Public Opinion in Authoritarian States
scholars-stage.blogspot.com
scholars-stage.blogspot.com
The meat of the story was the students who came to Australia had been fed a steady diet of propaganda, just like you, but after having been in Australia for a few years with no limitations on what they could read or see, they still thought (or at least said they thought on TV) the propaganda they were fed better reflected reality than the "fake news" they saw in Australia.
They can't all be that dumb, surely?
I'm guessing the real reason is they expect to go back to China one day and are over here to further their careers in China. One of the reasons for this belief is when a Chinese minority stage a protest in the capital outside of an embassy, these overseas students turn up like clockwork and stage an anti-protest.
This organised paid-for like protest is fairly rare in Australia, so it's caught a lot critical attention. The only time I recall it happening is Labour Union protests stages by workers for the Union itself, however even in that case the people doing the protesting were true Union believers.
It takes an unusual and frankly relatively rare amount of independent thought and personal research to believe something at odds with a reality that your entire social network accepts as obvious fact. Especially when you start from the same manufactured reality that they did. And I would guess, even among expats, speaking about such doubts of the official CCP line probably is met with significant resistance among other mainlanders as mainlanders tend to be relatively nationalistic (as a product of their censored media and “patriotic education“). Why bother with it then? Which is also a part of contemporary Chinese cultural (no doubt nurtured by the CCP) — politics are is the business of the government, not the governed anyway.
So, in short, there’s a lot of political inertia for mainland expats, not a lot of incentive to consider other views, disincentive to adopt other views, and a lot of work to learn about other views anyway (must be in English in non-work hours, learning a whole alternate history and political philosophy takes a ton of time, your network of Western friends with sufficient knowledge to discuss these topics with is probably amounts to zero). So really, it would almost be more surprising if they were flipping views — even though, personally, I’ve spent significant time learning the CCP canon and find it rather obviously holey.
I imagine leaving a cultural and national identity way of thinking would have similar repercussions. Many would lose family relationships, friendships, professional networks and could potentially burn bridges with their home country in such a way as to essentially be in exile. All of that for something they aren't even sure is more true than what they know or could be biased in another way (as most of history is more of a cultural collective of things composed of selected facts in such a way as to paint a narrative or map of what happened).
I still think it's wrong, and I'm not sure how to solve it, but I can kind of understand why someone wouldn't follow their curiosity down the first steps toward an open mind.
Let that be a lesson to us all.
Exactly. Heck, even non authoritarian regimes will drone strike people if they get in their way.
Consider the Liberal and Conservative divide. People that grew up in the same country and with the same culture can still have vastly different beliefs.
Both sides will accuse the other side of fake news and propaganda.
Thanks for your comment - it isn't often I see the poignant connection of similarities between past KMT propoganda under martial law in Taiwan and current propoganda under the CCP in China. The things you mentioned have also motivated me to seek out and identify my "Taiwanese identity."
A key bit was:
"Almost no one changes their mind because of one day' argument. Instead, we slowly start to see ideas we once would have rejected out of hand as "reasonable" only after we have been exposed to other people whom we respect or identify with who believe them."
This is something that is important with today's political climate in the west (UK and USA) as the right have as their leader someone who almost everyone on all sides agree doesn't command respect or behave as a statesman should. (and the left have lost touch with the lower classes, choosing instead to identify with the middle classes and their identities.)
How do you define "lower classes"? If you mean household income then quite the opposite is true: https://www.people-press.org/2016/09/13/2016-party-identific...
Could you stop working permanently today, continue to thrive & not experience a change in lifestyle?
if the answer is 'no', you're still working class.
'class consciousness' includes these three categories:
- Working - Managing - Ruling
The managing class is there between the ruling & working classes, doing it's job to tell you what to think & tell the ruling class how you're responding to leadership.
By definition middle class people work, it's in the middle between people who have to work to survive and the independently wealthy. However, the middle class has the capability to build wealth, own a home, retire someday, leave a little over for their kids to get their lives started. Working class people are often life long renters, would go bankrupt if they got cancer or any other serious medical illness, would be in significant financial strain if their car broke down, they very likely do not have the means to save up 6 months worth of expenses as a safety net.
Yes, these terms are rather antiquated, but with each and every passing year, there is an increasing distinction between the professional & managerial class (often referred to as the middle and upper middle class), and the precariat class (the working class). Also note that the former makes up ~34% of the population, and the later makes up 45% of the population, with the 1% on the upper end and the truly poor on the other end.
