3 ms·

How do we get people to start trusting each other again? When I get approvingly labeled "irredeemable", the answer is, that will never happen. The best outcom

by hga 10y ago

How do we get people to start trusting each other again? When I get approvingly labeled "irredeemable", the answer is, that will never happen. The best outcome is that we'll live and let live, although Ian Fleming's famous "Live and Let Die" formulation is of course much more accurate. Going back to your starting point, this is indeed a total rhetorical fail, which I thank you for pointing out. I'm going to assume that pjc50, who as I recall has a good head on his shoulders, hasn't noticed how institutions can change. To give an example on my side with about as much amazement as he's expressing about Snopes, I no longer dismiss out of hand everything Alex Jones and Infowars have to say (!!!).

pjc50 10y ago
> pjc50, who as I recall has a good head on his shoulders, hasn't noticed how institutions can change Thanks for the compliment! A little civility can go a long way in these things. Institutions and people certainly can change. I've lost a lot of respect for various media institutions over the years. e.g. the Telegraph, not just for having a climate change denial column but for the reasons Peter Oborne resigned (influence by advertiser HSBC to prevent adverse coverage). The BBC's political coverage is increasingly just bad, apart from Paxman - Question Time is the two sides shouting across each other, not an informative or useful programme. Their Scottish coverage in English is poor (weirdly, their Gaelic news programme is excellent despite, or possibly because of, its tiny budget). Sometimes news is absurdly localist, in the style parodied by the Onion's "Area Man": http://www.ellontimes.co.uk/news/aberdeenshire-business-owner-wins-presidential-election-1-4282745 http://www.ellontimes.co.uk/news/aberdeenshire-business-owne... I do wonder how much of this is just popularity effects. Do people actually want slower, more careful, less angry partisan news? Or do they want a team they can cheer for? The BBC hide all their insightful, analytical programming on BBC4. https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/peter-oborne/why-i-have-resigned-from-telegraph https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/peter-oborne/why-i-... Edit: you may be surprised to know that I used to read ZeroHedge, although not seriously. For sane capitalism-skeptic news coverage I'm fond of FT Alphaville.
- grzm 10y ago
  Anger has been shown to drive engagement stronger than reasoned opinion, or even good news. (I recall seeing research on this, but don't have it at hand.) So getting people riled up can unfortunately be profitable. This is similar to clickbait, sensationalist journalism when you have ad-supported news in comparison to subscription-supported. Ryan Holiday's Trust Me I'm Lying includes a very insightful section on this topic. I think it's less what people want than what they react to. O fabled homo economicus.
  - hga 10y ago
    Again, I cite Hillary labeling me and mine as "irredeemable"; absolutely nothing has made me more "angry"† than that in all the Presidential elections since I came of political age in time for the 1972 Nixon vs. McGovern one. †"angry" is an entirely insufficient word for this.
    - grzm 10y ago
      I can completely understand that. While we're having a useful discussion on how to rebuild trust, is it useful to bring up an emotional and tangential (albeit related) topic like this? I'm afraid it can potentially derail the conversation. (I hesitate to even bring this up for the same reason). That's not to say that this shouldn't be discussed. A lot of the language used during the campaign was particularly vicious and should be addressed. I just don't know if this particular micro-discussion is the place for it. Figuring out solutions to the things we agree on is particularly important given the highly polarized environment we find ourselves in. And with that, I'll take my answer off the air :)
      - hga 10y ago
        The problem is, it's anything but tangential. It flows directly from the French Revolution, and became a big thing in the US in the cultural '60s, which extended into the calendar '70s, the idea that the menu of solutions for your political problems includes outright liquidation of a subset of your opponents. How can I consider this to be tangential when our current President started his political career in the home of two of the most notorious '70s figures advocating this, who made a wild guess that 10% of the population could not be reeducated and would have to be liquidated? You might say, people they thought to be "irredeemable". And these are people of Hillary's generation. I bring this up not to attack Obama, but to show how well received such eliminationism is on the US Left (heck, in one of those things that makes you wonder if there's a God, the man had a feature article in The New York Times on 9/11 (written and printed before the attack, of course), with him standing on an American flag). That this sort of thing, including Hillary's speech, is not completely out of bounds means I cannot for a second assume the political struggle in the US is not existential for me and my family. And given that, I can't in the least see how trust can be rebuilt, at least prior to driving out of polite society all of these figures, instead of feating them. So, yes, it is, and unfortunately has to be a complete derail of the conversation, given that to the best I can discern you're not taking this issue seriously. Can I ask roughly how old are you? Did you grow up horrified at the mass murders by the tens of millions by the Left in the 20th Century, including by the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei AKA National Socialist German Workers' Party? How the Soviets were poised to kill > 100 million Americans in 30 minutes if they launched their misses and bombers? How Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge (Red Khmers, formally the Communist Party of Kampuchea per Wikipedia) killed off perhaps half their nation's people. How just having glasses was a death sentence, because it suggested to them that you might have a formal education? What's your opinion on the US crusade for gun control? Is it really about "gun safety"? Has it become something more sinister than the explicit through the 1970s "Keep guns out of the hands of blacks" (and other minorities starting around the turn of the century, but blacks were the foremost target)?
grzm 10y ago
Well, that gives me hope :) Thanks for that!

