According to the article, this phenomenon is most obviously manifested in the humorous expression “own the libs”, and not, say, by shrieking scaremongering about fascism and comparing the other side to the Nazis.
Well, I know you are being sarcastic, but my initial impression of the article was that while I agreed with everything the author stated, I felt the author was no where as subtle as she thought she was in herself promoting this polarization by what was left out.
All of the examples were one sided (and imo true, with many worse ones left unmentioned), while there was no mention of the elephant - the world view that all members of a certain race are racist by definition, and that all interactions between races are, by definition, based on race, no matter what the context. How is this not demonizing the "other" ?
My fear is that what used to be disagreements over what rights an individual has (who to marry, what to do in your personal space, what if any deities to bow before, what you are able to do with your own body) have turned into disagreements over what framework we should use to govern our society.
Individual rights, imo, need to be respected, and can be done without infringing on anyone else.
However, the current undercurrent of how we should govern ourselves as a society (marxism vs capitalism) is something that we all, as a society, need to abide by, and that differences in these views, historically, has been settled through war.
The interesting thing is that the claims about fascism at least have the possibility of being true while "owning the libs" betrays its own disingenuous purpose of not even trying to make a point other than winning against the other team.
One side has prominent interlocutors who routinely call the other side racists, Nazis, and harbingers of fascism in the United States, demanding their “de-platforming”.
The other side sees this as hysterical nonsense spouted by sanctimonious hypocrites and people blind to reality, who deserve to be mocked, hence “own the libs.”
These two sides are not equivalent. One is doing a lot more “othering”. The real equivalent would be some sort of Red Scare accusing the other side of being infiltrated by freedom-hating communist spies, demanding their removal from all institutions and positions of power.
Well yes, there's a wide gulf between voicing concerns about conduct and rhetoric, and being combative simply for the joy of watching your opponent suffer.
Were they Nazis doing counter protesting? No? Then this is not relevant to the conversation.
The point is that associating one political party in particular with fascist and white supremacist views is not an exaggeration; one party’s leader embraces them as “very fine people.”
It's hard because so much has become politicized. The dominant item in many people's lives right now is the coronavirus either directly or indirectly, which unfortunately has also become political.
I agree, we are all human after all. But that's becoming more and more difficult. The divide between the left and the right is no longer revolving around ideology, politics, regulation, laws, etc. It's now become a matter of "life and death", "racism" and "violence" for a large chunk of the Left (and to some extent more and more from the Right too if I'm being honest). The slogans that are emerging are being sponged by the individuals on the ground, and that is starting to make reasonable non-political discussion next to impossible.
I.e. You can no longer mention in-passing that you support certain parties/politicians/political-beliefs.
What I see anecdotally is that the left has become more inclusive, and the right as become more extreme. People have fled the right either to no party or to the center left. That leaves behind the extremes on the right which have become emboldened by Trump and their shrinking bubble.
It's like evaporating water out of a glass of salt water. The water left behind becomes more and more salty. If you have ever had a salt water aquarium you'll know that you don't add salt water back to the tank, but fresh water in order to balance out the evaporation.
You mention racism. The same people may have been racist before, but now they are ok yelling it out loud because the only people left in their bubble think the same way (Trump may or may not be racist, but he certainly stokes this fire). And this is why it's difficult, because if someone tells me they do not want black people living in their neighborhood, I'm going to tell them that's a racist statement.
> What I see anecdotally is that the left has become more inclusive, and the right as become more extreme.
I think there are some on the right who have become more extreme, but I interpret this as a reflex against a rapidly growing extreme leftism (apologies to anyone offended by this term; I don’t mean it as a value judgment as much as a literalism). I’m a liberal, personally, and I certainly feel like the left is moving quickly leftward. I feel this way because there are a lot of people who call moderate liberals “Nazis” and “white supremacists” and so on. To give another example, 10 years ago I couldn’t imagine the media uncritically accepting the BLM racial narrative without asking about whether we should consider violent crime rates when we talk about disproportions in police killings (which isn’t to say that the BLM folks wouldn’t have a good, enlightening response). Maybe I’m wrong, but it certainly feels like a significant leftward shift. It also feels like the extreme left are less tolerant than most of the rest of the spectrum, and they even kind of own up to it by arguing that their intolerance is necessary to prevent other intolerance (Paradox of Tolerance); however, in many cases, their intolerance is marshaled against people who can’t credibly be considered “intolerant”—the Hispanic utility worker who was fired after a left-wing Twitter mob accused him of white supremacy for accidentally making an “ok sign” with his hand while cracking his knuckles, or the professor who was suspended for saying a Mandarin phrase (even prefacing that it was a mandarin phrase) that sounded vaguely like the N word, or the journalist who was almost fired for interviewing a black man, or the data scientist who was fired for quoting a prominent black researcher’s research on the efficacy of nonviolent protests, or etc etc etc. These people don’t seem intolerant to me, and yet they are met with intolerance.
My more controversial opinion is that this behavior drives some people to the far right. While I think Trump provokes these leftists and thus creates more far-right-wingers, I think this effect predates him and indeed his very viability as a political candidate couldn’t have happened without the earlier rise of extreme leftism. I could be wrong here, but this explanation jives with much of what I see. Note that this doesn’t absolve anyone of moving to the far right, but it’s important to try to understand the dynamics at play. Notably, if I’m right about the dynamics, the best way to combat the far right is by moderating the left.
> You mention racism. The same people may have been racist before, but now they are ok yelling it out loud because the only people left in their bubble think the same way (Trump may or may not be racist, but he certainly stokes this fire). And this is why it's difficult, because if someone tells me they do not want black people living in their neighborhood, I'm going to tell them that's a racist statement.
I don’t know many people who would object to that definition of racism. I think people have a problem with more abstract definitions of racism which would encompass our utility worker, journalist, data scientist, and professor examples above and not, for example, people on the left who are opposed to mixed-race relationships and cultural exchange.
> My more controversial opinion is that this behavior drives some people to the far right.
Extreme begets extreme. If I claimed I knew who went extreme first, it wouldn't matter and only lead to arguments without furthering the discussion. I will say though, that I think the left feels pushed to more extremes by how SCOTUS has gone down since 2015.
> Notably, if I’m right about the dynamics, the best way to combat the far right is by moderating the left.
I agree, but I also understand when the left claims their moderation has let them get run over.
I don't know what the fix is, but I've watched family and friendships torn apart over this. It's a very sad situation.
I generally agree. I’m not arguing that “the left started it”, only that some people argue that this all originated with Trump and I think it goes back further than that.
Interestingly, I don’t think the left has been overrun by the right. It seems to me that liberalism was winning out circa 2010 (at least socially/culturally)—consider how quickly gay marriage became acceptable and even celebrated. I don’t think extreme leftism was a response to some rising tide of conservatism (whether extreme or moderate), but maybe I’m wrong.
In whatever case, I think the solution is to return to more moderate, liberal values (obviously im biased as a liberal), but specifically for all of us to foster an atmosphere of understanding. If we can foster intolerance in the name of tolerance, maybe we can foster genuine tolerance? If nothing else, I’m optimistic that the next generation will not see the point in our petty partisanship and want something better for our country. I hope I’m right.
Politics and government are definitely in the class of things we want to be boring. Interesting government and interesting politics were a major cause of death in the first half of the 20th century.
Unfortunately, ever since the debate between JFK and Richard Nixon, we increasingly demand that politics be spectacle, and that the president, specifically, be demagogue in chief. We don't believe politics can be useful, so it should at least be entertaining.
I'd rather being president were more like being prime minister, just a bureaucratic position without much prestige, necessary but no one is calling you "leader of the free world." But Americans are too entranced with the Great Man view of history (and their own importance) to allow that.
> I'd rather being president were more like being prime minister, just a bureaucratic position without much prestige, necessary but no one is calling you "leader of the free world."
I agree, but I don't think it's a possibility. An administration that would essentially just be boring and bureaucratic wouldn't "change" the country, but essentially run it on the status quo. Lots of people aren't happy with the status quo for various reasons, they want to change it. That in turn makes other people want to stop them from changing it.
If you didn't have two groups that split across some major fault lines, you didn't have "exciting" politics. When you have these divided groups, how could you have boring politics?
Except politics isn't "exciting" due to honest debates between honorable adversaries who recognize each others' legitimacy and respect the integrity of the political system, it's "exciting" because of scandal, propaganda, outrage and violence. Driven by conspiracy theories about satanic pedophiles and new world order death camps. We've descended from Lincoln-Douglas to the juvenile circus between Biden and Trump.
