to a tawdry mix of organized crime and blood sport for the politically protected. And that's the optimistic version.
The factors and populations today are much larger, and the general destabiliztion of America both domesically and internationally is creating a power vaccuum, which a lot of different parties are rushing in to seize the void.
This vaccuum idea predicts China's current aggression on Hong Kong and Taiwan, Russia on Ukraine (and the whole region), and Iran on Israel as a direct result of domestic instability in the U.S., because these powers know it's democratically impossible to be able to mobilze a draft for a ground war to defend your allies, so they're making their plays. While that shifts the discussion away from immediate domestic concerns, those players are absolutely involved.
The fashionably Girardian view would ask, who will be the scapegoat that lets all these groups save face and gives them an out for peace, and how grisly will its end have to be? I'm pretty sure it's going to be us thoughtful types, and maybe there will be a pogrom against rationalists, because if there is one thing everyone can agree on, people who write like this can be very annoying.
> It's still just skirmishes between very small physical groups that will probably move into terrorism and assasinations over the summer, and with tacit or direct approval and funding from within institutions to keep it going.
Over this summer (2021)? Or did you mean "summer" as in "there's a decade or three of spring where things heat up and it culminates in a violent, hot summer"?
> The fashionably Girardian view would ask, who will be the scapegoat that lets all these groups save face and gives them an out for peace, and how grisly will its end have to be? I'm pretty sure it's going to be us thoughtful types, and maybe there will be a pogrom against rationalists, because if there is one thing everyone can agree on, people who write like this can be very annoying.
The left and the right would be uniting to enact pogroms against "rationalists"?
Re: reaitonalists, Laughably, yes, because the idea of a scapegoat is ancient, and it needs to be someone essentially neutral to the conflict. Literally? Perhaps not them, but they are an example of who in the current culture war could stand in for one, e.g. moderate, meta, insensitive, and aloof thinkers are people the extremes could agree on.
On the terrorism and assasinations, yes this summer is a reasonable bet. We saw trial runs of it last year in the U.S. and because the parties in the conflict are really small groups, they will use tactics that create that sort of cost effective spectacle. Once one is into real directed political violence, there's nothing earnest or heated about it, it's a cynical tactic mixed with manipulation and deception and the targets of it are reduced to symbols.
The perpetrators do not deserve our shock, concern, or even surprise. It's an inferior tactic to hold a losing cause together.
Dang, theres too much inconsistency with your moderation. You didn't seem to want to limit such flamebait from false statements from GP's comment. It is unfortunate factual statements are not allowed on here. Allowing one side to flame away is not the process to reach curious conversations. Good luck with that.
> It is unfortunate factual statements are not allowed on here
People use the words 'facts' and 'factual' a bit magically in internet arguments. There are infinitely many facts [2]. They don't select themselves; people do that. When they do it as part of curious conversation, great; when they do it as part of flamewar, well, the 'flamewar' part is the high-order bit. We're trying to avoid that here.
In the GP case, a barrage of links about everything from Vietnam to Ukraine to Robert Kagan is not curious conversation—it's boilerplate, as I said, meaning it reads like pre-existing material designed to be copy-pasted into ideological arguments. Even if all that is "facts" and all 100% correct on all the underlying issues, doing that is still boring and not what HN is for. How would you enjoy a conversation where someone insisted on reading all that stuff out to you?
I'm surprised income and wealth inequality didn't enter into the discussion. That seems like a significant contributing factor to sectarianism and the culture wars.
Economic dividends concentrated in a smaller group coupled with technology that is accessible to everyone and amplifies the differences between the two groups seems to portend a bad outcome.
It's not popular to point out, but a lot of the divisiveness is designed to keep wealth inequality from ever really being talked about. It's to keep the lower classes fighting each other over less important stuff, sometimes downright silly stuff.
My wife and I were just arguing about Adam Toledo, and had boiled it down to which frame within a single second of video matters the most. Obviously we were getting nowhere. How on earth could you get the truth out of that?