Which, when you look at it, is just another set of people trying to manipulate you into behaving the way they think you should. They say it's for your own good? So does everyone else trying to manipulate you.
Now, back in the day, the difference between working and managing was twofold: managers got paid more, and they were allowed (and expected) to think as part of their job. The workers were just robots made of flesh, but the managers were supposed to be able to think. Well, for all we (most of us) still have to work, we're more in the managing class, in that we get paid well and have to think. So trying to tell us that we should have "working class consciousness"... yeah, there's a reason why it doesn't feel to us like it fits.
>we're more in the managing class, in that we get paid well and have to think
The distinction which proponents of "class consciousness" talk about was never between thinking and doing, but between those who (loosely speaking) have nothing to sell but their labour power, and those who posses capital. The reluctance to view highly paid wage labour as a form of wage labour rests on misconstrued notions of what "working class" means in political theory (i.e blue collar workers, people who work with machines, etc.), notions drawn from romantic Soviet depictions of the worker (the strong, brave man with a hammer and sickle) and the "temporarily embarrassed millionaire".
There's been a lot of work since the 60s into trying to figure out why this notion is so prevalent. Perhaps it can be best summed up by Marcuse:
"If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television program and visit the same resort places, if the typist is as attractively made up as the daughter of her employer, if the Negro owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the Establishment are shared by the underlying population."
"middle class" is essentially white collar
"upper class" really means the aristocracy/ long-term establishment. Even a CEO making millions a year would be called "upper middle class" unless they came from an old established family.
At first I was incredulous, but then when I reflected on the fact my own [modest, developer] earnings likely seem to [for example] folks working in retail as disproportionately large as my doc's seem to me, and then considered the huge difference in lifeways between my doc and some of my other friends who live entirely on the interest / dividends from financial instruments [i.e., they don't have to go in to work in the morning] , I understood his perspective and now mainly agree with it.
In terms of emotional stress this is worlds away from the toil of the middle class, especially someone making $100,000/year or more.
I grew up poor--like, food stamps and having your furniture thrown out on the street during an eviction poor. Being upper middle class as an adult, one thing I do to relieve the stress is keep my "plan B" in mind. I have more than enough savings that if I had to I could buy a double-wide trailer in the sticks, send the kids to public school, buy a bait shop, and get by just fine. That makes a world of difference, but it's not an option available to the working class. If you're working class your only choices are poverty and the status quo.
A software engineer like myself, or a doctor making $600k/year thinking of themselves as working class, kinda blows my mind. It's not like the working class believe that they're the only ones who work hard.
It is about spending, and a lot of doctors - despite their high incomes - are in debt with no savings - and equity in the house is 5% as anytime it gets more than that they take out a home equity loan for the difference.
Which is why doctors can feel like they are barely making it: with their spending habits it is a good thing their job is in demand.
No matter how much money or wealth one has, one almost always feels like they're stuck in their situation. That's part of the human condition. And expenses rising to meet income is also typical, at least in the U.S. But different classes of people have objectively different sets of options available to them, regardless of whether they appreciate those options or not.
Also, $600k/year is a ton of money. I make half that and carry a mortgage, apartment lease (temporarily, hopefully), partial second apartment lease (mother), and office lease all in San Francisco, in addition to paying down $130k in law school debt, as well as typical family expenses (two young children). To blow through $600k/year this doctor must have some serious issues. I can only assume the doctor's home is several million dollars, so even at 5% equity a double-wide trailer and bait shop should be well within his reach. But, again, regardless, this doctor has unfathomably more options than a typical working class family. (As do I, for that matter.) To compare the situations is borderline obscene.
Also, to clarify in case he's reading this: I didn't intend to [and don't believe I did] imply that this particular doctor engages in reckless spending, lives beyond his means, is in financial trouble, or etc -- simply that he considers himself working class for the reasons originally noted
It's not surprising that relatively wealthy people self-identify as the good guys. But that doesn't mean we should indulge or lend credence to destructive equivocations that put working and wealth in opposition. We already have a catch-all, no-hurt-feelings, ambiguously safe category--middle class.