And the main reason for this, in my opinion, is having "change" be embodied in a single demagogue figure elected to force their party's agenda through at any cost, rather than having "change' understood to be an effect of long-term and widespread engagement with the system at multiple levels.
Change shouldn't be the president's job anyway, that's what the legislature is for, and people wanting change should engage more with local and state politics. The executive keeps the system running, which implicitly means keeping the status quo.
This is really an argument for far less power in the executive. Unfortunately the trend has been toward an increasingly king-like presidency since the depression and especially WWII.
I'm not sure the scandalizing etc doesn't follow the importance, not the other way round, i.e. there's so much at stake, that's why people go all out. That we have natural incentives to encourage extremism certainly contributes, but I don't think it's the primary driver.
Countries like the US with a presidential system could have less politicized administrations (but that may just shift the primary fight to the elections for the legislative). In countries with parliamentary systems, the executive is accountable to the legislative, so division of power between these two is mostly on paper, as the executive is typically controlled by the majority of the legislative.
I do believe that "make politics boring again" would mean "make politics have less influence on the average citizen's life", and I think that's a great idea. But I'm aware that this also just so happens to align with my political views, so others might see that very much differently.
Maybe it's just a natural evolution when societies rapidly become more diverse. Identity/group/tribal politics play a much larger role, the stakes are raised, and more tribalism is the response.
Ironically, a lot of the world has seen the USA do this to everyone else for a while too. Too a lesser degree to their anglophone friends of course but the rest of the world is alien and unlikable all the same (with just as little arguments as you see in the political divide).
I suppose one could argue that the isolationism/tribalism has simply expanded inwards as 'the rest of the world' has already been put in the 'other people/cultures' box and only internal boxing up of each other remains.
I doubt the phenomenon has anything to do with the US in the ROW.
Here in NL, a NATO member, it has been primarily the 'left' which has been painting groups with different opinions as 'nazis' 'fascists' etc. Vegans describing other people as murderers.
I blame this culture for our last political murder [0] which already happened in 2002.
This phenomenon is not new, I think it has to do with the dissolution of the USSR and with it, the ultimate defeat of the original ideals of the 'left'.
The left (at least, the internet left) do this here in the UK too. Twitter seems to think all Tory voters are rich white men who want the poor to suffer.
Now I don't know if I'm in a bubble, because when I leave the internet and talk to actual lefties in person we always find a common ground. Hell, I have a friend group containing both anarcho communists and globalist one-world government types.
"6 people" seems to be an exaggeration, but most tweets are generated by a minority of Twitter users. And Twitter users themselves tend to be more political than the general population. So what you see on Twitter is representative of the more hardcore partisans, not the mainstream.
> > > The left (at least, the internet left) do this here in the UK too. Twitter seems to think all Tory voters are rich white men who want the poor to suffer.
On a similar note, most conservatives that I talk to think that everyone on the left is a social justice warrior who wants white men to suffer. I suspect a big part of the problem is that our views of the other side are based on the most extreme people from that side. This is certainly the view that'll be formed if one tries to "get a balance of views from both sides on social media" (you can't get a balanced view if you're only seeing extremists from both sides).
What strikes me is that it seems each side only thinks in the outcome of the others’ parties rethoric instead of the contents. Maybe that’s also what’s at core of the matter of this polarisation.
Agreed, but now we have some real criticism of the Tories, it's just noise to them because they're used to the constant hate. This is one of the issues with constant outrage.
That is true but a one sided take, at least over here in the USA. Here the right and the left seem to escalate in tandem. The extreme far right now calls anyone they disagree with a literal Satanic baby eating pedophiles.
This also identities the left entirely with Marxism-Leninism which is like identifying the right entirely with fascism.
Because your own observations are going to be influenced by your own politics. The media, too, has a political slant, regardless of whether it's mainstream or not. And before anyone chimes in with the meme that the media has a liberal slant: The largest newspaper in the Netherlands is a right wing tabloid -- same as in most if not all European countries.
I'm not sure what a good source would be. Maybe there is none.
Well, this is literally true if you consider non-human lives. The danger I see is then not listening to and interacting with these non-vegans to develop a more nuanced perspective of the people on "the other side" who may not be very different after all. Stating a legitimate political or moral view alone is not (itself) what induces polarization, as I see it.
> in real life I will not accept being called a murderer.
What do you mean by not accepting it? You're welcome to disagree with the classification, of course. That's how we start a hearty discussion on values, morals, politics, etc.
In real life, I would also hope that I use a more tactful strategy that doesn't immediately fall back on a term that will polarize my interlocutor.
>Well, this is literally true if you consider non-human lives. [...] Stating a legitimate political or moral view alone is not (itself) what induces polarization, as I see it.
Calling the other side "murderers" goes beyond "stating a legitimate political or moral view". You're accusing the other side of being criminals of the worst kind, so of course it's going to be polarizing.
A cow is less harmed by being fucked than by being eaten, yet a majority of people would lynch you if they could for doing the former while complaining they are being oppressed for being reminded cows are alive before the latter happens.
> Calling the other side "murderers" goes beyond "stating a legitimate political or moral view".
Can you explain your reasoning for this?
More specifically, if one only considers certain types of X to qualify as X, does calling someone X if they perform an action not universally considered to be X go beyond "a legitimate political or moral view?"
It's not so much their view is illegitimate, it's that it's possible to state their moral/political view without alienating the other side. "We shouldn't slaughter animals because they're living beings too" gets the same point across without accusing the other side of being heinous criminals. It's not as provocative as "meat is murder", but I doubt many meat eaters are going to do a 180 because someone called them a murderer.
I am also from NL, and first of all, you are blaming a big and diverse group, the 'left', for unnuanced statements and regrettable actions of some individuals. Every group has its crazies. Doesn't mean the whole 'left' is like that.
Second, they may be right. Which groups with 'different opinions' are you talking about? Geert Wilders has been convicted for libel against ethnic minorities. And Baudet has said that he wants Europe to be mostly white [1].
Third, now overgeneralizing myself, the 'right' does the same thing too: calling people on the left 'profiteers', crazy and lazy hippies who wanto to avoid any labor, etc. In fact, you are blaming the political left in your post right now for the murder of Pim Fortuyn, based on vague and unsubstantiated claims. You are doing the same thing you blame the left for.
And lastly, the original ideals from the left are very much needed in this neoliberal climate where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The economic divide is growing. Even the VVD is moving towards the left, seeing that the capitalist race has gone too far. One example: the Netherlands has a very serious housing crisis right now caused by neoliberalism. From the credit crisis to selling and reducing out the social housing stock, investors only wanting to build high end apartments, etc. In the last debate about it, the VVD was advocating for a bigger role in housing, that ideal is tradionally associated with the left.
So please, don't polarize, overgeneralize and blame the whole left for murder and name-calling. Using your line of reasoning again, it is not like the 'right' is in a good place right now with their corona denial and Qanon conspiracies.
I will only respond to one part of your rebuttal : do you think being called 'crazy or lazy' is in any way comparable to being called a fascist, nazi or murderer?
I agree. The President’s son, a prominent figure in the right, shouldn’t be comparing Democrats to Nazis. Surely that would upset you.
=="You see the Nazi platform in the early 1930s and what was actually put out there ... and you look at it compared to like the DNC platform of today, and you're saying, man, those things are awfully similar, to a point where it's actually scary," Trump Jr. said.==
Also, there was the time the President called people who cross the southern border as “rapists”.
== They're sending people that have lots of problems...they're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.==
Name calling is wrong either way and leads to polarization. It doesn't matter what term is worse. Calling people lazy and crazy is also a form of subhumanization.
I can't link directly but I quote: "Moslims zijn beter te vergelijken met linkse activisten, andere meningen worden niet getolereerd en desnoods met geweld onderdrukt."
(Translation: You can compare muslim with leftist activists, other opinions are not tolerated and are repressed, with violence if needed).
So your point that the left is somehow worse at demonizing is invalid. People of both sides do it, and both are wrong.
So I hope you can focus on policy instead, because the statement that one party is worse at name calling is biased and doesn't lead us anywhere.
I disagree with you in that it doesn't matter what term is worse. Calling somebody lazy or crazy is something fundamentally different than calling somebody a fascist, nazi or murderer. Or disguised dead threats like Roep dan pang.
> "Moslims zijn beter te vergelijken met linkse activisten, andere meningen worden niet getolereerd en desnoods met geweld onderdrukt."
What is your beef with this quote? I don't see the problem.
