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There's quite a difference between social media interjecting its opinion into your private, personal conversations and whatever the clergy at your local church
by chrisco255 6y ago
There's quite a difference between social media interjecting its opinion into your private, personal conversations and whatever the clergy at your local church back in the 90s would have said. They would not have even had visibility into say, what you might be talking about at the local pub or hanging out with your neighbors. A local newspaper might pitch a story, but editorials were clearly labeled and there were often competing newspapers in most towns. Statistically, police brutality isn't a problem and far more people suffer from the effects of too little policing than not (see murder rate in Chicago or Juarez). In this era, we suffer from magnification and amplification of the marginal. A thing that does not occur very often, statistically, can get blown completely out of proportion. The power of social media is the power of propaganda. Propaganda has been used throughout history to start wars, revolutions, religious battles, etc. It has the ability to shape the perception of reality in a way that has heretofore been unthinkable. Facebook alone has an audience and reach that no TV channel or newspaper has ever had. Quantity has a quality all its own.
- pjc50 6y ago> A thing that does not occur very often, statistically, can get blown completely out of proportion. 9/11 only happened once, and killed far fewer Americans than American police have since then. Therefore terrorism isn't a problem. (This argument isn't false, but it's highly misleading!)
- octaveguin 6y agoI don't want to go down this rabbit hole but a lot of people believe that terrorism isn't a large problem. The outsized response to it has been. Neither position is an absurd one to take.
- perl4ever 6y agoGenerally speaking, your attitude towards anything depends on your assessment of what will happen in the future if it is unchecked. If you see a crack in a dam, and a rivulet of water coming through, you base your actions on whether you think it's going to become larger. If a person is pretty certain that the dam is about to collapse, then talking about the water coming through right now seems palpably absurd, but reverse the assumptions and taking drastic action seems equally absurd. There's no neutral way based on facts and independent of opinions to decide what's absurd, extreme, or hysterical. But at the same time, different views are different, and some are going to be severely wrong about anything controversial and important. I don't know how you make a generic framework that tells you the right thing to do when people are talking about invading Iraq, and also tells you the right thing to do when people are talking about shutdowns for covid.
- Nasrudith 6y agoThe assertion that too little policing being a problem at large can be used to dismiss police brutality is disgustingly stupid and wrong. Police brutality isn't "too much" policing poured upon a location like floodwater but inherent crime and abuse of power and always a source of problems. Throwing police brutality into Jurarez is how you make the situation even worse and is part of how it got so bad in the first place! No institutional trust in policing caused organized crime to form long before prohibition was an issue. Police brutality is a seed of crime. It isn't like trolling where attention creates the problem but a tumor where ignoring it makes it grow from manageable to insurmountable.
- shadowgovt 6y agoAre Facebook walls "private, personal conversations?" "Wall" implies they aren't. Mechanically, they clearly aren't; they're passing through Facebook's servers and FB doesn't pretend to treat them as unfiltered content (in fact, the feed algorithm complaints are much older than the fact-checking complaints).