Then somehow we got onto "wait, why are so many people in desperate circumstances?" That's the real issue, but the polluted discussion around it wants to be able to divide into Frame 1 and Frame 2 camps.
Too many things are like this. NBC or whoever might go "See? Here's George Floyd cuffed and at the car. End of video" while the BBC might have that, but also the next few minutes with a much more two-sided struggle. I'm sure somewhere else they abridged it to nothing but the part where the cop flies out the rear of the car. Now we have three different truths to lash out at each other with while no one is paying attention to root causes.
> Now we have three different truths to lash out at each other with while no one is paying attention to root causes.
But I don't think this is true. There is plenty of writing about root causes, plenty of writing about reforms. I know, because I was interested in adjacent topics a while ago and it did not took that much effort to find it.
I am here talking about journalists, lawyers and generally activists pushing for larger reforms and what they perceive as root causes.
Yep, though I'd flip it: Concentrations of power create opportunities for wealth inequality. Or they're not even different things. Whenever something is centralized (Google), or a chokepoint is created (Suez, Panama), or network effects stabilize a monopoly position, then the people who control those contested single points of failure become wealthy; their wealth is their control of those resources (e.g., Bezos' shares in Amazon). Prices are Lagrange multipliers; they're forces impinging on a constraint (e.g., limited land in SV). Whereas systems that are more local and distributed create less concentration of power and wealth. Unfortunately they also tend to be less efficient. Where they win is in redundancy and robustness. I suppose this means that if you want more of the latter, then you need more chaotic conditions. Which might be even worse.
Why focus on a politically fraught issue like taxes/wealth redistribution as a path to addressing issues which are are not constrained by party politics? Surely it would be easier to gain a broad base of bipartisan support for legislation addressing corruption, if corruption is the problem, or concentration of power, if that's the problem.
It seems to me that wealth equality is nothing more than a handy wedge issue. The concept of 'fairness' is baked into our monkey brains[0], which makes it easy mechanism for engendering anger, in the hopes of turning anger into votes.
I see it in the smartest people I know. I live in the Netherlands but I have a "CNN addicted" colleague. And I like to tease her and say things like: "You know people want to carry guns so the government does not have a monopoly on violence, so when you feel like you got a leader (as you do now [this was Trump era]) that really does not have the consent of the governed anymore, you may not be powerless." Sure, society changed, we can have a dialogue.." And it would just end with her almost frothing at the mouth about how she could never have dinner with a Republican. And than I would think that she is so intelligent, and a scientist, imagine how bad it is back in her home country. Or, maybe it has nothing to do with intelligence. Maybe it was also her way to feel even smarter, obviously there are so many stupid people that just don't see how it is. It's fascinating. And I see the echoes in Dutch colleagues as well, although they are not so worried about their country going to hell, so they are less emotional.
It's biologically rooted tribal hatred, which is probably mostly independent of intelligence. Smart people might be able to reason about why they feel that hatred but can't reason the hatred away.
Well you made my point. Your country is not going downhill because of one or the other, it's because both can't stand each other any more. A republican will write a similar story about Hillary. Have a nice life over there people, I hope sincerely that things will change.
Thank you; I do take your last sentence as genuinely sincere. Regardless of the cause, it's an unfortunate situation.
I am making the assertion that "it's because of both sides" is actually part of the problem. I don't believe that a reasonable person would look at the 2016 candidates and conclude that they showed hostility equally. I believe that one side is weaponizing that instinct to draw compromises. You're certainly correct that a Republican would write a similar story about Hillary Clinton, but I can only leave it to your judgment about whether that argument has equal merit.
You're absolutely right that we can't stand each other, but if they're insistent on not standing me regardless of what I do, it does not improve the situation for me alone to grow ever more accommodating. I understand the impulse to do so, and engaged it for many years. I've come to believe that it has only allowed the problem to worsen, because it allows increasingly irrational people to demand more and more. I believe that 2016 marks a turning point where no reasonable observer could disagree that one side's irrational people are in charge, and that's not true for the other.