Violent repression of speech is a hallmark of oppressive regimes (putting intellectuals in the gulag for example) and saying such a thing about the left is just as bad as calling them nazi's or murderers. The commenter in question uses more words but it essentially boils down to the same.
But nitpicking about what insult is worse is beside the point for me. It is not as if most of the left is out to demonize the right and vice versa, and I regret it if you see it that way, and even more so if you think that one side is worse at it.
Putting the whole of society in two camps and ascribing behaviour to them which are exacted by a minority as if they are a homogeneous unit.. oversimplified and prejudiced.
>This phenomenon is not new, I think it has to do with the dissolution of the USSR and with it, the ultimate defeat of the original ideals of the 'left'.
You hit the nail on the head. USSR's failure and realization that they only survived as long as they did because they stole everything from the G8 countries and had slave labour of gulags.
Add in China's 'special economic zones' which is basically China implementing capitalism in a safe way. This implementation of capitalism has enabled them to greatly boost their economy. Unfortunately causing hyper globalization.
Communism demise has lead to them been rebranded countless times now. Fundamentally the collapse of communism worldwide has created lots of frustration. Which is a feeling that's built in to the animal kingdom. The unfortunate reality of this frustration is that almost certainly will result in violence.
Seriously! Go do it now! These sites are built with the goal of pushing people into groups that are always angry at each other. Angry polarized groups spend more time on the site and are easier to sell things to.
The only thing ignoring this trash will do is make you a happier, more functional person.
On some level yes. But the unfortunate side is that it's seeping into the overall culture and previously-benign and relatively apolitical institutions. That makes it dangerous to "ignore" and hope it goes away due to us all deciding to be reasonable and ignore the hateful and prominent voices that use social-media as a megaphone.
Some institutions being actively soaked in identity politics and other divisive elements:
> But the unfortunate side is that it's seeping into the overall culture and previously-benign and relatively apolitical institutions
It's very hard to be apolitical. Almost all behavior can be interpreted politically.
What has really changed is it's much easier to obtain information about an organization and the individuals involved. In the past you might have simply not known enough to peg someone politically. Hence the impression of neutrality. Today it's just harder to create this illusion.
Social media might need to be controlled in the same way cigarettes are. At the end of the day, both are drug dealers. One of them sells nicotine, the other sells dopamine.
Not sure what that would look like though. Cigarettes have scary labels and enforced age requirements. Maybe social media would have to change the way likes/upvotes/etc work to be less polarizing, in addition to an age limit enforcement?
According to me, they have at best been ineffectual, and more commonly made a bad thing worse.
I think/hope we're in a transitional phase of our civilization where we haven't figured out how to handle these new things yet. Over time, institutions will emerge. They always do, right?
Yes, but the dynamics may be different. If social network software is banned, and replaced with a ten million small DIY networks that don’t interact with each other, will that be any different than local pubs and clubs?
If the networks join up, letting people interact, enabling or encouraging hate between each other, there is an incentive for members of each group to report the illegal networks to the authorities to harm “the other lot”.
(This is just an off-the-cuff thought, I’m a long way from understanding sociopolitical dynamics)
If it wasn’t for Twitter I would have literally no clue about the machinations of the intelligence agencies to undermine the president or the corrupt activities of the Biden family. Unfortunately the mainstream media outlets choose not to report or pursue a lot of stuff, and have an alarming habit of citing dubious statements from “the intelligence community” as legitimate evidence that resolves the matter.
Twitter can only make meagre attempts to censor. They can stop something from “trending” or whatever. But if you want to hear from independent journalists and researchers and analysts, Twitter lets you do that, and short of shutting down the entire service, it’s unstoppable.
Twitter blocked the nation's oldest and 4th-largest newspaper, the New York Post, for 16 days. This was election interference. Twitter's CEO was called to testify about it in front of congress, where he falsely claimed that the New York Post wasn't blocked. Ted Cruz called him out on the matter, pointing out that lying in sworn testimony to congress is a felony, and the New York Post got unblocked an hour later.
The numerous little independent journalists rarely get that level of help from a senator. They have no chance against the censorship.
It may have been a ridiculous decision, but as a means of stopping the information from propagating, it was wholly ineffectual. There’s always enough people that want to get to the truth of the matter, rather than the version of events that has been shaped for The Narrative. Twitter lets those people easily connect with each other, so it is by far the most powerful tool for “freedom of the press” that we have.
If you're going to be upset about blocking a company blocking a low-quality, propaganda-laden newspaper, muster some outrage about the actual government suppressing the vote and gerrymandering.
I’m not joking. Is it your opinion that there were no
attempts, from within the agencies, to undermine the president (or his campaign) and that there is nothing corrupt about what the Biden family has been up to?
I'm not going to get sucked down this rabbit hole because there are a zillion other sites where you can have this specific argument, but I will say that if you're voting for Trump because you're anti-corruption then you and I have world views too far diverged for any meaningful communication to take place.
I don’t want to get into an argument with you, I was just curious if that was your actual opinion. Similar to how you asked if I was joking and I answered you.
Yes, my actual opinion is that Joe Biden is a vastly less corrupt candidate than Trump.
Presumably Hunter Biden traded on his famous name to get job opportunities (in a smaller way than the Trump kids), but I've seen no credible evidence (and please don't reply with a gish-gallop of shady twitter and youtube links) that Joe Biden compromised his office to assist his son.
If it wasn’t for Twitter, I too might think that Hunter Biden was just getting a cushy job similar to, say, Bush’s daughter getting a job at the Smithsonian Design Museum. It might not occur to me that of all the jobs he could have landed, these just happened to be big money deals in China and Ukraine, where Joe Biden was active in foreign policy - negotiating trade deals and firing financial fraud prosecutors - that seemed to involve a lot of free money for the Biden family. It might not strike me as corrupt, and I might not notice that the press are clinically uninterested in finding out more, or even asking the Bidens to clear things up.
> if you're voting for Trump because you're anti-corruption then you and I have world views too far diverged for any meaningful communication to take place.
How ironic. Have you read the linked article? Way to prove its point.
I watched a documentary about how covid was caused by a khazakstani journalist finding out about the clintons eating bill gates’ child’s adrenal gland. that was more credible than whatever conspiracy you’re reading about.
The double problem is, we are isolated, often after various moves due to our studies and first years of work, otherwise because we diverge politically from other ex- or people in our family who, themselves, got polarized the other way. So deleting social networks would be a good thing, but we depend on them for out last human interactions on weekends and evenings. Even worse during confinement.
Computer games with voice chat have helped me weather COVID cabin fever as an alternative to social media. Particularly in PvE MMOs, players are just there to collaborate and have fun, with no room for politics to intrude.
I'm not so sure that it's the cringe that is the problem. I think it's the notion that these social media platforms are acting as a lens for how a lot of people see the world.
It’s possible to (mostly) avoid political stuff on those websites if one wants to, instead of refusing to use the sites completely. Just as an example, I rarely visit r/all, but I do visit specific subreddits that I’m subscribed to like r/privacy, r/pihole, and r/thinkpad. On Facebook, I never browse my newsfeed, but I am a member of a group for my apartment complex in the Stockholm area which lists local events and people selling stuff or giving away stuff in the community.
My point is that is that it’s possible to filter out a lot of the political garbage on those sites if one wishes, but it does appear to be getting more difficult since political stuff is appearing more and more often in places that I personally wouldn’t expect.
It is virtually impossible on Twitter, I know because I've used every tool possible (tweet deck, lists, occasionally muting people, changing the feed layout) and it just doesn't work because (a) Twitter is designed to bleed content from one tribe to another (b), because people have one feed where they combine work, private life and politics and (c) the metrics Twitter use are based on designs that agitate and divide.
Was keeping an eye on Twitter a Few months ago, while watching the downtown being burned.
Started seeing tons of tweets from people who decided my area was next. Tons of people going out about how they were going to burn us down.
Then watching them as they all started heading our way.
Thankfully they found all the exits blocked by police.
I don’t own guns. But my area is big on gun rights. Looters vs gun nuts.
So yea, well. It’s a pretty screwed up situation. Like one step from civiL war screwed up.
How is a subreddit about privacy not political? It might not align to the two political parties in the US, but for sure I expect there to be an echo-chamber of people that value privacy more over other rights than regular people.
It’s easy to filter your reddit, and get quite boring results. (Who knows if that will change in the future, though? The old reddit interface could be taken away at any time.) But, Facebook and Twitter are a different beast. Facebook seems all the sadder since the groups can be quite good, and the prospect of staying connected with friends is obviously appealing.
