I call it the toaster fucker problem. Man wakes up in 1980, tells his friends "I want to fuck a toaster" Friends quite rightly berate and laugh at him, guy deals with it, maybe gets some therapy and goes on a bit better adjusted.
Guy in 2021 tells his friends that he wants to fuck a toaster, gets laughed at, immediately jumps on facebook and finds "Toaster Fucker Support group" where he reads that he's actually oppressed and he needs to cut out everyone around him and should only listen to his fellow toaster fuckers.
Apply this analogy to literally any insular bubble, it applies as equally to /r/thedonald as it does to the emaciated Che Guevara larpers that cry thinking about ringing their favourite pizza place.
And the invention of twitter... most sane people don't talk. If they ever say anything, it is too common sensual to be retweeted. But if someone say something explosive it got exponentially retweeted. The character limit also eliminate the possibility of any nuance in position.
I like the idea of common sensual, but I think we all might have slightly different tastes :D
I've shared your post with my good friends at the Toaster Fucker Support Group. Expect to get doxxed within the next 48 hours, bigot.
In 1995 it was a Usenet newsgroup, in 2005 it was a vBulletin forum, today it's a Twitter or Facebook community, tomorrow, it will be something else.
Facebook and Twitter get tons of hate because they make money hand over fist and founders/insiders become richer than god, (unlike Usenet or forum sites) but the internet has always been this way.
Also, you might be overestimating how high the barrier to entry was. There were over 200,000 usenet groups at the peak.
Reddit is designed around grouping people in echo chambers and users come to it for this reason. Facebook may still be more impactful due to the sheer volume of users, but I don't think Reddit's impact is negligeable.
As an aside, even though HN has a distinct left bias I would say it's definitely one of the fairest forums I've posted on in the last couple of years.
Social media has proven itself to have massive impact on the zeitgeist, and it has been weaponized the world over to serve the interests of those willing to manipulate others in order to further their own (often misanthropic) goals.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/14/how-400-russia...
[2] https://www.cfr.org/blog/whatsapps-influence-brazilian-elect...
This is actually one thing I don't understand about the alleged progressive side and many people share this view. You could be made to believe basically anything the same way Trump supporters believe a communist overtake of the US is imminent.
Furthermore the support these stories got from intelligence agencies point to very serious problems that do indeed influence democracy in a very bad way, far worse than Putin can imagine in his dreams. Of course it might put a smile on his face, that much is understood.
True that the zeitgeist has influence, but it is mainly driven by western companies, not by the Russian government. Aside from the language barrier you cannot name one talking point this alleged Russian propaganda contained.
You do understand the implication if you decry any opposition to EU integration as Russian interference? Because any political discourse stops right there with you.
No, there was honest dissatisfaction with the EU in Britain. That might be wrong or not, but the Russian thing just made people reinforce their views, because that actually makes sense now.
Russians, seriously...
Brazil is another story here, although I think the facts have to be checked.
Well, I don't know how honest you'd call The Sun. Obviously, it wasn't Russia - but equally obviously, the whole euro-skepticism thing was hardly an organic phenomenon. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a single issue of a right wing British tabloid published in the last ten years that didn't have at least one article in it about how bad the EU is.
Influencing democracy is older than democracy - I think the thing that's causing such a furore is that the internet is lowering the barriers for this kind of yellow-press skulduggery, to the point that losers like Steve Bannon start to have actual power.
You say "the Sun" as if a single tabloid the vast majority of all powerful people and decision makers don't even read was some decisive factor. Now consider the total and complete opposition of the BBC, the Guardian, the Economist, the Financial Times, the Times, the Civil Service, dominant factions in both political factions, etc.
To say Brexit wasn't organic is to innuendo into existence some vast but vague conspiracy. "Obviously" it wasn't Russia you say, but it had to be someone right? Isn't this the same sort of rhetoric that has lead to the Capitol just being stormed? Isn't it far more likely that parts of the British press reported bad stories about the EU for decades simply because there were bad stories to report, as you'd expect there to be? And reporting stories about governments is the sort of thing a free press is supposed to do?
That and the structure of the EU government is a mess, the parliament has precisely zero impact on decision making and everything is run by the unelected bureaucrats in Belgium.
The UK has essentially walked away from a position of power in a very large nation, to take a position as a small nation on the periphery.
That might be fine for ten years, it might even be fine for fifty - but inevitably, the difference in negotiating power between the UK and its neighbors will show, to the UK's detriment.
It's already been showing in the brexit negotiations, where the EU held essentially all the cards.
The UK/EU deal isn't perfect but Norway and Switzerland already pricked their ears up and senior politicians in both countries are now publicly questioning why they can't have the same sort of deal. The EU backed down on many things they'd previously claimed were requirements, like the ECJ. And the UK has signed over 60 trade deals in preparation for leaving.
There's a sort of assumption here that might makes right. But the richest countries in the world are all small ones: Switzerland, Singapore, etc. Meanwhile empires spent most of the 20th century collapsing, often due to internal corruption and decay.
I don't really know the details of the deal, but it seems to me that even if you do get a good deal at one point, the fact is, the UK has very little negotiating power in comparison to the EU. If the EU decided, much like the USA decided with Japan in the 80's, that the UK should sign an unfavourable deal like the Plaza Accord, the UK would be able to do very little but sign it.
Obviously, as you've pointed out, there are a ton of countries that, for some time, step their way around all the pitfalls of this kind of position. But none of them are as large as the UK.
This is a perfect example where the EU should have totally crushed the UK by using its supposedly superior size and strength, according to size=power theory. And yet what we see is the opposite.
The EU demanded that individual nations buy collectively through the Commission. The Commission is run by diversity hires: half the commissioners had to be women, by demand of von der Leyen. They then moved way too slowly, didn't approve vaccines quickly (and still haven't), didn't order enough and now EU countries are at the back of the queue as a result. The first German to be vaccinated with German technology received their jab in ... the UK. The collective buying operation has since collapsed, with Germany running to Russia to try and acquire some of the Sputnik vaccine.
The whole pathetic affair is documented here:
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-eu-has-botched-its-v...
When it comes to bureaucracies, size does not equal power. Size does not equal benefits. Size equals incompetence, lethargy and internal decay. The EU is run by people who failed upwards their entire careers. They insisted they be given power over vaccines even though the EU has no formal treaty-defined role in healthcare, and then they screwed it up on a massive scale.
Oh dear. I suppose you think Boris Johnson got to where he was by his sharp intellect? Or does he also qualify as a diversity hire, on the basis that his family tree is more a family strongly-connected graph?
On the other hand, perhaps you are seeing the brilliance of british leadership in the coronavirus numbers, which are of course, neck and neck with other great nations, like the US, and Brazil.
van der Leyen got to be head of the EU via an entirely secret process, about which we only have one public piece of evidence as to how it works: the claim that the next president of the Commission had to be a woman. She won nothing whatsoever to get there. Then she insisted that half of all Commissioners be women: this is a matter of public record. In theory she doesn't even get to influence the choice of Commissioners, that's meant to be up to the country, but the reality of the EU often doesn't seem to match what the treaties say.
COVID doesn't really respond to political leadership. That's one of the few things we can say about it with certainty. None of the interventions tried so far have any statistical correlation with healthcare outcomes. Vaccination programmes are quite responsive to politics, on the other hand (whether COVID will respond to vaccines is another topic, but the manufacturing and rollout are within the scope of human control).
You clearly live in a parallel reality, where east asia does not exist, where there isn't a direct and obvious relation between leaders who made light of COVID (Johnson, Trump, Bolsanaro) and horrible casualty figures, and where the population of british people named 'Dave' has more talent than the entire population of british women.
Honestly, mandating 50 percent of commissioners are women seems very reasonable. 50 percent of the population are women, so it makes sense that they should be proportionally represented. That's called democracy.
For the record, I'm not a big EU fan. But I also live in the real world, and on that planet, the fact that the last two male prime ministers of england (and diverse cabinet members) were in the same school, the same (small) social club, and probably share more than a few second cousins, is an outcome that would be so incredibly unlikely in a fair and competitive system that if it did happen, reasonable people would call foul play.
If you still think it's a fair and competitive system that selects for talent if this kind of ridiculous anomaly happens on a regular basis, then you're a dupe. If, moreover, you think it's a fair and competitive system when nobody even claims it is fair, or competitive, or about talent, then you're a moron of such rare and unique quality that you're basically redefining the word.
After the victory of John Major in 1992, the Sun ran the headline 'IT'S THE SUN WOT WON IT', a line that's since become a sort of mantra in english politics - nobody has won an election since without the support of The Sun.
The second most read is the Daily Mail, another euroskeptic paper. In fact, if you look down the list of papers by readership [1], you can see the euroskeptic press (Telegraph, Mail, Murdoch papers) is almost the entirety of newspapers that are in circulation.
I'm not saying there's some vast conspiracy. I'm just saying that Rupert Murdoch is not a fan of large, big-state regulatory projects, and as a result, his papers (which include the Times, for instance) have followed an anti-EU line. He traditionally takes a very active role in this kind of editorial decision making, and is very public about this fact.
Obviously, the establishment in england are traditionally liberal, internationalist, and the argument for Brexit is a hard sell on pragmatic grounds for obvious reasons - and that's why the vast majority of powerful people were against Brexit, and it took 'outsiders' to push the campaign through.
However, these 'outsiders' were able to do so because they knew the issue sold well with both conservative core demographics and swing voters. And, if you think that your average midlands swing voter would have opinions about supra-national trade standards without some serious narrative building, I have a bridge to sell you.
[1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/529060/uk-newspaper-mark...
You do have to be careful not to assume forwards causation. The argument that the British people dislike the EU because the successful parts of the press publishes negative stories about it can also be rephrased as, many people dislike the EU and successful newspapers don't ignore that. That is people's views drive newspaper coverage, not the other way around.
if you think that your average midlands swing voter would have opinions about supra-national trade standards without some serious narrative building, I have a bridge to sell you
But if you think the EU is actually only about supra-national trade standards, then I have a bridge to sell you too ;)
If the EU was just a European ISO that issued standards on goods labelling nobody would have ever cared, you're correct. It's obviously nothing even close to that, and very keen on trade standards being even less of what it does in future.
Isn't that exactly the point? Brexit happened because of a referendum where normal people got a vote.
> That is people's views drive newspaper coverage, not the other way around.
I think if this was true, nobody would bother printing them. It's not like they make much money. I'm sure there's an element of organic xenophobia that would make people sympathetic to the EU free movement idea, but I don't think that's enough to create a demand for daily updates on how 'bonkers brussels bureaucrats ban bent bannanas!' (a genuine story).
I don't think anybody ever has picked up a paper because they were dying to get the details about that particular scoop - and honestly, that was one of the most memorable ones.
I can see some grounds on which Euroscepticism was organic in england, but I also have absolutely no doubt that such an idea would never have been successful without the amount of media support it got.
That was over a decade ago yet you remember it and are still talking about it. Obviously that was quite the scoop, which is exactly what newspapers love and how they make money.
A free press loves embarrassing governments by showing them doing stupid stuff. The press in Europe is a mockery of a free press because too many journalists at some point decided that the EU is a morally and ideologically pure vision of the future, so they just stopped reporting on all the bad stuff it does even when it'd make for interesting stories, whilst continuing to do such reports on their local governments. Except in the UK, where parts of the press retained their traditional role.
I think if this was true, nobody would bother printing them. It's not like they make much money.
Left wing super-pro-EU papers often don't indeed. Other papers do make money, plenty enough to justify making them. The Daily Mail made £72 million in profits in 2020 despite COVID. The Guardian bled money and announced job losses.
Social Media did not create division. Internet did not create division. TV did not create division.
They only amplify it. US was divided long before the creation of Internet. That baseline were far higher than other countries. Compared to other countries Internet definitely has its impact, but the baseline was small it isn't as obvious.
Let's put some number into it.
Division Score of US is 100, Internet Usage as a Multiplier, US also has one of the highest Internet usage ( especially with Social Media ) around the world. if you put that as 10. You get a total of 1000.
Division in Country A is 50, Internet usage as 4 ( If you take social media ads revenue split per capita between US and other countries as an indicator ), you have 200.
That is 5x difference.
Now you can start whole blood feuds talking about pineapple on pizza.
As opposed to the US where you're pretty much divided on whether you grew up in the city, suburbs or rural and then again on state. A Californian is wildly different from a Texan, who are again wildly different from a Wisconsonian. The UK is similar with the divide between the north and south of England, the Scots, the Welsh and the Northern Irish.
I think some of it is natural, but it's being amplified with the advent of globalism.
But my point was the people that idolise him online and think they're going to carry out a violent revolution are inevitably the same people that tweet abuse at Adele for losing weight.
It isn't like the LGBTQ+ community was treated well. It was perfectly acceptable to not hire a queer school teacher, nor was it such a bad thing for students to shun a queer classmate. Or you could look at marriage between "races" and the slurs you got from them. A core teaching of a number of churches is to surround yourself with other believers instead of the non-believer next door. And certainly make sure you fit into your gender roles.
Best not to have communist or socialist leanings in the 50's, nor be asian in the US in the 40's. In so many places, it was outright dangerous to have dark skin.
Sometimes you would just accept those around you because that was all you had access to, which is true... so long as they weren't in the wrong group lest you be treated like the minority.
Social media amplifies some bubbles, but it also breaks a few and some things are more difficult to ignore.
The irony of this ahistorical claim is that it comes very close to "Make America great again".
Think about the Vietnam War. The civil rights era. The McCarthy era. The list is almost endless. The Civil War, of course. The US has almost always had major polarization. If anything, the internet reveals what had been hidden by the whitewashed corporate Big Three TV network monopoly, which was itself an historical anomaly.
You know the Pulitzer Prize for journalism? Well, Joseph Pulitzer himself was unapologetically partisan. As was William Randolph Hearst, et al. The whole idea of "objective journalism" is not much more than a naive blip.
Also, yeah, the term yellow journalism refers to Pulitzer's rags. Completely on board with that as well.
I find the "How did we arrive to this point" question interesting, because for most of recorded history, the masses of humanity have not been so different than they are today. If anything, "enlightenment" is a relatively rare occurrence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%B3n_Gnarr
Comedian technically, but eh.
Well obviously that would be unelected “fact checkers” who aren’t held accountable for anything and suspiciously seem to find nearly everything said by people in one particular political party to be “pants on fire” lies.
You're right to point out the dangers of entrusting an unaccountable group with the responsibility of determining what is and isn't true, but I'm not sure that electing the fact checkers would improve their accuracy.
Also, if you think it is suspicious that people in one political party make statements that are deemed lies, your problem might not be with the checkers.
Come on, I could easily remove context and/or provide a misleading "authoritative" interpretation to basically anything a Democrat says in order to brand it a lie. How new are you to this game?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_vie...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability
I'm imagining the media could be structured upon some sort of protocol codified in law that would ensure those guidelines would be respected.
However the main thing that's necessary is probably instilling some sense of duty, honor and integrity in a large number of individuals. No idea how to go about that.
EDIT: in the USA the FCC actually had regulation with a similar intent in the near past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine
I've suggested to @dang that he tries implementing a kind of experimental discussion mode like that right here on HN, where for certain types of topics he could enable this mode and see what the effect would be on the human mind.
I don't know all the particulars of what changes should be included in such a mode (would be a good topic for a discussion), but the main one I would include is an additional guideline something along the lines of "Please exert some effort in restricting your statements to the discussion of reasonably conclusive true facts about physical reality."
