The culture war is killing us [video]
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I know it's fashionable to blame Facebook for the divisiveness, but I'm old enough to recall Obama's 2004 DNC speech that got him his first national attention. Before there was Facebook, Obama was talking about divisiveness.
I firmly believe anger and anxiety is constantly injected into the mainstream corporate media to increase eyeballs and stickiness. One of the side effects of this content strategy is the divisiveness we see now.
Yes, Facebook (or twitter) amplifies these, but that's because Facebook provides every one of us a platform to exhale the frustrations we accumulate consuming these anger-laden content.
Ingeniously, the corporate media blamed all these on Facebook and whoever is/was advising Zuck really failed to come up with a solid strategy to counter this narrative beyond rebranding FB app icon and some color scheme changes.
Political divisiveness in the US goes back much further than that.
In the "you think it's bad now" department, I remember reading about the case of, I think it was in the 1800's, of a congressman assaulting another congressman with a cane over some political issue.
Of course the most infamous case of political divisiveness in the US was the Civil War.. which, judging by the Confederate flags man conservatives/Republicans proudly fly and the reactions they get from more liberal parts of the political spectrum, and the incomplete desegregation of many parts of the country, discrimination against minorities, vilification/adulation of Confederate statues, etc, still hasn't been fully resolved in many people's minds.
Getting to more recent, but still older than 1980's, political events.. it's not like the country was united during the Vietnam era or during that of the 60's counterculture.
Or look at the socialist/anarchist unrest and workers strikes (and police/corporate violence against them) or suffragettes of the early part of the 20th Century.
Plenty of times in America's history when the country was very divided, and today's divisiveness is nothing new.
As long as there's rapid change it's likely to continue, as some people will want to slam on the brakes while others want to go full steam ahead.
This was the Caning of Charles Sumner:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caning_of_Charles_Sumner
And yes, you and the grandparent comment are exactly right - this has been going on for ages, precisely because the economic incentives of media have been to create strife and discord for the eyeballs (and now clicks). Even in the days before 24-cable news, I remember thinking it would be nice that if when the nightly news came on, they would just say "All is well today. Have a good night!". And close the program.
But they can't - imagine the reaction from their advertising customers? "We paid you for these slots, you jolly well better produce the eyeballs on it!".
The mainstream mass media has been a weapon for as long as it's been around. In previous generations the elites and government kept quiet about it, because it served their purpose of cohesiveness and national unity, especially after WWII. (Never mind the consistent denigration of the Russians externally, I'm referring to internal Anglo Western societies).
But at some point in recent history, it switched instead from being more profitable to have national unity, to being more profitable with national DISunity. And so all and sundry have become "issues of the day", feeding the beast of the content and advertising machine.
Imagine the reaction from their viewers!
The sad fact of the matter is that the media strategy you describe would be worthless if the viewers didn't lap it up and ask for more.
The media's just giving most viewers what they want.
In most societies, you still can't drink to excess and drive, nor advertise cigarettes, nor sell them to minors, nor do all manner of narcotics or have polygamous relationships willy-nilly. All these things are certainly what people would like to if possible, but social norms and laws put a lid on it. There is certainly screeching about some or all of those issues (like by some parties here on HN, Reddit and elsewhere), but by and large those restrictions are good for the functioning of a healthy society.
Media consumption, and in fact media production, was regulated, initially by technology (you couldn't broadcast widely before radio) and then by law (The Hays code in the US and its subsequent incarnations).
Cable defanged that, and the internet has destroyed it.
I'm not for censorship, but harmful media production and consumption should certainly be contained and punished if done with malicious intent. It's not easy though - we all agree that online recordings from certain Middle East groups are inflammatory and can radicalise innocent people into doing foolish things, but we can't see as a society that the same radicalisation has been happening in the Western press as well. The targets are just different.
Written media origin however are very inflammatory and divisive writings. Well before corporate media.
Underneath the House of Commons (and I believe somewhere in US Congress) was a bar, and after arguing in the Commons, everyone would go downstairs and get wasted. The 1st PM of Canada drank 12 ounces a day minimum. Imagine that. 12 hard drinks a day (!).
What definitely has increased is the use of procedural tactics and such manoeuvring, the filibusterer, executive statements, congressman never taking the position of the other side. Also, the Republican/Democrat situation was not divided into urban/rural camps so much until recently, and that's a big kind of divide. 'Everyone' (quotation marks) used to be Christian, at least nominally. The Catholic/Protestant divide was big, but largely due to culture (i.e. Italian vs. English). I feel that the 'Evangelical / Atheist' divide even much wider. African Americans have a voice now (thankfully) and their presence as an active piece on the board can very easily be inflamed either in good faith or sometimes not. The Latino community is massive and they seem to be a 'behind the scenes', silent force, a the MSM doesn't give them the time of day, but they are voting, although pragmatically I don't their presence adds to any negative confrontational dynamic. But those are new vectors for division.
