8 ms·

I really don’t think describing two sides of the “culture war” as red and blue is healthy for anyone. Most people have a mish-mash of beliefs, but lumping peopl

I really don’t think describing two sides of the “culture war” as red and blue is healthy for anyone. Most people have a mish-mash of beliefs, but lumping people together creates division and solidifies factions, rather than allowing people to be swayed or make up their own mind.

loggedinmyphone 8y ago
The "culture war" isn't about beliefs; it's about satisfying the human need to blame (scapegoat) someone else for your problems, meanwhile not becoming the target of blame yourself (or at least, being blamed by anyone you care about). The solution that's been devised is to designate two groups to mutually scapegoat each other.
RobertRoberts 8y ago
I tend to agree fully with your assessment of the labels, but is it a coincidence that people's behavior online during these kinds of situations are divided already? And the labels aren't creating the divide, but only describing it? I've found on both sides of an argument about a person's behavior (ie, depraved, evil, despicable, etc...) was ignored when the arguer discovered that person shared their "groups" view point. I think (in my experience) it's extremely rare that people don't pick a side, and generalities do have uses in communication. Unless you think only one side uses labels to create two sides? Where the other side is innocent of this behavior? (a silly question)
- flukus 8y ago
  > I tend to agree fully with your assessment of the labels, but is it a coincidence that people's behavior online during these kinds of situations are divided already? And the labels aren't creating the divide, but only describing it? Yes they're divided already but not nearly as neatly as red/blue. Being that unnecessarily divisive (and I've been just as guilty as anyone) pushes people further apart, even people that agree on a lot more than they realise. On the flip side, when you agree with someone simplifying like that it just pulls your bubble tighter and tighter, you can lose perspective on how the other side really feels, which is usually much less extreme than the built up charicature.
  - RobertRoberts 8y ago
    >...when you agree with someone simplifying like that it just pulls your bubble tighter and tighter... I don't "agree" with it, I just find that style of communication clearly indicates their perspective, which I find useful. I try not to use labels like that on groups dogmatically, because I overlap agreements with almost everyone on something. But, if we are talking about "one topic", as soon as you disagree with someone, you are now on different sides on "one topic". This article seems to be about "one topic", not a bunch, so I am not so sure it matters to much, because I have an opinion about that topic, so I am clearly on one side of it. >...you can lose perspective on how the other side really feels.. I guess I just don't care to have "perspective" on how someone "feels" about kiddie porn, it's repulsive, sick and horrific. I don't need to empathise with them. Everyone has limits to their empathy, that's certainly one of mine. I am just fine being divided on this topic.
meowface 8y ago
The concept of red and blue tribes described by Scott Alexander [1] isn't so much about belief, but environment, upbringing, and who you associate with. It's a convenient term for describing the sides in certain situations that devolve into these kind of identitarian tribal battles. I think it's appropriate for this Mastodon discussion. The people with a wider spectrum of belief and no strong tribe affiliation generally aren't the people engaging in these intense social media "wars". It's a descriptive, not a prescriptive, explanation. [1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything...
- repolfx 8y ago
  Yes, the red/blue divide is essentially accurate and using it doesn't create the divide, which is already there. The only real simplification is that it's more like a spectrum rather than a hard cut, but it's still a single dimension variable (there is less complexity to it than lots of people like to believe). The best explanation for what it truly is and why it occurs throughout history is in "Conflict of Visions" by Thomas Sowell. I'll give a précis of the argument here: The red/blue divide is ultimately a disagreement over the span of human nature. All humans develop intuitive beliefs about human nature merely through the act of living, so nobody is actually neutral or truly 'centrist' - people who appear to be are usually just people who haven't been in a situation where the differences actually matter. But if they were to be, suddenly you'd find they picked a side. The "free speech" side believe that human nature is limited and relatively static. Humans are corruptible, always have been and always will be. They can't perceive or handle the true complexities of reality, never could and never will. Because human nature is flawed and unchanging, there will always be war, there will always be unfairness, there will always be a divide between the rich and poor and so on. Progress is an endless struggle to find