This way, when people inevitably succumb to mistaking the virtual reality in their mind (where one has supernatural powers like omniscience, the ability to read minds at scale, predict the future with precise accuracy, completely understand infinitely complex indeterminate/chaotic systems, etc) for physical reality (where we do not have these powers), such comments could be flagged and reviewed a few days later (when cooler heads prevail) in a group Post Incident Review process of some sort (maybe a zoom meeting), where we could examine our behavior from a more metaphysical perspective, the goal being to increase awareness of the fact that inaccurate beliefs about reality are not something that only members of our personal outgroups suffer from, but rather something we all suffer from. It is simply a consequence of the same base software we all run in our minds.
Unfortunately, this idea seems to be rather unpopular (shocking!) - so, the beatings will continue until morale improves (or some variation of that), or until this never ending process comes to its natural conclusion. Mother Nature is a cruel mistress.
https://humorinamerica.wordpress.com/2014/05/19/the-morpholo...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MHExbJGIQs
https://youtu.be/smX2UtdJFq8 (not recommended for filthy casuals)
I don't think there's a way to system-design ourselves out of this situation.
> I don't think there's a way to system-design ourselves out of this situation.
I personally prefer to try and fail before declaring defeat. After all, how would one know if something isn't possible if no one ever tried it? If our ancestors had this attitude, we'd probably be doing something like having a pleasant ride in our horse and buggies rather than having pointless arguments with people we don't know who live half way around the world.
I don't believe all problems are unsolvable, but I've seen many systems fail because they do not take human nature into account.
Facebook and Twitter are probably the biggest such disasters I know about.
I realize your proposal's intent is to help people realize they have this problem.
I don't think it would do so very well.
I agree. But we've got them now, so what will we do about it?
> I don't believe all problems are unsolvable, but I've seen many systems fail because they do not take human nature into account.
Me too. Let's say we did this and it didn't work - would this leave us in a worse state than before (excluding the development time involved)?
> I realize your proposal's intent is to help people realize they have this problem. I don't think it would do so very well.
You may be right! But how would we find out for sure?
Hypothetically: if the idea went to a vote (to try such an experiment here on HN), would you vote for or against, and why?
I probably would just ignore it entirely, if it was experimental and opt-in.
If it was required, I would probably stop using HN.
Despite trying to be a careful systems thinker and programmer, at my heart of hearts I am a mystic and an artist.
I suspect those parts of my worldview would be largely dismissed as drivel by people who are confident they know the truth and ideas that diverge from theirs as mine do aren't worth considering.
A good way to see this is by looking at what news organisations call "fact checks". Almost always, these are simply repeating the claims of some random academics or government institutions, which are taken to be true by default. A lot of people really do assign a very high prior to "member of the establishment saying something makes it true", but a whole lot of other people do not. If the latter go and dig in and discover the underlying claim seems false, and start saying so, then the news orgs will claim it's "disinformation" and the others will say it's the "lying media" and yet nobody is literally making things up maliciously, even if a claim is objectively true or false.
I will try to explain...
> It's unpopular because it's naive.
You have no way of knowing whether this is naive.
> Nobody has the ability to prove everything to themselves and everyone else from first principles.
In no means whatsoever did I state this as a goal or requirement.
> Everyone takes shortcuts by repeating things they were told by others
Agreed. But my point is: people do not realize (in realtime) that they do this - and, this can have severe consequences.
> thus "lying" is occasionally the 5-year old type of lying where someone just makes something up on the spot and tries to avoid looking guilty, but these are not the meaningful or common types of lies.
I am not discussing lies (lying requires conscious intent) - I am discussing the mind's default inability to reliably distinguish between virtual reality and physical reality. This phenomenon can be observed in very high quantities on HN, but only in certain types of threads (culture war topics) - on other topics (computing, physics, etc), one will find very little flawed logic or assertions (relative to other social media sites).
Even if one doesn't think this is worth worrying about, it should at least be considered potentially interesting, considering the consequences of this phenomenon if it exists at scale. Take the climate change debate for example, or 'masks for covid' as a simpler scenario: what is the ACTUAL reason(s) our societies can't sort this shit out?
Should we care about such things, or should we not care? I'm getting very mixed messages on this from every social media site or organization I belong to. There seems to be general consensus that we should care (as a boolean) - but on the degree to which we should care, it seems like some people are opposed to caring too much (when it extends into thinking deeply and precisely, based on first principles (free of axioms and premises) and sound epistemology).
If you are debugging a complex system, would you use skills like precise observation, logic, and systems thinking, or would you just make a few wild guesses and throw up your hands in defeat when your guesses turn out to be ineffective?
> A good way to see this is by looking at what news organisations call "fact checks". Almost always, these are simply repeating the claims of some random academics or government institutions, which are taken to be true by default.
Agreed. This is an example of how 'that which is not true' in physical reality can become "true" in virtual reality.
> A lot of people really do assign a very high prior to "member of the establishment saying something makes it true", but a whole lot of other people do not.
Subconscious bayesian reasoning is often converted to binary when passed to the conscious (or so it seems).
> If the latter go and dig in and discover the underlying claim seems false, and start saying so, then the news orgs will claim it's "disinformation" and the others will say it's the "lying media" and yet nobody is literally making things up maliciously, even if a claim is objectively true or false.
Mostly agree, except for the "nobody is literally making things up maliciously" part - sometimes people actually do make things up with "malicious" intent.
That's not unique to any one political party. All political partisans are susceptible to propaganda, but only party-specific propaganda. There are different forms of propaganda on different sides that would never work on the other side.
However, if people are put in a situation where the only information they have access to—or the only information given an official sanction—is the propaganda, then whether or not it conflicts with their existing biases, they're pretty unlikely to be able to refute it. Especially not over a long period of time.
Also worth noting that saying people "do it to themselves" only applies to adults: the adults who are "doing it to themselves" are, in fact, doing exactly what I described above to their children: providing an "official sanction" to only the propaganda that agrees with their biases, thus ensuring that their children grow up molded in the same way, with no easy way to make an informed choice for themselves.
To an extent, yes. However, there are a number of mitigating factors. (1) Individual parents vary widely in their persuasive skill. (2) If there are 2 parents, those 2 don't necessarily agree in their beliefs, which means mixed messages for the children. (3) The child's friends, neighbors, schools, and community are also important influences on the child. (4) Genetics guarantees individual differences regardless. (5) Kids have a natural tendency to rebel against their parents, regardless of the parent's beliefs.
A lot of kids turn out a lot like their parents. And a lot of kids don't. Some even become the opposite of their parents. So the parental influence is definitely a factor, but it's not inescapable.
In any case, most kids pay very little attention to politics or "hard news" before they reach voting age (or even after). The news consumption itself tends to occur mainly in adulthood.
The propaganda that we are concerned with here deliberately seeks to trigger these childish responses in adults. If you go around telling people that they are entitled to something which these other people are taking from them, you will get some disciples regardless of whether there is any merit to the claim. It is like a mountainside in snow: you will get many small avalanches, but now and again a big one will let loose and sweep everything away.
"Free market" does not just mean "everyone (with enough money) gets to provide whatever they want, and call it whatever they want, and it's up to ordinary people to figure out what's reliable and what's not."
(Bad as in quality, not as in pessimistic. Bad meaning emotional and inciteful rather than informative and constructive. Humans have proven they respond more to the former.)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/karlynborysenko/2020/03/31/grea...
But how many women are afforded the opportunities to attain the job and life experience it takes to make as much as a man at the same job?
Once again -- stop thinking equality and start thinking equity.
If you are alluding to family constraints, having a family is a choice. I'm a man with a family and I have seen many opportunities disappear as a result of my decision to have a family.
Women simply do not have the same opportunities that men do in this country.
Where are these "genuine journalistic organizations" defined except in our own minds?
There is no journalist licence. There is no license to publish. You have a printer, and someone to buy what you print out? Congratulations! You're a journalist! In the U.S. anyway.
Intent, in that the organization, and the people making it up, genuinely seek to find truth and publish it, rather than seeking to push one agenda or another regardless of the facts.
And capability, in that they can, in fact, do the research and possibly fieldwork necessary to get truths that are interesting enough to be worth publishing, as opposed to just reposting stories someone else researched, whatever their truth value.
Having the intent described above but not the capability makes you something of an aggregator. Having neither capability nor intent makes you, more or less, a partisan blogger.
Having the capability to be journalistic but the intent to push an agenda regardless of the truth makes you an incredibly dangerous propaganda outfit.
I'm incredibly leery assigning a particular set of qualities to the essential journalist, even if by and large I do agree with the criteria you state.
A lot of the effects of religion have been mostly positive, but in its core it's based on misinformation.
And to top it off, his story ends with him rising from the dead!8-))
debate the authenticity all you want, but what exactly do you think the new testament is?
Personally, I don’t really think it matters much either way (the events of a few decades being much less influential than the following two millennia of activities by people who did believe he existed), so I default to taking the word of people who’ve actually studied the matter in depth; but as he was one of several Roman-era Messiah claimants wandering around (we know of at least two others, and there were probably more whose names never made it into the histories we have) it seems reasonable that the group which happened to catch on would have also originally coalesced around an actual person.
So it is generally accepted he existed, even if the criteria used to judge other historical characters is loosened for JC.
Edit - but please try to not say things like "ignorant" or "disabused" unless you meant to attack OP. Those are pretty loaded words for a collegial discussion.
In contrast Pontius Pilate is historical - there are extant documents with his name and title.
Simply b/c Pontius Pilate was real doesn't mean Jesus Christ was real. And it certainly doesn't mean he rose from the dead!
Two mentions. One is almost certainly fabricated, or at least heavily rewritten by later Christians.
> For eyewitness, you can find first person account in the New Testaments.
The Gospels aren't first person accounts. The closest you get to first person accounts of Jesus in the NT are brief mentions of Paul's conversion experiences in his epistles. The Gospels probably draw on first person accounts to some extent, but they themselves aren't first person accounts.
There's a very strong case to be made for the historicity of Jesus, but you make a misleading one by leaving out some very important context regarding Josephus and mischaracterizing the accounts of Jesus in the NT.
If I told you the story of our lord and savior Sauron, could you prove to me it's not true? Could you prove to me any of the Lord of the Rings didn't happen?
We don't generally require proving a negative.
I argued that that claim is wrong.
Someone responded saying, "find one true account that religion is based on". I responded asking whether they could find an account that is proven false.
The context here is important--I'm not arguing my belief in religion, or that you must believe in religion. I'm arguing that not all religion is based on misinformation. I brought up my question to point out that his question is irrelevant, and he can't prove anything to be false, therefore he can't prove that it's all misinformation.
If I see a bird fly over my head, then claim to you, "a bird flew over my head", I can't prove it. Neither can you disprove it. That doesn't mean it didn't happen, or that my claim isn't real, or that my claim is misinformation.
~2000 years ago people witnessed Christ die and some claim they saw Him come back to life. They wrote about it. Those letters still exist today. I agree that this information alone is not enough to justify someone changing their life to believe the letters--merely existing doesn't "prove" that what's in them is true. But pretend for a second it really did happen. What evidence/proof do you think you'd find that could prove it?
This is honestly getting watered down a lot though, with people jumping in without reading everything. I don't blame them--I do the same on HN.
If someone wishes to discuss why I personally believe, and what I believe in, that's a different thing altogether that I'm happy to discuss but not here on HN.
Everything is misinformation until proven otherwise.
The bigger and grander the claim, the higher the burden of proof. With a bird, the claim ain't exactly grand, and I'm willing to take you at your word. On the other hand if you told me a bird flew over your head, turned into a plane and wrote "I'm Your Lord and Savior" in skywriting, well, I'm gonna need more than just your word on it.
Given that religion contradicts what we know about the physical world, and that its existence is explained without reliance on the supernatural, it's not logical to believe its supernatural claims.
No one claims that someone is resurrected every day. The claims of Christianity are that it occurred once, and that it was a miracle.
The thought that it's impossible for something to have occurred unless it's commonly overserved isn't sound. There is no such requirement. There are plenty of rare events that occur, with and without scientific explanation.
Update: Perhaps here's what we're missing. There is information, misinformation, and then there's claims that cannot be proven or disproved. I do not believe that all things are false until proven true. I believe that Christianity, and many other religions, can be neither proven or disproven using modern science. It is neither misinformation or information. It is a belief.
Where we disagree is that you think that a 2000 year old text that's been translated 7 or 8 times and by what we would consider today to be idiots (human IQ has increased dramatically over time, in 1910 alone the IQ midpoint would be today's 70, which is a full standard deviation lower) - should be given the benefit of the doubt and be granted a reverse burden of proof. Idiots mind you who would have you burned at the stake for the laptop you're replying on.
The scriptures should be approached analytically with modern techniques. Does anything in there line up with observable reality? No. Is there a plausible explanation? No. Ergo, we should assume its false unless we discover some evidence that it might be true.
The challenge with doing that is religions rely on indoctrinating the youth before they're capable of making rational evaluations and play to our evolutionary weaknesses (the need for an explanation).
> There are plenty of rare events that occur, with and without scientific explanation.
Indeed but I'm not going to recommend telling a 4 year old I've just dunked under water about them based on a book written by an idiot 2000 years ago.
> It is neither misinformation or information. It is a belief.
It's a myth. Myths are fine, but shouldn't be presented as fact. And they certainly shouldn't be true until proven false.
By this token, until you prove otherwise, the whole world was started on a giant turtle. [1]
[1] https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/turtle-isl....
I agree there are many strangeties that are in the Bible that don't seem to be plausible, and we should not accept them as fact, due to the nature of translating ancient texts and the corrupting influences of government and religions. You are right that certain stories shouldn't just be believed or accepted without evidence. But you are wrong to say that there is nothing in the scriptures that lines up with observable reality.
The Bible contains many many stories about Human behavior and emotions. Mob violence, rape, drunkeness, greed, corruption, and contain many good lessons on understanding these behaviors in order to overcome them. These are behaviors we observe in our everyday lives.
There are great teachings in the Bible if that is what you are looking for. If you look in the Bible to try and find every falsehood or inconsistency you will never actual find anything of value to your life.
"It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, But the glory of kings is to search out a matter." - Proverbs 25:2
Nothing to do with trig, it's based on IQ assessments. [1] Human intelligence has increased dramatically as a function of nutrition, as a function of living in cities, as a function of education and so on. It's even happening to raccoons who live in cities. [2]
It's not their fault, but compared to modern humans, they were big dummies.
> There are great teachings in the Bible if that is what you are looking for. If you look in the Bible to try and find every falsehood or inconsistency you will never actual find anything of value to your life.
Yeah, it's a modern Aesop's Fables. It's a bunch of stories, some made up, some collected from experience, which are used to provide guidance to living your life.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/intelligence
[2] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200416-how-city-life-ca...
What matters is do you today believe heaven and hell are real, and will you go to either one when you die? Will you be judged by some know-it-all entity, and what rules does (s)he judge you by? Do you need to follow the roman, greek, egyptian, viking, moslim, christian, catholic, protestant, ..., rules to go to heaven? And if you follow the christian rules, and god turns out to be allah, will you go to hell?
There are some interesting arguments that we evolved to become hard-wired for religion. Fear during early evolution was probably the driver for this, all the earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes, death by germs etc. We invented religion as a means to explain stuff - the solar cycle, disease, etc, etc. Turns out those explanations were wrong, but our biology is still the same ..
Go ahead and read any religious text (I've read many!). Nearly every culture has one or many myths. Do you believe them to be fact? Or do you only believe your religious text to be true? And if so, why?
I don't mean to take a stance against religion in general. I agree with the above commenter that the impact of religion in a general sense does seem to be positive! A shared mythos can be a very powerful way of building community. This can have very real positive affects on a population, and, depending on that mythos, on an individual. But to suggest that religion doesn't require "faith" (i.e. believing in something despite no evidence) is... well... naïve.