So we are in a new divisive situation there's no doubt about it.
Bollocks. Charles Sumner gettin whupped with a cane WAS a big deal and made national and international headlines.
It was a direct response to Sumner criticizing slavery, and helped cement opinions in the South that they'd need to take drastic action to preserve that institution.
That said, that was probably a very divisive era.
This isn't even a new phenomenon. Back during the Cold War before there was a real Internet the Soviet intelligence services did similar things by infiltrating political action groups and paying off journalists to write stories calculated to stoke dissent.
Even the act of people writing debunking articles like "Is shocking X actually true? No." is still doing a little bit of work to inject that idea into your psyche.
I get a chuckle every time I see a social media post about <subject> that's some minor mishap and OP is pretending to be repentant ("if only I had <virtue singling trope that applies to that subject> this wouldn't have happend") and all the commenters virtue signaling to each other along those same lines.
Little do they know they're making it seem more normal for people to do whatever sin they're all hating on.
In practice, I find that the term is mostly just used as "vice signalling". It's not really an argument at all, but rather a call to other subscribers to their ideology that they're all in this together, as indicated by the use of the common buzzword.
The term is used only along ideological lines, and I do believe that those ideological lines are turning increasingly hostile. Calling it a "war" is always going to have weird connotations, but the terminology used for hostility is always subject to escalation.
I do believe the divisions are growing louder and more angry, if not always violent (though there's a good case to be made that they have gotten more violent over the last 40 years or so). Is that where your disagreement is, or is it elsewhere?
He structured secret societies like an MLM, where you only know you're direct downline, and your recruiters direct downline. Each secret society had 6 members, and each of the 6 members would create another one with 6 members, but never sharing the identities across the groups and instruct each of the six to replicate the structure and so on. Each group of 6 would meet, discuss topics, come to a group consensu, and pass this up and down. This is how the revolution and much more was fomented.
The la-le-lu-li-lo still run the show
If you're Pepsi, you've got every reason to retweet all of the Coke stuff about "don't be white".
Russia is bombarded incessantly by US propaganda from US troll factories.
Ever since I'm on Internet, I'm reading that Russians are drunkards, barbarians, that our past (even going 1000 years back) is all history of mutual killings, yadda yadda.
It's so disgusting that I guess it even somewhat stopped to work because people are tired of this shit.
But nevertheless: any time on any social network there's a post like: "Look, there's a new undeground station opened in city N", there would be thousands of comments like:
- Built on money stolen from us! We don't need no stinking underground, better give this money to starving retired people
- 100500 millions of rubles were stolen during construction by Putins' cronies
- I'm a construction engineer and I assure you it was built in the wrong place by worthless dumb Russian engineers and this will cause the city N to collapse in 10 years
- City N doesn't need new underground stations, it needs more cars, nobody uses underground, what a useless project!
- 10 opposition activists supporting Navalny were buried during construction of this station. Wake up sheeple! You can become the next victim of the regime!
- Putin destroyed education in Russia! Russian engineers can't design anything. The blueprints for the station were stolen from glorious US engineers. Elon Musk designed the station and Petrov and Boshirov stolen them from him! They also attempted to poison him with Novichok but failed again, the dose was too small!
....
Literally hundreds of such comments under every video on YouTube in Russian, every post in Facebook, Vk, Pikabu, just anywhere it is possible to write comments.
And I guess it's even open information that at least 10-15 well funded organizations in US exist to publish this sort of comments. At least I remember reading how some US president assign funds for several such organizations.
It started to happen when the first Internet link came to Russia and it intensifies with every year. We don't have resources to publish as much bullshit as US organizations and organizations sponsored by the US (e.g. in former USSR republics that has cheap labor, high levels of unemployment and almost 100% of the population are good Russian speakers).
As an American on the Internet since 1990, I didn't realize that Russians are like that.
Is this propaganda written in English or Russian?
You mean you don't believe me? When you watch Hollywood movies if there's Russian in the movie, would it be a good person? Or most Russians in the movies are blood thirsty villains that love to kill people as a hobby?..
Or have you watched the famous HBO series Chernobyl? Do you think that we really drink warm vodka from the bottle any time of the day? Or that all engineers, managers and government officials in Russia/USSR are clueless psycopaths like they're in Chernobyl and other movies and series about Russia/USSR?
Is this propaganda written in English or Russian?
In Russian. This propaganda is for creating dissent in Russian population, no sense to publish it in English. Besides, you can hire lots of people in poor former USSR republics to publish comments in Russian literally for the price of a bowl of rice. Such expenses are negligible for the US budget, why waste the opportunity.
