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Comment by bellyfullofbac | Hacker News Reader

I'm not so sure about meaning well. If you read https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/I-Can-Tolerate-Anythi... , it feels like there's a lot of decisions nowadays that's taken because it will hurt/offend the "other team", with post-facto justification why the decision benefits "me/our side".

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.

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Well, they take the perspective that the "other team" is hurting the country, so hurting them helps the country.

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.

> Well, they take the perspective that the "other team" is hurting the country, so hurting them helps the country.

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..

When you view something as extremely morally important, you're willing to cross a lot of moral boundaries and make a lot of rationalizations.

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.

On that note, I recently found out about a term “Tittytainement”, coined by Zbigniew Berzinski, a national US security advisor in the 90s.

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.

That's a similar premise to the Roman notion of bread and circuses. Given the when for this that you provided, there was apparently a book in 1996 that describes the 20/80 society. The term "tittytainment" was, per wiktionary, coined by Brzezinski, but he was not in any kind of public office in the 1990s, he held the National Security Advisor position in the 70s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Global_Trap

Thank you for the correction and the reference.

> 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 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.

Seems like Xi Jinping has decided to put a stop to the entertainers in China:

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/

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