I've gone through other forks on this thread. Here's my conclusion. No religion that I'm aware of can be proven or disproved based on scientific fact or observation. Yet that does not mean they are all false or true. One could very well be true. Or they could be false. But simply because we can't prove it doesn't mean it must be false. You cannot claim "misinformation" without proving its false. I cannot (and am not) claiming it "information" without proven it true. Its neither.
There is a different question to ask, which is how and why people choose to believe in religion provided that they cannot be proven. I have my reasons, my personal evidences, that have led me to believe my religion is true. I also believe that you can learn for yourself whether or not my religion is true. If you wish to learn more about my experience and what has led me to believe, I'll share it in a venue that encourages respect and understanding. Unfortunately online forums rarely provide that.
There are many myths from many cultures that seek describe where we came from or how we ought to live. For example, nearly every culture has some story about the creation of man/the earth. They all cannot possibly be true. I'm sure we can agree that man/the earth wasn't created as many times as there are stories about it.
So you are making claims about truth! How can you square the above with your belief in your own religion using the thought paradigm you outlined above? By claiming that your creation story is true (or as you may put it, "not proven false") you are also making a claim that all others are not true. A claim you have just argued cannot be made... It's all a fallacy.
The most interesting question worth answering is: Why do you believe the myths that you do?
Statistically speaking, the answer is because it is the one your parents believed. It's hard to explain away the eerie correlation between a person's religion and where they were born. Why is it that a child born in the Middle-East is so likely to follow Islam, a child in the West Christianity, in India Hindu, etc. etc.? It's almost as if these religions are a product of the people, not some greater truth.
And for what it's worth, I see no meaningful difference between something that is false and something that cannot be proven to be true:
"There are 2,145,124,152 birds in flight above the earth right now." - do you believe me?
"Jesus Christ just came down and told me personally that Hindu is the one true religion" - do you believe me?
"I just saw a red 2018 Toyota 4Runner drive past my house" - do you believe me?
"One of the above claims it true" - do you believe me?
What role does "faith" play when appraising the above questions? Are you applying "faith" in the same way to the above as you do to your religion? Probably not.
My arguments on this thread have been about the claim that all religion is based on "misinformation". I feel a bit like a broken record here, but in order for something to be misinformation it must be proven false. Claims can either be proven true, proven false, or simply not proven true or false. There are 3 states--not 2. Religions fall into the last category, where the claims have not been proven or disproved. It's not misinformation until it's proven false. It's also not information until it's proven true. Which gets back to the key differences between faith and scientific fact. Faith is belief in something not (yet) proven true or false. Belief in science is based on something science has proven true or false. You're trying to take the way you approach science, likely because it's what you've been surrounded by in your recent life, and force it upon religious views. It doesn't work, because the basis for faith in a religion implies that the thing isn't proven using science.
> Statistically speaking, the answer is because it is the one your parents believed. It's hard to explain away the eerie correlation between a person's religion and where they were born. Why is it that a child born in the Middle-East is so likely to follow Islam, a child in the West Christianity, in India Hindu, etc. etc.? It's almost as if these religions are a product of the people, not some greater truth.
What environment have you been raised in? Western world, analytically educated? Atheism is a religion. It's the belief that there is no higher power--but it's still a belief... based on faith (not science). Science has neither proven or disproved the existence of God. Agnostic is also a religion based on faith. Whatever your actual beliefs or lack of beliefs are, it's not based on scientific fact.
The word "myth" implies the account is proven false (through science). It's not accurate to use, unless you're able to prove the religious accounts false.
I'm not asking you to believe me. I'm not asking you to believe in my religion. I'm simply stating that claiming all religions are based on misinformation cannot be done until they're all proven false.
You've made great leaps about why I believe without understanding me, my faith, or the process I went through (and continue going through) to obtain and keep my faith. You can make as many assumptions as you want, but they haven't been accurate and likely won't be if you continue to do so.
> What role does "faith" play when appraising the above questions? Are you applying "faith" in the same way to the above as you do to your religion? Probably not.
I do not have faith in any of the claims you've made, no matter how reasonable. I'm not arguing that any one of them is true or false.
> The most interesting question worth answering is: Why do you believe the myths that you do?
I agree, this is the more interesting question. But it's not something I wish to discuss on a public forum. It's deeply personal. If you are genuinely interested, I'd happily share it in a different venue.
With the above inconsistency in mind we can explore what it means to "prove something false":
https://www.quora.com/What-does-it-mean-to-prove-something-f...
The top answer here summarize the current state of our understanding. The key terms on which to focus are "inconsistent" and "contradiction". Can you see how believing in something that cannot be rationalized is inconsistent or a contradiction? It is the belief in a religion itself that is the contradiction. It doesn't matter whether any specific event can be proved true or false (again that is not my point). My point is that "having faith" is to recognize this contradiction and choose to believe anyway. By simply "having faith" you are, yourself, proving it false.
That isn't to say having faith is a bad thing! I will again commend organized religion as a valuable tool to both the individual and society. People are not rational. Feelings are not rational. I genuinely believe that the good that comes from religion outweighs the bad. That doesn't mean I can't recognize it for what it is...
And I am not an atheist! I guess it depends what you mean be "God" though... I don't believe in any region as an ideology, but I do believe in religion as an institution (I do go to church on occasion): Was there a person name Jesus? Probably. Did he inspire good things? Mostly likely. Are the lessons we learn from his story valuable? Absolutely! Did he turn water into wine? No. Did he rise from the dead? Of course not.
In this way I believe in religion, but I don't "have faith".
[0] The word "myth" does not always denote something that is false.
> You are arguing that religious myths[0] cannot be claimed to be true or false
I'd correct this to say "You are arguing that religious myths[0] cannot be claimed to be true or false [using science]"
> It means to hold a belief that cannot be rationalized.
I think you're ignoring the possibility for people to believe things for reasons other than science. If I have a spiritual experience that leads me to believe something is true, I have reason to believe, yet I cannot prove it to others. Does that make it rational? I think it could be argued that it is, especially for the person who had the experience.
I'm okay with "myth" being used then.
Thank you for the respect you've demonstrated. I value discussions like this.
This discussion started as an exploration of the claim that [all] religion is based on misinformation. And I can see, upon reading that word, how someone could interpret "misinformation" to connote a negativity towards religion. I personally do not see it that way, rather, as an accurate and objective description of the phenomenon. This is because believing in religion requires faith, and to "have faith" means [look at discussion above].
In other words religion is a paradigm based on information that cannot be proved true (not just that it hasn't been proved true). I would classify the above as misinformation -- information that cannot be believed (i.e. rationalized). Choosing to believe anyway is each individual's prerogative, but I don't think it changes how we should talk about it.
I don't mean this as a critique to living a life of faith. Though I personally cannot "have faith" (I cannot believe a person walked on water), it doesn't mean I don't believe in God or the values that many religions profess. It just means that "God" means something different to me. It probably means something different to everyone. As you say, "It's personal".
It is impossible to believe in the teachings of the Bible without having faith. I'm sure you bring an equal amount of faith when reading other stories. You don't? Why not?
I suspect this is the same article: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/revenge-of-...
Sure, some people (especially historically) have treated it like a tool, but that is not religion's fault (religion can't be at fault because it lacks agency). Those people would have seized upon whatever cultural phenomenon that was available to their own political purposes.
It absolutely was designed. Thoughtfully and explicitly.
You might find it interesting to learn about how the new testament was assembled. Many books did not make it into the final version of the new testament, left on the cutting room floor of history. The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew for instance has a teenage Jesus fighting dragons. Check out the New Testament Apocrypha. [1]
Any scholar of the NT knows that the apochrypha date very late and the cannon is the legitimately oldest extant texts. There is no evidence that earlier texts were excluded. You do know (you probably don't) that the majority of the Pauline epistles are considered to be authentic, by secular atheist scholars, and date to to the middle of the first century right?
Outside of the pauline works, Hebrews is dated to no later than about 45 AD by secular, non believing scholars.
You're advacing a rather tired late 19th century view that just doesn't wash in the light of modern scholarship but was the darling of many 1800s and early 1900s lutherans.
The point I'm making is that the new testament was curated and texts were picked and chosen to advance the interests of those picking and choosing.
Ancient Jews saw the scriptures as possessing different levels of “cannonicity” - the Books of Moses were “very cannon” while books like Maccabees were “new fangled.”
Christians adopted that view as well. The fights over the Old Testament are still ongoing with different religions organically accepting or rejecting other books every now and then.
The logic behind these still ongoing arguments has much to do with traditions, and little with the actual content.
If we were to reevaluate the Old Testament with fresh eyes, I don’t think anyone would include Ecclesiastes or Job. Too depressing and bizarre.
Not even clear what’s going on or when it’s taking place.
But ultimately there’s a certain logic to these debates - and “we’re designing a religion” isn’t part of it.
Edit: Here’s an excellent example of how “non-designed” the Old Testament is: https://orthodoxwiki.org/Old_Testament_Canon
"Canon" is what's considered truth in a mythos (also a musical form and an electronics company).
"Cannon" is a type of gun.
Throughout history societies have used religion as a way to do this. Every society usually had one official religion that was used in this way: ancient egyptians, ancient greece, roman empire (first a religion copied from greece, later replaced by christianity, where the center of christianity was actually moved to rome), european kingsdoms with different versions of their official christian religions, and other countries throughout the world.
It's a pretty simple mechanism: follow our rules, god sees everything, if you don't follow the rules you will be punished, i.e., go to hell, if you follow the rules you will be rewarded, i.e., go to heaven.
We do the same thing with children in the hope that they'll listen to their parents: if you are a good boy/girl you get presents from sinterklaas (santaclause), if you are bad you will be be punished. Dutch santaclaus will take the bad children to spain, which is our version of hell ;-)
Funny thing is that children around the age of 8 will be smart enough to understand that they've been lied to and that santaclaus doesn't exist, whereas with religion some adults never get to this point of enlightenment.
This claim only holds water because -- in theory -- there is no precise definition of what "religion" is. In practice, it's a set of rules and rituals to follow (literal manipulation) on penalty of an unprovable/unfalsifiable entity or system punishing you (misinformation).
So, okay, "generally speaking" it's not about that. Now show me that the majority of religions don't boil down to manipulation and misinformation.
CNN, NYT, Washington Post, HuffPost, Vox, Fox News turned into extremely biased sources of disinformation and blatant propaganda.
E.g. a fabricated story in The Atlantic magazine, citing anonymous sources, was repeated and amplified by all these major media hubs and then further by social media for weeks. It's like a giant wave after wave of misinformation and rumors presented as facts. The burden of evidence apparently no longer applies.
The bias is mostly on the left wing of political spectrum, but the right wing are not too far behind.
OANN/Newsmax delenda est
One could certainly argue that a system where leaders have a direct platform to address the people is more democratic than one that relies on media gatekeepers, but it does have its downsides.
Older Trump fans are mostly getting their info through FB now. Look at FB's top shared pages/posts. The younger ones are on spread out on FB, reddit, reddit clones.
-for most of his presidency, Fox News has echoed President Trump's viewpoint
-therefore for most of that period I'm not confident that his Twitter access has made a huge difference to outcomes (although a number of his comments have certainly been notable).
-recently though, Fox has not been entirely on board with Trump's claims that the election was rigged. They haven't denounced them as strongly as other media, but they haven't wholly endorsed them either.
-So in recent weeks, it appears to be that Trump's direct channel to his supporters via Twitter was instrumental in leading to the current situation.
It appears the majority disagree with me, but I'm not clear where.
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/living-und...
What a tired old marxist line this is; And one never applied to say, the political theory of marx himself
Religion is no more misinformation than a particular Philosophy is misinformation; a perspective on reality. Even the meta-philosophical act (philosophy of philosophy) of having an ontology of philosophy or any form of abstraction/reification, is an organized form of how one views the world.
The US yo me now seems to have become close to the comedy movie Idiocracy. You know in the 80s and 90s everyone looked up to the US so much. It was where everyone dreamt of going. I dont know anyone who clings on to that idea now.
Part of what fascist politics does is get people to disassociate from reality, there is no truth, there is only opinions. You get them to sign on to this fantasy version of reality, and from then on their anchor isn’t the world around them — it’s the leader and his opinion.
Part of interview on Fascism with Jason Stanley Professor of Philosophy at Yale University.
People don't simply consume information and form ideas like a summary-generator. There's a strong component of imitation and rehearsal that is disrupted when the patterns of engagement with other people are drastically changed.
> nobody is tied down in a chair and forced to watch certain TV shows or listen to certain radio shows for hours, days, weeks, months at a time, to the exclusion of all else.
Doesn’t this behaviour sound familiar? To me it sounds like addiction. What has changed is not our capacity to become addicted but the willingness of some to exploit this weakness for money and/or power. From the internet outrage generators to the social media outrage amplifiers. The addictiveness of outrage is now fully weaponised by those who have fully succumbed to the addictiveness of power and money. No handbrakes. No filters. No conscience. Lots of self denial, self delusion, self-justification.
The collision of these two addictions will destroy us if not unwound.
EDIT: auto-correct correction.
A good education should produce a balanced and well rounded adult. I teach CS ages 14 to 18 and all teachers have pastoral care responsibilities. I teach much more than just the curriculum. Some lessons — tutorials — are dedicated to general education.
A highlight from last term was tackling the question “is being gay the same as being a paedophile?” It was asked earnestly and in context. It was my pleasure to answer, ask them more questions, and get them to think about consent and what is and isn’t ok for society to ban.
This is what blaming the algorithm gets us. It's well past time to start shutting down platforms with algorithmic content systems.
There's nothing inherently wrong with automating content discovery; it's the cost function being optimized that I think we would almost all take issue with.
Or rather, they knew the answer, but knew that it was the best way to maximize engagement and thus profit.
A cop sees a guy crawling around under a streetlight and asks him, "Sir, what are you doing?"
The man replies, "Well, officer, I dropped my car keys and I'm trying to find them."
The policeman offers to help, and they search fruitlessly for ten minutes.
Finally, the officer says, "Are you sure this is where you dropped them?"
"Oh, no, it's not. I dropped them way over there in the parking lot."
Dumbfounded, the cop says, "WHY are you looking over HERE?"
"Well, the light is better over here."Tech companies should be able to explain and demonstrate the logic their systems use. These algorithms should probably be public. And any system which cannot be transparently explained should be shut down.
But what would even count as an explanation, and what does a "public" algorithm reveal?
There is no line of code that says "if (video.content == extreme) { show_to(EVERYONE) }".
A lot of the dangers are possible from a simple algorithm which merely performs A/B testing on whether a certain (randomly chosen, at first) video increases the amount of time a user spends on a site.
You could pass a law against A/B testing, or require companies to provide deliberately bad suggestions to make their users frustrated, but I'm not sure if that is a proportionate legislative response.
That sort of gets to the heart of it - saying "it's impossible to explain my algorithm because it is so complicated" no longer cuts it. It's the same as if I said to the FDA "This drug works in our testing for the indicated purpose but we have no idea if there are side effects" they aren't go to say "well, OK then, you can sell it". They'll say "come back when you have tested for all possible side effects and you can precisly define its behavior"
Currently Facebook, Google et al, will measure a narrow set of metrics to define the success of their algorithms (primarily relating to $$$) and then declare victory based on empirical optimisation of those metrics. They have to show that not only does the algorithm work for its stated purpose, it doesn't have undesirable side effects. They could do massive testing to demonstrate a huge range of side effects are not present. That would be similar to and probably as expensive as drug development. But an easier way to do that is to transparently explain what the algorithms do so that side effects can be predicted. If that is actually impossible for a given algorithm - well, maybe that algorithm shouldn't be used on the public at all.