"Rivals are alien, unlikable, contemptible" could be a description of feelings in Northern Ireland during its worst days, long before the advent of social media. Poisonous rhetoric definitely made things worse, but the real damage was done by things like gerrymandering, unequal access to jobs and housing, and repressive one-sided policing.
From a distance, it looks like some of those same problems are contributing to the USA's polarisation. Fixing them will be much more important, and much harder, than just tuning out obnoxious media.
People in social media spend several hours per day following politics but almost nobody of them is engaged in any real political work. They are engaging with politics to satisfy our own emotional needs and intellectual curiosities. That’s political hobbyism/consumerism.
It's not different from being sports fan. Making noise from the couch but not having no effect in the game and annoying people who don't follow.
They have no serious purpose. They are just wasting energy.
Engaging in the political dialogue is not wasted energy. Low level engagement on social media might be about as impactful as filling a stadium to see a politician speak during a pandemic but high level engagement is really the only way to participate in American democracy right now. If it wasn't valuable, nobody would be training bots to disrupt the process by amplifying division and hate.
Sane politicians aren't going door to door these days or standing on crowded street corners. They're interacting on social media.
> If it wasn't valuable, nobody would be programming bots to disrupt the process and amplify division and hate.
The fact that social media sites are a valuable manipulation target to certain people doesn't make them valuable to you as a consumer. To the contrary.
It seems like your assumung that pundits and bots already dominate the dialogue to such an extent that normal people can't communicate and voice their political grivances. I don't belive that's the case.
We're learning to deal with new forms of propaganda the same way we dealt with the old ones. I remember when people were talking about the information overload of the early days of the internet as driving people insane. Or people who complained about TV advertising being a form of mind control.
People that can't cope will either succumb to the will of others or retreat but that doesn't mean the rest of us shouldn't keep using these tools to our advantage.
> Yes. Politicians. They also do actual political work.
Isn't it clear that renaming post-offices a few months before they're defunded qualifies as actual political work or filling stadiums of people to give them a rock concert version of the political experience or hosting twitch streams of a co-op video game to an audience of 500k people? You might consider grilling social media companies for not doing enough to promote for their party's interests "political work" but when it's done in a chamber dedicated to governing through legislation and comes of as whining or yet another attempt at pandering it misses any loftier goals you're implying might exist.
This got me thinking. Is it ultimately better for people to be battling it out online, on social media, rather than actually fighting in the streets? Everyone will get to have their fair share of outrage and stress release(after amassing it online in the first place), but no one get's hurt. On the other hand, like you suggest, none of their struggles will produce anything real. Which got me thinking, was it better back then, when people actually had to fight it out in real life? Then there would be some kind of result, and people would be able to make changes to the society that they see fit. It was often bloody though, and one side losing meant actual death(s). But from that, there was progress - good and bad. The way things are now, reminds me of all the bureaucracies in the world that prevent things from getting done - good and bad. Maybe people are drawn to fighting it out online, because they subconsciously know there's nothing they can do in real life anymore. They are well aware of how little influence they actually have on the real world and the only outlet for fighting for their ideals is online, which mostly result in nothing but mental stress and pain. Another thing, I have this idea that after two sides fight in real life, sometimes they can gain an understanding or appreciation of each other. They see each other face to face, as real people, and both understand that they are fighting for what they believe in. Whereas online, there's none of that. You could be fighting against a bot, or someone across the seas who was paid to just start shit. And online, if you lose, you just move on to a new thread or a different forum. You never have to live with the consequences of losing.
I mean, HN is a "single feed" which avoids the belligerent group dynamics... but culture bleeds.
The narrative dichotomies and other elements of this belligerence dynamic (I think it's more belligerence than polarisation, btw) exist here and other social media that isn't explicitly structured for it like twitter, reddit or fb. Is massive, many-2-many communication a lost cause?
Just deleting social media is not a solution. Divisive otherisum is an attack on the social sensibilities of the the last few decades and a lot of it is being promoted by bots. A better solution is to find ways to disrupt the bots creating or amplifying the hate.
Why poison the well that opened up global communication and brought us closer together? Why promote anti-globalism and distrust in journalism while disrupting the lines of communication? Are we being primed for war? genocide? mass-depopulation? Whatever it is, the last thing people should do is comply.
Maybe we should do the opposite. Maybe we should all create thousands of Facebook accounts, with randomized profiles that promote random articles and AI-generated comments. Then that program runs on your machine whenever you're not using it. It would be opt-in, like SETI@Home. It could bring the whole world together in a massive community effort, with the feel-good focus of destroying-Facebook togetherness. I would call it Baseball-and-Apple-Pie@Home. Then we all sit back and enjoy the ensuing utopia of a clean, Facebook-free planet.
America had this issue before these sites came up.
Ignoring this will make a single individual better, but that will only leave you back at square one - which is being at the mercy of the America news media environment.
For an individual this may be the right call, for the scope and scale of the issue being discussed in this article, it doesn’t seem like it.
My wife wrote a paper about this phenomenon. This happens in specific policy contexts as well as generally.
In political science, the phenomenon is called the “devil shift”, coined by Sabatier. Similarly, there is also the “angel shift”: you see people who agree with you as having more virtuous motivations.
It is very sad that the authors of the article either believed in all these accusations against the Russians or are afraid to say that this is nonsense so that they are not accused of supporting the Russians.
I want to note that the Russian government also accuses its political opponents of being foreign agents, using the same rhetoric.
It's well known that Russian trolls/bots use fake personas on social media in order to sow discord. Are you arguing that's not done at all, or that there is no evidence it's done in the article specific instance?
Here's an article examining how it's done in relation to anti-vaxx.
The OP was specifically arguing the Russians are innocent, which I think has been been shown they are not. If you want to expand the conversation into generally how world governments use disinformation to their advantage, go for it.
While it is true there are "Russian trolls" on the internet, (and it is true the every nation with a national intelligence operation does the same)
The problem occurs when EVERY opposition statement from "the other side" is dismissed as "your just a Russian troll as no real American would ...."
"Russian Troll" and "Russian Bot" have been become a modern day no true Scotsman fallacy used by people to dismiss anyone that dares disagree with them on public policy, or the role of government as being Russian disinformation
These trolls really exist on Russian social networks, trying to refute any news from the opposition media. And some people (Russian enthusiasts) count and list these bots. But your article does not prove it to me, because some Russians are afraid of vaccinations and there are crazy paranoids in Russian social networks that convince not to get vaccinated, including vaccines that are done by Russian medicine - what do you think this proves? That Russian bots are trying to weaken their own nation? For me, these are not bots, but religious fanatics, religions often reject medicine. You may have noticed that many religions have denied the existence of COVID this year.
Peoples willingness to line up behind banners, flags and slogans without bothering to look at what those politicians are actually selling baffles me.
I think if people from both sides were willing to ignore that and just sit down and talk about what kind of county they want to live in they would find they have a lot more in common than they think. I think this is what the article is proposing, and I think I agree with it.
Are people willing to line up, or are they being pressured to line up?
In many cases, a person's principles are clear from what they say and do. That being said, a refusal to align one's self with a movement is often construed as supporting the other side. There are many reasons for refusing to align: a preference for independent thought, a realization that ideological movements change, an understanding that one's own principles shift (while labels often stick), or simply not buying into some fundamental points. None of that seems to matter when issues are polarized.
I think I'm starting to realize why sport was pushed so hard until the 00s. It is complete nonsense that you can get your tribalism out on without impacting any part of your life. Imagine how much better the world would be if people checked game scores instead of tweets.
There is no reasonable discussion to be had with people that deny science, deny inclusiveness, promote racism, accept white supremacy, and refuse to condemn violence against groups they don't like.
Remember, the other side is saying the exact same thing: "There is no reasonable discussion to be had with people that deny freedom, want to take away guns, promote socialism, accept killing babies, and refuse to condemn enemies."
Nobody is willing to even come to the table anymore because of how totally wrong and evil they see the other side as. Which is kind of the point of the article.
Except these 2 "sides" are not equivalent. Not in the least. Everything in your quote above is made up or a strawman with the possible exception of "accept killing babies" which is admittedly well phrased.
I personally think about half or so of both quotes are completely made up straw men, while about half of each are justified. Your approach here is "exhibit A" for the comments above.
The article goes into specifics, but the general premise is as old as humanity. The subtitle: "The new political polarization casts rivals as alien, unlikable and morally contemptible"
This is tribalism at its core. It's baked into us for evolutionary reasons that helped us survive, but is now a detriment.
Yes, the problem is obviously media and social media stoking up tribalism and rage.
