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‘Culture wars’ are fought by tiny minority – UK study

465 points by archiepeach 6y ago

throwaway3699 6y ago
> It found that there was actually widespread agreement in the UK over topics such as gender equality and climate change – often seen as culture war issues. I really don't think The Guardian understands what they're talking about here. The so called "culture war" is about Marxist ideology. The people denying climate change are fringe wackos of this tiny minority who fight culture wars.
- vidarh 6y ago
  The proportion in the UK who are any kind of Marxist is vanishingly small. The extremist pushing "culture wars" do like to argue it's about "Marxist ideology", but what they paint as Marxist rarely has anything whatsoever to do with Marxism. EDIT: It's fascinating to see the votes on this change without anyone even trying to make an argument to justify the claim it has to do with Marxism. I'd love to see one of those downvoters explain exactly how it has anything to do with Marxism. I'm not holding my breath.
  - zozbot234 6y ago
    Jeremy Corbyn has praised Karl Marx as "a great economist", FWIW.
    - vidarh 6y ago
      And yet his policies are moderate enough that UK Labours 2019 program is outflanked on the left by the Norwegian conservative party on a number of issues. Corbyn is certainly left wing by US and UK standards, but has never been a Marxist, and is moderate by the standards of most of Europe. McDonnell on the other hand, could reasonably be described as Marxist.
    - Qwertious 6y ago
      Well, Marx was a big contributor to our view of economics. He sure as hell hasn't been obscure - he basically founded Marxian economics (not to be confused with Marxist politics). He had some pretty sharp ideas about the problems in his contemporary economic system that are still relevant today, even if he dropped the ball on predicting the best solution.
    - jacobion 6y ago
      Karl Marx WAS a great economist. Is this something one is no longer allowed to say without being smeared as an extremist?
      - stale2002 6y ago
        > Karl Marx WAS a great economist. He really was not. He was great at politics. He was great at taping into things that workers cared about. But his actual economics that he laid out, in Das Kapital? The actual mathmatical equations in it, and falsifiable predictions in that book? The labor theory of value? All pretty worthless. Basically no serious academic takes the labor theory of value seriously. It is non-sense. Heterodox economic theories are heterodox for a reason. That reason being that they are not reflective of reality.
        throwawaygh 6y ago
        >> Karl Marx WAS a great economist. > He really was not. He was great at politics. Not in the governance sense (he wasn't a statesmen), so you must mean in the other sense ("activities within an organization that are aimed at improving someone's status or position"). But this is sort of a difference without a difference, right? For most of human history, people who were "great at X" were in truth at least as good at politics as the thing they're actually known for. Even e.g. Euclid was arguably a great geometer but an even greater politician. Hell, Pythagoras was literally a cult leader. With rare exceptions, your name isn't remembered by history unless you're good at politics. > Basically no serious academic takes the labor theory of value seriously. The labor theory of value is much older than Marx, and components of it are certainly taken seriously in management schools when talking about pricing services for example. Similarly, economists use components of other theories of value where it makes sense. I think it's more accurate to say that economics as a profession has moved on from these sorts of "generalizable theories of value" to give more nuanced analyses, which is quite different from saying that those theories proposed historically by Marx or Frisch or whoever have no influence. Anyways, can you define "serious academic" in a way that doesn't make this sentence tautological? There's no one who claims Das Kapital is the Bible of Economics, but the same is true for Wealth of Nations and basically any other historical text. That doesn't mean that Smith and Marx are irrelevant, though.
    - renewiltord 6y ago
      Obviously he was that and a foundational social scientist. I'll do that and I'm almost certainly closer to being an ancap than you are.
  - gampleman 6y ago
    A lot of the Scottish intellectuals I've talked to where pretty explicitly Marxist (including, but not limited to, my supervisor who had a poster of Lenin in his office). Also I think current SNP politics are pretty close to Marxism-Leninsim.
    - vidarh 6y ago
      Yes, you can find Marxists in the UK. That does not at all change what I wrote. The narrative of Marxism as some big scary bogeyman in UK politics is an alt-right trope. Suggesting the SNP, which is only moderately left wing even by UK standards, is close to Marxism-Leninism is equally ludicrous. Put another way: If Marxism had any prominent support in the UK, RLB would have been outflanked on the left in the Labour leadership elections, rather than losing to someone on her right.
    - arethuza 6y ago
      "Also I think current SNP politics are pretty close to Marxism-Leninsim." Care to share which policies those might be?
      - arethuza 6y ago
        It's not like the Socialist party in Scotland are fans of the SNP: https://scottishsocialistparty.org/?s=snp&submit=Search https://scottishsocialistparty.org/?s=snp&submit=Search
adamjb 6y ago
Here's the study https://www.britainschoice.uk/ https://www.britainschoice.uk/
rayiner 6y ago
I like the More in Common Project. But it overlooks the disproportionate representation of the extremists in our institutions. This happened at my alma matter earlier this year: https://freebeacon.com/campus/northwestern-law-administrators-confess-their-racism-in-online-diversity-session https://freebeacon.com/campus/northwestern-law-administrator.... They also voted to abandon entrance exams at my magnet high school: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4979 https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4979 It’s not comforting to know that only a tiny minority of people are standing up and declaring themselves “gatekeepers of white supremacy” when that person is the Dean of a school or a School Board Superintendent. Just because folks fighting the culture wars might be few in number doesn’t mean they don’t have their hands on a lot of levers.
- throwawaycltr 6y ago
  I wasn't able to find the details about this course the faculty participated in but I wouldn't read too much into it. For some of these you must describe yourself as a racist and apologise for your evil. Suggesting that perhaps you're not that bad means it's even worse than we feared. I don't think someone who really was a "gatekeeper of white supremacy" would describe themselves that way.
  - charlesu 6y ago
    Being racist isn’t the same as being evil. Just about everyone, to some extent, is racist. I don’t see how that’s an extreme claim. Humans are a social species. We have in-groups and out-groups. Often times the most salient marker for whether someone is in your group is whether they share certain phenotypes or language. There’s nothing weird about that. It’s expected. It’s our default setting. But it does lead to treating some people differently than others. That’s racism. In racism training, you simply acknowledge that by being human, you are racist. You can’t cure it anymore than you can cure alcoholism. It’s always with you and if you care to not be racist, you have to be aware of that. Why is that claim uncomfortable?
    - zozbot234 6y ago
pjc50 6y ago
Yes. The culture war is to a great extent a US import. The US is extremely polarised, possibly uniquely so for a country with a single national language and mostly-shared ethnic background (compare Belgium, which is highly polarised but along language lines). The UK has its own natural fragmentation lines (north/south, class system, four nations, catholic/protestant) but those are not the lines on which the culture war is run. While there has been incursion of talk radio (LBC/Farage), there is no counterpart to the hyper-polarised TV of Fox News yet. Sky News is comparatively normal. The right-wing disinformation comes in via the press and various "client journalists" who repeat things they've heard from "Downing street sources" who they refuse to hold accountable. > It found that most voters balanced competing political concerns and ideas. Its polling found that 73% believe hate speech is a problem, while 72% believe political correctness is an issue. Some 60% believe many are too sensitive about race, but 60% also recognise issues around “white privilege”. This is just the combination of leading questions and people responding to words without actually thinking about the underlying concepts. See, always, Yes Minister: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0ZZJXw4MTA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0ZZJXw4MTA