Let me give you an example of a good system: Spam filters not operated by Google. Algorithms decide whether or not mail gets through my corporate mail filter. It determines it based on a score, which is tallied from a set of rules. And you can drill down and see the score a spam email received, and then you can see the rules and factors that created that score. As a user, you can even generally see this, because the results are included in the message's headers in your inbox. And if you're the admin, you can then adjust those rules to fix errant behavior.
That's how a recommendation system should work. A system which can't be analyzed in that matter should not exist, and the rules and scoring applied to such systems should be disclosed in some sort of header.
You believe it causes no harm, but that doesn't make for a good assumption, considering image recognition NNs have been repeatedly demonstrated to be racist. So you may find it's classification of dogs might work really well, but it might label other people's coworkers or family members as dogs.
Which is my main point, why should this apply to all tech when in some cases unexplainable mistakes are fine?
That's a valid argument for not using Gmail, but that in the case of Youtube, almost everyone wants a single place where they can watch all the user-generated videos.
I have my doubts this is true, so much as people are used to the relatively common controls/experience that comes with clicking a YouTube link. If I gave you a link to ocdtrekkietube.com/s8fsj2 (not a real link), and it worked as well as YouTube, I'm not sure any user would be particularly upset about it.
The biggest reason YouTube is as powerful as it is is that video hosting is expensive and few companies can eat that kind of bandwidth and storage without being an ad giant.
Then it should be illegal to use on consumer websites. It's that simple.
> If you want explainability it's going to require giving up a lot of innovation that could help people.
Four people died in the US Capitol because of this "innovation". It's time to stop pretending technology doesn't cause more harm than good in these cases.
The nuclear bomb is exactly why we need to block "innovation" that causes more harm than good.
The question is, how do you know something is bad before developing it? You oftentimes can't put the genie back in the bottle.
Also there MUST be some randomization or more generalized content introduced. And I'm not talking Trending Now or Hit Songs That Just Came Out. I'm looking at you, YouTube and Facebook. Sometimes I actually want new stuff and it keeps dragging me back into a virtual rabbit hole.
- There's no simple decision tree, but an ML model with countless knobs that are mostly implicit. Not worth the money to make an UI to tweak it.
- The puprose of these platforms is to maximize your exposure to ads. Nothing more. Anything that detracts from it is a no-go.
(This might be the very point you are making, rhetorically?)
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence#Paper...
In capitalism anyone who opposes the corporation is disappeared.
You end up needing a mix of both. An independent news media with an explicit obligation to the truth, one that they can get in trouble for violating. We had that obligation for a long time through the middle of the 20th century. News organizations were well regarded even if they didn't always make the right calls they tried their best.
But then Rhupert Murdock realized that you could simply pretend to be one of those respected parties and lie to the viewers constantly and there would be no consequences. The obligation to the truth turned out to be a gentleman's agreement and there were no truth police breaking down your door when you told lies. That's when we discovered that the media is like the Prisoner's Dilemma. Fox news discovered that as long as everybody else was beholden to the facts they could lie repeatedly and constantly win the game. They've only fallen from the very tippy top of the ratings in recent years as other news organizations like OAN have discovered that the bigger the lie the bigger the ratings.
Fast forward to today and respect for the independent media (the all important 4th branch of government) is at an all time low and we have completely indoctrinated delusional people storming the Capitol building.
I am not a fan of the specifics of the fairness doctrine, but I believe the current state in which media companies can freely and knowingly lie as long as they don't stray too far into defamation is not tenable.
If you study political philosophy (e.g. Plato, Hobbes, Locke etc..) and read stuff like Orwell's Animal Farm, I think it becomes pretty evident that it ultimately won't matter how you structure society, whether that's a mix (of communism/capitalism), or having all of one or the other. Just using a simple thought experiment, you can show that the sheer existence of two or more people, can potentially give rise to situations where inequality becomes inevitable. In which case, leads to Hobbes's arguments about the state of nature.
Everyone’s Youtube subscriptions are an echo chamber of views they mostly agree with because people only click subscribe on such channels.
A recommendation engine working perfectly is going to show you lateral channels that might be more or less extreme of the last one. But that’s not the root of the problem.
My (logged out) YouTube feed has mostly cooking shows, programming videos, stuff about crafts and watchmaking etc, because those are mostly what I like to watch.
I’m also interested in guns. The moment I watch a gun video, I immediately get shown Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, and The Blaze instead of all the cooking videos etc.
And yet none of the gun videos I watch are remotely political. They are exclusively about sports and history, and don’t even talk about gun politics, let alone politics in general.
I never see (amateur) political talking heads recommended. It's all trash pop-history talking heads, semi-trash documentaries and low brow entertainment related to cars and guns (e.g. demo ranch and whistlin diesel).
I recently (like yesterday) watched a semi-political talking head discuss the economics of OnlyFans after a friend linked to that particular person's analysis so it'll be interesting to see if the algo tries to drag my content toward more talking heads.
E.g. if you live in a generally pro-gun area I think they be algorithm would probably be less likely to assume that it’s worth showing you political content.
I know recommendations are based on many factors that differ between us (such as location), but I can't reproduce that behavior. If I watch hickok45 or Paul Harrell in an incognito window, I get recommendations for more of their videos along with a few from Demolition Ranch, Forgotten Weapons, and other gun channels. I see no political videos in the recommendations.
I’m using AppleTV, but not logged in. It’s possible that it takes some time for that to happen.
Also, I watched a Jerry Miculek Video yesterday, and got no political stuff, so it’s also possible that the algorithm has been improved or they have specifically acted to break this association.
Sure, but to assume that you _probably_ hold conservative beliefs due to having an interest in guns is way more often the case than not. Same is true in an opposite way if you watched some video on abortion rights.
Only in the crudest statistical sense. For example the fastest growing demographic of gun owners is black women, who are overwhelmingly Democratic voters.
And that’s exactly what the complaint about these algorithms is.
I’m simply pointing out that the algorithms do in fact steer people towards polarizing content, that is not what they would have otherwise chosen.
You may simply be that % of the false positive/false negative that is a cost of doing business.
I mean - the alternative to this is having Google employ all the out of work journalists and editors and manually curate lists for people. I think the cost of losing a few people is vastly lower than hiring that many people, in each culture and country around the world.
It's fairly easy to see how this can lead people who did not already hold those viewpoints down a rabbit hole where they end up far more radicalised than they would have otherwise been, especially since I've not once seen Youtube put any sort of "rebuttal" videos in amongst the "illuminati aliens are controlling your government" ones.
What I want to know about is more coherent explanations of abstract math and some scientific experiments which I never got to see in school, in addition to comedy. That I watch something else once in a while is not really an indication of my identity or my Jungian shadow self.
If a large percentage of people who watch gun blowing up videos also are interested in the videos you mention than why wouldn't they show it (I assume if it were breaking guidelines it would be removed)
The homepage ones should show you subscriptions videos but also based on the last keywords/videos watched.
I don't see the value in using 2012-2019 videos watched when your recent ones speak more to what you currently are interested in.
IMO autoplay for anything but music is one of the worst decisions ever made on online streaming services.
Kind of reminds me how repeatedly clicking the first link on Wikipedia articles inevitably leads to the article about Philosophy, but diverging instead of converging.
This is an interesting random walk experiment :)
You were offered the recommendations, but you declined. It's still a matter of self-selection and self-exposure. How many recommendations would it take to turn you into a white supremacist? How many video viewings? If your answer is that no amount would, then the algorithms don't seem to be the real problem.
My mother is a PhD. I asked her whether she will accept a paper without sound academic bibliography. She said no. Then why would she believe in extremist videos with shady citations and outright lies? But she does. I think it is because of the recommendation engines which keep feeding similar videos. Just like Goebbels' maxim of repeating a lie often enough and loudly enough to make it the truth.
We can keep saying that our algorithms are fine. But if what we see today has never been seen in history, I think it is high time that we re-evaluate our current beliefs about the impact and the correctness of our work.
This is very common. I would even say the norm. No person is fully rational. Rather, people may think rationally about certain things — their "speciality", perhaps — but not about others. Everyone is irrational in some ways.
> But if what we see today has never been seen in history
Which part do you think is historically unprecedented? The technology of course is unprecedented, but I don't see anything about the beliefs of people today that's unprecedented.
Has existed for longer and I believe started this downhill trajectory, perhaps created the 'tinder' if you will.
They too do it for the engagement/ratings.
Rupert Murdoch's empire as a prime cause creating an alternate reality solely because it made his media the #1 most watched news network, print, etc.
They've even argued in court themselves that any 'normal' person wouldn't take their 'news' seriously. Take Tucker Carlson's early videos as another example of this gross negligence; he's an actor saying what gets views no matter his actual beliefs are.
And making that distinction helps highlight that there are factors in how information is shaped and transmitted through networks of people that results in these outcomes.
I certainly don't know what the right answer here is, or even if there is one. The flip side of this polarization is the Internet has allowed discriminated groups to organize (e.g. see the "It Gets Better Project")
A pretty good doc about it; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brainwashing_of_My_Dad
How exactly did he get into listening to that stuff? Were there no other choices? Not music? Not NPR?
My theory is pretty simple: anger (and especially anger with an object of blame) is like a drug, and he got addicted. I think it’s as simple as that.
This is the story I never believe. My reaction to hearing Rush Limbaugh is the desire to shut it off ASAP. Don't you have to willingly invite him into your life? To listen and enjoy and want to listen more, to even "experiment" with the drug of anger with an object of blame, is not very indicative of kind and optimistic IMO.
The thing is, people are complex. They can be very kind... to their own kind, if you know what I mean. Alternatively, some parents can be kind to everyone else's kids and be abusive toward their own. It's almost always nuanced. You may only see side one side of a person, even if you think you know them better than anyone else.
It's more like, I wouldn't say that the vodka distillery is the cause of alcoholism.
Anyhoo, I agree with you on the politics of the matter, but I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree about whether my dad was a good person who fell into the sway of bad influences or was a bad person all along.
The crucial difference is that cigarettes are targeted at children, and the majority of smokers become addicted before they become adults. Whereas the audience for Limbaugh, Fox News, etc., skews much much older. Everyone is complaining about how their dad was brainwashed, not about how their child was brainwashed. How many smokers start as dads rather than as teenagers?
(To further clarify: Alcoholics are a minority of alcohol drinkers. The majority of drinkers drink simply because they enjoy drinking, and they could quit if they wanted to without withdrawal symptoms. In fact I quit drinking entirely when the pandemic started, for several reasons, and I'm fine, I feel like I could continue abstaining indefinitely with no ill effects. Thus, I don't consider the purpose of the alcohol industry to be hooking junkies, whereas that's almost unavoidable with nicotine, which is medically established to be highly addictive.)
> we’ll have to agree to disagree about whether my dad was a good person who fell into the sway of bad influences or was a bad person all along.
I don't believe in such black and white, good and bad people. As I said, people are complex. "It's almost always nuanced. You may only see side one side of a person". I think we're all flawed, just in different ways. My claim is that Rush Limbaugh is not a magical snake charmer, he's a guy who tells some people what they want to hear, otherwise how do you explain how you yourself are "magically" immune to his charms?
This is the missing piece in the explanatory puzzle about propaganda. It's easy to point out, but you can't jump to conclusions about its effectiveness without explaining why you who are pointing it out were not affected.
If propaganda comes in small amounts, it will not be apparent and one can fall victim of it.
If it comes in a sudden, big quantity, people may react with disgust and be more wary of similar content in smaller amounts.
For an example, younger people can easily be effected watching videos with slight racism. Yet if you were to put a straight up neonazi speech in front of them, they would probably be disgusted.
I think that’s the core of the problem on both sides.
This is similar to how I view 4chan. I almost went down that path because I started viewing it as an edgy teen and thought it's just fun and memes, no one takes this stuff seriously. But over time it becomes normalized and they do start taking it seriously. Looking at it now and I assume as a "normal" person seeing it for the first time, it's crazy.
This sounds more plausible. However, it's in direct conflict with the claim "I can pinpoint it to exactly when my dad started listening to Rush Limbaugh".
I feel that there's a whiff of "Reefer Madness" in the hysteria against partisan media, as if mere exposure will drive unsuspecting innocents mad.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2016/06/22/1-feelings-a...
https://theweek.com/articles/880107/why-fox-news-created
> If Fox News had a DNA test, it would trace its origins to the Nixon administration. In 1970, political consultant Roger Ailes and other Nixon aides came up with a plan to create a new TV network that would circumvent existing media and provide "pro-administration" coverage to millions. "People are lazy," the aides explained in a memo. "With television you just sit — watch — listen. The thinking is done for you." Nixon embraced the idea, saying he and his supporters needed "our own news" from a network that would lead "a brutal, vicious attack on the opposition." Alas, his fantasy network did not come into being at that time, and the 37th president was soon engulfed in the Watergate scandal. At first, Republicans dismissed the scandal as a Washington Post "witch hunt." But then the White House tapes proved beyond doubt that Nixon had used the levers of government to pursue vendettas against his opponents and cover up his extensive skulduggery. Disgusted GOP leaders, including Sen. Howard Baker of the Senate Watergate committee, chose principles over party. Nixon was forced to resign.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/11/newt-gi...
> “One of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty,” he told the group. “We encourage you to be neat, obedient, and loyal, and faithful, and all those Boy Scout words, which would be great around the campfire but are lousy in politics.”
It's there to treat everything as 9/11 and blow every story put of proportion
I am willing to buy this argument.
The Internet just ushered in post-modernism on a global scale, which undoes a lot of the thought-unification (some would say thought-control) that came with modernity.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Paul_Marat 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iskra 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_St%C3%BCrmer
But the broader point that the French Revolution was proceeded by a radicalized literature [0] is accurate (Sieyes' "What is the Third Estate?" is the most famous work [1]). Though it's contribution to the origins of the Revolution is the matter of some debate [2].
[0] For a good overview, see the work of Robert Darnton, esp. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674536579 [1] https://fr.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Qu’est-ce_que_le_tiers_état... (I don't recall if there's a full English translation of this... there are excerpts in Keith Baker's French Revolution reader (U Chicago Press) [2] One of the better treatments of this is https://www.dukeupress.edu/The-Cultural-Origins-of-the-Frenc...
Now that anyone can publish anything, and make it appear reasonably professional, there's much more competition for everyone's attention.
And the media outlets who cater to specific biases, and are outspoken and over-the-top, seem to win the attention.
That has allowed traditionally marginalized news sources that embrace less-vetted news to shine. Say what you want about Alex Jones, but he was covering Jeffery Epstein's lolita express/island in 2008 and no one would touch that story back then. So now we have the marginalized news sources ending up larger viewerships than the national evening news. So while you do get real news which is less skewed left or right than in the MSM, it is wrapped with plenty of crap and is less vetted.
The news industry, politicians, and big tech censorship has made this problem. Now they get to lay in their beds. It sucks, I'm not a fan of what's going on in DC right now, but I also don't blame those doing what they feel they must for their country. They are merely products of the system that made them. Until the MSM and politicians decide to stop twisting everything for market share or political gain this will continue to escalate. And we know that won't happen sadly.
It doesn’t matter very much if one side is more crass, or tells more obvious lies.
It matters a lot if everybody has derelicted the attempt to represent views and understandings across the spectrum, and it’s important that we be able to distinguish that situation from just blaming a particular actor.
Perhaps you have something deeper to offer though?
Agreed.
