[1] Though I have to say that some of the "build the wall" rhetoric around immigrants has made me question this.
[1] Though I have to say that some of the "build the wall" rhetoric around immigrants has made me question this.
It seems like people have been losing their pride in their selves that now they're invested in their "football teqm" winning in the arena of politics.
Almost all evil comes from the over-application of morality. "My team is good, and their team is bad, and it is good to hurt bad people."
The problem is that democracy depends on cooperation. If you insist on winning at all costs, the other side adopts your tactics and it becomes a no-holds barred power struggle.
Democracy is in short a system where people can struggle for power without killing or unjustly imprisoning each other.
It seems like the perspective gets taken to - as I write above - justify, after-the-fact, "why I've decided the same way my herd decided". There is a lot of grasping for easy answers ("Yeah, he must be being controlled by China, that's a good enough answer for me!") and cognitive dissonnace when challenged, that usually ends with people being angry so the challenger stops..
Full moral consistency is almost impossible: you're always balancing self-interests with other higher ideals, etc., and there's always some dissonance. This is just a more problematic example of people striking that kind of moral balance.
Message was that due to globalization, a 20/80 split in the job market was inevitable. So there needs to he work done on placating and nursing unrest by distracting people with movies, sports etc..
This was during the 1995 World State Forum. I tried to look up any more material whether that any concrete actions were taken place but couldn’t.
This reminds me of the "entertainers" in the Civilization series, where you can convert some workers into professional entertainers who help alleviate discontent that would otherwise throw a city into civil disorder.
https://scholars-stage.org/xi-jinpings-war-on-spontaneous-or...
Interesting how "the market" has seemingly spontaneously created things like YouTubers, TikTokers, Instagram influencers, etc. Wherever there is money to be made, someone's there. Political news is hot in the attention economy? Macedonians make fake news sites with Google ads: https://money.cnn.com/interactive/media/the-macedonia-story/
Can you give some sort of reason why you have this impression?
I don’t agree with either of those statements, and I think their actions as a result of these beliefs are bad, but I do think they want things to be best for America, though I think they have a different definition of “best”
Obviously this is anecdata, but you asked why I believed this.
Some remedies:
(1) Actually talk to those voters and get to know them at a human level, don't just group them as an undefined mass of "people who vote badly".
(2) Try a mental game where you imagine your side has the wrong arguments or is talking from privilege, etc., and study what the other side is saying (even the naive people there, but even more so the smarter and less naive people there), trying to see how they are right. Find arguments why your (current) position is wrong.
(3) Then try for a month, to see all those sides (voters for R or D for example), as an outsider, who doesn't agree with either side. Check what people not belonging to either side have to say - e.g. political outsiders, academics doing a critique of both parties, pundits, commenters, and philosophers from a previous century not giving a damn for today's politics.
(4) Finally, see the ideas of today as from 2121, the same way we see the ideas of 1921 today. Then as from 3021 B.C. Don't assume a monotonic increase in agreement of the future with your current ideas, or the prevalent ideas of today, but that history goes back and forth in ideological fashions (including what's "good").
>[1] Though I have to say that some of the "build the wall" rhetoric around immigrants has made me question this.
Here are some examples of (2) in this case:
(1) Note that the idea of borders and citizenship is already the idea of a wall. And nobody, not even the "good guys" you voted for, ever challenged those.
(2) Note that the wall is defensive (we don't want no any more to come) and not actively harmful, then see how the good guy politicians that are feigning the idea unacceptable and inhuman, often advocate for foreign wars and interventions that actively harm millions.
(3) Note that those in favor of "building the wall" might have issues in their communities or work that e.g. a FAANG engineer might never experience as problems because they have different job prospects. Consider if your private interests were directly harmed by immigration (e.g. you are living in close quarters with poverty striken immigrants, taking to petty crime and so on, or because your low skill job industry prefers immigrants to lower costs and you're either out of a job or have your wages slashed).
And inversely, if you're say a Republican:
(1) Note that your family doesn't have very deep roots here. Just 400-200 years ago they passed some other people's non-wall (and killed a lot of them) to grap the land. If, say, you're a Kowalski or a Smith, you're not fooling anyone that you're the rightful owner of this land. B...tc please, your ancestors didn't come traversing the Bering Strait, you're not Clovis. If you're, like, second generation, your parents were bona-fide wall climbers. Perhaps they did it legaly through Ellis Island for example, but do you think they'd stopped if they were denied there, but had some other way in?
(2) Note that the Wall is established on land (TX, NM, FL, AZ, CA) stolen from the very country its people tries to keep out. It's even in the names of the states, all Spanish. Who are you fooling?
(3) Note that if you're out of a job, it might have more to do with clean shaven, suit wearing anglosaxon bosses preffering cheap immigrant labor, and less about the immigrants themselves. Plus, if those immigrants were legitimised, and given an easy way to citizenship, would they still be a cheaper option to undercut your wage?
The thing I was referring to (and this is my bad for not being more clear) in regards to the "build the wall" rhetoric wasn't actually specifically about the wall exactly, but more of the surrounding anti-immigrant sentiment that followed. My wife (a Mexican immigrant) had to deal with an increased level of horrible stuff being said to her after the "build the wall" stuff started, and it did seem to correlate as a dogwhistle. That's why I said it gave me a bit of pause about the intentions of some voters: it really seemed to bring out the worst of people, and it did seem like there were a lot more "worst of people" than I thought. It didn't seem like a lot of them really cared about "a wall", they just didn't like people who didn't look like them.
Well without the Gadsden purchase, Yuma and Tucson would still be in Mexico.
I appreciate when institutions (such as universities) ceremonially acknowledge the indigenous people whose land they occupy and never intend to return or pay rent on (often while running their own housing and office rental businesses on top of it.)