- arethuza 6y ago
  "there is no counterpart to the hyper-polarised TV of Fox News yet" The Daily Mail?
  - raverbashing 6y ago
    The Sun, Express, etc are probably worse (I'm not condoning the Daily Mail with this statement)
  - derriz 6y ago
    To be fair, the Daily Mail seems to have toned it down a bit since the editor changed a few years ago. Subject to the caveat that I haven't lived in the UK for over 15 years, overall the popular press in the UK is a bit shocking. I don't know of any liberal western country where you see the kind of racism routinely displayed on the front page of mainstream/popular UK newspapers. Perhaps xenophobia rather than direct racism would be a better description but it's not easy to tell the difference in many cases. It's all a bit weird as the UK is generally a tolerant society but somebody must be buying all those newspapers. About the only UK newspaper I can read these days without getting upset is the Financial Times - there's pockets of good journalism in the Guardian also but it's almost too much of a struggle to find them in the swamp of opinion pieces. I guess the Times isn't too bad or at least tries to represent some sort of centrist view but it feels fairly shallow. For me the Brexit issue is the UK's version of the culture war in the US. I've talked to people who say they can barely talk to members of their family any more because of Brexit stance differences. And I don't see this division healing very soon - I fear it's going to fester for years.
drran 6y ago
Almost any war is fought by a tiny minority, which is backed by large majority.
- goatinaboat 6y ago
  Almost any war is fought by a tiny minority, which is backed by large majority. While technically true, in a real war the “tiny minority” (the military) don’t choose when or where or why to fight, that is done by the “large majority”, the voters electing a government.
  - arethuza 6y ago
    "don’t choose when or where or why to fight" The UK has been in a number of wars since I've been able to vote - I don't recall being asked to vote on any one of them? Or indeed the wars in question being part of the manifesto for any party at any election?
    - goatinaboat 6y ago
      Are you asserting that the British military picks its own wars? Because that’s the quote you replied to.
      - arethuza 6y ago
        I was replying to the assertion that "that is done by the “large majority”, the voters electing a government." The government picks the wars without any reference to the voters?
        goatinaboat 6y ago
        Whether true or not, my point about those who fight in real wars stands. Whereas in a so-called culture war, those who do the “fighting” are also the instigators.
        6y ago
krona 6y ago
Isn't this (more or less) what we'd expect to find? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
originalvichy 6y ago
I’m a person who has seen the culture war start and evolve to its current status. I knew it became about money when certain outspoken people in the movement against ”left wing” ideas started going on speaking tours and selling books. They would act as though they were intellectuals and people who had common sense. I listened to hours and hours of them talking, and an observant person saw through their act pretty quickly. These people could rarely offer any depth in any other subjects other than ”guess what I saw on Twitter yesterday”. They get money by believing people online (especually Twitter) represent a majority opinion, and after building that strawman they go on speaking tours to scare people to be afraid of college kids with blue hair. Outrage porn sells. It’s easy to sell outrage and this symbiotic relationship is very lucrative. Unfortunately they flooded many of my favorite places online and I’ve had to learn to tune them out.
- deleted 6y ago
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- notsureaboutpg 6y ago
  I 100% agree with you but then you know one of the so-called college kids with blue hair married into my family and it's never made me tune in more to these "outrage porn" sellers than ever in my life. I think perhaps much of their audience has real-life relationships (through work, family, etc) with one of those caricatures they make and that's probably what drives a lot of their audience.
insickness 6y ago
When I was younger, this was a quote that was always thrown around: “Never doubt that a small, group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” — Margaret Mead Is this really true though or does change occur in ways that are a lot smaller, more incremental and undetectable than we realize?
- deleted 6y ago
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- mathnmusic 6y ago
  Nassim Taleb also argues this in his "Minority rule". That all it takes a stubborn minority to bring along changes. This can be both a good thing and a bad thing.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  The common pattern tends to be that a focused, outlier minority, through consistent and concerted effort, can change the public perception on a topic until it becomes the publicly-advocated goal, and then a culture can shift. The US 'Founding Fathers' were a relatively small group of merchants, land owners, an publishers that were, if you will, "thought leaders" of an American "englightenment" movement that saw significant opportunities if they could toss the foreign rule of Great Britain. But "Let's break loose from the monarchy" was hardly a common public opinion before a combination of a series of writings made by an absolute handful of individuals in the group and a series of publicized bad tactical / strategic calls made by the representatives of the British government in the Colonies. (It may be difficult to tease apart cause and effect on this topic, however; consider the possibility that there are fringe thinkers pulling in all directions, but as circumstances change, an accident of incidents may bring some of the fringe thinkers to a position of being less fringe. People were saying police in the US were too brutal to minorities for decades before combination of ubiquitous smartphone cameras and multiple disconnected high-profile incidents that common folk considered brutality started to bring public perception around to that way of thinking. We're in the middle of a cultural fight right now, but if policing as it's done in the US does fundamentally change, history will probably record a story of Black Lives Matter leaders bringing about that change. And if it doesn't change, this era of US history will probably hold a place in history books similar to the one the LA riots hold).
OneGuy123 6y ago
The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15 https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
- totetsu 6y ago
  The Most Tolerant wins: The silent battle of who cleans the toilet.
another-dave 6y ago
I think the main culprit exacerbating this is the main stream media. "Vox pops" have formed part of filling air-time or column inches for a long while, but this is largely replaced now by journalists looking at Twitter and either a) using that as a stand-in for 'this is what the public think' or b) making it the story itself. Social media is no longer just "second screen" below-the-line commenting on events, it's helping to shape what becomes a story. I think a lot of it is probably a symptom of trimmed budgets and the 24hr news cycle — social media is in easy reach and available at whatever point you're writing your article. Unfortunately, I don't think we can roll back on the constant need for more 'breaking news', but would be interesting if a newspaper were to take an editorial stance that it won't quote/embed any tweets or social posts in their articles.
- secondcoming 6y ago
  > newspaper were to take an editorial stance that it won't quote/embed any tweets or social posts in their articles. The entire internet should take this advice, firstly for the reason you stated, and also because the Twitter website UX is appalling.
- neilwilson 6y ago
  When I did media training years ago they told us that the media isn't there to inform. It's there to sell imprints. And that journalists have knowledge that is a mile wide and an inch deep. Their job is to file copy to strict deadlines.
- cmdshiftf4 6y ago