So I disagree with your assertion that it's not one side or the other, and the ability of the other side to claim it's me shouldn't be taken at face value. Neither should my argument, of course. But the existence of two opposite arguments doesn't make them equal. That's specious, and if you want to come to a deeper understanding, you should suspend the hypothesis that both sides are equally wrong. Maybe you'll come to it again through a different path, and if so you should try to convince me.
I agree with much of this. But there may be republicans out there that do not like every aspect of Trump, yet agree even less with the democratic candidate. Such a person may have good reasons for the way she or he voted and may be the way for you to learn to appreciate some aspects of “the other side”. It’s not black and white, your “two party system” forces a choice. I bet many people find what they choose suboptimal if they are being honest. But they may not tell a hostile person from the other side that does not even want to dine with them.
>But there may be republicans out there that do not like every aspect of Trump, yet agree even less with the democratic candidate.
Sure, they wanted the Supreme Court stacked with conservatives, a hardline stance against China, a protectionist trade agenda focused on domestic manufacturing ... we've heard the apologetics. But if you're in one of the demographics that have spent the last four years living in fear and dread of what the social and political consequences of Trumpism and alt-right populism might represent, all you know is that those reasonable Republicans are willing to pay for their agenda with your safety, freedom and sometimes blood. They may not hate you as much as the extremists, but they'll tolerate the extremists all the same to get what they want.
That doesn't make them look sympathetic. The extremist elements that Trump's candidacy and presidency brought to the surface had been simmering in the Republican party for years, and they did nothing about it. There was no grassroots push within the Conservative movement or the Republican party to disavow the alt-right or white supremacist agenda working its way into the body politic, and far from separating their policy positions from Trump's poisonous beliefs and rhetoric, Republicans embraced them because to do otherwise - to even admit their house was in disorder - would be a show of weakness to the enemy.
And they still won't admit they made a mistake. The GOP would rather stand behind the woman who believes in Jewish Space Lasers and the QAnon agenda than risk loosing Trumpists in 2024 and finding a new, less insane direction for the party. Enough is enough already. Republicans can't have their cake and eat it too, they can't burn their bridges and cross them again, they can't ask for reason, tolerance and sympathy while doubling down on their support for the least reasonable, least tolerant and least sympathetic Republican since Nixon.
It went too far. And although your attitude may be excusable and perhaps even rational, it is for sure not helping to get your country into a better state. Maybe it now seems impossible but the road to a nicer country starts by forgiving and then understanding. And then civil discourse, perhaps over dinner ;)
I'll have dinner with virtually anyone, and I'll try to understand them. I also have a lot of historical books, including one written by a genocidal dictator who killed a lot of my countrymen. I try to understand him too.
If you're expecting to convince people, it sounds like you're putting in the wrong effort. The goal of a conversation is understanding, not agreement.
"Here, let us rationally discuss the issues, but regardless of what you say I'm going to go back and vote for [their candidate]" is exactly how a conversation ought to go. If your expectation is different, it's not them. It's you.
If I fly to Japan, my goal is to understand Japanese culture. My goal isn't to Americanize it. And vice-versa. It's no different here. You're not going to successfully impose your values on other people.
"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the results of a hundred battles" - Sun Tzu
The problem, I believe, is that there is no effort being made to understand me. My side is very fond of publishing books and articles about how they think and what their values are (cf Jonathan Haidt, Thomas Frank, etc). I've never seen a similar effort from the other side.
I'm not as optimistic as Sun Tzu about my ability to win simply by understanding. Perhaps it works in a physical combat, where every human being has a physical limit that can be overcome. In a political system, there are no limits: a vote is a vote, and if they wish to vote in ways that harm me, I cannot change that by any effort, regardless of what I understand.
If efforts to demonize me are sufficiently effective, nothing I understand will help me. And I believe we've reached that point. I can only implore people to understand me, and failing that, protect myself as best I can. That includes not wasting time on dinners with people who wish me harm. I will not enjoy them. Nor will it produce anything of value.
I haven't flown anywhere. It's as incumbent on them to adapt to me as it is for me to adapt to them. This is my country too, and if they're treating me as a hostile foreigner trying to impose his ways on them, it will not end well.