No, the problem will not solve itself by simply telling the public to think more critically.
These media and social media companies are incentivized by engagement metrics - which becomes money through ads - to destroy society via enraging their user against one another.
The algorithms that measure engagement and then feed it are the tools of our destruction.
This is not intentional on their behalf but an emergent result of what they've optimize for.
It's something that seems to be happening throughout the west - not just America.
This monster is probably our biggest existential threat today. The question is how do we stop it?
This is just an escalation of the "groupthink" pervasive throughout the more progressive circles. Every 100 years or so it seems to explode into a full civil unrest/conflict or war.
IMHO it indicates that we, as a species, are built/evolved to exist in small tribes and cannot cope with large societies or crowds.
> A 2018 study had people who were partisan get exposed to some information on the other side. So if you’re Republican, you get to see what Hillary Clinton is saying, or if you’re a Democrat, you’re exposed to what Donald Trump is saying. And that actually made it worse.
The messenger matters just as much as the message. People on both sides carry strong Bayesian priors associated with Trump and Clinton, as well as with most major news outlets now, so they’re predisposed to assume words coming from messengers of “the other side” are inherently untrustable or malicious.
A more interesting study would be to expose partisans to identical content (an argument for something wonky, like trade policy or entitlement reform) through venues that otherwise look like their ideological stomping grounds, and watch how quickly people from both sides would agree.
Another part of the problem is that many of the current polarizing topics (gun control and abortion come to mind) are rooted in fundamental moral differences that don’t allow for rational discussion of the middle ground. Either the government can take guns away or it can’t. Either people can terminate a pregnancy or they can’t. Slippery slope arguments dominate these conversations and make people afraid to give any ground.
This is actually why I see promise for an AI tool like GPT-3 (or -6 or -7, more like) in politics. Prompt it with content from both sides and see how it answers debate questions. Maybe it would just learn how to give political non-answers. Maybe it would just lead to the politicization of AI, which currently enjoys healthy distrust from both sides. Or maybe people find that they’re more comfortable trusting a machine than a human from the other side.
I searched the article and was unable to find the phrase "basket of deplorables." That's puzzling, because it's a really stellar instance of the very action the article discusses.
Certainly, you can get a very wound-up contingent of people anywhere who will work themselves into hysterics, call people murderers and Nazis (and then of course jump to how moral it is to punch them), but it's rather different seeing a statesperson succumb to that kind of thing was a little startling. The article missed an opportunity there.
Polarization means the increased tendency to see the worst of the “other side.” But how can we honestly talk about the assymetry of today’s polarization without the analysis being accused of being political? After all, “Nazis are bad” is hardly a poltical statement.
For some fresh breath and broader perspective, much of post war western Europe was extremely polarised between religious and non-religiuous (liberals, but especially socialists).
- Near where I work, there's a tiny village. Until recently, there were two competing music bands: the "mice" and the "rats". One group was socialists, the others catholics. By 2010, both were largely composed of octogenarians and dying. But don't think they'd ever play one note together!
- After WWII, my grandfather, being very poor and having been in the resistance, had a right to financial assistance. He never claimed it because his wife was catholic and the resistance group he participated in was socialist. Claiming his benefits would have been social suicide.
- My mother's aunt was a catholic nun, and one of the nicest and most welcoming people, widely respectd by all in the village were she lived. Once, she went to the funeral of a local farmer, a socialist. Her going to that funeral was quite out of the ordinary already, to put it mildly. On her return, she said: "He was a socialist, but a very good and decent man."
Headline: we're so polarized! How awful wrings hands
Body: Republicans are bad Republicans are bad Republicans are bad Republicans are bad Republicans are bad Republicans are bad
I don't even have a problem with a certain amount of contempt for Republicans, or at least their politicians. It's just, if you pretend to be concerned about polarization in the abstract, you might try harder to pretend to be concerned about the ways in which both sides contribute to it. If you only know about the specific ways in which conservatives or Republicans are bad, or "more bad", you're unable to overcome your partisanship in a search for the whole truth.
If you want to learn about how the left contributes to polarization, you can start by having a look at Matt Taibbi's or Jesse Singal's Substack.
If you actually read the article, why would you choose an irrelevant metric that is basically uncorrelated with the actual content of the article to prove your point?
Very easy way to disprove your frankly very low effort post. You have since edited it to be a bit more substantive but when I replied it was reddit grade.
I guess it'd be a disproof if my original claim was about the number of times "Republican" and "Democrat" were mentioned in the article. I'll give you that! I will definitely root for your side in any dispute that involves the number of words in an article. You may well be the world's expert there!
This is a sociology op-ed by a journalist for an ideologically-charged stats rag (538) being published in a science magazine.
I would appreciate it if tree people would stick to their trees, and stop (erroneously) extrapolating every minuscule change in the sap into a chicken-little prognostication for the entire forest.
I like liberals, I like conservatives, but one type I cannot abide are these preening, midwit, overcredentialed, underperforming, doomsayers.
Disengaging from social media or encouraging others to disengage on it's face appears to be the well-meaning advice of someone genuinely concerned with their own mental health and the mental health of others. For many this is precisely the correct course of action.
But, the vocal minority and ideologues aren't going to disengage. If all those who recognize illusion refuse to retain territory in the cultural and political dialog then the social media landscape would only be populated by the uninitiated and those who seek to initiate them into echo chambers. Those who have discernment enough to be frustrated by the hypocrisies and bias on social media are precisely the people who can de-escalate and bring more balance, reason and rationality to it.
The problem is then that the moderate voices are drowned out, censored, or out-right abused off the platforms (if not by actual people, but by droves of carefully coordinated bots). That leads to a larger discussion of the role of these platforms in societal discourse (or as the town square) and their woefully inadequate protections of free speech and privacy.
Same topic, list of authors match, recently published, near match on title. I'm pretty sure this is the paper referenced. For the love of the FSM, why can't people use links?
Skim reading this paper, it appears complimentary to other reports. Will read in full shortly.
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Polarization isn't just one thing. It's the result of everything mushed together.
Ezra Klein's Why We Are Polarized is a terrific summary, synthesis of the research. Connects so many dots. Physical sorting (urbanization) promotes polarization, faceted identities are now super identities, nationalization of media begat the nationalization of our politics, the massive political reorg fallout from LBJ's Great Society ending the Dixiecrat's strangle hold on southern states (aka Nixon's Southern Strategy), and many more.
Klein doesn't much touch on social media in this book. Some of his podcasts episodes are relevant. Two underreported factoids popped out for me, First, how the landscape changed from blogging to social media. Second is the elephant in the room about the algorithms and how most critics are guilty of conflating speech with signal boosting.
(I have my own thoughts about social media, shared piecemeal thru my comment history. No thesis or narrative yet, sorry.)
Whatever the evil of social media today, eliminating it outright (not gonna happen) would only mitigate some of the toxicity and definitely won't unwind polarization.
Put on a "Make America Great Again" hat and walk through downtown Chicago, San Francisco, Ann Arbor, or Cambridge before or after election day 2016 (or 2020). Now, put on a "I'm With Her" or "Biden/Harris 2020" shirt and walk through Provo, Fort Worth, or Pensacola before or after election day. In which scenario are you more like to be yelled at and/or physically attacked?
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[ 7.5 ms ] story [ 247 ms ] threadAll of the examples were one sided (and imo true, with many worse ones left unmentioned), while there was no mention of the elephant - the world view that all members of a certain race are racist by definition, and that all interactions between races are, by definition, based on race, no matter what the context. How is this not demonizing the "other" ?
My fear is that what used to be disagreements over what rights an individual has (who to marry, what to do in your personal space, what if any deities to bow before, what you are able to do with your own body) have turned into disagreements over what framework we should use to govern our society.
Individual rights, imo, need to be respected, and can be done without infringing on anyone else.
However, the current undercurrent of how we should govern ourselves as a society (marxism vs capitalism) is something that we all, as a society, need to abide by, and that differences in these views, historically, has been settled through war.
The core problem is that America uses a two party system and that can only result in heavy partisanship.
The other side sees this as hysterical nonsense spouted by sanctimonious hypocrites and people blind to reality, who deserve to be mocked, hence “own the libs.”
These two sides are not equivalent. One is doing a lot more “othering”. The real equivalent would be some sort of Red Scare accusing the other side of being infiltrated by freedom-hating communist spies, demanding their removal from all institutions and positions of power.
Otherwise, I accept your downvote as proof that facts are not relevant to you.
The short video at the bottom of the page is particularly interesting.
Only one American political party needs white supremacist votes in order to be elected. Only one.