  >I think the main culprit exacerbating this is the main stream media. I understand your argument but I also in no way want to distract from the culpability owned by social media companies, their product designers and managers, and the people who wrote the code to implement their desires. They are ultimately guilty for the damage they have wrought on our societies. Traditional media companies may have exacerbated the issue with their participation, but they didn't create it. >Unfortunately, I don't think we can roll back on the constant need for more 'breaking news' We can't, but just like smoking cigarettes or shooting up opioids we can recognize it as a source of damage and addiction and start changing things to combat it.
totetsu 6y ago
You know I don't recall hearing the term "culture war" when I was studying critical theory and culture and media and so on at university last decade.. I heard about hegemony, and how theories of cultural transmission have changed over time.. I heard of Edward Said and his The Myth of the “Clash of Civilizations”, I heard of Virilio's "Pure War" of technology vs humanity... but I can't recall any discussion of a culture war.. which leads me to suspect that this phrase is actually just made up by a group of people who want to bring the ideas of violent struggle into their discourse about who the world ought to be.. and journalist have unwittingly picked up the phrase and reified it(another nifty media studies word). There aren't two side to a culture war, there isn't any war. from what I've heard of fascist ideology, and how it glorifies violence and war, it's not surprising that the phrase would arise.
- brobdingnagians 6y ago
  Studies have shown that both sides are increasingly favorable to violence for political ends. The interesting thing I gained from your statements is, it would appear that both parties are moving towards fascism or "corporatism" as Mussolini liked to put it, with all the military-industrial complex that comes with it. It is clear to most people how corporatism could be applied to the Republican party, but socialism is also a "partnership" between government and corporations where government regulations and incentives to the market bend it to the governments will (and both the Right & Left have consistently increase the military-industrial complex). We may feel that climate intervention and laws implementing that needs to happen, but it is quite clearly a corporatism partnership with the government where companies are given marching orders with legal regulation, then given incentives to change their behaviour. Oddly enough, I think America is moving towards fascism, but the "anti-fascists" are just as guilty as the war hawks on Wall Street. There are very few people advocating truly a truly free society or scaling back the massive military-industrial complex and surveillance state.
- deleted 6y ago
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- renewiltord 6y ago
  Well, that's obvious. Social sciences that describe societies usually lag behind the events they describe. That's natural. It's also true for other sciences. You won't learn cutting edge Physics in your lecture class. You'll learn the established stuff. It takes a long time till you attend lectures where you'll hear that stuff and it won't be general admission.
dmurray 6y ago
> It states that 12% of voters accounted for 50% of all social-media and Twitter users – and are six times as active on social media as are other sections of the population. That's not a tiny minority: it's a pretty reasonable dispersal of social media use. 12% of the population accounting for 50% of anything is a more egalitarian distribution than we see with, say: wealth, healthcare use, or educational attainment. Public discourse was dominated by a "tiny minority" when the only people with a wide-reaching mouthpiece were a few hundred journalists and a few hundred politicians. I don't really disagree with the article's main claim - that the more extreme views are overrepresented on social media - but it's not a numbers thing.
- thinkingemote 6y ago
  12% of voters is not 12% of the population. People who didn't vote, People who are too young to vote, People who cannot vote. Etc Voters as a group is meant to reflect that proportion of the population that is involved with the political process at the basic level.
  - dmurray 6y ago
    Good point. Only about 50% of Britons voted in the Brexit referendum, for a turnout of 72% [0]. So the inequality is twice what I made it out to be there. I don't think it changes my comparisons all that much: we don't usually consider infants when measuring inequality in wealth or educational attainments either, or we use their caregivers as a proxy. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_Kingdom_European_Union_membership_referendum https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_Kingdom_European...
- raverbashing 6y ago
  And to add to that, not all of those 12% take hyper-polarizing stances
anarchop 6y ago
Most people are scared of losing their jobs for saying / thinking / doing / being accused of doing the wrong thing by the vocal minority of social justice warriors. This is totally obvious if you’re not part part of the minority, but a bitter pill for the woke crowd to swallow.
mellosouls 6y ago
Somewhat ironic to have the leading liberal culture warrior publication in the UK dismiss the ugliness as some sort of sideline crank affair. The Guardian is as bad as The Daily Mail from the other side, but seems to genuinely believe it's somehow above it all.
Wolfenstein98k 6y ago
This is a surprise only to that tiny minority.
RickJWagner 6y ago
Another interesting factor is the level of excitement found in young people with little experience in the sphere under discussion. (i.e. college campuses are full of zealots who've lived privileged lives and don't really have any contact with many of the subjects they are excitedly concerned about). Last week the internet had a compelling video showing a young white person yelling at a black man trying to cross a BLM barricade. The black man wanted to go on his way, the protester was insulting him and telling him what a terrible person he was. It's completely nuts. But not a new phenomenon.
pessimizer 6y ago
This is "centrist" propaganda. I'm also absolutely sure you'll find that 99% cross-stitch and scrapbooking content online is posted by a tiny percentage of cross-stitchers and scrapbookers. You'll also find that radical centrists (as defined by actual political positions) are an infinitesimal group, and that the vast majority of people will report their beliefs as middle of the road no matter what the actual content. They will also report that they are middle-class, no matter what their income. And what content-free questions: > It concludes that unlike in the US, climate change is not a culture-war issue in the UK. In Britain, it found that 85% of voters believe climate change concerns us all. The most sceptical group were voters described as “disengaged traditionalists”, where the figure was still 76%. Meanwhile, 79% of all voters say gender equality is a sign of progress. Does climate change "concern us all"? Yes, climate change is being used as a weapon to destroy progress and people's livelihoods. Is gender equality a sign of progress? Yes, when the courts stop favoring women, and give me the right to choose who I want to hire regardless of whether they're a man or woman, society will have progressed. > The research also suggested that the Covid-19 crisis had prompted an outburst of social solidarity. In February, 70% of voters agreed that “it’s everyone for themselves”, with 30% agreeing that “we look after each other”. By September, the proportion who opted for “we look after each other” had increased to 54%. I don't even know what this question means, or how it's relevant to the thesis. I think they were searching for people who both had no loved ones, and are not just covid denialists, but not even aware that anything is even going on. Covid denialists have support networks, that's how they keep their businesses open and schedule protests. It's very difficult to phrase a question when the position that you think is the most reasonable is also a very extreme one (that covid is very dangerous and justifies extreme measures.) > More than half (57%) reported an increased awareness of the living conditions of others, 77% feel that the pandemic has reminded us of our common humanity, and 62% feel they have the ability to change things around them – an increase of 15 points since February. Unintelligible. And these are the entirety of the examples cited in the article. edit: also Jo Cox supported BDS, so I guess she was an extremist, too. edit2: missed this > Its polling found that 73% believe hate speech is a problem, while 72% believe political correctness is an issue. Some 60% believe many are too sensitive about race, but 60% also recognise issues around “white privilege”. - looks pretty extreme to me.