I differ on this too, I listen to my republican voting friends because I value their friendship more than political differences.
Much of this "culture war" is actually a difference in values, so I seek out what my friends values are. Sometimes I feel like I'd like to offer counterpoints, sometimes I don't but its not such a big deal for me that I can't hang out with conservatives OR liberals.
Dark pattern: War is bad. It’s their fault. Therefore, war is good.
So sick of this zero-information propagandertainmemt. Admitting dysfunction doesn’t fix it. Candid reporting of facts would fix it. There are hundred page reports written for every incident that hits the news cycle, and all they give is some uninformed celebrity opinion. People cannot be that stupid.
Maybe they are though. TV news is basically a senile retirement occupation. If you’re young and you watch this stuff, you may want to ask yourself what else you could be doing with your life.
Check the history. There's nothing new about divisiveness in America. Nothing. Culture wars? A lot of mounds have gone missing since 1494.
So some of us are more conscious of it. Are they feeling uneasy about what used to be easy to willfully ignore? What's the price of justice? "All created equal"? Fancy words. "I got mine." Ain't that grand.
> Regarding just recent history, 2015-2021 is more divisive the 2000-2015, don't you think?
Maybe, but not as a sudden phase transition, just sort of a continuous process since the end of the New-Deal-to-~1994 overlapping partisan realignments and thr subsequent crystallization of the current ideological divide between the two major parties, returning to the steady state norm.
The periods of reduced—or not-party-aligned—divisiveness during the realignment period were an aberration and artifact of the unsettled alignment.
No - I think there's a class of people who weren't exposed to the divisions who're only now aware of it. In roughly chronological order: Anti-"war on terror" demonstrations, The Dixie Chicks being canceled, freedom fries, the handling of Katrina, the divisive 2008 presidential campaign season, the backlash to Obama's presidency, the rise of the Tea Party, the Benghazi investigation, Sandy Hook, birtherism.
I probably missed a bunch of other partisan clashes.
edit: I don't know how I forgot Bush v. Gore. That was way up there in terms of divisiveness.
It's almost as if something outside the norm happened relatively recently which for some reason dialed the divisions in American society and politics up to 11 then broke the knob off.
Of course, to mention specifics would be partisan, and partisanship is culture war, and culture war is killing us so who can even say what? We'll just say that somewhere around the end of Obama's term it seems like maybe something happened.
I very much dislike media like this that tries to reduce polarization by "presenting both sides" because, at least on its face, falsely presents "both sides" as "equally valid" when that just isn't true
there are positions like trans rights, voting restrictions, climate change, etc. that don't have "equally valid perspectives" from both sides - and treating like such is foolish
I know attitude doesn't help the problem but it's my two cents
Hmmm. While I likely agree with you on many of the issues you’re highlighting.. what your response highlights more is exactly what the hosts are identifying as the real problem. Which is kind of ironic.
On the other hand, "both sides" can be used to rationalize bad actors. I'd imagine that 1940's Germany would be an excellent countpoint to the "both sides" fallacy.
Sometimes there really are bad guys and its useful to keep an eye out for them.
The political "other side" in Germany in 1930s was the German Communist Party. Not "free health care" communists more like gulags and firing squads communists.
I'd like to read up on the gulags and firing squads of the German left around that timeframe, can you point me to some examples, coming up a bit short on Google.
That is because they never gained power and the nazis murdered/imprisoned most of them after they won the election of 1933. Unfortunately it turned out the medicine wasn't any better than the disease.
If you want to read about what
the Communists had in plan for German you can read about the horrors they did in Russia. The Gulag Archipelago has been highly recommend.
so let me get this straight, the few german communists that didn't get murdered, moved to russia and did the gulag thing? I was always under the impression that russians did their own overthrow of their predecessors, I didn't realise that they were actually germans. was stalin german?
There is an interesting book coming out later this year: "The Bias That Divides Us: The Science and Politics of Myside Thinking" by Keith E. Stanovich (applied psychology professor famous for his work on rationality)
I'm seeing this get worse in my own country for very different reasons. There is a profound lack of reasonable people that take a moderate position where the other side is not demonized.