incrementally better tradeoffs, but attempting to make one thing better over here frequently makes something worse over there, and our limited abilities mean it's easy to think you found a better tradeoff when really it was worse. Attempting to change any of these things is naive, futile and usually dangerous. The "safe speech" side believe that human nature is essentially unlimited and relatively flexible. Humans may be imperfect but they can improve or be improved over time and in the long run are perfectible. This process of improvement occurs through debate, thought, learning and reflection. Intelligence and expertise are paramount, so the best outcomes come from putting decisions in the hands of the best people. That's an important point: because the span of human nature is very wide, some people are much further along the path of enlightenment than other people are, and it's important that the less developed people don't get too much influence in society. Almost all left/right/red/blue/free-speech/safe-speech/conservative/liberal disputes in life flow from this disagreement over one thing. With respect to Twitter, we can see the following ideas at work: - Safe speech side: Ideas are important, spread easily and most people are easily influenced by them. Therefore speech can be dangerous because the mere act of someone speaking can significantly damage the human nature of the listeners, making them literally worse people. Speech control is thus highly important and a moral imperative; free speech by "bad people" can seriously damage civilisation itself. The best way to stop bad ideas spreading from bad people to the lumpen proletariant is moderation by better people, who can use a variety of speech-limiting tools to ensure the best ideas win. - Free speech side: Ideas are pretty harmless, because people are robust and can easily reject bad ideas that other people talk about. Free speech is essential because nobody has the big picture, all we have are small fragments, and because power corrupts so being able to speak out against power is fundamental. Speech controls and moderation are themselves a form of power which will corrupt the moderators, so it's better to have no controls at all and put up with some level of abuse and spam than submit a free speaking place to the tyrannical will of a handful of self-proclaimed moral overlords. This is not a US specific thing of course. I don't know why anyone thinks that. You can see it everywhere. For instance, in Europe the EU is essentially controlled by "safe speech" types. This can be seen most visibly in the reaction of the various EU leaders to Brexit. Martin Schulz who was at the time an important figure in the EU Parliament (and went on to be briefly important in German politics), said this: For decades the UK tabloids have performed mass brainwashing, and the leave campaign force-fed their readers with intolerance of foreigners. No change to the EU will convince those who have fallen victim to these factors. A bonfire of the EU is therefore not the way forwards. The safe speech / perfectible-human ideas are everywhere in this short quote. People are easily "brainwashed" by ideas that they would naturally reject, except they were "force fed" them and have become "victims" - Schulz believes that people are reprogrammable biological FPGAs whose political beliefs are entirely controlled by those who speak loudly and frequently. These sorts of people also have frequently referred to dislike of the EU as a "virus" that's "spreading". Because people's views are entirely created by listening to charismatic speakers, there is little point in actually changing how anything is really done. It is impossible for people with such wildly different takes on human nature to co-exist in the same space. If a new space was created by people with free speech mentality, the safe-speechers will not rest until they have taken it over and imposed speech controls on it, because they feel that to not do this is literally dangerous. Hence their name!
makomk 8y ago
From what I've seen, one of the more common "blue tribe" beliefs these days is that there are in fact two sides - either you're a good person who holds all of the correct beliefs that every decent person has, or you're the enemy. A few months ago, a whole bunch of the social justice-y folks on Mastodon actually turned on its creator in #ForkOff because he introduced a popular tags feature that (in their eyes) every good-thinking person should realise was a bad idea, and therefore was a bad person and should be shunned. (Not sure how tightly-policed the red tribe is these days.)
- mercer 8y ago
  I think that's equally true for the 'red tribe'.
  - drostie 8y ago