The point is that associating one political party in particular with fascist and white supremacist views is not an exaggeration; one party’s leader embraces them as “very fine people.”
I.e. You can no longer mention in-passing that you support certain parties/politicians/political-beliefs.
It's like evaporating water out of a glass of salt water. The water left behind becomes more and more salty. If you have ever had a salt water aquarium you'll know that you don't add salt water back to the tank, but fresh water in order to balance out the evaporation.
You mention racism. The same people may have been racist before, but now they are ok yelling it out loud because the only people left in their bubble think the same way (Trump may or may not be racist, but he certainly stokes this fire). And this is why it's difficult, because if someone tells me they do not want black people living in their neighborhood, I'm going to tell them that's a racist statement.
I think there are some on the right who have become more extreme, but I interpret this as a reflex against a rapidly growing extreme leftism (apologies to anyone offended by this term; I don’t mean it as a value judgment as much as a literalism). I’m a liberal, personally, and I certainly feel like the left is moving quickly leftward. I feel this way because there are a lot of people who call moderate liberals “Nazis” and “white supremacists” and so on. To give another example, 10 years ago I couldn’t imagine the media uncritically accepting the BLM racial narrative without asking about whether we should consider violent crime rates when we talk about disproportions in police killings (which isn’t to say that the BLM folks wouldn’t have a good, enlightening response). Maybe I’m wrong, but it certainly feels like a significant leftward shift. It also feels like the extreme left are less tolerant than most of the rest of the spectrum, and they even kind of own up to it by arguing that their intolerance is necessary to prevent other intolerance (Paradox of Tolerance); however, in many cases, their intolerance is marshaled against people who can’t credibly be considered “intolerant”—the Hispanic utility worker who was fired after a left-wing Twitter mob accused him of white supremacy for accidentally making an “ok sign” with his hand while cracking his knuckles, or the professor who was suspended for saying a Mandarin phrase (even prefacing that it was a mandarin phrase) that sounded vaguely like the N word, or the journalist who was almost fired for interviewing a black man, or the data scientist who was fired for quoting a prominent black researcher’s research on the efficacy of nonviolent protests, or etc etc etc. These people don’t seem intolerant to me, and yet they are met with intolerance.
My more controversial opinion is that this behavior drives some people to the far right. While I think Trump provokes these leftists and thus creates more far-right-wingers, I think this effect predates him and indeed his very viability as a political candidate couldn’t have happened without the earlier rise of extreme leftism. I could be wrong here, but this explanation jives with much of what I see. Note that this doesn’t absolve anyone of moving to the far right, but it’s important to try to understand the dynamics at play. Notably, if I’m right about the dynamics, the best way to combat the far right is by moderating the left.
> You mention racism. The same people may have been racist before, but now they are ok yelling it out loud because the only people left in their bubble think the same way (Trump may or may not be racist, but he certainly stokes this fire). And this is why it's difficult, because if someone tells me they do not want black people living in their neighborhood, I'm going to tell them that's a racist statement.
I don’t know many people who would object to that definition of racism. I think people have a problem with more abstract definitions of racism which would encompass our utility worker, journalist, data scientist, and professor examples above and not, for example, people on the left who are opposed to mixed-race relationships and cultural exchange.
> My more controversial opinion is that this behavior drives some people to the far right.
Extreme begets extreme. If I claimed I knew who went extreme first, it wouldn't matter and only lead to arguments without furthering the discussion. I will say though, that I think the left feels pushed to more extremes by how SCOTUS has gone down since 2015.
> Notably, if I’m right about the dynamics, the best way to combat the far right is by moderating the left.
I agree, but I also understand when the left claims their moderation has let them get run over.
I don't know what the fix is, but I've watched family and friendships torn apart over this. It's a very sad situation.
Interestingly, I don’t think the left has been overrun by the right. It seems to me that liberalism was winning out circa 2010 (at least socially/culturally)—consider how quickly gay marriage became acceptable and even celebrated. I don’t think extreme leftism was a response to some rising tide of conservatism (whether extreme or moderate), but maybe I’m wrong.
In whatever case, I think the solution is to return to more moderate, liberal values (obviously im biased as a liberal), but specifically for all of us to foster an atmosphere of understanding. If we can foster intolerance in the name of tolerance, maybe we can foster genuine tolerance? If nothing else, I’m optimistic that the next generation will not see the point in our petty partisanship and want something better for our country. I hope I’m right.
I'd rather being president were more like being prime minister, just a bureaucratic position without much prestige, necessary but no one is calling you "leader of the free world." But Americans are too entranced with the Great Man view of history (and their own importance) to allow that.
I agree, but I don't think it's a possibility. An administration that would essentially just be boring and bureaucratic wouldn't "change" the country, but essentially run it on the status quo. Lots of people aren't happy with the status quo for various reasons, they want to change it. That in turn makes other people want to stop them from changing it.
If you didn't have two groups that split across some major fault lines, you didn't have "exciting" politics. When you have these divided groups, how could you have boring politics?
And the main reason for this, in my opinion, is having "change" be embodied in a single demagogue figure elected to force their party's agenda through at any cost, rather than having "change' understood to be an effect of long-term and widespread engagement with the system at multiple levels.
Change shouldn't be the president's job anyway, that's what the legislature is for, and people wanting change should engage more with local and state politics. The executive keeps the system running, which implicitly means keeping the status quo.
Countries like the US with a presidential system could have less politicized administrations (but that may just shift the primary fight to the elections for the legislative). In countries with parliamentary systems, the executive is accountable to the legislative, so division of power between these two is mostly on paper, as the executive is typically controlled by the majority of the legislative.
I do believe that "make politics boring again" would mean "make politics have less influence on the average citizen's life", and I think that's a great idea. But I'm aware that this also just so happens to align with my political views, so others might see that very much differently.
Maybe it's just a natural evolution when societies rapidly become more diverse. Identity/group/tribal politics play a much larger role, the stakes are raised, and more tribalism is the response.
I suppose one could argue that the isolationism/tribalism has simply expanded inwards as 'the rest of the world' has already been put in the 'other people/cultures' box and only internal boxing up of each other remains.
Here in NL, a NATO member, it has been primarily the 'left' which has been painting groups with different opinions as 'nazis' 'fascists' etc. Vegans describing other people as murderers.
I blame this culture for our last political murder [0] which already happened in 2002.
This phenomenon is not new, I think it has to do with the dissolution of the USSR and with it, the ultimate defeat of the original ideals of the 'left'.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pim_Fortuyn
Now I don't know if I'm in a bubble, because when I leave the internet and talk to actual lefties in person we always find a common ground. Hell, I have a friend group containing both anarcho communists and globalist one-world government types.
For a long time now, the social media have been embraced by 'progressives'. I see them destroying themselves.
Trump's 'surprise' election in 2016 fits in this : people don't voice their moderate opinion anymore, they vote however they want though.
Do you have a link?
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2020/10/15/differences-...
"6 people" seems to be an exaggeration, but most tweets are generated by a minority of Twitter users. And Twitter users themselves tend to be more political than the general population. So what you see on Twitter is representative of the more hardcore partisans, not the mainstream.
> > > The left (at least, the internet left) do this here in the UK too. Twitter seems to think all Tory voters are rich white men who want the poor to suffer.
On a similar note, most conservatives that I talk to think that everyone on the left is a social justice warrior who wants white men to suffer. I suspect a big part of the problem is that our views of the other side are based on the most extreme people from that side. This is certainly the view that'll be formed if one tries to "get a balance of views from both sides on social media" (you can't get a balanced view if you're only seeing extremists from both sides).
The recent vote on school meals certainly didn't help that image
This also identities the left entirely with Marxism-Leninism which is like identifying the right entirely with fascism.
What would be a good source for this?
I'm not sure what a good source would be. Maybe there is none.
Well, this is literally true if you consider non-human lives. The danger I see is then not listening to and interacting with these non-vegans to develop a more nuanced perspective of the people on "the other side" who may not be very different after all. Stating a legitimate political or moral view alone is not (itself) what induces polarization, as I see it.
If you want redefine language, that is fine, but in real life I will not accept being called a murderer.
1984 was not a manual.
What do you mean by not accepting it? You're welcome to disagree with the classification, of course. That's how we start a hearty discussion on values, morals, politics, etc.
In real life, I would also hope that I use a more tactful strategy that doesn't immediately fall back on a term that will polarize my interlocutor.
I will make sure you will never call me a criminal of the worst kind ever again. In my experience, not very much is needed.