What disgusts me perhaps even more than seeing all those people in the US flinging hatred at each other is just how thoroughly they've armed themselves in all sorts of logic(?) to justify that flinging more and more intense hatred is the only correct course of action, that there simply is no other way, and that all alternative routes are not only worthless but just as evil as their enemies are.
Ad hominem and 'don't look over here' isn't the strongest rhetoric.
And 'simple' is just fine.
If it's that bad, then you should be able to succinctly explain why it's bad.
The notion of 'in group vs. out group' compassion changing over time seems to be a secular, noteworthy shift, that doesn't seem to get that much attention.
On my TikTok account, I've seen a few people talking about 'dumping people on the other side' because 'we don't sleep with the enemy' - which was really scary to hear out of the mouths of 'probably still teens'.
There is definitely a generational issue here because some of us are old enough to absolutely remember that 'it was not like this', but for others 'it's normal'.
Just like all news, we take it with a grain of salt, but I think it's a refreshing perspective worth hearing, certainly not a narrative you find that much in the bigger outlets.
I believe that effectively the general argument is essentially correct, and it's very saddening to me, aside from the sheer mental health and intellectual fatigue ... it's just not civil for us to be like this.
I disagree. The message here may be obvious to some, and therefore shallow to you, but it sure doesn't feel like it's obvious to many. If this isn't worth our time, please share what is.
Agreed. It's really easy to say "stop hating each other" when you refuse to point the finger at the media companies which have stoked the flames of division.
But that's the same game. Just pass the blame. Yes, let's recognize media, foreign state, etc roles in all of this. But let's also take responsibility and therefore control of the situation ourselves.
The Hill, like the Observer, used to be a great actual newspaper.
The reporting in there was just phenomenal.
And then presumably some conservative billionaire took it over and turned it into fox news light.
Jared Kushner did the Observer takeover and turned it from something very weird and entertaining and serious and very New York into a directionless soup of trivialities.
I used to buy and actually read the physical weird-somewhat-grapefruit-pink-colored newspaper on my way to/from my office near wall street.
Sometimes things 'back in the day' really were a lot better.
From what I’ve seen they make an effort to be balanced. Saagar Enjenti, who appears in this video and is a Republican, regularly presents alongside Krystal Ball, who is a progressive, in this joint show:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rising_(news_show)
The Overton window applies is. That dividing that site is doing is in no way indicative of how the world is or how the US has been. Just how the mainstream is since Reagan. Notice it doesn’t take into account any leftist publications. Their left most section includes mostly neoliberal things.
The owner and manger of the The Hill, Jimmy finkelstein, is a friend of Trump's, whose wife held an unpaid position as adviser to Melania trump in 2017-18 ( a fact not mentioned to Hill readers).
Given that the outlet publishes a large number of libertarian and conservative op-eds, your claim seems at odds with reality, and is not supported by anything other than vague generalities about demography.
I am not familiar with The Hill, but the segment posted here did not seem to me to be biased one way or the other. Did you find there was something that leaned right/conservative in this specific video?
Trump was a New York democrat most of his life. His platform had a lot in common with Bernie Sanders. To name some areas of overlap: strict border control, ending the wars, and renegotiating trade deals. Trump increased restrictions on guns. Trump was even open to socialized healthcare but the republicans wouldn’t have supported that.
I'd recommend watching it before objecting to the content as a whole, as some of those objections are answered.
For instance, the quote about political faction being more divisive than race or religion was explicitly made to contrast the "bad old days" of Jim Crow or Catholic-bashing against today's society. Everyone can identify the hatred of those times, and pointing out that political identity is now more divisive than race/religion in their respective heydays really does show that political division is a problem (as opposed to just saying that political division is more prevalent than racial division which, as you mentioned, would be entirely expected.)
I really wanted to vomit after the first couple minutes, so I think I'm gonna pass. It felt incredibly leading & manipulative & I'm disgusted this sort of shit is out there, making people feel like they have very smart educated sophisticated takes for swallowing this dramatized weakly structured pucky.