Anyhow, FWIW, I've been upvoting both of you because I [feel like I] appreciate what you're saying. I'm mostly objecting to the doctor's sentiments, and the notion that we should sympathize with them. The sentiments are self-serving and socially destructive. That doesn't make him a bad person, but I feel like the sentiments should be called out for what they are.
This is the problem with the check-your-privilege movement. If disempowered groups think they can shame the empowered into giving up power, they're seriously deluded. What will happen--what is happening--is that the wealthy and powerful will self-identify as the disempowered. So I'm not saying that this doctor should "check his privilege", so to speak, but neither should he be doing the exact opposite by willfully denying his privileges. And that's why I say such sentiments are destructive. With privilege comes responsibility; if you can deny the privilege you can shirk the responsibility, such as a civic mindedness that emphasizes constructive cooperation across all groups, and particularly the financial and political participation of those with financial means. If everybody thinks they're not wealthy enough, that it's only the other guy that should pay more taxes, etc, well then we know exactly where that road leads. We shouldn't vilify or shame the privileged (the notion that we can shame people into civility is preposterous), but neither should we condone the privileged pretending that they're not. Those are two sides of the same coin.
https://www.thestreet.com/personal-finance/how-much-do-docto...
There's labor.
There's capital.
There's a class that has substantial dependence on both labor and capital, with neither clearly dominating their interests.
The first two, sure, match working and ruling roughly (many managers, though, in labor, and some, particularly at the executive level, in nearly pure capital.)
But the group in between pure labor and pure capital—the traditional “middle class” in capitalism—isn't really “managing” as a class, though it includes lots of managers. Also lots of white-collar professionals that aren't managers as such. And even a fair number of independent small business owners that aren't white collar professionals.
The middle class is a distinct class from the working class, but management isn't what distinguishes it. And it's not really a natural class ally of capital any more than of labor, and those on the labor side who attack it (either in its proper identity or as “management”) that way are acting in a self-defeating manner.
Your average manager covering a small team of people (e.g. say a fast food manager or a retail manager) is still working class, they just happen to be one step higher in the hierarchy , with slightly more pay but relatively little power.
At least that's how I have always viewed it. My definition could be completely wrong though.
The way I learned, gentlemen could support themselves from the fruits of their investments alone and did not need to labor to afford their expenses.
You didn't need to have great wealth to be a gentleman, but you couldn't afford to rise in your station without it.
This is false. Labour is undergoing a reversal in the policy of the blairite years where they tied their mast to corporate/NGO elites and decoupled themselves from unions. Unions now have a lot more power (including official voting power / influence over the NEC) in the Labour party than they ever have and corporate influence has waned almost completely.
We've got better things, more urgent things to spend money on that nationalising utilities etc. (we can control them through regulation anyway)
If that would be true, the level of service wouldn't have degraded to the point nationalization is a reasonable (and popular) proposal.
In fact, the Conservatives adopted a similar term in their campaigns of a few years ago "Working People". Apparently it didn't do them any good but it's worth pointing out.
I think Labour does understand working people and they understand working class people too - they just have lost touch their their working class roots and are middle class now.
It's interesting that in the USA "class" refers almost exclusively to wealth. In the UK "class" has a slightly different meaning and relates to everything from genealogy to which school you went to social grace. As an example, a "Lord" who went to Eton and comes from an old family will always be upperclass, even if they are bankrupt and worth less than nothing, with no income at all.
It's not quite a caste system as class mobility IS a thing but it's not simply wealth either.
I, his tenant had less money than him and am solidly upper middle class in lifestyle, from my foamy coffee drinks, to my Subaru, salary, education and occupation. We're the same age, and he has more dough, but he can't move in the circles I can, and his upside is probably capped at owning a couple of residential apartment buildings. He's also crippled from arthritis, and I'm not.
Most of the time, though, upper middle class people have more money than working class people.
It's more subtle than the UK system, but roughly speaking this is the model for the world. Professionals constitute a social class. The fact that professionals have mostly taken over the left wing parties and turned them into Blairite/Clintonite "who cares about the poors" neoliberal parties, the middle and working classes are basically in revolt against them. All over the world. Trump, Brexit, Giletes Jaunes and so on. It's not going to change until there are economic reforms which accrue some wealth to lower classes. This will almost certainly involve immigration reform (as in stop importing so many new residents and making labor so cheap), taxation (professionals can pay more tax) and economic protectionism for important unskilled labor groups. Which of course, the upper middle professional classes absolutely freak out about because it's against their class interests.