    No see it's not quite true for either side. It's called "outgroup homogeneity," when you are part of an us-vs-them scenario your "us" always seems to be a coalition of diverse viewpoints whereas your "them" is a single collective viewpoint. So for example if you are in a team of white males you might want to get a token black person or a token woman on your team to "bring the black perspective" or "bring the female perspective" to whatever you're working on: that's a systematic bias, you're implicitly assuming that there's not going to be a diversity of black/female perspectives the way that you already know there's a lot of white male perspectives. In fact the broader issue that will lead the US inexorably to civil war even if present communications difficulties abate is that we do elections by dividing our electoral bodies into independent seats and then run first-past-the-post elections for each seat. The issue is fixed-point theorems. Each election is a polity -> polity map; the fixed point of split-FPTP-elections is a polity which is 50% one party, 50% the other party, both parties are completely spineless chameleons which shift however they need to in order to maintain the 50/50 status quo, and people are loosely affiliated with one party while disgusted by the opposition. As the first US civil war showed, this disgust will naturally build without bound until the highly prominent issues at the time cause movements toward secession which then lead to active conflict. I was going to say "if you're coming from a place that does proportional elections this probably seems like nonsense to you," but that is my own outgroup homogeneity effect rearing its ugly head again! The truth is that even proportionate systems have problems with this sort of divisiveness; witness Brexit in the UK and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands for two examples. But I would insist that there is a characteristic spinelessness that pushes this further from just "we are one nation with serious divisions to reconcile" to "they are awful and we will never reconcile, let's just get a divorce" in the US system.
evernon 8y ago
That describes exactly what is happening. An individual's nuanced stance and well reasoned argument doesn't matter so much as their use of a hashtag does. Anyone on the fence is fraternizing with the enemy. The sides are ill-defined, but certainly delimited by what the self-ascribed gatekeepers at the top of the social jenga tower consider personally "deplorable", through blacklisting and social pressure.
- dielan 8y ago
  This is exactly the problem that is happening on the big english speaking Mastodon instances and the reason I left mastodon.xyz I went to a GNU Social instance that doesnt block any other servers and its like a whole different network. I prefer to have my beliefs challenged and not be punished for speaking with people the instance admin didnt agree with.
Taniwha 8y ago
I think that 'red' and 'blue' are just plain confusing because the US has relatively recently taken its own bindings of these labels to political positions that are completely arse-backwards to the long term historical uses of these colours in the entire rest of the world. I think it's best to use more descriptive terms that everyone can actually agree on
- GLjEI4YbnGD27LB 8y ago
  Well in the US the colours used to be reversed as well, but then they switched in the beginning of the 20th century.
- nl 8y ago
  Blue/Red in the US used to be (deliberately) switched on TV broadcasts in every election until the 2000 Bush election where the continual coverage of how close it was locked the colors in for all time.
  - 18pfsmt 8y ago
    This wikipedia entry takes 6 paragraphs to explain the nuances involved and they are far more complicated than you state (not that I think you intended that way): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_states_and_blue_states#Contemporary_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_states_and_blue_states#Con...
    - Taniwha 8y ago
      Which basically gets back to my original point in an international forum like this (or the one described by the above article) these colours don't really mean anything you can talk about and they're best avoided unless your goal actually is to sow confusion
    - nl 8y ago
      Yeah interesting. I wasn’t aware of all the subtleties at all. Thanks for the link.
Sidious 8y ago
I think the real problem with those type of binary (false dichotomies) situations, other than fostering thinking inside the box and extremism is that it's a setup for the Hegelian dialectic. Problem-reaction-"solution", or thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis.
orblivion 8y ago
It's not about your basket of beliefs, it's about the fact of coalition and the feeling of tribal alliance. When you see the armies forming you increasingly feel compelled to pick a team. I never cared for that sort of thing, but at some point in 2016 it happened to me.
kemonocode 8y ago
Reality is far more nuanced, yes. By some of the author's measures I'd be on Red's side (Even though I think the whole GamerGate ordeal was thoroughly idiotic) and by some others I'd be on Blue's side. People don't fit neatly into tags and categories, and for that opinion I've been attacked by members of both sides before.
- karrotwaltz 8y ago
  IMO it was also a naming problem. GamerGate doesn't refer to anything precisely, it just encompass the whole mess. The ones who had interesting claims should have forked the movement under an unambigous name. It was impossible to be fully pro or anti gamergate because both sides had so many claims and their fair share of trolls.