- 6y ago
godelzilla 6y ago
There's no "culture war". People who oppose science, human rights, etc. are irrational and violent terrorists. Humanity should defend itself both on the internet and IRL.
throwaway2245 6y ago
The idea that it is a culture 'war' comes out of a right-wing framing. A (small) group of Conservative Party MPs in the UK have presented it as such and indicated that it's useful to their cause that there is a perceived enemy to unite behind, whether or not they agree with any particular policies. e.g. https://inews.co.uk/opinion/tories-culture-war-win-back-popular-support-670637 https://inews.co.uk/opinion/tories-culture-war-win-back-popu... similarly referenced from an international perspective on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_war#Artificiality_or_asymmetry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_war#Artificiality_or_a...
- notsureaboutpg 6y ago
  Eh, communists also portrayed their struggle against the capitalists as not only a political, military war, but also a cultural/social war. That's why it was called the Cultural Revolution after all. The Communist Party of China explicitly mentioned that the bourgeoisie was using old ideas, culture, and customs to stage a comeback after being overthrown. That squarely places culture in the same realm as the military/political in terms of warfare.
bluescrn 6y ago
From The Guardian, a not-insignificant player in those culture wars.
- frankish 6y ago
  > Tim Dixon, co-founder of More in Common and co-author of the report, said that while there had been an increase in “culture war” politics in Britain, the country was far better placed to avoid further divisions than many other nations: “Both sides of a culture war rely on exaggerating the threat of the other,” he said. “Both sides want us to think that every person who is ‘on the other side’ to them has all these opposing views. The truth is many of these debates just pass most people by, because they are often based on creating false choices.The UK is actually in a better position than many countries and should be more optimistic. It was a very sour taste in my mouth after reading this paragraph near the end and then seeing the exaggerated threats to garner donations. > America faces an epic choice ... > ... in the coming weeks, and the results will define the country for a generation. These are perilous times. Over the last four years, much of what the Guardian holds dear has been threatened – democracy, civility, truth. > > The country is at a crossroads. The Supreme Court hangs in the balance – and with it, the future of abortion and voting rights, healthcare, climate policy and much more. Science is in a battle with conjecture and instinct to determine policy in the middle of a pandemic. At the same time, the US is reckoning with centuries of racial injustice – as the White House stokes division along racial lines. At a time like this, an independent news organization that fights for truth and holds power to account is not just optional. It is essential. > > Like many news organizations, the Guardian has been significantly impacted by the pandemic. We rely to an ever greater extent on our readers, both for the moral force to continue doing journalism at a time like this and for the financial strength to facilitate that reporting. > > We believe every one of us deserves equal access to fact-based news and analysis. We’ve decided to keep Guardian journalism free for all readers, regardless of where they live or what they can afford to pay. This is made possible thanks to the support we receive from readers across America in all 50 states. > > As our business model comes under even greater pressure, we’d love your help so that we can carry on our essential work. If you can, support the Guardian from as little as $1 – and it only takes a minute. Thank you.
clydethefrog 6y ago
Reminds me of the research NPR did before closing their comments section. >In July, NPR.org recorded nearly 33 million unique users, and 491,000 comments. But those comments came from just 19,400 commenters, Montgomery said. That's 0.06 percent of users who are commenting, a number that has stayed steady through 2016. https://www.npr.org/sections/publiceditor/2016/08/17/489516952 https://www.npr.org/sections/publiceditor/2016/08/17/4895169...
- dugmartin 6y ago
  That pretty well matches the 90-9-1 rule: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/participation-inequality/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/participation-inequality/
  - ciarannolan 6y ago
    I wonder if dang or others could comment on whether this is true of HN too.
    - Cactus2018 6y ago
      Dang comment about the 1% rule from 7 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22622983 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22622983 > The number of accounts that have posted to HN this year, divided by the number of IP addresses that have accessed HN, is 0.008. How close that is to the '1% rule' ratio depends on which is the bigger factor: users with more than one IP or IPs with more than one user. We don't know. If the former is bigger, then 0.008 is a lower bound. > Here's another way. The number of accounts that have posted this year, divided by the number of accounts that have viewed HN while logged in, is 0.36. That doesn't tell us much, but we can estimate the ratio of logged-in users to total users this way: logged-in page views divided by total page views. That ratio is 0.23. We can multiply those two to estimate the ratio of posters to total: > So the two ways of estimating produce 0.8% and 8% respectively. Both ways are bogus in that they assume things we don't know and mix units that aren't the same, but they're the two I came up with and I don't remember how I did it before. It's interesting that they're almost exactly an order of magnitude apart. That makes it tempting to say the number is probably in between, but that's another cognitive bias talking.
overlyresucpp 6y ago
Similar result on Twitter from a year ago: https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/23/just-6-of-u-s-adults-on-twitter-account-for-73-of-political-tweets-and-they-disapprove-of-trump/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/23/just-6-of-u-s-adults-on-tw... It’s just text. Copy-paste is the first computer user habit anyone learns. The idea machines are learning is nuts. Sorting the same old human copy-pasta isn’t learning. What is there to learn about vanilla ice cream? It’s all in eating it. What a shock we’re just more efficiently eating shit
TulliusCicero 6y ago
Culture wars are fought by tiny minorities, but they're fought over the large majority. The issue of gay marriage in the US was fought mostly by progressive and social conservative activists, but the people they were trying to convince were those in the middle. The reason the progressives won is that the middle became increasingly convinced that banning gay marriage was immoral for the government to do.
- john_moscow 6y ago
  There's a very disturbing difference between the gay rights movement and the current social justice people. In the case of a gay marriage, a small minority was directly affected by a tangible and quantifiable problem: not being able to have the same legal status as straight families. It wasn't about taking something from the majority, or guilt-tripping others. So adopting what they asked for had a net-positive effect: straight people were unaffected, while the gays got perks previously unavailable to them. The current trends are different. Climate change and social justice issues don't personally affect most the people who are vocal about it. Interestingly, most of them do have one thing in common: lack of highly marketable skills or professional weight. Most of them are priced out of property ownership or retirement. Many are depressed to a point where they cannot find anyone to make family with (in my experience, strong marriages boil down to having common constructive interests, working on the same goal together and relying on each other). Except, they are not addressing the quantifiable problems. Instead, their fury got redirected to much broader problems that are almost impossible to quantify or address in a measurable way. So now it's a fight with no winning, it keeps people busy blowing their steam off at random strangers who dare to disagree with them, but all it does in the long term is increases the divisiveness of the society and makes fear and anger the new normal.