Calling the other side "murderers" goes beyond "stating a legitimate political or moral view". You're accusing the other side of being criminals of the worst kind, so of course it's going to be polarizing.
Can you explain your reasoning for this?
More specifically, if one only considers certain types of X to qualify as X, does calling someone X if they perform an action not universally considered to be X go beyond "a legitimate political or moral view?"
Second, they may be right. Which groups with 'different opinions' are you talking about? Geert Wilders has been convicted for libel against ethnic minorities. And Baudet has said that he wants Europe to be mostly white [1].
Third, now overgeneralizing myself, the 'right' does the same thing too: calling people on the left 'profiteers', crazy and lazy hippies who wanto to avoid any labor, etc. In fact, you are blaming the political left in your post right now for the murder of Pim Fortuyn, based on vague and unsubstantiated claims. You are doing the same thing you blame the left for.
And lastly, the original ideals from the left are very much needed in this neoliberal climate where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The economic divide is growing. Even the VVD is moving towards the left, seeing that the capitalist race has gone too far. One example: the Netherlands has a very serious housing crisis right now caused by neoliberalism. From the credit crisis to selling and reducing out the social housing stock, investors only wanting to build high end apartments, etc. In the last debate about it, the VVD was advocating for a bigger role in housing, that ideal is tradionally associated with the left.
So please, don't polarize, overgeneralize and blame the whole left for murder and name-calling. Using your line of reasoning again, it is not like the 'right' is in a good place right now with their corona denial and Qanon conspiracies.
[1] https://www.ad.nl/politiek/baudet-verliest-zaak-tegen-buiten...
I don't think so.
=="You see the Nazi platform in the early 1930s and what was actually put out there ... and you look at it compared to like the DNC platform of today, and you're saying, man, those things are awfully similar, to a point where it's actually scary," Trump Jr. said.==
https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/02/politics/donald-trump-jr-dine...
Also, there was the time the President called people who cross the southern border as “rapists”.
== They're sending people that have lots of problems...they're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.==
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/election-2016-donald-trump-defe...
Besides, you only have to check geenstijl.nl (https://www.geenstijl.nl/5155500/et-tu-francisco/#comments) for worse: the left are terrorism enablers, etc.
I can't link directly but I quote: "Moslims zijn beter te vergelijken met linkse activisten, andere meningen worden niet getolereerd en desnoods met geweld onderdrukt."
(Translation: You can compare muslim with leftist activists, other opinions are not tolerated and are repressed, with violence if needed).
So your point that the left is somehow worse at demonizing is invalid. People of both sides do it, and both are wrong.
So I hope you can focus on policy instead, because the statement that one party is worse at name calling is biased and doesn't lead us anywhere.
> "Moslims zijn beter te vergelijken met linkse activisten, andere meningen worden niet getolereerd en desnoods met geweld onderdrukt."
What is your beef with this quote? I don't see the problem.
But nitpicking about what insult is worse is beside the point for me. It is not as if most of the left is out to demonize the right and vice versa, and I regret it if you see it that way, and even more so if you think that one side is worse at it. Putting the whole of society in two camps and ascribing behaviour to them which are exacted by a minority as if they are a homogeneous unit.. oversimplified and prejudiced.
You hit the nail on the head. USSR's failure and realization that they only survived as long as they did because they stole everything from the G8 countries and had slave labour of gulags.
Add in China's 'special economic zones' which is basically China implementing capitalism in a safe way. This implementation of capitalism has enabled them to greatly boost their economy. Unfortunately causing hyper globalization.
Communism demise has lead to them been rebranded countless times now. Fundamentally the collapse of communism worldwide has created lots of frustration. Which is a feeling that's built in to the animal kingdom. The unfortunate reality of this frustration is that almost certainly will result in violence.
Seriously! Go do it now! These sites are built with the goal of pushing people into groups that are always angry at each other. Angry polarized groups spend more time on the site and are easier to sell things to.
The only thing ignoring this trash will do is make you a happier, more functional person.
Some institutions being actively soaked in identity politics and other divisive elements:
Higher education
Lower Education
United Nations
Local government bodies
Charity Organizations
Sports
The internet is causing the growth of IdPol as well as the growth of the movement against it.
IMHO, we need a return to "boring" centrist politics.
It's very hard to be apolitical. Almost all behavior can be interpreted politically.
What has really changed is it's much easier to obtain information about an organization and the individuals involved. In the past you might have simply not known enough to peg someone politically. Hence the impression of neutrality. Today it's just harder to create this illusion.
Not sure what that would look like though. Cigarettes have scary labels and enforced age requirements. Maybe social media would have to change the way likes/upvotes/etc work to be less polarizing, in addition to an age limit enforcement?
https://www.epa.gov/environmental-topics/chemicals-and-toxic...
https://www.epa.gov/fera/dose-response-assessment-assessing-...
How did we build these tables?
Same process will apply to how much dopamine (and whatever else) you can keep giving a kid or a group of people over time without serious consequences
Whether that takes 2 years or 20 years more to tabulate, lots of people will take a hit thanks to their internal reward mechanisms being gamed.
According to me, they have at best been ineffectual, and more commonly made a bad thing worse.
I think/hope we're in a transitional phase of our civilization where we haven't figured out how to handle these new things yet. Over time, institutions will emerge. They always do, right?
If the networks join up, letting people interact, enabling or encouraging hate between each other, there is an incentive for members of each group to report the illegal networks to the authorities to harm “the other lot”.
(This is just an off-the-cuff thought, I’m a long way from understanding sociopolitical dynamics)
It started slightly innocently but at some point it became a product.
Yes water vapor is safe. But additives are poorly regulated/understood.
But people are destroying their lungs faster then cigarettes ever did.
The numerous little independent journalists rarely get that level of help from a senator. They have no chance against the censorship.
How about next time?
Fact checking became a thing less for facts and more as an attack tool.
I’ve been part of as agencies. They go out of their way to make sure their is only one viewpoint on anything that gets ad dollars.
Makes it difficult for other side to run a media company if they can’t get advertising dollars.
Presumably Hunter Biden traded on his famous name to get job opportunities (in a smaller way than the Trump kids), but I've seen no credible evidence (and please don't reply with a gish-gallop of shady twitter and youtube links) that Joe Biden compromised his office to assist his son.
How ironic. Have you read the linked article? Way to prove its point.
My point is that is that it’s possible to filter out a lot of the political garbage on those sites if one wishes, but it does appear to be getting more difficult since political stuff is appearing more and more often in places that I personally wouldn’t expect.
Started seeing tons of tweets from people who decided my area was next. Tons of people going out about how they were going to burn us down. Then watching them as they all started heading our way.
Thankfully they found all the exits blocked by police.
I don’t own guns. But my area is big on gun rights. Looters vs gun nuts.
So yea, well. It’s a pretty screwed up situation. Like one step from civiL war screwed up.
From a distance, it looks like some of those same problems are contributing to the USA's polarisation. Fixing them will be much more important, and much harder, than just tuning out obnoxious media.
It's not different from being sports fan. Making noise from the couch but not having no effect in the game and annoying people who don't follow.
They have no serious purpose. They are just wasting energy.
"wherever the people are well informed they can be trusted with their own government" Thomas Jefferson (https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jefferson/60.html)
Engaging in the political dialogue is not wasted energy. Low level engagement on social media might be about as impactful as filling a stadium to see a politician speak during a pandemic but high level engagement is really the only way to participate in American democracy right now. If it wasn't valuable, nobody would be training bots to disrupt the process by amplifying division and hate.
Sane politicians aren't going door to door these days or standing on crowded street corners. They're interacting on social media.
The fact that social media sites are a valuable manipulation target to certain people doesn't make them valuable to you as a consumer. To the contrary.
As it is practised in the internet it's horrible destructive energy in the internet.
Actual political work is much better.
>Sane politicians
Yes. Politicians. They also do actual political work. Public that spends hours in political internet and does not engage outside it goes insane.
We're learning to deal with new forms of propaganda the same way we dealt with the old ones. I remember when people were talking about the information overload of the early days of the internet as driving people insane. Or people who complained about TV advertising being a form of mind control.
People that can't cope will either succumb to the will of others or retreat but that doesn't mean the rest of us shouldn't keep using these tools to our advantage.
> Yes. Politicians. They also do actual political work.
Isn't it clear that renaming post-offices a few months before they're defunded qualifies as actual political work or filling stadiums of people to give them a rock concert version of the political experience or hosting twitch streams of a co-op video game to an audience of 500k people? You might consider grilling social media companies for not doing enough to promote for their party's interests "political work" but when it's done in a chamber dedicated to governing through legislation and comes of as whining or yet another attempt at pandering it misses any loftier goals you're implying might exist.