loggedinmyphone 8y ago

The "culture war" isn't about beliefs; it's about satisfying the human need to blame (scapegoat) someone else for your problems, meanwhile not becoming the target of blame yourself (or at least, being blamed by anyone you care about). The solution that's been devised is to designate two groups to mutually scapegoat each other.

RobertRoberts 8y ago

I tend to agree fully with your assessment of the labels, but is it a coincidence that people's behavior online during these kinds of situations are divided already? And the labels aren't creating the divide, but only describing it? I've found on both sides of an argument about a person's behavior (ie, depraved, evil, despicable, etc...) was ignored when the arguer discovered that person shared their "groups" view point. I think (in my experience) it's extremely rare that people don't pick a side, and generalities do have uses in communication. Unless you think only one side uses labels to create two sides? Where the other side is innocent of this behavior? (a silly question)

flukus 8y ago
> I tend to agree fully with your assessment of the labels, but is it a coincidence that people's behavior online during these kinds of situations are divided already? And the labels aren't creating the divide, but only describing it? Yes they're divided already but not nearly as neatly as red/blue. Being that unnecessarily divisive (and I've been just as guilty as anyone) pushes people further apart, even people that agree on a lot more than they realise. On the flip side, when you agree with someone simplifying like that it just pulls your bubble tighter and tighter, you can lose perspective on how the other side really feels, which is usually much less extreme than the built up charicature.
- RobertRoberts 8y ago
  >...when you agree with someone simplifying like that it just pulls your bubble tighter and tighter... I don't "agree" with it, I just find that style of communication clearly indicates their perspective, which I find useful. I try not to use labels like that on groups dogmatically, because I overlap agreements with almost everyone on something. But, if we are talking about "one topic", as soon as you disagree with someone, you are now on different sides on "one topic". This article seems to be about "one topic", not a bunch, so I am not so sure it matters to much, because I have an opinion about that topic, so I am clearly on one side of it. >...you can lose perspective on how the other side really feels.. I guess I just don't care to have "perspective" on how someone "feels" about kiddie porn, it's repulsive, sick and horrific. I don't need to empathise with them. Everyone has limits to their empathy, that's certainly one of mine. I am just fine being divided on this topic.

meowface 8y ago

The concept of red and blue tribes described by Scott Alexander [1] isn't so much about belief, but environment, upbringing, and who you associate with. It's a convenient term for describing the sides in certain situations that devolve into these kind of identitarian tribal battles. I think it's appropriate for this Mastodon discussion. The people with a wider spectrum of belief and no strong tribe affiliation generally aren't the people engaging in these intense social media "wars". It's a descriptive, not a prescriptive, explanation. [1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything...