Conversely, where Russia will take that much money and that many English-speaking people to create the same amount of propaganda? It's impossible. We're losing the war of comments and fake news and we never could win it. I'm really doubtful that we even tried to fight back.
You won't find many people capable of writing texts in English in Russia. And usually those people already have a good job and they're usually on the side of the West, it's very unlikely they would agree to work against the West.
They are also at much higher risk of fragmentation. Russia with the far east, etc. China with Xinjiang, etc.
I wouldn't expect them to stop unilaterally. It would require a treaty like SALT, which the US has shown zero appetite for - likely coz it sees fragmentation of rival states as a bigger prize than preventing political arguments at thanksgiving.
specifically all rile up division both because of ideological reasons and money
A Clockwork Orange uses Russian slang ("nadsat") based on the aggressive propaganda that was blasted at the West. There are some uncomfortable comparisons to be made with modern times there, e.g. Q-Anon and aggressive propaganda aimed at the survivalist types...
I see the same behavior in some users here on HN. You could replace "social media" with "Hacker News" and your comment would read the same.
I don't know if you include HN as under the umbrella of "social media" or not, but I just thought I'd point this out. I see lots of people "culture warring" about Facebook and "Big Tech"... on HN.
There was a brief period in the mid 20th century when centralized communication was far superior to decentralized communication, and the populous hadn't had much time to apply selective pressure toward more divisive media, but even then, you had McCarthyism, Jim Crow, pro-war/anti-war, etc.
Humans are a tribal species and hate comes easy. You can't blame any single player or small groups of players. It's more of a species level problem. And I'm not convinced the current levels of divisiveness are historically unprecedented, albeit high.
Buried in this otherwise mediocre article posted a few weeks back is a visual called "Ideological positions of the major parties" [0]. It can be a proxy for relative internal divisiveness in the country (note that the lowest periods of divisiveness had high international divisiveness).
[0] https://www.economicprinciples.org/Why-and-How-Capitalism-Ne...
Great metaphor. Thanks for that.
The rise of the tabloids in the UK is a good example: highly-partisan papers that appealed to specific demographics with stories that aimed to evoke an emotional response (usually a negative emotion).
It's the same mechanic, though: competition for eyeballs. Social media became the super-competitor, but the ad-based model would have got there eventually even without the internet.
"Yellow Journalism" was a thing as long as we had newspapers and a free press. The term was coined in the 1890s, but was almost certainly around long before then. William Randolph Hurst did what Rupert Murdoch does now, just with slower turnaround time. If you assume Fox News help make Iraq happen, then they've both caused the same amount of wars.
> It's the same mechanic, though: competition for eyeballs. Social media became the super-competitor, but the ad-based model would have got there eventually even without the internet.
It was already there, by a long shot. Internet social media just made it omnipresent, automated, and responsive.
The divisiveness happened when the tea party took off in 2009 after Obama was elected and the tea party dialed up the oldest trope in the book, race. It was also the only part of the republican party that could oppose the ACA. The ACA was modeled on Romney care after all who was a popular Republican. The republican party reeling from the loss to Democrats basically had to double down on the tea party to have any chance of sucess at the 2010 midterms. So it became about race, death panels and socialism.
the video has some merit, but one of the mistakes in the video (in my opinion) is telling us to "politely explain our side", but I've had much more success being deeply curious about the other side and its been very enlightening. If a friend feels differently about politics than I do, I want to be the sort of person to converse about the differences while keeping the friend. Its never too late for me to learn something and learn I have!
The detachment of our news and media from local civics denies our population practice working together, with real problems, with real consensus. Instead the polarization is on more abstract, national, and intractable concerns -- political sport with little hope of amicable resolution.
As technologists, how can we work to rebuild regional and local political and economic sovereignty? Sustainable power comes from the bottom up, not the top down.
I’m all for decreasing the size and scope of the federal government as well, but I hardly think that’s a non-polarizing opinion.
Completely different issues.
They are aligned against discrimination, but divided on economic inequality.
There is a sentiment that at a macro level the economic system is geared to advantage those at the top.
What I see mega corps are doing now is try to shift that frustration from a discussion of class to a discussion of race.
Suddenly the white working class outside of major economic centers, the same ones who have seen their economic prospects erode over a generation due to deindustrialization can be painted as the villain and racists.
No, its not. The racial justics movement predates OWS, and was active when OWS was a thing. Its true that BLM was, triggered, or coincided with a reenergization of that movement, but it wasn’t grounded in OWS’s complaints. (There was a big-money sponsored grouo which coopted some OWS complaints but shifted the focus go better serve particular institutiobal interests; but it was the Tea Party Patriots, not BLM.)