  - TulliusCicero 6y ago
    > Climate change and social justice issues don't personally affect most the people who are vocal about it. Okay, I'm stopping reading here to start replying, because there are already numerous problems with your reasoning: * In the case of gay marriage, many of the people fighting for it were not, in fact, gay, and were not personally affected. Why does that matter? There were white people fighting in the civil rights movement for black rights, is that somehow lesser? Why is fighting for others a problem? * Climate change already has, in fact, displayed some impact on most people by now. * The fight over climate change is focused on the future, it's focused on prevention of larger harms, we're talking about a timeline that includes decades. Waiting until things are already a total, unmitigated disaster and then doing something about it would obviously be deeply stupid. * Social justice issues actually do affect tons of people -- my wife, being a woman, is affected by various problems of sexism. Women and girls comprise half the population, add in basically any ethnicity or sexual minority and you're already at a majority of people. * Again, even if you're personally the whitest, straightest, cis-est, male-st person possible, what's wrong with standing up for the rights of others? How is that disturbing in the least? I think you may be confusing "disturbing" with "encouraging" or "inspiring". > Interestingly, most of them do have one thing in common: lack of highly marketable skills or professional weight. Imagine someone making an identical argument for MLK's march on Washington DC, or for the broader civil rights movement at large. This is basically a character attack designed to deflect from the actual problems they're protesting. "These people only protest because they're losers!" is basically the message you're sending here. If you look at social conservatism as a whole, this is basically always the argument, the way that history is rationalized. As soon as they lose one fight -- women being able to vote, civil rights movement, gay marriage, etc. -- the mantra suddenly goes from "okay okay, fine, [last change] was totally a good thing after all, but [new change] is completely crazy! For real this time!"
o_class_star 6y ago
The cultures wars are stoked by the 0.01% because they want working people divided against each other. If "blue state" workers think their red-state brethren are incorrigible racist assholes, and "red state" working people think the blue states are full of virtue-signaling effete hypocrites... then capital wins because, even though 75% of the American public likes socialist economic ideas (when stated plainly and without a "socialist" label) they are all fighting each other over unrelated stuff, like whether J.K. Rowling's latest misinformed comment means we should stop reading her.
WhompingWindows 6y ago
Any diverse media ecosystem is going to have a wide variety of quality and stance of writings and media, the issue is: is our populace well-educated enough to contextualize and understand it? What if we levied an information fee -- any entity which dispenses information for profit must then pay into public education tax funds to enhance the discerning capabilities of the populace.
- deleted 6y ago
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crazygringo 6y ago
It's good to get every bit of confirmation we can of this, but the "myth of polarization" has been known for a long time -- best described in Morris Fiorina's 2011 book Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America. There is overwhelming evidence that at the end of the day, people's political and issue views are overwhelmingly bell curve-shaped. The issue is that the bell curve gets split into categories. American voters are given two options, so people get split into "right" and "left" even when the mode is in the center. Or academics define the "center" extremely narrowly and therefore claim a majority of citizens are polarized. [1] https://www.google.com/books/edition/Culture_War/s5YZQQAACAAJ?hl=en https://www.google.com/books/edition/Culture_War/s5YZQQAACAA...
- k__ 6y ago
  I had the impression, that the center is exactly the problem because it's always looking away. Hook-theory, etc.
  - crazygringo 6y ago
    You mean "fish hook theory", the idea that centrism is somehow inherently ideologically aligned with the far right? AFAIK that's simply a fantasy promoted in certain corners of the internet (like the ironically-named r/EnlightenedCentrism). It's not supported by any actual quantitative evidence at all, nor am I aware of any credence given to it in academia. It's essentially made-up. There is no political scientist I'm aware of who takes it seriously. To my knowledge, it's nothing more than a talking point invented by progressives to try to convince other progressives not to be pulled to the center.
    - bigbubba 6y ago
      Fish hook theory is perpetuated by some among the far right in an attempt to rebrand their ideology to give it more mainstream appeal.
    - k__ 6y ago
      I don't know. The center is pro police, which is known to the other way for right terrorism.
yters 6y ago
What happens if culture warriors make everyone hate the position they are fighting for by using really annoying methods?
- crocodiletears 6y ago
  People like Trump.
whywhywhywhy 6y ago
This should come as a surprise to nobody, unless you happen to be in the bubble that believes Twitter is the real world.
DevX101 6y ago
The Enlightenment was also a "culture war" fought by a tiny minority.
shadowgovt 6y ago
That's not particularly surprising. The core of the US Revolutionary movement was very small relative to the total population
- toyg 6y ago
  Indeed. I mean, one guy made a system out of the concept, and ended up taking over one of the biggest countries on the planet some 100 years ago. Anyone serious about political technique has known this since forever.
- Barrin92 6y ago
  I was about to say, isn't virtually everything fought over by a tiny minority? Like was there ever a point in history when culture wasn't determined by either elites or revolutionary groups? The indifferent, amorphous general population just swings wherever successful opinion-making moves, that's not news, and also not really relevant.
offtop5 6y ago
This is why it's impossible to have a nuance discussion online. The vast majority of people who heavily use social media, are much more likely to have much stronger beliefs one way or another than people who don't. I even have a theory much of this is driven by social isolation, mostly young men with nothing better to do. So these young men go on tirades about how the Last of Us Two is a feminist plot to destroy masculinity or something stupid like that. Normally if you have stuff going on you won't waste your time being angry about a piece of media. Society is going to need to find a path for these left over men, self worth shouldn't be tied into your income after all.
- sakopov 6y ago
  > Normally if you have stuff going on you won't waste your time being angry about a piece of media. I'd wager that boredom and, more importantly, lack of purpose fuels most of the hate and insanity we see today on the internet. This impacts all genders equally and our society is going need to think real hard how we go about tackling a growing number of young people struggling with existential angst.
- toyg 6y ago
  Way to overgeneralize. Women go on tirades too.
JoeAltmaier 6y ago
I recall when movies were condemned by the Catholic Anti-defamation League, it was one rich old woman and her priest. And they didn't watch the movies.
eurekasurveys 6y ago
Intolerant Minority rule by Nassim Taleb.
monoideism 6y ago
This is not my experience in the US. Culture wars have invaded both work and family life. It's not a tiny minority, it's many, if not most, Americans. I feel sure most Americans have the same experience, but perhaps I'm an outlier?
- standardUser 6y ago
  I'm curious how culture wars have impacted your work and family life. I've lived most of my life in large metro areas, so from my perspective "culture wars" are mostly people in far away towns waving fists at us city folk. The actual impact on my life is minimal.
  - stale2002 6y ago