Nonprofit museum/library techie here. Anecdotally, if by "the left" mean supporters of Democratic establishment politicians, this is very true. They're doing well enough for themselves that they're insulated from economic bumps and they just don't seem to care about the things that real working people do. Real leftists and progressives get it though, which is why politicians like Bernie are so popular with working class people.
> The Overton window is the range of ideas tolerated in public discourse, also known as the window of discourse. The term is named after Joseph P. Overton, who stated that an idea's political viability depends mainly on whether it falls within this range, rather than on politicians' individual preferences.
I'm not sure this is true; it's a standard media line, certainly, and there's definitely a problem in that a lot of the most visible figures on the left tend to be of privileged backgrounds (because that privilege gives visibility!). But because of the changes in working practice and social structure over the 21st century, what constitutes "working class" now looks very different.
The UK is not quite so factionalised as the US yet, although it's clear that EU membership has been used as the "wedge issue" in the way that abortion has in the US. It's gone from being something of very low salience to the only issue it's possible to talk about.
At least, that's how some people see it.
And by the way, immigrants, at least the ones you hear about in the media, are largely working-class. When people just ignore certain groups of people when talking about "the working class," it's pretty clear that they're not really just talking about economic status.
I don't think my comment did this.
> And by the way, immigrants, at least the ones you hear about in the media, are largely working-class.
I don't believe anyone has ever claimed otherwise. Or if they have, it's more along the lines of referring to immigrants as welfare recipients. Either way I'm not going to defend a strawman.
Are their interests at odds? If there is some objective idea of interests, e.g. some ideal like "the American dream", some sense of a decent life and prosperity for normal people, then no. Our interests are shared (save for a few contrarians).
However, most of us have our own moral principles that we believe should be used and not violated to achieve that interest. This is a real boundary that limits progress in one direction or another.
Anyhow the point is that those in the lower classes do not have someone they can "respect or identify with" anymore
Edits (sorry I've been editing a lot) - I think the main point is that Labour used to be the voice of the working class. Now it's the voice on behalf of the working class. Working on behalf of and in defence of but not actually from. So they are still very much involved in the lives of the working class and seek to serve them but the relationship to them has changed to one of a benevolent caretaker. Additionally they no longer use the term "working class" and prefer "vulnerable people" which to me indicates the change in relationship better.
But then in the outside world that isn't what the voters want / respect.
I see it time and again even with political parties I'm inclined to agree with. They show up even in general elections with slogans and somewhat corner case policies, attacks on their opponents, and ideas that really don't appeal to the masses. They seem to bamboozle even themselves unable to even recognize it at times.
Now consider all late night shows, nearly all newspapers, most big news blogs, and the other cable (and broadcast) TV news channels. But regardless, there's not a lot of point in debating what "mainstream" means.
My point is that seeing things like Jimmy Kimmel cry over health care policy [1] is exactly the kind of thing OP is describing. You don't need to be a cartoon politician to fit the bill OP describes. People like and respect celebrities and media personalities, and they see a lot more of them than they do of Trump.
[1] https://money.cnn.com/2017/12/12/media/jimmy-kimmel-son-late...
I'm sure it would be lovely if Trump spoke in complete sentences and behaviour is important; but decisions, tribe and policy are ultimately more important.
[0] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/...
While Obama was in office, he just didn't have to create a controversy despite the media attacking him on everything from his choice of mustard to the color of his suit.
It's a two way street. Gay marriage (for example) used to be unreasonable.
> we slowly start to see ideas we once would have rejected out of hand as "reasonable" only after...
I think you parsed it as
> we slowly start to see (ideas we once would have rejected out of hand as "reasonable") only after
and concluded that "unreasonable" was intended.
But I think the proper parse is
> we slowly start to see (ideas we once would have rejected out of hand) as "reasonable" only after
Bizarre how it can work either way - thanks for pointing this out.
I don't know where to go with this. Both Trump and Boris have the uncomfortable task of burning off the dead wood in society. The UK and the US find this the most difficult, the UK wanting to keep every scrap of wood they have, playing social musical chairs instead of getting on with business. The US gets all steamy and hot about China/Russia and tax returns but at the end of the day it's about money. This is our ww1 moment except without the destructive european alliance setup and proclivity for war.