Either my children will be rejected from universities even if they have perfect SATs and grades on the basis of their race or they will not. There is not much to misunderstand here.
Think you're focused on the wrong issue there. The most likely reason your child is unlikely to get into a good university is because good universities have consistently chosen not to increase class sizes in line with the number of qualified students apply, as a result your child is way less likely due to pure statistics to get in. That's because the schools are social institutions not academic ones.
The ratio of qualified students to good uni seats has always been overloaded. In the context of 'culture wars', the 'number of seats added' is not really a culture war issue. Also, there are tons of great universities in the US.
In 'culture wars' we have to have some way of allocating sets to 'the top schools', and it could be just 'SAT', family connections, entrance exam, race, class, etc.. Some groups feel slots should be allocated base on race, some feel otherwise. That one is actually a little bit complicated because although SATs do provide some basis of objective rigour, it's probably the most easily 'gamed' thing and to the extent it's 'gamed' it has little meaning. Do we really want to limit top uni entrance to the 0.1% of HS students spend all of their time preparing for 'A Big Test'? That might be a little bit counterproductive ... but then that 'test' was also one of the more objective metrics.
So it's complicated and a ripe area for 'culture war'.
16% of candidates to Harvard were accepted in 1992, this year that has dropped to 4%. So even if there is a problem with the selection criteria it’s likely marginal compared to the real issue which is the refusal of the top schools to actually meet demand despite clearly having the funds to do so.
" refusal of the top schools to actually meet demand "
Doesn't work that way.
Every student probably wants to go to Harvard, demand is unlimited. If they lowered the standards for example, there would be more applicants.
The number of applicants varies by all sorts of factors. Students probably have started applying to far more schools than otherwise. There are more total uni students, even if the number of seats across america has grown commensurate, the number of applications to Harvard will still go up.
Finally, Harvard probably wouldn't be Harvard if it were 10x bigger, moreover, they have no obligation to do so. They can do as they please, there are tons of good schools in America.
This is not the issue we face with selectivity and race/class/gender, that's a lot harder and it's a problem they cannot avoid.
In some contexts it is considered a bad look to tell people facing discrimination for their unchosen group membership that people of all groups face the same issue and their concerns about the issue are equally valid.
Allow me to explain the metaphor. When two sides shoot at each other that is called a war. When one side shoots the other that is called a massacre. Hence if another side starts shooting at you and isn't willing to negotiate, massacre or war are your two choices.
In "cultural war", this would correspond to one side trying to keep moving their positions forward. The either side either puts up a fight or they don't.
And there's no culture war, because war involves death, bombs and stuff. Right, language, we find it useful to use concepts that don't literally apply because they might help us see similarities.
In that case, you don't need literal shooting and trenches. You can talk of wealth redistribution, where "we'll take from A and give to B" is an attack on A. It doesn't involve guns immediately (though it will if A doesn't "voluntarily" give up the goods), but it's useful as an analogy. What the commenters seem to imply is that, if A does not fight back (again, not literally with guns, but politically), they'll be massacred (again, not literally), their interests will not be considered at all.
Yes, this made me laugh. “No, no way there is any issue with decisiveness, identify politics, or generalization of groups. The only issue is in fact with group B.”
I'm going to directly rebut/address some things that I disagreed with, I'm going to to try to do so calmly and in a way that furthers discussion, let me know if I don't do a good job. This is obviously a politically charged topic, so I'd ask folks to use their votes on how effective I am on articulating my concerns and furthering discussion rather than if you agree/disagree with my political opinions.
He discusses the response to Chauvin's trial --
This... misrepresents a lot of people's opinions. I don't say, "Derek Chauvin's sentencing was good but not enough." because I'm appealing to my tribe, I'm saying it because I genuinely feel we have significant improvements we need to make to policing. A single conviction is a watershed moment, but it isn't the same as doing the hard work of reforming or abolishing policing. It's not nothing, but it's also not enough. It was necessary, but not sufficient (assuming you believe policing should be reformed.)