> What I see mega corps are doing now is try to shift that frustration from a discussion of class to a discussion of race.
At the time BLM emerged, much less when theie efforts started bringing corporations around, its not like there was a widely salient class-based but race-free narrative that institutions paying lip service to BLM werr marginalizing.
> Suddenly the white working class outside of major economic centers, the same ones who have seen their economic prospects erode over a generation due to deindustrialization can be painted as the villain and racists
The BLM movement is about powerful institutions and the lack of unequal lack of accountability and concern they exhibit by race.
As a class, the “white working class outsidd of major economic centers” is not a focus, positive or negative of BLM activism, and are only really relevant, in any negative sense, to the extent they actively or passively support or participate inbthe racist institutions and actions BLM addresses.
May you please expand on this, because I am not following how white working class outsiders are involved. To my knowledge, corps & MLB have commented on specific actions by organizations such as the police or legislatures.
I'm afraid that still doesn't answer my question. Corporations supporting BLM does not does not make "white working working class the villain and racists" unless you assume supporting black activists automatically pits you against white working class folk - and I disagree with this unstated assumption (if I'm parsing you correctly). I apologize if this is not the implied logic - and I ask that you break it down for me so I can understand, as briefly as you possibly can.
That does seem to be the perception.
One of the core ideas of BLM is that we live in a systematic racist society. If that is true who are the perpetrators?
Thank you for making this explicit. Thus we come full circle to culture wars - that's the only reason for this perception, IMO. From where I stand, culture wars are all about short-circuiting critical thinking and logical analysis, aiming straight to the emotional core - that is how sound-bytes like "kneeling is disrespecting the military/veterans" comes from - there's no sound logic, but it gets people going (I'm sure you can come up with examples used by the left).
> One of the core ideas of BLM is that we live in a systematic racist society. If that is true who are the perpetrators?
The system? It's paradoxic how a group can feel "left behind" or feel like "the forgotten" and simultaneously identify as part the system.
Less than 20 years ago the same people unanimously told us that the war in Iraq was good and necessary. I don’t think these institutions and in many cases the exact same people have suddenly become interested in doing the right thing.
Major institutions were brought around by activist pressure to pay lip service to racial justics issues before by thr Civil Rights Movement; BLM isn’t unique in that.
> Less than 20 years ago the same people unanimously told us that the war in Iraq was good and necessary.
No, the people positions of influence supporting BLM do bot consist exclusively of people who were Iraq war supporters.
Regardless, if you actually quantify it over time, there is a sharp uptick in discussion of race and identity politics in general shortly after Occupy Wall Street. The same rhetoric was used to attack Bernie Sanders and his supporters despite from the 2016 primary onward.
Is it technically a “conspiracy theory” to suggest this is intentional? Sure. But that doesn’t mean it’s not true, or that this is purely a coincidence.
Because “the same people” isn’t the same thing as “a group that includes some of the same people”
> There’s still a HUGE overlap.
I see no evidence of that.
> Regardless, if you actually quantify it over time, there is a sharp uptick in discussion of race and identity politics in general shortly after Occupy Wall Street.
I see no evidence of that.
That’s very much not my memory, and doing a review of the easily verifiable facts (like Google Trends), I can see that various racial justice issues saw a turn from a preceding long gradual decline to gradual increasing interest about a year before OWS which continued long past (some dropping off a bit after 2016), and then took a sharp uptick around the beginning of 2020.
> The same rhetoric was used to attack Bernie Sanders and his supporters despite from the 2016 primary onward.
So was anti-gun rhetoric and lots of other things pertaining to core Democratic constituencies that other candidates had better relationships with. That's... kinda normal politics.
It is a mistake to equate these two unrelated movements, with “the activists”. I mean, you might as well say that “the activists” took a break from BLM on Jan 6 to storm the Capitol.
BLM isn’t a cosmetic rebrand of OWS.
It is also misleading to suggest BLM “is aligned with megacorps”; the institutions which have been brought around by pressure (public, employee, and otherwise) to at least paying lip service to BLM were largely indifferent and in some cases hostile when the movement started, and for some time after, much as occurred with the earlier Civil Rights movement. That’s kind of the point of activist movements, though some are successful and most are not.
I think you hit the nail on the head. Unfortunately, technologists are naturally focused on scaling solutions up to the entire world. We want to use technology to push hard real world problems behind a screen, behind keyboards, and behind servers. This creates a contradiction in our thinking that cannot be resolved. It cannot be resolved because the political climate is created by exactly that phenomenon of scale, by pushing people and their problems behind screens and servers and making them dance at the touch of our keyboards.
You really want to fix things? Stop thinking about technology and making money and help out in your local community.