Frankly they are both behaving as statesmen do. The younger Bush was a war president and lost the ability to speak in full sentences - whilst at war. He regained his ability to speak after he left the presidency. Nixon nearly refused to give up the chair. Clinton went out on "what the definition of is - is".
Trump's legacy is going to be that he made China pay him some cash and he didn't get into a nuclear war. Other than his explosive entrance and flushing out many things (right or wrongly) he has been much like other US presidents.
I get a display of quality in leadership is valuable. That'll come back in 2028.
This isn't remotely true. The left is overwhelmingly concerned with working-class people in the US (and in the UK). Do you mean the left as in anyone not Republican/Tory?
> "Normal" is another way of saying, "What is considered acceptable within my in-group."
I very frequently tell people that I have trouble understanding what “normal” is in the context of things like issues of health or other people’s behaviour because I only really know how how I feel. In addition, I find survey questions that try to bucket frequencies of some event into an unrelated numeric scale in order to quantify or qualify said event similarly bewildering. I never could explain why any better than using something like “you’re not me”, or “I only have one life”. I guess another possible way to describe “normal” would be something like “most common anecdote”.
Don't more people worry about this? Why do I get the feeling that too many people stick to the notion that democracy is automatically good, without considering possible reforms to address its current weaknesses?
Another thought: It is entirely possible that the CCP is not keen on democracy exactly because of democracy's weaknesses. Weaknesses that traditionally kept China weak. If we want China to accept democracy we can't just keep labeling them as 'evil' and call it a day, we should actually come up with a better sell.
But maybe this is precisely why China would adopt democracy. They already control the media so it would be easy to control the masses, just like in the united states.
It is amusing that you attribute such selflessness to a political faction; the CCP no less
For every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, elegant and wrong. As long as you stick to simple black and white views of the world, you stand no chance to actually solve problems.
Also, what does selflessness have to do with this? If the CCP's goal is a strong, prosperous, unified China then it is rational to avoid decisions that don't lead to that goal. Unless you think the CCP is not interested in that, and is only interested in enslaving people for their own amusement. Then we go back to my opinion about the evil caricature.
You’re setting up a very unreasonable straw man in suggesting that the CCP is either cartoonishly evil, or virtuous
I said that CCP is not caricature evil, and that many westerners have a hard time believing that. However, “not caricature evil” does not equal virtuous. Not being at the desert does not mean that you are at the north pole.
As for your notion that the goal of the CCP, as well as all other governments, is to maintain/grow power: I agree that that plays a part. I do not agree that that is the only part. I believe there is a mix between maintaining/growing power, legitimate national concerns, and personal advanced. Just like with everything else in life, human motivation is complex and multi-faceted.
But all this talk about “how much evil they are” is, in itself, a diversion from more productive endeavors. I see way more value in addressing weaknesses in our democracies first, and then ‘selling’ this, than continuing to argue how much evil various governments are.
That power and wealth was not fated to come by divine right, it's something that the CCP has achieved through strong—often unethical—but usually (not always) effective leadership, whether it be in setting industrial strategy to produce tons of jobs for formerly starving rural Chinese (while the US has lost jobs for its working class consistently); developing cities to have best-in-world subway systems and high-speed rail on the base of villages that didn't have reliable water or electricity decades ago (while the US hasn't improved its infrastructure in decades); and paving the way for many of the worlds' foremost scientists, to be Chinese-born (while the share of Americans doing the same thing has been in decline).
You cannot say the same for many, if any, other developing countries in the world. And I think most mainstream Chinese people you'd ask (if you can), would say that they do believe the CCP does represent and work for the benefit of the Chinese people.
(Note, I didn't say its minorities, I said its people—those mainstream Chinese who comprise the vast majority of its population).
Whether or not you think it's "good" for this government to have more power or represent the world, is largely irrelevant. If you want that system to look more like yours, you have to make the alternative materially better _for those who benefit from it_ (or beat that system into the ground). Calling it evil or listing out human rights violations does not achieve that goal, and represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the values that underpin it.