> there is no "spectrum"
Only true in a pedantic and useless sense.
It certainly is possible to cluster and organize political preferences.
> there are only "particular actors" and people decide in real time which particular actors they prefer to focus their attention on.
Without further explanation this is just a frame which doesn’t add meaning on its own.
Overall it’s not clear what you have added here.
No. It's true in the sense that you cannot impugn a particular part of the spectrum for the actions of individuals because there is no way to reliably quantify dishonesty much less attribute its distribution across a poorly defined political continuum.
> Without further explanation this is just a frame which doesn’t add meaning on its own.
In other words, dishonesty is everywhere and it's trivial to collate a mountain of cherry-picked evidence from a particular part of the continuum to support the conclusion that a certain part of the continuum is dishonest.
> Overall it’s not clear what you have added here.
Your pretentious snark is bad form and unnecessary.
This isn’t pretentious snark. It’s an expression of surprise, and feedback that you really don’t seem to be making a clear point.
You reduced my original comment to “everyone is biased, this is not a deep insight”.
I thought you might have something deeper to add, so I was surprised not to see it.
“It's true in the sense that you cannot impugn a particular part of the spectrum for the actions of individuals because there is no way to reliably quantify dishonesty much less attribute its distribution across a poorly defined political continuum.”
This seems like a re-statement of the original comment I made in response to the post about FOX. I guess we agree about that.
It continues not to be clear what you are trying to add.
Yes, we agree on this point, what I'm critiquing is your injection of this obvious fact into a discussion about a specific event that can be attributed to the particular type of misinformation spread by FOX, the fact that "there is ideological distortion going on everywhere" is beside the point, obviously that's true, so what? If an oil spill dumps millions of barrels into the ocean and someone exclaims "wow, these oil spills are really destroying the environment" your response is akin to "yes, but pollution is a global problem that includes more than just oil spills", yes, nobody is arguing otherwise, so what's your point?
So really you are just saying this was caused by FOX.
You could have just said that.
In my view our political environment is much more complex than that and involves a pattern of escalations which can’t be so reductively disentangled.
I accept that you disagree with this.
When the NYT misrepresents something, for example, it contributes to the narrative of distortion just as much as when FOX openly claims there is distortion.
FOX news as far as I am aware has maintained that there is no evidence of election fraud, and called the election for Biden very early, so it’s not clear how you attribute this event to them. I don’t watch it, so I could be wrong about this, but it wouldn’t change the point.
The problem is not so easily attributable to a particular media outlet.
I wish it were that easy.
Read more closely, that's not what I said.
> a specific event that can be attributed to the particular type of misinformation spread by FOX
So no, I didn't say this was caused by FOX.
That sounds like you are saying FOX is a cause, although perhaps not the only cause.
If you don’t want it to sound like that, why not explain what ‘particular type’ of misinformation you think the event is attributable to?
FOX is now regarded as a traitorous part of the MSM by Trump supporters because they didn’t push that narrative.
Newsmax is the channel that has been pushing it as if it is true.
FOX has been reporting that there is no evidence that the election was stolen.
Possibly. I follow occasional links to fox, have done some searches and also read reporting about FOX.
I don’t watch it every day because I find it unbearable, as I do CNN and really any TV news.
Can you link to a piece where they report that the election was stolen?
Every news outlet is reporting on people who claim it was stolen, but that is not the same as claiming it themselves.
Here is a nice piece which explains why our current crisis can’t so easily be reduced to a particular piece of rhetoric.
Of course Trump is the proximate cause, and nothing justifies his lies about the election, but there is a lot more going on than that.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/american-cr...
If all we had to deal with is bias in decision making which resulted in suboptimal outcome, things would still be okay, as long as people making decisions and in position of authority (which includes voters) are still honestly thinking that one strategy will yield the best outcome for all of society.
But as soon as people start being dishonest for self-interest reasons, they've subsumed the goal for their own, that's the real problem. I'd rather have someone in charge whose not the best at coming up with strategies and approaches that meet the goal, possibly due to their bias or other reasons, but is at least trying their best, then someone whose trying to manipulate support and slowly put goons they control in various positions so that they can just focus on their own self-interest and promotion while pretending to everyone that this is in our interest.
The hyperpolarization is not to do with the right vs left dichotomy so much as it is a deliberate, encouraged-by-both-sides establishment of a false dichotomy designed to pen people into a small range of discourse. Some call this the Overton window; the deliberate establishment of contrasting narratives in a 2-pronged strategy was perfected in America by Arthur Finkelstein in the mid-20th century and is becoming an art form today.
If you can see FOX as a "right wing propaganda machine" but can't see the other MSM networks as being equally polarizing machines aimed at a different half of the audience, you're missing the shot.
The solution is to see the false dichotomy for what it is, look at who is pushing it, and look at what direction both "sides" actually push for. If you're on the right, they want you to have your attention and energy soaked up in this useless Stop the Steal push for Trump, who actually didn't accomplish any of the things his populist base asked for (immigration control, really bringing back American jobs, giving a shit about the working class). If you're on the Left, they want to soak you up with Biden instead of the more progressive policies that someone like Bernie or Tulsi Gabbard espoused. Either way, you're being played if you allow your energy to go toward supporting one of these useless figureheads instead of critiquing the system itself.
FOX was created explicitly by Ailes and Murdoch to prevent a second Nixon style teardown of the GOP. It's the reason Disney wanted absolutely nothing to do with the news arm when it acquired the rest of the Fox media empire - it's a capitalist enterprise only in the sense that it's profitable as a side effect of their main goal.
You mean the meme-graph one? Don't think so. Every time I take a quiz based on that it lands me near the center, yet I don't resonate with any self-proclaimed centrist I've talked to.
> FOX was created explicitly by Ailes and Murdoch to prevent a second Nixon style teardown of the GOP.
I don't think the intent decades ago particularly matters compared with their actions presently, which are as aimed (at the level of the individual Fox employee) towards revenue and clicks as anyone - just going after a different market niche than MSNBC et al. The ownership is going after propaganda and narrative control, of course; the whole point of what I am saying is that both sides are doing that.
> it's a capitalist enterprise only in the sense that it's profitable as a side effect of their main goal.
The fact that you can't see that that's true of the other side of the media is very telling. WaPo and friends lose money every year, but will never, ever be shut down. What could the reason for that be, other than to use it as a propaganda mouthpiece?
Honestly. If you can turn on an MSM network right now and not hear the propaganda baked into every sentence, you need to turn off all media, read some old books, disconnect for a few months, and come back when you have a perspective wide enough to realize that both sides are being harmed, and having their animosity aimed at one another, rather than at anyone who is actually doing the harm.
(This may be easier for me to see as a non-American, of course. I shouldn't blame someone who has been soaking in yank propaganda their whole lives for having difficulty taking off the blinders.)
What changes which he implemented do you feel where behind these improvements?
If I posited the idea that he was simply riding a wave of positive economic progress established under the Obama administration, how would you counter that?
2. Imports from less-regulated low-cost places like China were impacted by tariffs, favoring American workers. Retaliatory tariffs were largely unsuccessful.
https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-une...
Wage growth is more complex. However, this too doesn't seem to be immediately correlated with Trump's policies.
> During Obama’s last four years in office the average weekly earnings for production and nonsupervisory workers went up 4.9%
I'd furthermore question that anyone is very good at accurately assigning proximate causes for people doing what people do, but the more economically minded tend to get upset when you do that as they're rather fond of their equations.
This was pretty intriguing to me, because I do believe Fox had a lot to do with the radicalization of their side of things. It drove their support, and the moment they backed off from the crazy train, people abandoned them in droves for whatever agreed with the direction they were heading, be it Newsmax or OAN. Fox brought on it's own downfall here.
Just my two cents. Hope your having a good day.
Honestly, I think it's only people to blame. No media would restrict you from just going to your neighbour who's having opposite values and views, and simply talk and try and understand.
People voluntarily selected extreme toxic partisanship, media just feeding the hungry ones. Even half of this thread could be reduced to "these other people are just dumb their values are wrong that's the problem"
1. Sampling. There’s a big universe of facts, and each media outlet reports on a tiny piece of this universe.
2. Stereotypes. When you read a news story, you unconsciously pattern match and associate it to related examples you have in your mind.
3. Context. When you read a news story, you subconsciously have some fascet of your own identity in mind (as a Republican, as a pro-choice person, etc.).
All three are in effect when stories are reported on and consumed. It’s a series of lenses that samples, then distorts, the truth in a way that given the same real-world event, different people may come to completely different conclusions about what happened.
I’d add a #4: fake news. This amplifies #1 significantly. It was less of a problem in Lippmann’s time since the News world was much smaller. He might have called this “rumor”, not news.
> people may draw completely different conclusions from the same facts
Le Bon points out a more basic issue. He wrote about the kinds of crowds who used to storm the Bastille and so on—and appear to have returned to American history today after a long vacation. He concluded that the members of such crowds simply don't do things like considering facts or drawing conclusions. Instead, they associate chains of images and follow suggestions from prestigious leaders. TV advertisments do exactly what he suggested, and so does Donald Trump. It appears to work.
This puts me in a dilemma. As a physicist with egalitarian tendencies, I want everyone to take action that will provide the things they want and need, according to valid arguments founded on the laws of nature. But apparently, one of those laws of nature says that valid reasons have nothing in common with the reasons people do things.
Bernays resolved that dilemma by telling people like me to manipulate everyone else into doing what (we believe) is in their best interest. I'm really uncomfortable with that position, but it's hard to see an alternative.
Lippmann says the answer is two parts:
1. For voters, improve their ability to make the right choice via education and representative (not direct) democracy.
2. For politicians, improve data so they can make better choices.
Interestingly, (2) sounds a lot like data.gov, a century before data.gov!
Propaganda.
> For voters, improve their ability to make the right choice via education and representative (not direct) democracy
The common theme of Le Bon and Bernays was that such groups as "the voters" are inherently not capable of making deliberate choices, and those choices will be made for them by propagandists. I find that depressing, but their arguments for it are convincing.
It wasn't always the case that "fake news" aka propaganda made so much headway. The degree to which that was happening from ~2015 until now is a unique phenomenon not paralleled since Lippmann's time.
He called it propaganda and it was a big problem during his time.
> Without some form of censorship, propaganda in the strict sense of the word is impossible. In order to conduct a propaganda there must be some barrier between the public and the event. Access to the real environment must be limited, before anyone can create a pseudo-environment that he thinks wise or desirable. For while people who have direct access can misconceive what they see, no one else can decide how they shall misconceive it, unless he can decide where they shall look, and at what. The military censorship is the simplest form of barrier, but by no means the most important, because it is known to exist, and is therefore in certain measure agreed to and discounted.
IMO we got here because social media allows people to run from one form of censorship straight into the arms of another without realizing they're still being censored. The same thing happened in Lippmann's time. People did not realize their circles were excluding information. The result was a couple periods of very-difficult-to-reconcile division.
1) On web sites like this I've noticed a rule "Assume good faith". But in real life there are lots of people who say things in bad faith. In the case of PR people and trial lawyers and partisan politicians it seems to be in the job description to say things in bad faith. I have no solutions on how to fix this- I don't believe in God but I can imagine a deity punishing people who choose to exercise their free speech to profit on bad faith lies- but I have no theory of government to stop this behavior on earth.
2) We have a society based around money. People in this site like to whine about what Zuckerberg or whomever is doing but the guiding principle of society seems to be "he who has the money makes the rules". So if Zukerberg wants to weaponize Facebook against society the full power of the financial system will help him do it as long as he has the money/ property to control Facebook. I think in theory we could transition to a society where CEO and board members have their shares and/ or control of companies confiscated if they act in ways which harms society. (Perhaps putting things to a vote, i.e. a universal ballet: should Zuckerberg have his shares of Facebook seized and auctioned off under the theory he is harming society y/n)). Since this has never been tried as far as I know I don't know if my solution could even work.
About 2:
> Since this has never been tried as far as I know I don't know if my solution could even work.
This was tried, during various revolutions that included the phase of killing the rich people and collectivizing their wealth. I worry your suggestion here would end up being used the same way - with prominent CEOs getting their companies auctioned from under them by angry mobs.
Humans seem to be wired via evolution to tolerate being controlled by higher status humans otherwise I'd expect confiscation of property to be a popular proposition in a world where high status people own the majority of property and wealth inequality keeps increasing.
We'd have more discussions about where institutiins are serving us well and less about "those poor CEOs, think of their feelings" if we weren't seemingly wired to care about high status people's desires more than our own needs.
Democratic rule is simply mob rule by proxy.
Sure, hypothetically if Mark Zuckerberg refuses to leave the Facebook building after being evicted of his Facebook ownership he could be physically removed by the police.
Why this deserves our sympathy more than a sixteen year old physically arrested for smoking weed is not obvious- or even a tenant physically evicted for being unable to pay rent. Arresting people for drug crimes is treated as normal state violence and happily supported by Americans- but it seems people have evolved to sympathize with a high status billionaire over some kid commiting a victimless crime.
But the fact you think a right to obtain billions of dollars and control the labor of 10 of thousands of workers is a fundemental right- when housing for the poor isn't- I think again goes to my point we've evolved to care more about high status rulers than ourselves. (I mean that literally, tribal humans or proto-humans murdered or outcompeted with less tribal humans at the whims of their tribal leaders and we are the result.)
Anyway I am under no illusions that we are going to have a change in policy and stop caring about aristocrat's feeling more than our own well-being (Donald Trump is sad, let's storm some buildings you guys. Jeff Bezos treats warehouse workers bad- but he needs to be able to do that cause it would hurt his feelings if the workers ran the company instead.) So there's no reason to debate it other than intellectual fun.
Banal, rules-based democracies still need a fundamental set of rights if they're to avoid instantly devolving to mob rule. I really don't want a rules-based democracy voting to kill me and my family, so I'm glad that I have the fundamental right not to be subject to that risk (even if it were supported by the majority.)
One of the values that's pretty prevalent in the United States and a lot of other developed nations is a respect for property rights; if you worked for something, you get to keep it, even if other people would want it more.
Both of these rights exist on a spectrum (e.g. the death penalty can override your right to life in the extreme case, and taxes can override your right to your property to a small extent), but by almost any measure putting your right to property to a vote is extremely far on the "not respecting property rights" side of the spectrum.
Also, I have extremely little confidence that the best way to assuage our political divide is to introduce the perpetual threat of "the majority had better think that what you're doing is useful, otherwise we'll take everything you have."
The rule of law means that sometimes things will arise that slip through the cracks in unintended ways. The solution to this is to fix those cracks and make the law more clearly define what's desired. If this makes a given business model non-viable, then so be it; that's the price of progress. I'd imagine that those is favor of the rule of law, though, can see the slippery slope of letting the mob vote on what do with the property of those who were following the law at the time.
So that got me wondering, ironically given your listing of lawyers as one of the named bad-faith groups, could government be made to act more like the legal system, or could the legal system be incorporated more into government. One specific idea I was considering was whether you could have the option of a defamation-style judicial review of statements of fact made by elected officials. Obviously you wouldn't litigate every statement, but what if there were some sort of challenge process - perhaps with a fee to bring a challenge, and/or consequences for spurious challenges, so they wouldn't become overwhelming - by which the opposition could challenge any public statement of fact by an elected official? Critically this challenge would be brought in a court of law, with all of the professional standards and requirements that entails. (As opposed to being litigated by politicians, like an impeachment proceeding.) It wouldn't be a criminal proceeding, and there wouldn't be criminal consequences. Probably the result would simply be made public, and maybe the losing side would need to pay the costs of the winning side. Of course they would also have had the opportunity to retract and correct the untrue statement at the outset.