Don't take this to mean you, personally. Just someone else. Someone else should work in their local community. We can still write code and make money.
Oh wait. Dang it again.
These are not mutually exclusive; on the contrary, they are complementary. Moreover, with the notion of "calm companies" who move deliberately and fix things, it's though local economic engagement that social problems are resolved though mutual interdependence and individual prosperity.
"Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."
https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Babel_Fish
Inflammatory news and memes very clearly propagate in communities sharing the same language. They can overcome the language barrier (e.g. English to Hungarian), but they usually lose quite a lot of their original potency in the process.
The more people speak English on a proficient enough level, the bigger the pond through which the ripples go. I do not really believe that anyone can carve this pond back into small puddles. Not in the time of the Internet.
I always thought it fascinating how "technologists" thought themselves somehow able to solve social issues. SV is a glaring example of this - Mark Zuckerberg anyone?
Anecdotally, I know many people in the MMO game industry. Wonderful people, but none have more than average EQ. Most are extremely awkward and/or have social anxiety (which, in part, is what drove them to become gamers in the first place). It is really interesting to watch them struggle with trying to figure out what "social" features to add, but cannot grok what actually makes something social. Trying and failing over and over -- sometimes on the most obvious things.
Why would you think you could solve social problems when you, yourself, aren't a social animal?
I presume that, to affect the world in a positive way, it's done though collaboration with those able to articulate real problems and form a coalition of those working to address them. In this regard, technical expertise is a necessary element, but one should not confuse our part of the effort with the entire work. We should not be seeing ourselves as building "the solution" to social challenges, so much as we may better equip a community that tackles those problems.
At the end of the day you're forced to pick a side. The anchors are suggesting you ignore that eventuality.
You'd still have coalitions, e.g. right now it's CDU + SPD (social democrats), but the (published) split is there as much as it ever was. It's changing now, as a new conservative/far-right party has emerged, and the green party gets lots of love from the media and has won some state elections (on a conservative platform, ironically), so it's hard to say where we'll go from here.
I don't think more parties necessarily break it up. During the cold war, we had a Soviet bloc and a Western bloc, even though you had individual countries in each.
If the incentives in a democracy naturally tend towards outcomes where it has destroyed itself, either democracy is a bad idea or it requires regulation and oversight. As a liberal myself I believe democracy is an inherent good and requires care just like anything else.
Who's forcing? It's possible to be in the center...
> The late 1960s, early 1970s saw a dramatic shift in the American political matrix, a redefinition of competing political ideologies or belief systems. War, urban riots, campus protests and student alienation, assassinations, inter-generational mistrust, monetary inflation, the growth of the welfare-warfare state, and the “Sexual Revolution,” were the background sociopolitical issues driving this sea change.
From: https://www.lewrockwell.com/2009/04/charles-burris/from-radi...
So all the violence, riots, and corrupt politics (on both sides) seems to be we are going through another cycle of warring political parties and movements?
All the calls for calm today are exactly the calls for calm they've always been in America -- calls from folks who are not suffering to those who are to just deal with it.
In my opinion, calling for unity and calling for calm are dismissive of very real concerns people have.
Martin Luther King Jr. and the rest of the non-violent Civil Rights movement during the 1960's were calling for calm as they were being beaten, firehosed, attacked with dogs, imprisoned, assasinated and lynched. So I guess you must think they didn't suffer?
“Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. . . . I must confess that I am not afraid of the word ‘tension.’”
King was non-violent, but he did not avoid conflict. King regularly called on people to break laws because they were unjust. He specifically called for increasing tensions. And he was called an 'agitator'. He specifically chose not to condemn riots:
“But it is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard.”
And he famously objected to calls for calm and order:
“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice”
Edit: Removed my judgement of the parent poster's understanding of King from the comment.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: the sentence I was reacting to was "You do not have a good understanding of King's work." Since it has been edited out now, I'm going to mark this subthread off topic and collapse it.
I often read technical conversations on HN in which one user tells another they don't have an accurate understanding of some topic. Just because it's a historical or cultural matter doesn't mean it's ad hominem to state plainly and dispassionately that someone lacks understanding.
There's no need to comment pejoratively on the other person. The post is stronger without it, and the expected value of such swipes, in terms of the impact they have on subsequent discussion, is sharply negative.
Moderation appears highly selective. E.g.,
"This argument is clownish and we should be embarrassed it's on the front page."[1]
That is the top comment for that post, but I don't notice your reminder there about pejorative comments.
If I had to rankly speculate, I'd say moderation happens consistently on topics where the average HN user tends to have a low level of knowledge (unionization, civil rights history), and less consistently for topics where there is a greater probability of a critical mass of participants with domain expertise (digital security).