repolfx 8y ago
Yes, the red/blue divide is essentially accurate and using it doesn't create the divide, which is already there. The only real simplification is that it's more like a spectrum rather than a hard cut, but it's still a single dimension variable (there is less complexity to it than lots of people like to believe). The best explanation for what it truly is and why it occurs throughout history is in "Conflict of Visions" by Thomas Sowell. I'll give a précis of the argument here: The red/blue divide is ultimately a disagreement over the span of human nature. All humans develop intuitive beliefs about human nature merely through the act of living, so nobody is actually neutral or truly 'centrist' - people who appear to be are usually just people who haven't been in a situation where the differences actually matter. But if they were to be, suddenly you'd find they picked a side. The "free speech" side believe that human nature is limited and relatively static. Humans are corruptible, always have been and always will be. They can't perceive or handle the true complexities of reality, never could and never will. Because human nature is flawed and unchanging, there will always be war, there will always be unfairness, there will always be a divide between the rich and poor and so on. Progress is an endless struggle to find incrementally better tradeoffs, but attempting to make one thing better over here frequently makes something worse over there, and our limited abilities mean it's easy to think you found a better tradeoff when really it was worse. Attempting to change any of these things is naive, futile and usually dangerous. The "safe speech" side believe that human nature is essentially unlimited and relatively flexible. Humans may be imperfect but they can improve or be improved over time and in the long run are perfectible. This process of improvement occurs through debate, thought, learning and reflection. Intelligence and expertise are paramount, so the best outcomes come from putting decisions in the hands of the best people. That's an important point: because the span of human nature is very wide, some people are much further along the path of enlightenment than other people are, and it's important that the less developed people don't get too much influence in society. Almost all left/right/red/blue/free-speech/safe-speech/conservative/liberal disputes in life flow from this disagreement over one thing. With respect to Twitter, we can see the following ideas at work: - Safe speech side: Ideas are important, spread easily and most people are easily influenced by them. Therefore speech can be dangerous because the mere act of someone speaking can significantly damage the human nature of the listeners, making them literally worse people. Speech control is thus highly important and a moral imperative; free speech by "bad people" can seriously damage civilisation itself. The best way to stop bad ideas spreading from bad people to the lumpen proletariant is moderation by better people, who can use a variety of speech-limiting tools to ensure the best ideas win. - Free speech side: Ideas are pretty harmless, because people are robust and can easily reject bad ideas that other people talk about. Free speech is essential because nobody has the big picture, all we have are small fragments, and because power corrupts so being able to speak out against power is fundamental. Speech controls and moderation are themselves a form of power which will corrupt the moderators, so it's better to have no controls at all and put up with some level of abuse and spam than submit a free speaking place to the tyrannical will of a handful of self-proclaimed moral overlords. This is not a US specific thing of course. I don't know why anyone thinks that. You can see it everywhere. For instance, in Europe the EU is essentially controlled by "safe speech" types. This can be seen most visibly in the reaction of the various EU leaders to Brexit. Martin Schulz who was at the time an important figure in the EU Parliament (and went on to be briefly important in German politics), said this: For decades the UK tabloids have performed mass brainwashing, and the leave campaign force-fed their readers with intolerance of foreigners. No change to the EU will convince those who have fallen victim to these factors. A bonfire of the EU is therefore not the way forwards. The safe speech / perfectible-human ideas are everywhere in this short quote. People are easily "brainwashed" by ideas that they would naturally reject, except they were "force fed" them and have become "victims" - Schulz believes that people are reprogrammable biological FPGAs whose political beliefs are entirely controlled by those who speak loudly and frequently. These sorts of people also have frequently referred to dislike of the EU as a "virus" that's "spreading". Because people's views are entirely created by listening to charismatic speakers, there is little point in actually changing how anything is really done. It is impossible for people with such wildly different takes on human nature to co-exist in the same space. If a new space was created by people with free speech mentality, the safe-speechers will not rest until they have taken it over and imposed speech controls on it, because they feel that to not do this is literally dangerous. Hence their name!

makomk 8y ago

From what I've seen, one of the more common "blue tribe" beliefs these days is that there are in fact two sides - either you're a good person who holds all of the correct beliefs that every decent person has, or you're the enemy. A few months ago, a whole bunch of the social justice-y folks on Mastodon actually turned on its creator in #ForkOff because he introduced a popular tags feature that (in their eyes) every good-thinking person should realise was a bad idea, and therefore was a bad person and should be shunned. (Not sure how tightly-policed the red tribe is these days.)