by hga 10y ago

pjc50 10y ago

> pjc50, who as I recall has a good head on his shoulders, hasn't noticed how institutions can change Thanks for the compliment! A little civility can go a long way in these things. Institutions and people certainly can change. I've lost a lot of respect for various media institutions over the years. e.g. the Telegraph, not just for having a climate change denial column but for the reasons Peter Oborne resigned (influence by advertiser HSBC to prevent adverse coverage). The BBC's political coverage is increasingly just bad, apart from Paxman - Question Time is the two sides shouting across each other, not an informative or useful programme. Their Scottish coverage in English is poor (weirdly, their Gaelic news programme is excellent despite, or possibly because of, its tiny budget). Sometimes news is absurdly localist, in the style parodied by the Onion's "Area Man": http://www.ellontimes.co.uk/news/aberdeenshire-business-owner-wins-presidential-election-1-4282745 http://www.ellontimes.co.uk/news/aberdeenshire-business-owne... I do wonder how much of this is just popularity effects. Do people actually want slower, more careful, less angry partisan news? Or do they want a team they can cheer for? The BBC hide all their insightful, analytical programming on BBC4. https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/peter-oborne/why-i-have-resigned-from-telegraph https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/peter-oborne/why-i-... Edit: you may be surprised to know that I used to read ZeroHedge, although not seriously. For sane capitalism-skeptic news coverage I'm fond of FT Alphaville.

grzm 10y ago
Anger has been shown to drive engagement stronger than reasoned opinion, or even good news. (I recall seeing research on this, but don't have it at hand.) So getting people riled up can unfortunately be profitable. This is similar to clickbait, sensationalist journalism when you have ad-supported news in comparison to subscription-supported. Ryan Holiday's Trust Me I'm Lying includes a very insightful section on this topic. I think it's less what people want than what they react to. O fabled homo economicus.
- hga 10y ago
  Again, I cite Hillary labeling me and mine as "irredeemable"; absolutely nothing has made me more "angry"† than that in all the Presidential elections since I came of political age in time for the 1972 Nixon vs. McGovern one. †"angry" is an entirely insufficient word for this.
  - grzm 10y ago
    I can completely understand that. While we're having a useful discussion on how to rebuild trust, is it useful to bring up an emotional and tangential (albeit related) topic like this? I'm afraid it can potentially derail the conversation. (I hesitate to even bring this up for the same reason). That's not to say that this shouldn't be discussed. A lot of the language used during the campaign was particularly vicious and should be addressed. I just don't know if this particular micro-discussion is the place for it. Figuring out solutions to the things we agree on is particularly important given the highly polarized environment we find ourselves in. And with that, I'll take my answer off the air :)
    - hga 10y ago
      The problem is, it's anything but tangential. It flows directly from the French Revolution, and became a big thing in the US in the cultural '60s, which extended into the calendar '70s, the idea that the menu of solutions for your political problems includes outright liquidation of a subset of your opponents. How can I consider this to be tangential when our current President started his political career in the home of two of the most notorious '70s figures advocating this, who made a wild guess that 10% of the population could not be reeducated and would have to be liquidated? You might say, people they thought to be "irredeemable". And these are people of Hillary's generation. I bring this up not to attack Obama, but to show how well received such eliminationism is on the US Left (heck, in one of those things that makes you wonder if there's a God, the man had a feature article in The New York Times on 9/11 (written and printed before the attack, of course), with him standing on an American flag). That this sort of thing, including Hillary's speech, is not completely out of bounds means I cannot for a second assume the political struggle in the US is not existential for me and my family. And given that, I can't in the least see how trust can be rebuilt, at least prior to driving out of polite society all of these figures, instead of feating them. So, yes, it is, and unfortunately has to be a complete derail of the conversation, given that to the best I can discern you're not taking this issue seriously. Can I ask roughly how old are you? Did you grow up horrified at the mass murders by the tens of millions by the Left in the 20th Century, including by the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei AKA National Socialist German Workers' Party? How the Soviets were poised to kill > 100 million Americans in 30 minutes if they launched their misses and bombers? How Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge (Red Khmers, formally the Communist Party of Kampuchea per Wikipedia) killed off perhaps half their nation's people. How just having glasses was a death sentence, because it suggested to them that you might have a formal education? What's your opinion on the US crusade for gun control? Is it really about "gun safety"? Has it become something more sinister than the explicit through the 1970s "Keep guns out of the hands of blacks" (and other minorities starting around the turn of the century, but blacks were the foremost target)?

grzm 10y ago

Well, that gives me hope :) Thanks for that!