I also rankly speculate that you don't state this outright to prevent the tinder fire that would result from making users aware of their own lack of knowledge on the topics more likely to be moderated.
You could always flag and/or email the moderators if you think something needs a further look, though.
The truth is far more boring than your speculation, which I suppose is a consistent problem with speculation. We moderate guideline breakage when we see it. Moderation is inconsistent because we don't see everything (as pvg already pointed out). https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
There's also some selection involved, but it's more along the lines of "do I have the energy to make a post about this one", "am I prepared to deal with howls of protest in this case", and "is it borderline enough to just let go".
Discuss what is wrong with what they are saying. You don't need to make inferences about what personal failings might be leading them to make an incorrect statement.
I'm struggling to parse that first sentence in a way that someone would be offended by.
> You don't understand blah, here's a quote!
is quickly followed by
> No, YOU don't understand blah, here's my quote!
It's not offensive, but it's a subtle bit of rhetorical judo to rile somebody up. And in a political thread that's probably going to get locked in 10 minutes anyway because it's got other flame wars going on.
The original poster may well see that as talking about them and reply in the usual flamebait way -- possibly with an extra dig for failing to engage them or trying to hide it. That's the risk you take when arguing on the Internet.
But if everybody really is interested in discussion rather than arguing, it sets up a reply more along the lines of trying to merge X and Y, or even changing their minds, or other constructive behavior. It starts with making it about the issues and a clear understanding of how different viewpoints lead to different conclusions based on the same facts -- all of the facts, not just the ones that support your arguments and diminish theirs.
Would a "This is a commonly held misconception about King" be more appropriate?
"So I guess you must think they didn't suffer?"
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
No, he explicitly did. Even in the full context of the famous "language of the unheard" quote it is clear he is criticizing both riots (as being counterproductive) and the conditions that led to them.
Here's a another quote from him:
> Let me say as I’ve always said, and I will always continue to say, that riots are socially destructive and self-defeating. I’m still convinced that nonviolence is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom and justice. I feel that violence will only create more social problems than they will solve. That in a real sense it is impracticable for the Negro to even think of mounting a violent revolution in the United States. So I will continue to condemn riots, and continue to say to my brothers and sisters that this is not the way. And continue to affirm that there is another way.
https://news.yahoo.com/no-martin-luther-king-not-193204120.h...
The seeming national debate that one either must be pro-riot or pro-status quo/"law and order" is another instance of unnecessary "culture war" divisiveness and one that Dr. King would have disagreed with.
I wish HN and other social sites gave you the ability to update your comment at least with an indication that you no longer stand by it.
Sectarianism is something I've talked to acquaintences about for a few years, as I was thinking about how to make predictions on how current events were playing out, and the precdents I thought would be useful as a model to anticipate were an environment like the Troubles in Ireland, or the Years of Lead in Italy, and to a lesser extent, a re-run of the 1968-1970s U.S. era Weathermen type conflicts, but I think this emerging conflict will be even more of a melee.
It's still just skirmishes between very small physical groups that will probably move into terrorism and assasinations over the summer, and with tacit or direct approval and funding from within institutions to keep it going. Over a decade or more it reduces to a tawdry mix of organized crime and blood sport for the politically protected. And that's the optimistic version.
The factors and populations today are much larger, and the general destabiliztion of America both domesically and internationally is creating a power vaccuum, which a lot of different parties are rushing in to seize the void. This vaccuum idea predicts China's current aggression on Hong Kong and Taiwan, Russia on Ukraine (and the whole region), and Iran on Israel as a direct result of domestic instability in the U.S., because these powers know it's democratically impossible to be able to mobilze a draft for a ground war to defend your allies, so they're making their plays. While that shifts the discussion away from immediate domestic concerns, those players are absolutely involved.
The fashionably Girardian view would ask, who will be the scapegoat that lets all these groups save face and gives them an out for peace, and how grisly will its end have to be? I'm pretty sure it's going to be us thoughtful types, and maybe there will be a pogrom against rationalists, because if there is one thing everyone can agree on, people who write like this can be very annoying.
Over this summer (2021)? Or did you mean "summer" as in "there's a decade or three of spring where things heat up and it culminates in a violent, hot summer"?
> The fashionably Girardian view would ask, who will be the scapegoat that lets all these groups save face and gives them an out for peace, and how grisly will its end have to be? I'm pretty sure it's going to be us thoughtful types, and maybe there will be a pogrom against rationalists, because if there is one thing everyone can agree on, people who write like this can be very annoying.
The left and the right would be uniting to enact pogroms against "rationalists"?