mercer 8y ago
I think that's equally true for the 'red tribe'.
- drostie 8y ago
  No see it's not quite true for either side. It's called "outgroup homogeneity," when you are part of an us-vs-them scenario your "us" always seems to be a coalition of diverse viewpoints whereas your "them" is a single collective viewpoint. So for example if you are in a team of white males you might want to get a token black person or a token woman on your team to "bring the black perspective" or "bring the female perspective" to whatever you're working on: that's a systematic bias, you're implicitly assuming that there's not going to be a diversity of black/female perspectives the way that you already know there's a lot of white male perspectives. In fact the broader issue that will lead the US inexorably to civil war even if present communications difficulties abate is that we do elections by dividing our electoral bodies into independent seats and then run first-past-the-post elections for each seat. The issue is fixed-point theorems. Each election is a polity -> polity map; the fixed point of split-FPTP-elections is a polity which is 50% one party, 50% the other party, both parties are completely spineless chameleons which shift however they need to in order to maintain the 50/50 status quo, and people are loosely affiliated with one party while disgusted by the opposition. As the first US civil war showed, this disgust will naturally build without bound until the highly prominent issues at the time cause movements toward secession which then lead to active conflict. I was going to say "if you're coming from a place that does proportional elections this probably seems like nonsense to you," but that is my own outgroup homogeneity effect rearing its ugly head again! The truth is that even proportionate systems have problems with this sort of divisiveness; witness Brexit in the UK and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands for two examples. But I would insist that there is a characteristic spinelessness that pushes this further from just "we are one nation with serious divisions to reconcile" to "they are awful and we will never reconcile, let's just get a divorce" in the US system.

evernon 8y ago

That describes exactly what is happening. An individual's nuanced stance and well reasoned argument doesn't matter so much as their use of a hashtag does. Anyone on the fence is fraternizing with the enemy. The sides are ill-defined, but certainly delimited by what the self-ascribed gatekeepers at the top of the social jenga tower consider personally "deplorable", through blacklisting and social pressure.

dielan 8y ago
This is exactly the problem that is happening on the big english speaking Mastodon instances and the reason I left mastodon.xyz I went to a GNU Social instance that doesnt block any other servers and its like a whole different network. I prefer to have my beliefs challenged and not be punished for speaking with people the instance admin didnt agree with.

Taniwha 8y ago

I think that 'red' and 'blue' are just plain confusing because the US has relatively recently taken its own bindings of these labels to political positions that are completely arse-backwards to the long term historical uses of these colours in the entire rest of the world. I think it's best to use more descriptive terms that everyone can actually agree on

GLjEI4YbnGD27LB 8y ago
Well in the US the colours used to be reversed as well, but then they switched in the beginning of the 20th century.
nl 8y ago
Blue/Red in the US used to be (deliberately) switched on TV broadcasts in every election until the 2000 Bush election where the continual coverage of how close it was locked the colors in for all time.
- 18pfsmt 8y ago
  This wikipedia entry takes 6 paragraphs to explain the nuances involved and they are far more complicated than you state (not that I think you intended that way): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_states_and_blue_states#Contemporary_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_states_and_blue_states#Con...
  - Taniwha 8y ago
    Which basically gets back to my original point in an international forum like this (or the one described by the above article) these colours don't really mean anything you can talk about and they're best avoided unless your goal actually is to sow confusion
  - nl 8y ago
    Yeah interesting. I wasn’t aware of all the subtleties at all. Thanks for the link.

Sidious 8y ago

I think the real problem with those type of binary (false dichotomies) situations, other than fostering thinking inside the box and extremism is that it's a setup for the Hegelian dialectic. Problem-reaction-"solution", or thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis.

orblivion 8y ago

It's not about your basket of beliefs, it's about the fact of coalition and the feeling of tribal alliance. When you see the armies forming you increasingly feel compelled to pick a team. I never cared for that sort of thing, but at some point in 2016 it happened to me.

kemonocode 8y ago

Reality is far more nuanced, yes. By some of the author's measures I'd be on Red's side (Even though I think the whole GamerGate ordeal was thoroughly idiotic) and by some others I'd be on Blue's side. People don't fit neatly into tags and categories, and for that opinion I've been attacked by members of both sides before.

karrotwaltz 8y ago
IMO it was also a naming problem. GamerGate doesn't refer to anything precisely, it just encompass the whole mess. The ones who had interesting claims should have forked the movement under an unambigous name. It was impossible to be fully pro or anti gamergate because both sides had so many claims and their fair share of trolls.