I mean, HN is a "single feed" which avoids the belligerent group dynamics... but culture bleeds.
The narrative dichotomies and other elements of this belligerence dynamic (I think it's more belligerence than polarisation, btw) exist here and other social media that isn't explicitly structured for it like twitter, reddit or fb. Is massive, many-2-many communication a lost cause?
How does civil society survive if we're just a collection of tribal groups pursuing divided interests and throwing rocks at each other?
Why poison the well that opened up global communication and brought us closer together? Why promote anti-globalism and distrust in journalism while disrupting the lines of communication? Are we being primed for war? genocide? mass-depopulation? Whatever it is, the last thing people should do is comply.
Now I still suggest people to reduce online activities as much as possible. It's probably a long term neurological disease.
Traditional Mainstream media take sides and present one side as orthodox and the other as heterodox.
Google is guilty of soft censorship (either deranks, or with autocomplete refuses to autocomplete search phrases that are contrarian to orthodoxy).
Ignoring this will make a single individual better, but that will only leave you back at square one - which is being at the mercy of the America news media environment.
For an individual this may be the right call, for the scope and scale of the issue being discussed in this article, it doesn’t seem like it.
In political science, the phenomenon is called the “devil shift”, coined by Sabatier. Similarly, there is also the “angel shift”: you see people who agree with you as having more virtuous motivations.
My wife, Dr. Juniper Katz, wrote about these shifts in the fracking context: https://www.academia.edu/37275520/The_Space_Between_Demoniza...
I want to note that the Russian government also accuses its political opponents of being foreign agents, using the same rhetoric.
Here's an article examining how it's done in relation to anti-vaxx.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6137759/
The problem occurs when EVERY opposition statement from "the other side" is dismissed as "your just a Russian troll as no real American would ...."
"Russian Troll" and "Russian Bot" have been become a modern day no true Scotsman fallacy used by people to dismiss anyone that dares disagree with them on public policy, or the role of government as being Russian disinformation
In many cases, a person's principles are clear from what they say and do. That being said, a refusal to align one's self with a movement is often construed as supporting the other side. There are many reasons for refusing to align: a preference for independent thought, a realization that ideological movements change, an understanding that one's own principles shift (while labels often stick), or simply not buying into some fundamental points. None of that seems to matter when issues are polarized.
From chariot races to football clubs, real politic change happens through sports.
Here's an account of the famous chariot race riot in ancient Constantinople:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nika_riots
Humans will make an identity group worth dying for over anything.
Bread and circuses was a state policy in the Empire for a reason.
Nobody is willing to even come to the table anymore because of how totally wrong and evil they see the other side as. Which is kind of the point of the article.
This is tribalism at its core. It's baked into us for evolutionary reasons that helped us survive, but is now a detriment.
No, the problem will not solve itself by simply telling the public to think more critically.
These media and social media companies are incentivized by engagement metrics - which becomes money through ads - to destroy society via enraging their user against one another.
The algorithms that measure engagement and then feed it are the tools of our destruction.
This is not intentional on their behalf but an emergent result of what they've optimize for.
It's something that seems to be happening throughout the west - not just America.
This monster is probably our biggest existential threat today. The question is how do we stop it?
IMHO it indicates that we, as a species, are built/evolved to exist in small tribes and cannot cope with large societies or crowds.
The messenger matters just as much as the message. People on both sides carry strong Bayesian priors associated with Trump and Clinton, as well as with most major news outlets now, so they’re predisposed to assume words coming from messengers of “the other side” are inherently untrustable or malicious.
A more interesting study would be to expose partisans to identical content (an argument for something wonky, like trade policy or entitlement reform) through venues that otherwise look like their ideological stomping grounds, and watch how quickly people from both sides would agree.
Another part of the problem is that many of the current polarizing topics (gun control and abortion come to mind) are rooted in fundamental moral differences that don’t allow for rational discussion of the middle ground. Either the government can take guns away or it can’t. Either people can terminate a pregnancy or they can’t. Slippery slope arguments dominate these conversations and make people afraid to give any ground.
This is actually why I see promise for an AI tool like GPT-3 (or -6 or -7, more like) in politics. Prompt it with content from both sides and see how it answers debate questions. Maybe it would just learn how to give political non-answers. Maybe it would just lead to the politicization of AI, which currently enjoys healthy distrust from both sides. Or maybe people find that they’re more comfortable trusting a machine than a human from the other side.
Certainly, you can get a very wound-up contingent of people anywhere who will work themselves into hysterics, call people murderers and Nazis (and then of course jump to how moral it is to punch them), but it's rather different seeing a statesperson succumb to that kind of thing was a little startling. The article missed an opportunity there.
You may want to watch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Camillo_and_Peppone#Films as an accessible example, but everyone from Western Europe speaking to people who were adults between 1940 and 1960 will dig up countless stories.
Here's some of mine:
- Near where I work, there's a tiny village. Until recently, there were two competing music bands: the "mice" and the "rats". One group was socialists, the others catholics. By 2010, both were largely composed of octogenarians and dying. But don't think they'd ever play one note together!
- After WWII, my grandfather, being very poor and having been in the resistance, had a right to financial assistance. He never claimed it because his wife was catholic and the resistance group he participated in was socialist. Claiming his benefits would have been social suicide.
- My mother's aunt was a catholic nun, and one of the nicest and most welcoming people, widely respectd by all in the village were she lived. Once, she went to the funeral of a local farmer, a socialist. Her going to that funeral was quite out of the ordinary already, to put it mildly. On her return, she said: "He was a socialist, but a very good and decent man."
Body: Republicans are bad Republicans are bad Republicans are bad Republicans are bad Republicans are bad Republicans are bad
I don't even have a problem with a certain amount of contempt for Republicans, or at least their politicians. It's just, if you pretend to be concerned about polarization in the abstract, you might try harder to pretend to be concerned about the ways in which both sides contribute to it. If you only know about the specific ways in which conservatives or Republicans are bad, or "more bad", you're unable to overcome your partisanship in a search for the whole truth.
If you want to learn about how the left contributes to polarization, you can start by having a look at Matt Taibbi's or Jesse Singal's Substack.
I would appreciate it if tree people would stick to their trees, and stop (erroneously) extrapolating every minuscule change in the sap into a chicken-little prognostication for the entire forest.
I like liberals, I like conservatives, but one type I cannot abide are these preening, midwit, overcredentialed, underperforming, doomsayers.
It will all be just fine.
But, the vocal minority and ideologues aren't going to disengage. If all those who recognize illusion refuse to retain territory in the cultural and political dialog then the social media landscape would only be populated by the uninitiated and those who seek to initiate them into echo chambers. Those who have discernment enough to be frustrated by the hypocrisies and bias on social media are precisely the people who can de-escalate and bring more balance, reason and rationality to it.
The problem is then that the moderate voices are drowned out, censored, or out-right abused off the platforms (if not by actual people, but by droves of carefully coordinated bots). That leads to a larger discussion of the role of these platforms in societal discourse (or as the town square) and their woefully inadequate protections of free speech and privacy.
Political Sectarianism: A Dangerous Cocktail of Othering, Aversion, and Moralization
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~nyhan/political-sectarianism.pdf
Same topic, list of authors match, recently published, near match on title. I'm pretty sure this is the paper referenced. For the love of the FSM, why can't people use links?
Skim reading this paper, it appears complimentary to other reports. Will read in full shortly.
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Polarization isn't just one thing. It's the result of everything mushed together.
Ezra Klein's Why We Are Polarized is a terrific summary, synthesis of the research. Connects so many dots. Physical sorting (urbanization) promotes polarization, faceted identities are now super identities, nationalization of media begat the nationalization of our politics, the massive political reorg fallout from LBJ's Great Society ending the Dixiecrat's strangle hold on southern states (aka Nixon's Southern Strategy), and many more.
https://www.amazon.com/Why-Were-Polarized-Ezra-Klein/dp/1476...
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Klein doesn't much touch on social media in this book. Some of his podcasts episodes are relevant. Two underreported factoids popped out for me, First, how the landscape changed from blogging to social media. Second is the elephant in the room about the algorithms and how most critics are guilty of conflating speech with signal boosting.
(I have my own thoughts about social media, shared piecemeal thru my comment history. No thesis or narrative yet, sorry.)
Whatever the evil of social media today, eliminating it outright (not gonna happen) would only mitigate some of the toxicity and definitely won't unwind polarization.