Have a read of a summary of John Garnaut's talk to the Australian Parliament on "Engineers of the Human Soul":
https://sinocism.com/p/engineers-of-the-soul-ideology-in
He posits that Stalin -> Mao -> Xi consider that everything must serve the State: culture, the arts, etc. Obviously that would include people. So Xi Jinping Thought (recently written into the constitution) has people serving the state. In fact, not only their bodies, but their artistic expression belongs not to them but to the state. The CCP doesn't physically enslave people, it enslaves them through fear. People are theoretically free to choose not serve, but they risk bad things for themselves and their family. On top of this, they claim to serve the people (but instead the people serve them), so they are living out a lie. To maintain the deception they have to control what people know about the world, hence the Great Firewall. If you value liberty, honesty, or free expression, I think being nearly forcibly deprived of them could qualify as evil.
Now imagine a society where no one is truly free to think for themselves, where your neighbors can potentially turn you in (= can't trust people close to you), where the arts are limited to the party line. It kind of deprives society of the best of humanity (trust/community, wealth of ideas, innovative arts). That could qualify as evil.
But hey, China is strong, prosperous (in terms of money), and seemingly unified. I do believe that the CCP is doing what it thinks is best for China, but creating a cultural dystopia in exchange for outward wealth and strength seems like a bad bargain. If they created cultural wealth I bet outward wealth and strength would show up naturally.
Well, it probably isn't when compared to an utopia. But if everyone is united in that we should walk into some abyss, maybe you'll want some divisiveness, no? Churchill was a divisive figure in the appeasement years, yet would it have been better if he had been silenced?
> Don't more people worry about this?
It's been a major topic for years.
> Why do I get the feeling that too many people stick to the notion that democracy is automatically good, without considering possible reforms to address its current weaknesses?
The Democratic Peace Theory[1], if true, is a damn good reason to see democracies as the best option, despite its weaknesses. The authors' point is that they believe China's current system will lead them to bloody battles instead of peaceful integration. It's not absurd to prefer the ugly divisiveness of current western democracies to war.
> If we want China to accept democracy we can't just keep labeling them as 'evil' and call it a day, we should actually come up with a better sell.
Is there any reason to think we can convince the CCP any way or the other?
We can be united in the wrong thing, true. But we can also head into an abyss because of divisiveness, which is equally dangerous (see Game of Thrones). I get the feeling that far too little attention is paid to this perspective.
I see unity-divisiveness is a spectrum. There's the contemporary divisiveness where people become more and more polarized and people don't listen to each other, nor try to work with each other, but merely try to shutdown the other. There's also a more constructive kind of divisiveness (which is closer to the unity side) where people acknowledge that they have different opinions but try to work with each other nevertheless.
There's no reason why we can't (or shouldn't) move the needle more towards "unified" even though there's no way we can (or should) reach it all the way. I don't see enough effort being put into promoting unity more, and that's worrying me.
> But if everyone is united in that we should walk into some abyss, maybe you'll want some divisiveness, no? Churchill was a divisive figure in the appeasement years, yet would it have been better if he had been silenced?
I have no answer to that. Perhaps people downvote me because they think I'm suggesting that he should be silenced (i.e. that I'm strongly in favor of CCP's way of doing things), but I'm not.
> The Democratic Peace Theory[1], if true
That is a big if, considering that the Wikipedia page lists pre-WW1 and pre-WW2 Germany (which were considered democracies) as examples of criticism on this idea.
I personally do not believe China is interested in war (at least, not in the way WW2 Germany was), but I also admit that I know far too little about geopolitics to back up this opinion.
> Is there any reason to think we can convince the CCP any way or the other?
I don't think this is a productive question to ask, because you can ask it about any other entity too. I'd rather turn it around: is there any reason to think that convincing will fail 100% of the time? If the chance isn't 0%, and we are interested in the wellbeing of the Chinese people, then shouldn't we at least give a try no matter how small the chance is?
Let's look at it another way: what are the alternatives? Can you go war to overthrow the CCP? Can you "enlighten" Chinese tourists so that when they go back home they'll overthrow the CCP? Can you overthrow the CCP with a trade war or economic sanctions? No. Convincing the CCP is literally the only option we get.
We need some form of Fairness Doctrine updated for the internet age. Otherwise things will only get worse and the democracy experiment will fail in probably catastrophic ways.
I worry about bubbles and echo chambers. Nowadays people don't watch much tv anymore. The media that they do consume, suggest content that align with their exiisting views. Unlike tv where you get a range of different views. Whats more, people actually like this! This is why those media are so successful.
I worry about the fact that nobody is interested in actually listening to opposing views. People just shout at each other and reaffirm their existing beliefs.