    The way that this usually effects people's personal lifes, is when there are individuals who care way to much about abstract politics, turn it into a moral cursade, and think that if you don't agree with them on every single issue then this is some huge judgment on you as a person. Basically, it is with us or against us mentality. Even not having an opinion on some abstract idea, means that you are therefore a perpetrator of this moral wrong. Not caring about politics is often the worst sin that you can commit to those people, no matter what other actions you have taken in your personal life regarding them or the community. This is less common in person, and more common with individuals who have arguments with their "friends" on Facebook and the like. Anyone who makes a post like "If you don't agree with me on X, then unfriend me, as I don't want any people like you in my life!"
    - gsk22 6y ago
      Apathy and centrism are friends of evil governance everywhere. To quote Howard Zinn (even if you disagree with his politics - it applies to both sides of the aisle): "You can't be neutral on a moving train. Events are already moving in certain deadly directions, and to be neutral means to accept that." Being "above" politics is not a virtue when the politics in question are harmful - thus, the "moral crusade".
ehnto 6y ago
I think that's why it catches "the rest of us" off guard when the media portrays this intensely divided community.
reccanti 6y ago
From my perspective, it doesn't really matter to me what percentage of the population holds what beliefs, or how many different political stances they're balancing. What matters is the beliefs they have and the outcomes of these beliefs. For example, if you think about support gay marriage and LGBT nondiscrimination protections, these are things that would have been framed as fringe progressive ideas a few decades ago, and in the US it's still framed as a "culture war" issue. However, if you are in the LGBT community, these things DO have an impact and will affect your life. It doesn't really matter whether 30% of the population supports these things or 60%.
- throwaway2245 6y ago
  > It doesn't really matter whether 30% of the population supports these things or 60%. In two-party democracies, 30% and 60% are exactly the percentages that do matter. At 30% support you can expect no change - even human rights violations will scarcely be considered a relevant political issue with such a level of support. Once you hit 60% support, you can expect reform that won't be rolled back. Exactly as we have seen with gay marriage in the USA. Support for gay marriage reached 40% around 2005 - I can't establish when it hit 30%, as it was rarely polled in the decade before this. Support reached 60% for the first time in 2015 - the year when the Supreme Court ruled it a constitutional right.
  - reccanti 6y ago
    It’s true that these numbers do matter when it comes to _implementing_ these laws, my argument is that it isn’t a useful barometer for the quality of the ideas. In your example, 60% of people didn’t support gay marriage in 2005. I would argue that gay marriage didn’t become a “better” idea between 2005 and 2015. It was always a good idea that provided tangible benefits to gay people, public opinion didn’t just reflect this. This is sort of aimed at other comments in this discussion, which seemed to be lamenting that the “polarizing” ideas were being pushed in people. I don’t really care if something like, say, a “bathroom bill” is considered a polarizing culture war issue or how many people support it. It has an effect on me and the other trans people in my life, and I don’t feel any inclination to compromise on my position
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jjones2 6y ago
You can tell that much of it is paid and bots. Social media spreads a lot of negativity.
- DenisM 6y ago
  Any reading material you would suggest? I do wonder how much of the raging conflict is organic vs paid, and how much organic afterglow one gets from paying for a certain campaign. If your theory is correct much of this kerfuffle will dry up right after the election, along with the funding.
da39a3ee 6y ago
The claim that it is a tiny minority is not very relevant considering the recent dominance of intolerant identity-politics type views in the media. For example, read Matt Taibbi on the US media: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-news-media-is-destroying-itself https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-news-media-is-destroying-i...
bfrydl 6y ago
One issue I have with this is that on many of the “battlegrounds” of the “culture wars”, non-participation is effectively the same as fighting for one particular side.
nooyurrsdey 6y ago
> It states that 12% of voters accounted for 50% of all social-media and Twitter users – and are six times as active on social media as are other sections of the population. The two “tribes” most oriented towards politics, labelled “progressive activists” and “backbone Conservatives”, were least likely to agree with the need for compromise. However, two-thirds of respondents who identify with either the centre, centre-left or centre-right strongly prefer compromise over conflict, by a margin of three to one. Really telling. These fringe groups are taking over our political discourse and online discussion. They are driving a societal wedge.
bobthechef 6y ago
First, the Guardian is one to talk given they've fueled and capitalized on the culture war themselves. They're not the only ones, of course. Mainstream media outlets are propaganda outlets. They all have a POV that the owner and editorial staff enforce through hiring, company culture, what they accept for print, etc. Second, culture wars are always fought by minorities. It doesn't take a large number of people to change the status quo. This applies as much to revolutionaries (communists, Nazis, etc) as demographics (Taleb once gave the relatively innocuous example of kashrut classifications on food in the grocery store as an example of how a tiny minority can impose its sectarian norms on an agricultural industry that serves a majority that probably doesn't even know what kashrut is; he used this, I believe, to illustrate that the argument that you don't need a majority of devout, Sharia law-following Muslims for Sharia to become a realistic possibility). Third, the current culture war is real. Even if it is led and actively propelled by a small minority, it nonetheless embroils everyone. It's difficult to give a single date of birth for the current culture war, and in some sense, the world has always been in a state of cultural war. But what people typically have in mind is the deep-cutting revolution that has been escalating since the 1960s. Like newborn fish that don't know what water is and have no memory of things past, many fail to grasp the revolution taking place. Perhaps people expect revolutions to look theatrically dramatic. But there is a culture war taking place. In the last 20 years along, we have seen changes that were unthinkable across human history. The stakes are high and the multitudes will be led by whoever is the victor. The media are instruments of different factions in the war. Some are looking for a seat at the table when the dust has settled Other look to wage total cultural war against their opponents. Some are fighting to preserve what's left. Others seek to counteract the entire rebellion. It may be better to call this a culture battle. I claim to know the victor of the war. I just don't know who will win the battle, or how much blood will be spilled.
platz 6y ago
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/01/16/the-internet-of-beefs/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/01/16/the-internet-of-beefs/
bla3 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) too.
lki876 6y ago
Like journalists at the guardian...
SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago
It is a minority until people start to see a direct impact an issue has on their lives. I know it is de rigueur to bash the minority of liberals at the forefront of these "wars" (as opposed to the conservatives pushing back to "conserve" the cultural status quo, hence the names), but this article kinda shoots itself in the foot when it shows the increase of of awareness around issues that used to be fringe, like Climate Change, that are now regarded as a main-stream threat and not a "culture war", which is what conservatives have tried to paint it as for 30+ years. Or consider gay marriage. In the 80's this was heretical on both sides of the pond, now it is close to being the law of the land in the US and no longer a "culture war". But thankfully the minority fought for what is now majority.
idiocrat 6y ago
There is also a Paradox of Tolerance, as from Wiki: The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly paradoxical idea that "In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
srtjstjsj 6y ago
I don't see how the article's data supports the headline at all.
rev0lutions 6y ago
yes. its called the cia