He says, "I never thought I'd use the word sectarian to describe US politics" --
US politics have been FULL of historical examples of violent conflicts over politics. From independence, abolition, the civil war, the bombings of unions, the civil rights movement (and the murders of their leaders), the handling of the AIDS epidemic -- there are many, many cases where sides have resorted to literal violence against individuals and leaders on 'the other side'. He goes on to say we were founded to be a democratic society free from sectarianism, but this seems like a very hagiographic view of our history.
People vote against candidates, not for candidates --
Yeah, this makes sense. I'd agree with this. I don't know anyone who voted for Biden who was excited about it.
"The emotions of feeling under assault are powerful, but if we succumb to them, then we deserve our violent fate" --
This needs to be challenged more. There are communities that exist that are under assault. Trans women, for instance, face a rate of violence that is unbelievably high. What are communities under assault supposed to do? There's a material difference in my mind to communities that are suffering violence at the hands of majorities, and telling them "don't feel under assault" when they very much are is counter-productive.
The saving grace of our society is that, thankfully, things are still pretty comfortable at the personal level, even if their politics dictate that they be in conflict.
If you don't search for it you won't see the kind of bifurcation around the Chauvin trial. Most people just breath a sigh of relief, including a lot of Republicans.
It does deeply concern me that so many people claim Chauvin was framed, etc. Those who don't believe it, but claim it for effect, they are the sociopathic trolls; the ones who really believe it, I would suggest either have serious mental health issues or are very susceptible to groupthink. It is the groupthink folks that I find particularly terrifying, because they are really good people, but will happily cheer on someone or something truly horrible, and continue to truly believe they are right with God.
Framed? That is a completely stupid thing to believe, and I have never heard it suggested by anybody except you. The problem here is not those boogeymen that don’t exist. It’s you. And now me because I’ve dragged myself down to your level.
I flagged your comment. Calling names and pointing fingers doesn't solve anything. Especially since, in this case, you are reacting to something I did not say (and I reread my post to make sure).
No they don’t. You created that monster in your mind. And you breathe life into it by telling the world it exists. What difference is there then, between that monster, and you.
"I see people I know who say, 'Chauvin is innocent', and I'm like, did we watch the same video?" This from the OP video https://youtu.be/0DRHn_Dz_js?t=384
How is claiming that Chauvin was framed different from these statements in any material way? They all tacitly assume Chauvin was justified, and explain it in some absurd way. Their narrative gets life from the same callous cruelty that let them watch that video with the motive to figure out a way to blame anyone but the obvious murderer. The summary is: "Yes, Chauvin killed the man, but he was justified. The facts were distorted by those with a political agenda in the media and in the justice system, and they got what they wanted, convicting an innocent man for murder." And that's no different than what I said.
It appears to me that I triggered someone on the internet by using a word they didn't like. It triggered them to pivot, ironically, to an unrelated warning about talking about people you don't know personally.
I'm disengaging, but I suggest you look up the word "irony". Or maybe it's "hypocrisy". I don't know. Either way, I will not stop calling out anyone, famous or not, who I know personally or not, who watch a LEO murder a man in cold blood, from the start of the murder to the end of the Floyd's life, and STILL defend the cop! It is outrageous, monsterous, and that's where your energy should be spent, not attacking someone who, in your opinion, used the wrong word to characterize this kind of inhuman reaction to a gross injustice.
I know it's fashionable to blame Facebook for the divisiveness, but I'm old enough to recall Obama's 2004 DNC speech that got him his first national attention. Before there was Facebook, Obama was talking about divisiveness.
I firmly believe anger and anxiety is constantly injected into the mainstream corporate media to increase eyeballs and stickiness. One of the side effects of this content strategy is the divisiveness we see now.
Yes, Facebook (or twitter) amplifies these, but that's because Facebook provides every one of us a platform to exhale the frustrations we accumulate consuming these anger-laden content.
Ingeniously, the corporate media blamed all these on Facebook and whoever is/was advising Zuck really failed to come up with a solid strategy to counter this narrative beyond rebranding FB app icon and some color scheme changes.