All this are separate issues from fake news.
It's true, they aren't listening to each other; But few people are saying anything worth listening to ( for example, having critical thoughts about ANY subject that isn't a regurgitation of talking points they heard/read/saw from their bubble ).
The propaganda has been successful enough that it's created a cultural viewpoint that starts with the premise that there ARE sides and that the other side won't listen so they're hopeless.
Let's try this:
If you take a LONG view ( more than the last 15 years ) you would see that prior to the fairness doctrine being removed, we generally weren't 'entertained' by media. That removal, rise of cable news and radio "shows" and the one issue wedge strategy of the Neo-con/Conservative movements created a socialization atmosphere for the last 30 years which advocates for a growing anger towards "mainstream" media. This first obvious signs of this were the obstructionists of the mid-90s, with Newt Gingrich leading the charge... This gave rise to the Tea Party, where obstructionism and venomous anger becomes the party line, not just an also ran belief. Simultaneous, the liberals are getting soundly beaten by not only a more directed and better orchestrated ground game but by tactics that aren't 'fair' by conventional standards. These events give rise to the seeds of 'falternative facts propaganda', which reframes everything as a personal attack and creates the 'drain the swamp narratives'. However, there's still a communication gap as traditional print media won't engage, and radio programming is notoriously hard to propagate. In comes the mainstream internet, starts connecting like minded folks from disparate areas who start grouping together. Twitter, Facebook, et. al start gaining in popularity, basing their entire business model on fueling the divisiveness playbook ( outrage engagement ), originated WAY WAY back when the fairness doctrine was eliminated. Media companies were also starting to getting in on the action, first by way of 'conservative' talking heads using shock-jock techniques pandering to their audience, creating a feedback loop. Liberals, after a few years of this, start seeing that they're 'losing' the culture war and fight back, emulating the tactics of their perceived opposition. Sprinkle some foreign involvement to amplify, season liberally with money and boom: 2019.
Anyway, I could go on, but I think you're not actually interested in any of this, but instead are trying to Trojan horse some nonsensical ideas about causation under the guise of intellectual exchange ( see: "China gets a bad wrap" as an example ).
Thanks for the chat though, I wish you the best.
The Manchurian empire of Qing was swept by the anti-British uprising, not anti-Manchu one.
People indeed do somehow gravitate towards successful totalitarian states, but are extremely negative towards totalitarian states not doing well.
being with people like you who share the same culture is the natural inclination. its the opposite that needs to nurtured and "catered to".
Nothing wrong with wanting to live with other Somalians, other Japanese, or Northern Europeans, as long as the different communities collaborate and get along.
>40% of Americans
probably more like 80%. people just want peace, the current climate is chaos.
Even if we were to simulate a preternatural perfectly uniform society of clones, wouldn't they need to have different ages, genders and vocations and wouldn't they as a consequence of living their lives arrive in a variety of economic and health circumstances? Wouldn't even this artificial society therefore find a benefit in having the capacity to value and include each other despite their differences?
Within these categories, there’s a range of tolerance levels from “I love my neighbors and would sacrifice my well being for theirs” to “I’m OK with my neighbors but don’t feel any sense of group attachment,” all the way down to mass riots and civil war.
In any case: horrible.
is `values` synonymous with `beliefs` here? if so, isn't coalitionism a first principle itself? and therefore really what's happening is there's a hierarchy of beliefs and primary beliefs (such as loyalty, faith, etc.) inform secondary (more fungible) beliefs/political interests.
personally i have throughout my life heard people say things to that effect ("god, family, country"). it has stood in stark contrast to how i've felt (because i didn't grow up religious, don't have close family ties, am an immigrant - so not patriotic) and as a consequence (i hypothesize) affects the way in which i approach politics, in that i try to reason things out from first principles.
Look at it from a game-theoretic angle.
Your moves may increase your chance to stay in power, increase your chance to get to the power, or symmetrically decrease either chance.
You can choose to always act to increase the chance to be in power, or sometimes decrease it willingly because of your values.
At every turn, some players leave (e.g. due to age), and some new players with either strategy join the game.
I posit that the concentration of players in power with the "anything for power" strategy will be higher on average than of players in power with "sometimes risk power for values" strategy. With a low enough rate of losing power due to external causes (not the strategy), the concentration of "anything for power" players staying in power may become very high, up to 100% sometimes.