465 points by archiepeach 6y ago

> It found that there was actually widespread agreement in the UK over topics such as gender equality and climate change – often seen as culture war issues. I really don't think The Guardian understands what they're talking about here. The so called "culture war" is about Marxist ideology. The people denying climate change are fringe wackos of this tiny minority who fight culture wars.

vidarh 6y ago
The proportion in the UK who are any kind of Marxist is vanishingly small. The extremist pushing "culture wars" do like to argue it's about "Marxist ideology", but what they paint as Marxist rarely has anything whatsoever to do with Marxism. EDIT: It's fascinating to see the votes on this change without anyone even trying to make an argument to justify the claim it has to do with Marxism. I'd love to see one of those downvoters explain exactly how it has anything to do with Marxism. I'm not holding my breath.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  Jeremy Corbyn has praised Karl Marx as "a great economist", FWIW.
  - vidarh 6y ago
    And yet his policies are moderate enough that UK Labours 2019 program is outflanked on the left by the Norwegian conservative party on a number of issues. Corbyn is certainly left wing by US and UK standards, but has never been a Marxist, and is moderate by the standards of most of Europe. McDonnell on the other hand, could reasonably be described as Marxist.
  - Qwertious 6y ago
    Well, Marx was a big contributor to our view of economics. He sure as hell hasn't been obscure - he basically founded Marxian economics (not to be confused with Marxist politics). He had some pretty sharp ideas about the problems in his contemporary economic system that are still relevant today, even if he dropped the ball on predicting the best solution.
  - jacobion 6y ago
    Karl Marx WAS a great economist. Is this something one is no longer allowed to say without being smeared as an extremist?
    - stale2002 6y ago
      > Karl Marx WAS a great economist. He really was not. He was great at politics. He was great at taping into things that workers cared about. But his actual economics that he laid out, in Das Kapital? The actual mathmatical equations in it, and falsifiable predictions in that book? The labor theory of value? All pretty worthless. Basically no serious academic takes the labor theory of value seriously. It is non-sense. Heterodox economic theories are heterodox for a reason. That reason being that they are not reflective of reality.
      - throwawaygh 6y ago
        >> Karl Marx WAS a great economist. > He really was not. He was great at politics. Not in the governance sense (he wasn't a statesmen), so you must mean in the other sense ("activities within an organization that are aimed at improving someone's status or position"). But this is sort of a difference without a difference, right? For most of human history, people who were "great at X" were in truth at least as good at politics as the thing they're actually known for. Even e.g. Euclid was arguably a great geometer but an even greater politician. Hell, Pythagoras was literally a cult leader. With rare exceptions, your name isn't remembered by history unless you're good at politics. > Basically no serious academic takes the labor theory of value seriously. The labor theory of value is much older than Marx, and components of it are certainly taken seriously in management schools when talking about pricing services for example. Similarly, economists use components of other theories of value where it makes sense. I think it's more accurate to say that economics as a profession has moved on from these sorts of "generalizable theories of value" to give more nuanced analyses, which is quite different from saying that those theories proposed historically by Marx or Frisch or whoever have no influence. Anyways, can you define "serious academic" in a way that doesn't make this sentence tautological? There's no one who claims Das Kapital is the Bible of Economics, but the same is true for Wealth of Nations and basically any other historical text. That doesn't mean that Smith and Marx are irrelevant, though.
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    Obviously he was that and a foundational social scientist. I'll do that and I'm almost certainly closer to being an ancap than you are.
- gampleman 6y ago
  A lot of the Scottish intellectuals I've talked to where pretty explicitly Marxist (including, but not limited to, my supervisor who had a poster of Lenin in his office). Also I think current SNP politics are pretty close to Marxism-Leninsim.
  - vidarh 6y ago
    Yes, you can find Marxists in the UK. That does not at all change what I wrote. The narrative of Marxism as some big scary bogeyman in UK politics is an alt-right trope. Suggesting the SNP, which is only moderately left wing even by UK standards, is close to Marxism-Leninism is equally ludicrous. Put another way: If Marxism had any prominent support in the UK, RLB would have been outflanked on the left in the Labour leadership elections, rather than losing to someone on her right.
  - arethuza 6y ago
    "Also I think current SNP politics are pretty close to Marxism-Leninsim." Care to share which policies those might be?
    - arethuza 6y ago
      It's not like the Socialist party in Scotland are fans of the SNP: https://scottishsocialistparty.org/?s=snp&submit=Search https://scottishsocialistparty.org/?s=snp&submit=Search

adamjb 6y ago

Here's the study https://www.britainschoice.uk/ https://www.britainschoice.uk/

rayiner 6y ago

I like the More in Common Project. But it overlooks the disproportionate representation of the extremists in our institutions. This happened at my alma matter earlier this year: https://freebeacon.com/campus/northwestern-law-administrators-confess-their-racism-in-online-diversity-session https://freebeacon.com/campus/northwestern-law-administrator.... They also voted to abandon entrance exams at my magnet high school: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4979 https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4979 It’s not comforting to know that only a tiny minority of people are standing up and declaring themselves “gatekeepers of white supremacy” when that person is the Dean of a school or a School Board Superintendent. Just because folks fighting the culture wars might be few in number doesn’t mean they don’t have their hands on a lot of levers.

throwawaycltr 6y ago
I wasn't able to find the details about this course the faculty participated in but I wouldn't read too much into it. For some of these you must describe yourself as a racist and apologise for your evil. Suggesting that perhaps you're not that bad means it's even worse than we feared. I don't think someone who really was a "gatekeeper of white supremacy" would describe themselves that way.
- charlesu 6y ago
  Being racist isn’t the same as being evil. Just about everyone, to some extent, is racist. I don’t see how that’s an extreme claim. Humans are a social species. We have in-groups and out-groups. Often times the most salient marker for whether someone is in your group is whether they share certain phenotypes or language. There’s nothing weird about that. It’s expected. It’s our default setting. But it does lead to treating some people differently than others. That’s racism. In racism training, you simply acknowledge that by being human, you are racist. You can’t cure it anymore than you can cure alcoholism. It’s always with you and if you care to not be racist, you have to be aware of that. Why is that claim uncomfortable?
  - zozbot234 6y ago

pjc50 6y ago

Yes. The culture war is to a great extent a US import. The US is extremely polarised, possibly uniquely so for a country with a single national language and mostly-shared ethnic background (compare Belgium, which is highly polarised but along language lines). The UK has its own natural fragmentation lines (north/south, class system, four nations, catholic/protestant) but those are not the lines on which the culture war is run. While there has been incursion of talk radio (LBC/Farage), there is no counterpart to the hyper-polarised TV of Fox News yet. Sky News is comparatively normal. The right-wing disinformation comes in via the press and various "client journalists" who repeat things they've heard from "Downing street sources" who they refuse to hold accountable. > It found that most voters balanced competing political concerns and ideas. Its polling found that 73% believe hate speech is a problem, while 72% believe political correctness is an issue. Some 60% believe many are too sensitive about race, but 60% also recognise issues around “white privilege”. This is just the combination of leading questions and people responding to words without actually thinking about the underlying concepts. See, always, Yes Minister: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0ZZJXw4MTA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0ZZJXw4MTA

arethuza 6y ago
"there is no counterpart to the hyper-polarised TV of Fox News yet" The Daily Mail?
- raverbashing 6y ago
  The Sun, Express, etc are probably worse (I'm not condoning the Daily Mail with this statement)
- derriz 6y ago
  To be fair, the Daily Mail seems to have toned it down a bit since the editor changed a few years ago. Subject to the caveat that I haven't lived in the UK for over 15 years, overall the popular press in the UK is a bit shocking. I don't know of any liberal western country where you see the kind of racism routinely displayed on the front page of mainstream/popular UK newspapers. Perhaps xenophobia rather than direct racism would be a better description but it's not easy to tell the difference in many cases. It's all a bit weird as the UK is generally a tolerant society but somebody must be buying all those newspapers. About the only UK newspaper I can read these days without getting upset is the Financial Times - there's pockets of good journalism in the Guardian also but it's almost too much of a struggle to find them in the swamp of opinion pieces. I guess the Times isn't too bad or at least tries to represent some sort of centrist view but it feels fairly shallow. For me the Brexit issue is the UK's version of the culture war in the US. I've talked to people who say they can barely talk to members of their family any more because of Brexit stance differences. And I don't see this division healing very soon - I fear it's going to fester for years.