On the terrorism and assasinations, yes this summer is a reasonable bet. We saw trial runs of it last year in the U.S. and because the parties in the conflict are really small groups, they will use tactics that create that sort of cost effective spectacle. Once one is into real directed political violence, there's nothing earnest or heated about it, it's a cynical tactic mixed with manipulation and deception and the targets of it are reduced to symbols.
The perpetrators do not deserve our shock, concern, or even surprise. It's an inferior tactic to hold a losing cause together.
Economic dividends concentrated in a smaller group coupled with technology that is accessible to everyone and amplifies the differences between the two groups seems to portend a bad outcome.
Then somehow we got onto "wait, why are so many people in desperate circumstances?" That's the real issue, but the polluted discussion around it wants to be able to divide into Frame 1 and Frame 2 camps.
Too many things are like this. NBC or whoever might go "See? Here's George Floyd cuffed and at the car. End of video" while the BBC might have that, but also the next few minutes with a much more two-sided struggle. I'm sure somewhere else they abridged it to nothing but the part where the cop flies out the rear of the car. Now we have three different truths to lash out at each other with while no one is paying attention to root causes.
But I don't think this is true. There is plenty of writing about root causes, plenty of writing about reforms. I know, because I was interested in adjacent topics a while ago and it did not took that much effort to find it.
I am here talking about journalists, lawyers and generally activists pushing for larger reforms and what they perceive as root causes.
Inequality leads to power centers. Power centers lead to systemic corruption. Systemic corruption is a problem.
So yes, extreme inequality is itself a problem.
Yep, though I'd flip it: Concentrations of power create opportunities for wealth inequality. Or they're not even different things. Whenever something is centralized (Google), or a chokepoint is created (Suez, Panama), or network effects stabilize a monopoly position, then the people who control those contested single points of failure become wealthy; their wealth is their control of those resources (e.g., Bezos' shares in Amazon). Prices are Lagrange multipliers; they're forces impinging on a constraint (e.g., limited land in SV). Whereas systems that are more local and distributed create less concentration of power and wealth. Unfortunately they also tend to be less efficient. Where they win is in redundancy and robustness. I suppose this means that if you want more of the latter, then you need more chaotic conditions. Which might be even worse.
It seems to me that wealth equality is nothing more than a handy wedge issue. The concept of 'fairness' is baked into our monkey brains[0], which makes it easy mechanism for engendering anger, in the hopes of turning anger into votes.
So sick of this zero-information propagandertainmemt. Admitting dysfunction doesn’t fix it. Candid reporting of facts would fix it. There are hundred page reports written for every incident that hits the news cycle, and all they give is some uninformed celebrity opinion. People cannot be that stupid.
Maybe they are though. TV news is basically a senile retirement occupation. If you’re young and you watch this stuff, you may want to ask yourself what else you could be doing with your life.
Just turn it off. Let it die.
I fed it, but I’m also going to downvote.
So some of us are more conscious of it. Are they feeling uneasy about what used to be easy to willfully ignore? What's the price of justice? "All created equal"? Fancy words. "I got mine." Ain't that grand.
I probably missed a bunch of other partisan clashes.
edit: I don't know how I forgot Bush v. Gore. That was way up there in terms of divisiveness.
Of course, to mention specifics would be partisan, and partisanship is culture war, and culture war is killing us so who can even say what? We'll just say that somewhere around the end of Obama's term it seems like maybe something happened.
Maybe, but not as a sudden phase transition, just sort of a continuous process since the end of the New-Deal-to-~1994 overlapping partisan realignments and thr subsequent crystallization of the current ideological divide between the two major parties, returning to the steady state norm.
The periods of reduced—or not-party-aligned—divisiveness during the realignment period were an aberration and artifact of the unsettled alignment.
there are positions like trans rights, voting restrictions, climate change, etc. that don't have "equally valid perspectives" from both sides - and treating like such is foolish
I know attitude doesn't help the problem but it's my two cents
Sometimes there really are bad guys and its useful to keep an eye out for them.
Not much better.
If you want to read about what the Communists had in plan for German you can read about the horrors they did in Russia. The Gulag Archipelago has been highly recommend.
Here is an article detailing the topic of the book. https://quillette.com/2020/09/26/the-bias-that-divides-us/
I'm seeing this get worse in my own country for very different reasons. There is a profound lack of reasonable people that take a moderate position where the other side is not demonized.
It's a pretty depressing sight to see.
In "cultural war", this would correspond to one side trying to keep moving their positions forward. The either side either puts up a fight or they don't.
In that case, you don't need literal shooting and trenches. You can talk of wealth redistribution, where "we'll take from A and give to B" is an attack on A. It doesn't involve guns immediately (though it will if A doesn't "voluntarily" give up the goods), but it's useful as an analogy. What the commenters seem to imply is that, if A does not fight back (again, not literally with guns, but politically), they'll be massacred (again, not literally), their interests will not be considered at all.