As things stand, the president and his supporters are able to say whatever BS they want publicly, then they go to court with these lawsuits, and they say different things, because there are actual consequences there. Perhaps if there were consequences for any knowing lie by an elected official, you'd see fewer of them? The idea wouldn't be to use this for everything, just for clear, baseless statements of fact with reprocussions. And it's not like truth is unknowable; we already have this kind of litigation around defamation, and it largely works.
Anyway, not like I see anything like this happening, but if I were designing a system of government it's something I'd want to consider. (I suppose there's also the chance of it backfiring, simply politicizing the judiciary by involving it more in politics. But again, the responses to the election lawsuits give me some hope there.)
One of the most serious things the court system does is deprive people of their liberty and life. And it is not stellar. You may argue that the 2% to 10% wrongful conviction rate is good (I think it is unacceptable) but what does seem clear is that many judges are swayed by any old pseudo-scientific rubbish (if they even remain awake during the trial): https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-grisham-wrongful...
I like the idea of people being held accountable for mis-information though.
The rioters/protesters are largely white as opposed to the more-diverse BLM protesters (more on that later). These people feel like the US Government, in general, and that includes moderate republicans, has failed them in the past several decades by sending their jobs overseas, or by allowing immigrants into the country who have taken their jobs. They feel like they're being left behind, which, in truth, they are. Blue collar jobs have been exported, en masse, over the years, and that's been a bi-partisan effort resulting in lifting countless people out of poverty outside the US, but putting incredible pressure on people inside of the US, particularly the middle class, who feel like they have few or no prospects.
And of course the irony here, when compared to the BLM protests, is that if a sizable segment of these rioters/protesters weren't racist they would understand that this is how Black American have felt _for a couple of hundred years_. Important note: this is not to say that these rioters/protesters are even close to being as poorly treated as the black community. Outsourcing their jobs and giving their former wages to owners/capital in the form of profits is SO FAR from the historical treatment of black Americans that someone will read this and consider it laughable to even compare the two. But they are getting a taste of what it's like when the government stops working for them, the formerly very privileged (not relative to the 1% but certainly to black americans) white middle class.
All of the polarization stems from that. "You've taken my opportunity and everyone else seems to be getting theirs and I no longer have mine. Fuck you. I'm going to break shit until you listen up."
That said, I would agree most people could afford it today if we'd kept some of that exported wealth stateside, or if we'd spread the wealth that did remain stateside out more evenly over the past 40 years instead of our policies benefiting those with capital so disproportionately.
Now, with Dems in control, USCoC is back in the driver's seat:
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/jan/4/chamber-comm...
Move the boot factory to China and profit!
Maybe they were storming the capitol because they thought the ghost of Jack Welch was in there.
> And of course the irony here, when compared to the BLM protests, is that if a sizable segment of these rioters/protesters weren't racist they would understand that this is how Black American have felt _for a couple of hundred years_.
Why is what people look like so important to you? It sounds as if you are saying that if a group of thousands of black Trump supporters did exactly the same thing, it would be ok. And that the BLM rioters over the summer were somehow more acceptable because they were more diverse.
How is that not pre-judging people by how they look? Whenever I ask people this, they essentially tell me that while they can't know exactly what an individual is like by their skin color, they can use skin color as a proxy for other characteristics, and make inferences about how that person has been treated in life by how they look. So in a roundabout way, yes, they are making unjustified pre-judgements based on people's skin color.
Is this really ok?
You can see interviews with David Duke where he clarifies that he doesn't hate every black person, he just assumes that black people in general are not compatible with our society, but that there are individual exceptions to this. Klansmen will tell you in interviews that they don't hate black people purely because of how they look, but how they act, and that they are using their skin color to infer how they will act.
Height is a visible characteristic that is strongly correlated with success in life, do you use that to judge people as well?
The truth is that purely through numerical probability you can make pre-judgements about people based on their appearance. I for one however go out of my way not to. That doesn't mean that I am blinding myself to people's physical characteristics or trying to erase them of course. It merely means that I won't condemn or excuse people's actions because of how they look.
Rather than accede to the changing political landscape, Southern Democrats maligned the new Republican Party as an existential threat because it opposed the expansion of slavery in the Western territories. Promoters of secession, called “fire-eaters,” knew they did not command majority support even within the South, so they deployed a rhetoric of fear and anger that condemned Republicans as “fanatics” and encouraged fellow Southerners to regard Lincoln’s election as “an open declaration of war” upon the region.
This hyperbolic language left no room for compromise or middle ground; it was intended to terrify voters into opposing Lincoln. The result was that Lincoln was not listed as a candidate in many Southern precincts, and his election, thus, surprised even moderate Southerners who believed he could not command an electoral college majority. By perverting the electoral process, fire-eaters swayed moderates to adopt their conspiratorial approach to politics.
Lincoln believed in the protection of minority rights, but he also believed in majority rule. Secession was, in his words, an appeal from the “ballot to the bullet.” That is, because Southern Democrats could not persuade a majority of voters to their standard (as they had for decades), they abandoned the political process altogether. This action, Lincoln felt, made self-government impossible. If the losing side in an election could always walk away, how could a nation ever remain intact?
It somehow reminds me of Weimar Germany, with two very fringe (sometimes militant) opposing groups radicalising the rest of the society -- or the rest just ignoring the whole mess and going about their lives.
The Nazis weren't the nice guys, but neither were their opposition, at least not the one referred to by the parent.
People seem to think the Nazi party showed up on the stairs of the parliament demanding genocide and war. In reality it was a 14 year progression of bad options, political turmoil and very hard choices to defend extremely weak coalitions. Were those choices good? Obviously not. Can we judge them after the fact? I would say no.
Maybe if the NSDAP had campaigned with "we want to gas all the Jews" they wouldn't have won so many votes, but nobody can say that NSDAP voters could have been ignorant of the general tendency. In fact, I think this kind of "we couldn't have known what would happen" is IMHO revisionism.
The truth is that, while everything about economic depression, the political instability of the system, the KPD and SPD being unable to cooperate, etc., were important factors, it remains true that a large segment of the German population were totally OK with ideas of German imperialism, revanchism and anti-semitism, otherwise Hitler's rise to power would never had happened.
The simplified story of the nazi rise to rule removes one of the most important lessons that can be learned from it: the watchfulness required to protect democracy.
We don't need to watch out for the big step because those will be easily.spotted anyway, but for the many, many small ones.
However, I'd love a deep historical perspective – it would be fascinating if there were parallels to be drawn. But, are there any?
In 1932, the KPD had 360k members, 5m+ votes, and 14-17% of the electorate. From 1928, the KPD was basically the Stalin party. They believed that the SPD (most analogous to modern-day "Democrats" in USA) were fascist, let alone the NSDAP.
There is no modern equivalent to the KPD in contemporary American politics. The most left-leaning elected officials in the Bundestag-equivalent would have been SPD members. The fringe militant people on the left in the USA do not have any political representation at the federal level, mostly because they do not exist in meaningful numbers, certainly not anywhere approaching 10-17%.
I think that 10-17% might exist on the right (it is probably closer to 5%), but especially after this year, it will become clear that the Republican Party (more analogous to the CDU, historically) is not their party.
If history is cyclical, Trump will form his equivalent of the DNVP shortly, which will not be radical enough for the people storming the Capitol today. This election and transfer of power might be the American Dolchstoß moment, in retrospect. I really hope we've learned.
This isn't an accurate representation of the US. There are 4 sides:
- extreme left
- left
- right
- extreme right
The proportion of each is probably around: 5%/45%/45%/5% (maybe 10/40/40/10)
The 5% on each extreme are the one making the news on the other side to instill fear from the "other side" (fox news depiction of far left Portland, cnn depiction of far right, etc)
And logically, the people who consume news the most have the most distorted view of the other side: https://twitter.com/HiddenTribesUS/status/114314670369397555...
Since media get money from more viewers, and since fear sells, unfortunately they have no incentive to make this better. Finding neutral sources while staying informed is a hard problem.
And if anything, I think that this classical projected political spectrum isn't a line, it's really a circle. Extreme left and extreme right are the same thing; the particulars of the beliefs don't matter (if you think they do, you can always imagine this being a flat strip of paper glued into a Möbius strip).
It's not just you - this is named "Horseshoe Theory".
> Supporters of President Trump have stormed the US Capitol to protest lawmakers certifying Joe Biden’s election victory. Based on what you have read or heard about this, do you support or oppose these actions?
45% of Republicans said yes! Now I am not asserting that half of republicans are about to engage in sedition. But is it because they have different beliefs? No, instead I think it’s just that the 5% you describe has nothing to lose.
Also, is it possible there's a sampling bias in poll respondents? I almost never respond to polls myself because they often seem to be designed to be polarizing.
it's more along these three camps:
- Progressives / Left Populists (such as Bernie, AOC, etc...) - they aren't really "extreme left"; they are more moderate lib-left if you ask any Europeans. They don't really want to demolish capitalism as some actual Marxists suggest, they just want to fix/modulate capitalism to be reasonable to the ordinary people, at the expense of large corporations and free market policies. Although some of them are in the Democratic Party, they are still failing to exert any power in there, which is mostly comprised of neoliberals. However, they are gaining an noticeable amount of partisan support these days, up to the point that the neoliberals had to actually strategize a bit to make sure Bernie doesn't win in the DNC primaries.
- Neoliberals / Globalists (Obama, Biden, etc...) - this is where the majority of politicians are at, comprising the majority of the Democratic Party, as well as about half of the Republican Party (or even more). Although it seems on the surface that the Dems and Reps are fighting the shit out of each other, many of them are still bind by the common interest of supporting various austerity policies, free reign of large corporations and making sure the global free market economy continue without any problems. Note that the left tends to use the term "neoliberal" more, while the right tends to use the term "globalists" more. From the left and right populist's view they are the source of all evil, and from a neoliberal's view the populist left/right are respectively "communists" and "fascists".
- Right Populists / Nationalists (Trump, etc...) - Just like the progressives hate that the neoliberals are looting people with austerity measures and skyrocketing housing/healthcare/education costs, the right populists hate that the globalists are looting people by shutting down former industrial businesses, and imposing some weird liberal cultural hegemony upon them. Though I do not completely know the dynamics inside that camp, there seems to be a common agenda of being oppositional to immigration and being pro local business, as well as a deep hatred of liberal media. They have started to take over the GOP party, which is why there are no-Trump Republicans fighting against it.
Trump is kind of an outlier - he was a real-estate neoliberal but was kind of an outcast among them, and he forced his way into politics with many years of reality TV image-shaping. Many on the far-left criticize him being a neoliberal in right populist coating, and some on the far-right are disappointed by Trump about him having achieved nothing (which is a different phenomenon than no-Trump Republicans - I'm talking about actual fascists here!)
There are also some on the left (state communists, anarchists) as well as the far-right (fascists, neoreactionaries) which I've excluded, as they are still a bit fringe.
It also seems that the right often oversimplifies the left as well as the left oversimplifies the right, and that's partially because there are power struggles inside both of the respective camps that makes the whole situation a bit complicated. For example, if you picked a random BLM protester, chances are you'll get a neoliberal (if their protest was co-opted by the establishment Democrats), a progressive (if their protest wasn't co-opted but are still mainly peaceful and still believe in electorialism), or an anarchist (if they do not believe in electorialism and are more interested in looting and smashing the police). A naive right-populist will see protesters destroying police stations and say that the Democrats are letting this happen and the left are all "cultural Marxists", but in reality it's a situation where anarchists are on the rise and the neoliberals are failing to take control over the "peaceful/orderly protest" narrative. Actually, I don't really know if the protestors participating in the violence are simply "anarchists", maybe they are just uninterested in these labels and just want to wreck shit up as they are fed up by many decades of police suppression.
My own impression is that this is far worse in the US than in most other first world countries. If I'm right about that, then explanations based on social media algorithms etc don't really work, because the same algorithms apply in other countries too. It really then needs a US-specific explanation.
Maybe, the US has just got too big and too diverse – I am talking here about political/ideological/worldview diversity, not ethnic/racial/etc diversity – to hold itself together in the long-run. Countries don't last forever, and the US isn't going to last forever either. Of course, it isn't breaking up this year, and I think other countries are likely to break up before the US does (such as the UK, Spain, Belgium, Canada). But maybe these current events are bringing that eventuality closer to us.
The US might be too big. I want to agree, but I know I’m biased by the media. I want to disagree, but I haven’t traveled to enough of the country to say it confidently.
I used to appreciate grid-lock in DC under the idea that the less they got done, the less they'd do to me. Now I recognize that the best outcomes are a) when the lawmakers reach across the aisle and forge what both sides would consider a compromise and more importantly b) when the lawmakers we elect actually enact laws and run the country in a way that benefits the people they represent.
I suspect that our best way forward as a nation is to resume carefully growing the middle class. This will by nature mean that the financial elites (some of whom are clearly moral despots) will lose a small portion of their wealth. But it's amazingly analogous to the reforms at the beginning of the last century that started to protect labor from the robber barons.
I think the second step is to (yes, at a cost) restore at least some manufacturing capability to the US. This provides jobs to many who are NOT going to be talking tech on HN and also protects us (and the world) against there being potentially a single-source supplier of any given resource.
This is misguided. Respectful debate in general is good, but only when both sides act in good faith. When some act in bad faith, telling outright lies while maintaining a veneer of civility, then you don't have obvious conflict but arguably something worse: corruption. There is some research showing that angry exchanges are in fact helpful in maintaining the integrity of an online community when others are trying to subvert it: https://snap.stanford.edu/conflict/
Going back further, before the existence of mass media, everything was more in-person/local. When you have a small community of people you talk to in-person, you’re going to be way more reasonable than on some global, anonymous, online community. Social media is a great example - it’s a breeding ground for arguments, conspiracy theories and extremism. People who would be perfectly civil to each other in person can be absolute assholes to each other online. How many email/Slack disagreements have you been in at work that instantly resolve the moment you move to in-person or video chat?
Some will say this polarization always existed, but I do feel it has gotten significantly worse. I don’t remember the 90s feeling this polarized, with people so unable to agree upon basic facts about current events. And I’m guessing the 90s were more polarized than the 50s.
One good thing - hostilities BETWEEN nations seem to be decreasing. I don’t think we’re on the cusp of World War 3 or any such thing, but hostilities WITHIN nations seem to be on the rise, at least from my “gut feel” view of my life so far.
On that note, life has been good for a long time in the west. War is an absolute atrocity, but it does put petty disputes into perspective, and build some sense of national unity. Since World War 2, life has been pretty cushy and safe in western democracies, so maybe we’re starting to make enemies of each other to fill the void?
Like it or not, we haven't exactly done a great job at exposing primary sources to everyone. Until that can happen, media outlets who pay for boots on the ground will still have a degree of intutively granted credibility. Once everyone knows how to access it at will (and can be bothered to) we may see some better measurement on the reliabilitt of information sources.
Big chunks of the media decided a long time ago that they could make money by just pandering to angry people, and here we are.
And then social media decided to cut out the cost of producing content, and just put angry people in a cage together.
To be fair, they probably shouldn't be counted in that regard, but it is how they have branded themselves.
Both sides have "news" outlets which are agenda based and profit motivated. And truth doesn't usually sell as well. That's a problem. You can't even trust the fact checker sources as they say "out of context" or "partially true" when it's a fact against their agenda/team. Even the fact checking sites are super biased.
If you align with a side, you attach your identity to it like Paul Graham wrote about with Keep Your Identity Small [1]. People don't like their identity criticized, or want to believe they may be wrong, so they believe what they want and create their own distorted bubble.