In 'culture wars' we have to have some way of allocating sets to 'the top schools', and it could be just 'SAT', family connections, entrance exam, race, class, etc.. Some groups feel slots should be allocated base on race, some feel otherwise. That one is actually a little bit complicated because although SATs do provide some basis of objective rigour, it's probably the most easily 'gamed' thing and to the extent it's 'gamed' it has little meaning. Do we really want to limit top uni entrance to the 0.1% of HS students spend all of their time preparing for 'A Big Test'? That might be a little bit counterproductive ... but then that 'test' was also one of the more objective metrics.
So it's complicated and a ripe area for 'culture war'.
Doesn't work that way.
Every student probably wants to go to Harvard, demand is unlimited. If they lowered the standards for example, there would be more applicants.
The number of applicants varies by all sorts of factors. Students probably have started applying to far more schools than otherwise. There are more total uni students, even if the number of seats across america has grown commensurate, the number of applications to Harvard will still go up.
Finally, Harvard probably wouldn't be Harvard if it were 10x bigger, moreover, they have no obligation to do so. They can do as they please, there are tons of good schools in America.
This is not the issue we face with selectivity and race/class/gender, that's a lot harder and it's a problem they cannot avoid.
He discusses the response to Chauvin's trial --
This... misrepresents a lot of people's opinions. I don't say, "Derek Chauvin's sentencing was good but not enough." because I'm appealing to my tribe, I'm saying it because I genuinely feel we have significant improvements we need to make to policing. A single conviction is a watershed moment, but it isn't the same as doing the hard work of reforming or abolishing policing. It's not nothing, but it's also not enough. It was necessary, but not sufficient (assuming you believe policing should be reformed.)
He says, "I never thought I'd use the word sectarian to describe US politics" --
US politics have been FULL of historical examples of violent conflicts over politics. From independence, abolition, the civil war, the bombings of unions, the civil rights movement (and the murders of their leaders), the handling of the AIDS epidemic -- there are many, many cases where sides have resorted to literal violence against individuals and leaders on 'the other side'. He goes on to say we were founded to be a democratic society free from sectarianism, but this seems like a very hagiographic view of our history.
People vote against candidates, not for candidates --
Yeah, this makes sense. I'd agree with this. I don't know anyone who voted for Biden who was excited about it.
"The emotions of feeling under assault are powerful, but if we succumb to them, then we deserve our violent fate" --
This needs to be challenged more. There are communities that exist that are under assault. Trans women, for instance, face a rate of violence that is unbelievably high. What are communities under assault supposed to do? There's a material difference in my mind to communities that are suffering violence at the hands of majorities, and telling them "don't feel under assault" when they very much are is counter-productive.
If you don't search for it you won't see the kind of bifurcation around the Chauvin trial. Most people just breath a sigh of relief, including a lot of Republicans.
It does deeply concern me that so many people claim Chauvin was framed, etc. Those who don't believe it, but claim it for effect, they are the sociopathic trolls; the ones who really believe it, I would suggest either have serious mental health issues or are very susceptible to groupthink. It is the groupthink folks that I find particularly terrifying, because they are really good people, but will happily cheer on someone or something truly horrible, and continue to truly believe they are right with God.
No they don’t. You created that monster in your mind. And you breathe life into it by telling the world it exists. What difference is there then, between that monster, and you.
Here is Tucker Carlson claiming the jury only convicted because they were scared to do otherwise. https://thehill.com/homenews/media/549435-tucker-carlson-sug...
"This was a trial about whether the media was powerful enough to create a simulation and decide upon a narrative absent any facts." Candice Owens on Tucker Carlson's show https://www.foxnews.com/politics/candace-owens-slams-democra...
How is claiming that Chauvin was framed different from these statements in any material way? They all tacitly assume Chauvin was justified, and explain it in some absurd way. Their narrative gets life from the same callous cruelty that let them watch that video with the motive to figure out a way to blame anyone but the obvious murderer. The summary is: "Yes, Chauvin killed the man, but he was justified. The facts were distorted by those with a political agenda in the media and in the justice system, and they got what they wanted, convicting an innocent man for murder." And that's no different than what I said.
I'm disengaging, but I suggest you look up the word "irony". Or maybe it's "hypocrisy". I don't know. Either way, I will not stop calling out anyone, famous or not, who I know personally or not, who watch a LEO murder a man in cold blood, from the start of the murder to the end of the Floyd's life, and STILL defend the cop! It is outrageous, monsterous, and that's where your energy should be spent, not attacking someone who, in your opinion, used the wrong word to characterize this kind of inhuman reaction to a gross injustice.