My buddy always said "we're told to not talk about religion or politics. Probably the 2 most powerful and influential topics that exist". Now people have started talking about them, but not in a productive fashion.
If you believe someone on the other side is bad based on their views, you can't have a dialogue. This is the greatest tragedy. Disowning family members and friends over their views because you concluded they must be bad people?
Very few people on either side are actually bad. They just have a different experience, they've aligned their identity and team, and there's a ton of forces at play (ex: media, special interests, etc) to keep that divisiveness going.
The problem with the both sides argument is that one side is disproportionately loose with the truth and constantly resorting to not just half-truths, but complete fabrications.
Without good faith there will be no useful dialogue.
So maybe one side fabricates more and one side withholds more. Two ways to be scandalous. They are both profit driven and aren't truthful any way you slice it. They are not trustworthy with news and cannot be relied upon to be objective. Even the shows positioned as news are super biased and full of opinions.
I understand they are entitled to have opinionated segments with personalities. That's fine.
But we have regulations around what is Champagne or Bourbon. And you need a license to cut hair. Maybe anything dubbed "news" should have a standard?
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3791630 (sorry to those who don't have jstor... I'll try to find stuff)
See all those confederate flags today? The gallows? The Auschwitz shirts? When they tell you they are motivated by racism, believe them!
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2018/08/09/an-examinati...
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Fairness-Doctrine might be useful.
Fox broadcast stations having nightly news, like your local Fox affiliate news at 11 was and remains different.
Reagan himself was an FBI informant and was involved with blacklisting so-called Communists way back when he was President of the Screen Actors Guild, during the McCarthy era. So any story that says "It all started on such and such a date" is completely arbitrary.
You can talk about Barry Goldwater. The National Review. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. There was already a strong conservative movement growing that got Reagan elected in the first place. Not to mention the October surprise conspiracy theory of his 1980 election.
The 1960s, the Vietnam War, the civil rights era, these had a huge impact socially, started political realignments, and caused much internal turmoil in the United States.
The Gingrich "Republican Revolution" occurred in 1994. Hillary Clinton claimed there was a vast right-wing conspiracy in 1995. Government shutdowns. Impeachment. Oklahoma City bombing. All of this occurred before Fox News even went on the air.
Will anyone acknowledge that Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were radicalized before Fox News existed, not to mention before Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube?
Spoken by someone who clearly has not read the Powell Memorandum. Reagan was just following the playbook. It's all right there, out in the open. It goes like clockwork because the real backer for both sides -- mega-corporatism -- wants it. The "culture war" conflicts are considered unimportant, as they have no effect at all on the substance.
Trump is the first on his side to step out of line. It will cost them, but maybe not much. The goal now will be to get people distracted again, so the real work of eliminating people's influence may proceed.
This naturally leads to the natural balance being two parties, which has to oppose each other to the extreme in all topics, which then diverges further and further creating the US today.
Different variants of multi member districts or proportional representation allows for the both the progressive left and far right which today feel left out to form their own groups. They can then get into congress and slowly let the steam out while likely enacting some change which all can accept.
A proportional voting system would both allow new parties to emerge and prevent extremist or divisive candidates from leading those parties. That in turn would give people more options and make them more likely to vote (and less likely to excuse bad actors within their own party).
I would be careful about directing the blame at "single member districts", though. In the US, the most popular type of reform seems to be Instant Run-off Voting, which has its flaws, but avoids the potential criticism that multi-member districts face, namely that a voter's elected representative may end up living much further away from them. (Personally I'd rather a representative who is closer to my political viewpoint than to my physical residence, but I think that much of the criticism for multi-member districts are in bad faith anyway, and thus not amenable to reasoned debate).
A prime example is the Australian parliament, where the lower chamber is essentially IRV while the upper chamber has some variation of multi member districts.
The lower chamber has 4.5% of the seats being outside the two major blocks, the senate has 18.5%. I.e., the people want more choice but the system does not allow for it.
IRV doesn't solve the problem of gerrymandering either.
I'm completely with you on the distance vs. political opinions. There is something extremely powerful in electing one, who has personally convinced you, from your town to go and represent us all, but the world doesn't operate on that scale anymore.
In any case, fortunately there are better options out there than IRV, even with the requirement that districts don't change size. One popular (and simple) option is Approval Voting, although it is slightly harder to count than plurality (at least by hand, since you need to separate ballots into potentially 2^n piles, for n candidates).
The alternative I'd recommend is Asset Voting, where the ballots, districts, and counting remain the same, but after the count is complete, the losing candidates (from least popular to most) get to reassign their votes to other candidates until one of them has over 50%.
There may be some clever game-theoretic argument that could be made about spherical voters in a vacuum, but I think that "political science" results are likely to depend too much on data with too small a sample size (for example, the set of countries that use Approval Voting for national elections).
Maybe it is social media's fault. Maybe, just maybe, social media and information overload (which reduces critical thought in that moment) is the problem. Nevermind propaganda & conspiracies - just the bubble effects + overloaded conflicting information causes some kind of mental disorder but on a national scale. Too much nonsense being internalize and associated with, on a weekly basis, at some point America will have to ask itself if it is all worth it (social media, 24/7 news & streaming (and not to mention porn and the warping of minds)).
Maybe it is just a result of your political system, that this was always the outcome, because you only have 2 sides. Our world and human life/culture cannot just be boiled down to 2 options. There are so much complexity, nuance and scope context that gets ignored if you are forced to pick 1 of 2 options.
Maybe it is just a result of your economic system & regulations and related social structure & social programs. Maybe, just maybe your people are so badly squeezed to live decent lives (esp when it comes to wages/labour vs the cost of living and your bizarre take on healthcare). Maybe it is the greed and tax system favouring "the already rich". Maybe it is because your political system has too much money flowing through it (much of your political practices are illegal elsewhere).
How can you convince a group of people that they are wrong or doing the wrong thing? When the battlefield is rooted in idealogical is very difficult to convince people otherwise (see religions). Trying to convince the people that invaded your capitol will be fruitless. Punishing them will be fruitless too. Nothing you do will change their minds, cause their minds have been warped to believe in a different reality to what the rest of the world sees.
All I know is that America has a lot of reflecting to do to find/re-find your national identity and to decide if the dragon you've been chasing is the right thing. I truly hope you can find a way without thousands of people dying in civil wars etc (nevermind covid).
The other is “living” in their little Jim Crow fantasyland.
What’s happing today is the result of reality intruding on their fantasy. It’s the same mechanism that causes earthquakes, or psychotic breaks when people can no longer keep up the appearance of being that up-and-coming Hollywood screenwriter.
Even Pence, McConnell, and Mattis are calling this what it is: a fascist insurrection, led by a failed President. So congratulations on the audacity to both-side this.
Repealed in the 1996 telecom deregulation bill that cleared the way for the internet also took away the responsibility of the media to provide truth in the news.
Instead of charging for use of spectrum, it was given to TV and radio networks but they were required to provide responsible and truthful news.
Maybe that was a good idea ? Perhaps, the old timers knew a thing or two about how to keep an informed public so that democracy would work.
Go ahead and down vote me like usual. But I am not wrong.
3-4 decades of utter gridlock has left the country with both a power vacuum and many aggrieved parties looking for a break from the status quo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/06/roger-a...
This wasn't by mistake, or stumbling into it. It was a very purposeful attack on our democracy.
Another ability the internet has allowed is the creation of communities based around the type of information they consumed which always creates echo-chambers like you pointed out.
It's because of this that many have lost sense of the realities of other people and manifests its own distorted reality.
Not to mention, you also have multi-billion dollar companies utilizing algorithms to keep you there as long as possible, further propagating this effect.
Furthermore the world is so complicated and technology is so powerful that people are more affected by simulated reality than real reality. Major events that affect people's lives are mediated by technology that can be used to convey falsity as easily as truth (perhaps easier).
There's too much truth for most of us, so we hide in the comforting illusions of conspiracies and deception. (especially when in some countries, like the US, there's no checks on whether the information shared is accurate or not, and there's a shortage of fact checking even among the professionals....)
Most people do to one extent or another, just it might be wiser to vett them from time to time. It's a way of dealing with overwhelming information.
I think the internet is only being used as a tool; Peter Turchin says its overproduction of the elites, too many lawyers and managers chasing too few positions leads them to fight more vigorously over a limited turf. It's turf wars gone bitter.
Things were going bad enough as they were... then the pandemic hit and people turned to social media as their primary means for safe socialization. The breakdown of social discourse over the last year has been disheartening at best and horrifying at worst.
As a wise man once said, the chickens have come home to roost.
Start there, since that is the historic start point.
Many of these things are side effects of how networks of people propagate information, and where the people can be co-opted using specifically coded content.
The rest of it can also be seen as a trade off between 1-on-1 communication and Many-to-Many communications + speed of interaction.
Add to that a pandemic lockdown championed by one side who can mostly sit safely behind a screen while the other side loses their livelyhood in small businesses.
Something had to give. I hope this will be the limit.
1) People prefer news coverage which confirms their previously-held beliefs (aka confirmation bias).
2) News outlets are financially incentivized to deliver news which confirms whatever beliefs we may have, since if we don't then viewers will change the channel. This causes news outlets to balkanize along various points on the political spectrum, ranging from extreme right-wing to extreme left-wing.
3) News outlets receive 100% of the gain of confirming our biases, but pay less than 100% of the total cost of doing so (aka "the tragedy of the commons").
4) Viewers end up consuming primarily (if not exclusively) media which confirms their biases. This becomes a self-reinforcing echo chamber.
5) Simultaneously, there has been a proliferation of media outlets. In the 1950s, there were 2-3 TV channels from which one could consume news. Today, there are 500 channels on DirecTV, and any number of internet news sites / Twitter accounts / etc. where you can get your fix.
6) In the old days, news outlets had to be moderate in their reporting, in order to appeal to the broadest possible audience. Conversely, the more sources of information there are, the louder any individual source must become, in order to stand out from the crowd.
7) With the internet, it's possible to create news outlets which cater to a minority of people who hold extreme viewpoints (aka capturing the long tail of the media market).
8) Over time, there are more and more outlets delivering more and more extreme reportage, and the news we consume becomes more extremist in nature.
9) Since our news diet plays a big part in shaping our worldview, over time we ourselves become more extreme.
I'd love to be wrong about this, since it doesn't bode well for the future of the human race. Someone please restore my faith in humanity by effectively rebutting the points above.
2020: Politicians are news, and the Media is political.
1. Gangs
2. Ethnicity
3. Nationalism
4. Religion
Groups of people latch on to an ideology and act on whatever the leader tells them to do or what they see others do. You can observe this when looking at videos of riots or other mob like behavior.
Of course not caring about it was decried as privilege. This was self-victimization to a large degree. People in western nations overwhelmingly did not care about any of these things anymore.
This mostly I think. It's always been a case of birds of a feather flock together. But internet communication has bridged distance and recommendation engines created echo chambers
In short, the major political 'camps' think about events with a different dimension. Conservatives think in the 'civilization vs barbarism' axis. Progressives think on the 'oppressed vs oppressor' axis. Libertarians think on the 'authoritarian vs freedom' axis.
The same event, when viewed through the corresponding filter, has different interpretations.
One side effect of this personality type seizing power is that the Overton window has been inflated into a vast, festering portal through which our worst nightmares can crawl out. I doubt it was his intent, but it is the result.
You’ve almost got to admire the raw primitive energy and boundlessness of that level of id. How very sad that it has been employed to such feeble ends; it will ultimately have to be crushed for democracy to prevail.
The reality is there is a conspiracy/are conspiracies that are coordinated by various disparate secret and not secret organizations whose goals sometimes don't but most often do overlap, and occurences like Q-anon and these protests are likely psyop techniques to distract potential genuine movements that might respond or create desired counter-responses in order to limit the fallout while the oligarchs catch up in the race against the internet as the last bastion of freedom of speech that could cause a neo-peasants revolt if the people found out the truth.
I would like to question this a bit. If this were true, wouldn't this mean that China won this time since Biden is the President (vs Russia won in 2016 since Trump was the President)?
I think there are a lot more internal actors, such as special interest groups, PACs, activist groups, etc..., that may dwarf the external influence. There is so much money involved in politics and elections. I wonder how can we curtail the flow of money to make things more civil in politics?
Only if there was interaction between the Biden campaign and the Chinese state, which there was in the case of the Trump campaign
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_between_Trump_associates...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20...
Truly splitting up the USA would require a war and that's more trouble than its worth in most peoples' opinions: I've kinda grown fond of letting my neighbor's kid cut the lawn for $25, even though he is a Democrat.
Now, OTOH, spinning off a state or two is within reach: e.g., giving CA and NY their independence would be fine with me. But then that's just me!8-))
In this case a charismatic demagogue (Donald Trump) has built a cult of personality around himself. He and his enablers employ many of the tactics used by other cult-like organizations, such religious organizations (e.g. scientology), or otherwise (i.e. multilevel marketing schemes). These organizations offer the opportunity to be apart of something "great" and "historic", to teach you how to be strong, to transform yourself from "zero to hero", and have fellowship with other like minded individuals who have the will and desire to improve their lives too. In return they demand absolute, unquestioning, and unwavering fealty.
This has little to do with political orientation (left vs right) and everything to do with Donald Trump. There is currently a "civil war" going on inside the GOP, and the most vicious attacks from the cult-of-MAGA tend to be aimed at members of the political right who voice even the slightest dissent and are thus deemed "insufficiently loyal" (i.e. counterrevolutionaries).
My 2 cents
Right now no social media company will get serious about targeted propaganda because it would cut into their profits.
But regulation can create a level playing field - the rules apply to everyone, so, more-or-less, everyone’s profits take a hit and now you’re not putting yourself in a weaker position vis-a-vis your competitors by addressing all these issues we are seeing.
Regulation can create a level playing field and solve the collective action problem by making all companies do the same thing at the same time, more-or-less.
Done. You tell me which is which.
Also, issue is not polarization itself. Issue is that chunk of Americans wants to revert election.
Probably not a bad idea to keep the peace.
Or more practically, greater freedom for the states, and less federal power.
But having visited 43 states in the past five years, and making it my business to talk politics and religion everywhere I have gone (especially in the aftermath of the 2016 election), I have repeatedly been surprised by the simple commonness of people's hopes: for peace, justice, security, prosperity.
Most people with whom I spend my time seem to think that Trump voters are all just like Trump. But I have not found that to be so whatsoever. I have repeatedly been surprised and sometimes even confused by the reasonableness and sophistication of Trump supporters, especially in the South.
And rage at America's institutions - including surely dreams of raiding the Capitol and wrecking havok - is surely not limited to one party of political view. It's not a tactic I favor, though I do certainly hope to see this silly building fade into the irrelevance of the failed state.
The incentives of social media algorithms are influential in the way we think about each other.
We are constantly shown Trump supporters who can't form a coherent and fact-based narrative. We're shown 'antifa' who seem to prefer roving destruction and mayhem rather than an equitable society.
But neither of these tropes reflect anything close to the reality of 2020 America. We are a society of peaceful, educated, hopeful people. Travel. Ask. You'll see.
we need more of this on-the-ground reasonableness to overtake the tribal bullshit we're all wading in up to our eyeballs. it's not simply the media (though they in general are complicit), or just politicians (also complicit), or social tech (super-cash-grabbing complicit), or "the people" (most aren't playing that game, but the 'influentials' certainly are). it's power, consolidating and exerting its will, to subjugate people by any means necessary.
We lost our mojo. We forgot that leadership is not leaving anybody behind.
We left a lot of people behind, then we blamed them for not keeping up.
Sorry, on behalf of my class, I really am sorry. The consequences, when we face ecological catastrophe, could be very serious indeed.
Stay safe, people, and be kind
Haven't they been demanding to be left behind every step of the way? For decades they've opposed minimum wage, socialized healthcare, welfare, unions and just about anything "socialist" that would have helped them. Couple that with ever increasing urbanization that is not going to be reversed anytime soon, what could you possibly do to help them not be left behind?
We have those things in Europe and yet our economic periphery (Italy, Spain, Greece, to a degree France and former East Germany) is very similar to American rust belt. High unemployment, numerous industries collapsed, bitter voters casting their lot with populists and extremists.
The Yellow Vests in France were much more violent than anything that happened in USA recently, and they were driven by the same combination of economic uncertainty and alienation from the political elite.
Now even the reality that they are not a majority is too hard for them to understand.
Many organizations were fact checking and calling out the President, but they were part of the "lamestream media" and his supporters were explicitly told not to listen to or trust them.
Moreover my analysis and reflection of the last 4 years where in I awakened and gained a sort of political consciousness after previously in my life having zero care for politics in any way is
This is a particular evolution of democracy which I call Democratic theater and it relies on deceptive control of the population by the media and the intelligence and security apparatus to provide the illusion of freedom to prevent the need for delivering real results by keeping the population in a constant state of confusion and conflict by supporting both sides of an artificial divide to prolong the state of conflict
I guess some of the beneficiaries of this are upwards who can benefit from the enhanced media appeal of this division but I think the primary beneficiary is the status quo and it's done to preserve power in a system where people expect to be free but are basically constrained but given this outlet which is a sort of cathartic entertainment, the purpose of which is to channel genuine to satisfaction into controlled avenues so that it never actually emerges as revolution or organized political action that has any chance of disrupting the status quo in a meaningful way
I believe it's a form of controlled opposition where a cabal of intelligence security and media interests control both sides of the conflict and I believe these sort of mass phenomena are driven by masters of narrative control psychology sociology.
I started off believing that Trump would do what he said and kind of save America and root out these shackles and the cabal of interest that keeps them in place but it seems he was just a charlatan who couldn't deliver and perhaps never intended to. I now believe it's likely that Trump was probably compromised by the very same cabal of interests who got him to dance to the tune they wanted as a puppet for 4 years as part of his great charade
In essence all of this Democratic theater is more window dressing for business as usual.
I'm happy to hear different opinions and to update my own perspective but I'm not going to debate this it simply the belief that I've arrived at at this time after many years of reflection and thought.
You have my statement. Rather than pretending it doesn't hold up, why not specifically address my statement and demonstrate to yourself how you believe it to be false.
The public disagreements are over things that the corporations absolutely don't care about one way or the other, or that they are divided over. The one thing neither side will ever even hint at doing is make corporations and their officers responsible for the consequences of their actions and choices.
I just want and concrete example.
To pretend to be unaware of dependence of most US politicians on corporate campaign donations is not a way to participate in an honest discussion.
For the phenomenon I am talking about, both sides agree, and you never hear a peep about what they agreed on. For example, was any corporate officer of any large bank prosecuted for millions of counts of fraud, after 2008? For even one count? Did any single one go to prison? Tim Geithner got made SecTreas, instead.
The DoD every year utterly fails to account for how most of the money they are handed was spent. Do you imagine that is because it can't be done? That they can't follow orders? The major corporations account for more than that amount, every year, every dime.
If you want to talk about the 2008 financial crisis, ok. Why did Dodd-Frank pass? Why did the corporate backers allow for the creation of the CFPB? How is it that only once Trump came into office did it stop doing its job?
You are asserting that there is a cabal of corporations controlling politics in the USA, what do they actually agree on specifically? Why have things in many instances actually changed when administrations change?
Things change because things change. Look to the things that don't change, instead. Spook whistleblowers are hounded into solitary confinement right through Bush, Obama, and Trump presidencies. Random innocent people are vaporized from the sky in countries we are not at war with, right through Bush, Obama, and Trump presidencies. Massive fraud campaigns ordered by officers of major corporations are prosecuted with exactly zero of such officers ever imprisoned or even inconvenienced, right through Bush, Obama, and Trump presidencies.
I'll tell you more when you give me your email address to discuss. And a public profile with your real name. I'll share mine, if you have the cojones to share yours, friend.
Nothing in the comment faults my words. And what I'm saying is too important to tarnish with a dishonest discussion with someone being dishonest.
I know you hope you can dismiss this view with some metacommentary, but nothing raised has challenged what i said, and i think you're wasting your time by continuing to comment because you're not succeeding in dismantling the ideas i presented.
I have a solution for you, that i proposed initially. You don't want to believe this idea, so simply don't. Just refuse to believe it. That will be easiest for you and i really do not want anything to be hard for you.
You are right about one thing, this is a waste of time. Reply with whatever nonsense you want or don't, I'm done here.
That comment asked for how, that's not a challenge, nor a refutation.
You don't want to face this idea, so to try to avoid engaging with it, you pretend you need to see more to merely consider it. But you can consider it immediately, and relate it to the world you see.
I understand that's not something you want, and it's hard for you, and I don't want it to be hard for you, so you could try just not believing it. And you can do that, without pretending you've disproved it. Why are you unwilling to disbelieve without pretending you've also disproved it, yet at the same time refusing try to disprove it by addressing and criticizing it? No wonder you seem upset, it must be very hard to be stuck in such a bind. But it's no one else's responsibility to get you out of that except yourself. It's your responsibility what you choose to believe or not and it's your responsibility to convince yourself or not of ideas, no one else's.
You work it out. You can think and use your mind.
You say it's condescending to note you own your own beliefs but it seems more condescending or arrogant or immature or irresponsible to try to incorrectly put the responsibility on other people, for what you choose to believe and how you choose to believe it.
If you are open and curious I'm sure you'd be willing to engage with an idea and criticize it but it seems from your comment that you've already decided that whatever other people write here will be nonsense, which is similar to how you decided that other ideas are nonsense without engaging and criticizing them, you don't seem open and curious at all. it seems much more like denial and psychological avoidance. which makes sense because these ideas are challenging and they threaten the worldview and the associated sense of security and stability with that.
So this problem where you shut your mind off and refuse to consider and critique the ideas and instead of this project onto others to demand that they solve the problem for you, is a common pathological projection pattern, but you can fix it, accepting you got yourself into this place and owning your own beliefs and the responsibility to convince yourself or not of ideas that you encounter.
Best of luck, hope this helps!
Email me
1) The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It by Robert Reich [0]
- Reich drops the buzzword neoliberalism in favor of the word power. I like that as neoliberalism is a terrible phrase for the concept it describes, but make no mistake, it's the insidious, invisible nature of neoliberalism that put our country in a position where neither party served the people well. That is what Reich describes here.
2) The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News-and Divided a Country by Gabriel Sherman [1]
- There is also a Showtime miniseries based on the book you could watch. Pair with the movie Bombshell
3) Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer [2]
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52118381-the-system
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15981705-the-loudest-voi...
From OANN to Fox to MSNBC; it's all us-vs-them, fear the others, be afraid, be angry, and stay tuned in for more.
Every time I visit your country I'm apalled and horrified by your news media. It's blatantly exploiting basic animal instinct and core emotions to hook viewers in order to sell ads.
You are a product of your media.
And then there's the network effects of Facebook, Twitter and Parlor...
We have a couple of important institutions that safeguard our news media:
No, that has nothing to do with it.
Take a look on wide base social polls across Western countries.
The seemingly "extreme" right turn in Europe at around the refugee crisis wasn't one unexpected if you count that.
It's just that huge social mass was very latent, and quiet as nobody wanted to be stigmatized as a nazi. Now, it isn't.
You cannot "deaf it out," and expect the problem to disappear.
Terrible social rifts can last centuries in silence. Example: Greek independence war was more than a century ago, and seemingly forgotten before it gave Ottomans the last blow, and then 50 years later, Turkey. And it seems it never really ended given what is going on in the Mediterranean now.
In the "peaceful" Western Europe, Schleswig war has ended 150 years ago, nations of Europe embraced in brotherly love, and the legacy of the conflict was ceremonially buried 10 times over, but people of Schleswig still tell of icy silence.
They do? I've spent time in both Kiel and Flensburg and I've seen no indication that anyone would prefer Danish rule. It seems a moot point today with the EU anyway.
It's always been that way. We've been at war with each other since the very beginning. North vs South. Federalists vs Anti-Federalists. Nativists vs Pro-Immigration. Protectionist vs Free Trade.
Heck, just a decade or so into the republic a vice president and a secretary of treasury had a duel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burr%E2%80%93Hamilton_duel
The easiest tell is in the name. "United" States of America. If we were so united, we wouldn't have the need to put united since it would be self-evident.
The only times we've come together, briefly, is when we have a common enemy - whether it is natives, blacks, germans, japanese, russians, chinese, mexicans, etc. For a brief few weeks, the country was united after 9/11.
> Segregation of information sources? Politicization of media outlets? Self-reinforcing social bubbles? A combination of all of them and more?
Nope. You can have the same information and two people are going to come to two different conclusions. Forcing the entire country to watch CNN or Foxnews isn't going to solve the problem. It is just going to antagonize one side even more.
You can argue that it is impossible for a country as large as the US ( or china, russia, india, etc ) to be "united". Too many people across too vast a territory to keep everyone's interests aligned. Heck, you can argue that these aren't really countries but empires too. And all empires eventually crumble.
But the truth is that huge chunks of the population have lived under different realities in the US since the very beginning and has continued ever since.
https://battlepenguin.com/philosophy/the-fracturing-of-the-h...
If you would like more of this, continue to ignore non-virtual reality.
The vast majority of the US population live in a very normal a-political reality that is largely untouched by narratives that drive the higher-engaged folks' perception of what is going on.
The sliver of the US population that genuinely occupy a different reality is dominated by people that occupy an almost exclusively right-wing media reality. (There is a left-wing media reality for sure, but it is microscopic, counterpunch is just not that highly trafficked!)
The riots in the capitol today demonstrated this quite clearly when contrasted with the protests that kick off the Trump presidency. The "women's' march" was a fairly clear statement in acknowledgement of Trump's presidency but a denial that it was truly representative of popular will. Today's demonstration & riot was populated by a mix of people consuming non-facts and fabulists exploiting those people. QAnon followers were prominent and appeared to be at least a plurality if not a majority of the participants. The people filming themselves in Nancy Pelosi's office were prominent neo-nazis or YouTube provocateurs (Fuentes and BakedAlasaka).
A few thousand people on the capitol overwhelmed a police force that was at least partially sympathetic and was certainly understaffed, in the alternate reality where the opposition to Trump were anti-democratic in the same way they would overwhelm any force arrayed against them in a similar way much more easily through sheer quantity, but they don't hold those views or endorse those methods.
Roughly 1/3rd of voters thing the presidential election was fraudulent, but closer to 1/5th think Trump really won according to Morning Consult, some of this is just facing the fact that the US has always been a bit of a low-trust/conspiratorial society. Some of what is going on is certainly better reporting on what is really happening - things that have actually always happened. Some of what is happening is just good old fashioned bad leadership!
There has been a huge decline in how people are able to deal with uncomfortable conversations, so it's not surprising there is widespread confusion and frustration.
We're all somewhat guilty of sometimes not communicating perfectly, but which culture over the past four years promoted censorship? which culture promoted shutting people up and demonizing them? We will see these times very differently in the near future, I think.
edit: and of course this gets downvoted lol. When are we ever going to at least start listening without visceral emotional reactions, I wonder.
It's a powerful bubble, too. I checked in on thedonald.win at Thanksgiving, and they had a meme aimed directly at me: "So glad you could come take some time off during your busy day to come make fun of us. You must be a real piece of work" or something along those lines. I burst out laughing.
But the other side of it is valid too: People say that there's no point in debating with folks who are "True Believers," since it merely gives them credibility and legitimacy. It's valid; I just don't personally buy that. The way to change someone's mind is to try to see things from their point of view, and really walk in their shoes, i.e. allow yourself the possibility of you changing your mind. At that point, it seems like both people are in the right mental space to be willing to change.
Tough problem all around. I'm not sure there's any effective solutions, so maybe both sides banning each other and enjoying their respective bubbles is the best we can hope for, given human nature. I just try to take a positive view.
The country will likely settle down in a few months, so this too shall pass. It raises question marks about the next cycle, but at least it's four years away.
Also, there will be no unity. Everyone on the right-wing is doubling-down to oppose anything Biden plans on doing.
This Jan 6th march was actually planned weeks prior and many people were calling "for every able bodied man" to go to DC for the march.
Many more are planned.
I don't agree with other subreddits automatically banning people based on post history, but I can see why the subreddit was banned, along with the left leaning subreddit chapotraphouse which engaged in similar behaviour.
You say "issuing death threats" like it was mandated by the mods. As far as I could tell, the mods were doing what they could to keep everybody contained within their zone. And the premise of Reddit is that anybody can create their zone; if you don't like it, you don't have to view it.
My point is, the counterargument that they were banned due to bad behavior seems to be slightly misleading. Every sub has bad behavior, and I know for a fact (because I saw it!) that the mods were clamping down hard on anything remotely like what you mention. The community was downvoting such comments too.
along with the left leaning subreddit chapotraphouse which engaged in similar behaviour
Can you be more specific? /r/LateStageCapitalism is still up, and they seem to "issue death threats" just as frequently. For example, they frequently reference guillotines while gesturing towards the rich.
Even disregarding any content that may or may not have been on the subreddit, the ban happened (four?) months after the subreddit's mods had already locked it down and everyone had migrated to thedonald.win. The ban didn't actually have a purpose by the time they did it, so that reason was just an excuse to get rid of content they didn't like.
Reddit might be a valid example of this since the forums in question are largely closed communities, denying them one forum moved them en-mass to another. On other platforms like Facebook and Twitter the ecosystem is different, de-platforming works! In the grand scheme of things the traffic at TheDonald.win just isn't very many American voters.
At this point, even Trump telling people to stop (which, to his credit, he has) will not help, in the same way that democrats telling Antifa to stop will not help (I mean Biden has asked them to stop for months now, and they're still launching fireworks at the courthouse in Portland to the point the mayor is now begging for federal help).
Political violence has been normalized by the media (both social and not) to the point where, even popular politicians who disagree with the mob will become its victims.
The scary part is that some people perpetuated all this polarization and rage for money.
As a European I find the images from Georgia's vote counting absolutely astonishing.
What images?
I could not believe my eyes when I read up to how the US voting system works. No IDs etc ... and recommencing counting after observers are sent home like in Atlanta. I mean it seems like a willy nilly "whatever" system.
Despite claims of massive voter/election fraud and massive incentive to find it, no credible law enforcement or media agency has been able to prove it at a scale that matters. Maybe a couple hundred fraudulent votes have been proven across the country.
There is just no credible evidence
As it turns out, truth is a thing beyond price - which is to say, it is worthless.
Truth is not worthless. Quite the contrary. Truth is expensive. But a fair chunk of the population subsisted on a rather limited news diet.
I've seen compelling evidence on 4chan to make me believe that there was some shadiness going on in this election, perhaps moreso than normal. However, even I can admit that it does not appear to rise to the level of systemic voter fraud that I would need to call this election a "sham", nor does it appear systemic by any measure.
Can you see the difference between "everyone I don't agree with is 100% incorrect and racist" and my statement? Can you see how claiming intelligent working people are "in another reality" might be divisive to the people you're (falsely) claiming to want to meet halfway?
It goes both ways too - the right still won't admit that climate change is a thing to be combated even though that it is facially obvious to anyone that climate change has at least some negative effects.