drran 6y ago

Almost any war is fought by a tiny minority, which is backed by large majority.

goatinaboat 6y ago
Almost any war is fought by a tiny minority, which is backed by large majority. While technically true, in a real war the “tiny minority” (the military) don’t choose when or where or why to fight, that is done by the “large majority”, the voters electing a government.
- arethuza 6y ago
  "don’t choose when or where or why to fight" The UK has been in a number of wars since I've been able to vote - I don't recall being asked to vote on any one of them? Or indeed the wars in question being part of the manifesto for any party at any election?
  - goatinaboat 6y ago
    Are you asserting that the British military picks its own wars? Because that’s the quote you replied to.
    - arethuza 6y ago
      I was replying to the assertion that "that is done by the “large majority”, the voters electing a government." The government picks the wars without any reference to the voters?
      - goatinaboat 6y ago
        Whether true or not, my point about those who fight in real wars stands. Whereas in a so-called culture war, those who do the “fighting” are also the instigators.
        6y ago

krona 6y ago

Isn't this (more or less) what we'd expect to find? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

originalvichy 6y ago

I’m a person who has seen the culture war start and evolve to its current status. I knew it became about money when certain outspoken people in the movement against ”left wing” ideas started going on speaking tours and selling books. They would act as though they were intellectuals and people who had common sense. I listened to hours and hours of them talking, and an observant person saw through their act pretty quickly. These people could rarely offer any depth in any other subjects other than ”guess what I saw on Twitter yesterday”. They get money by believing people online (especually Twitter) represent a majority opinion, and after building that strawman they go on speaking tours to scare people to be afraid of college kids with blue hair. Outrage porn sells. It’s easy to sell outrage and this symbiotic relationship is very lucrative. Unfortunately they flooded many of my favorite places online and I’ve had to learn to tune them out.

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notsureaboutpg 6y ago
I 100% agree with you but then you know one of the so-called college kids with blue hair married into my family and it's never made me tune in more to these "outrage porn" sellers than ever in my life. I think perhaps much of their audience has real-life relationships (through work, family, etc) with one of those caricatures they make and that's probably what drives a lot of their audience.

insickness 6y ago

When I was younger, this was a quote that was always thrown around: “Never doubt that a small, group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” — Margaret Mead Is this really true though or does change occur in ways that are a lot smaller, more incremental and undetectable than we realize?

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mathnmusic 6y ago
Nassim Taleb also argues this in his "Minority rule". That all it takes a stubborn minority to bring along changes. This can be both a good thing and a bad thing.
shadowgovt 6y ago
The common pattern tends to be that a focused, outlier minority, through consistent and concerted effort, can change the public perception on a topic until it becomes the publicly-advocated goal, and then a culture can shift. The US 'Founding Fathers' were a relatively small group of merchants, land owners, an publishers that were, if you will, "thought leaders" of an American "englightenment" movement that saw significant opportunities if they could toss the foreign rule of Great Britain. But "Let's break loose from the monarchy" was hardly a common public opinion before a combination of a series of writings made by an absolute handful of individuals in the group and a series of publicized bad tactical / strategic calls made by the representatives of the British government in the Colonies. (It may be difficult to tease apart cause and effect on this topic, however; consider the possibility that there are fringe thinkers pulling in all directions, but as circumstances change, an accident of incidents may bring some of the fringe thinkers to a position of being less fringe. People were saying police in the US were too brutal to minorities for decades before combination of ubiquitous smartphone cameras and multiple disconnected high-profile incidents that common folk considered brutality started to bring public perception around to that way of thinking. We're in the middle of a cultural fight right now, but if policing as it's done in the US does fundamentally change, history will probably record a story of Black Lives Matter leaders bringing about that change. And if it doesn't change, this era of US history will probably hold a place in history books similar to the one the LA riots hold).

OneGuy123 6y ago

The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15 https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...

totetsu 6y ago
The Most Tolerant wins: The silent battle of who cleans the toilet.

another-dave 6y ago

I think the main culprit exacerbating this is the main stream media. "Vox pops" have formed part of filling air-time or column inches for a long while, but this is largely replaced now by journalists looking at Twitter and either a) using that as a stand-in for 'this is what the public think' or b) making it the story itself. Social media is no longer just "second screen" below-the-line commenting on events, it's helping to shape what becomes a story. I think a lot of it is probably a symptom of trimmed budgets and the 24hr news cycle — social media is in easy reach and available at whatever point you're writing your article. Unfortunately, I don't think we can roll back on the constant need for more 'breaking news', but would be interesting if a newspaper were to take an editorial stance that it won't quote/embed any tweets or social posts in their articles.

secondcoming 6y ago
> newspaper were to take an editorial stance that it won't quote/embed any tweets or social posts in their articles. The entire internet should take this advice, firstly for the reason you stated, and also because the Twitter website UX is appalling.
neilwilson 6y ago
When I did media training years ago they told us that the media isn't there to inform. It's there to sell imprints. And that journalists have knowledge that is a mile wide and an inch deep. Their job is to file copy to strict deadlines.
cmdshiftf4 6y ago
>I think the main culprit exacerbating this is the main stream media. I understand your argument but I also in no way want to distract from the culpability owned by social media companies, their product designers and managers, and the people who wrote the code to implement their desires. They are ultimately guilty for the damage they have wrought on our societies. Traditional media companies may have exacerbated the issue with their participation, but they didn't create it. >Unfortunately, I don't think we can roll back on the constant need for more 'breaking news' We can't, but just like smoking cigarettes or shooting up opioids we can recognize it as a source of damage and addiction and start changing things to combat it.

totetsu 6y ago

You know I don't recall hearing the term "culture war" when I was studying critical theory and culture and media and so on at university last decade.. I heard about hegemony, and how theories of cultural transmission have changed over time.. I heard of Edward Said and his The Myth of the “Clash of Civilizations”, I heard of Virilio's "Pure War" of technology vs humanity... but I can't recall any discussion of a culture war.. which leads me to suspect that this phrase is actually just made up by a group of people who want to bring the ideas of violent struggle into their discourse about who the world ought to be.. and journalist have unwittingly picked up the phrase and reified it(another nifty media studies word). There aren't two side to a culture war, there isn't any war. from what I've heard of fascist ideology, and how it glorifies violence and war, it's not surprising that the phrase would arise.

brobdingnagians 6y ago
Studies have shown that both sides are increasingly favorable to violence for political ends. The interesting thing I gained from your statements is, it would appear that both parties are moving towards fascism or "corporatism" as Mussolini liked to put it, with all the military-industrial complex that comes with it. It is clear to most people how corporatism could be applied to the Republican party, but socialism is also a "partnership" between government and corporations where government regulations and incentives to the market bend it to the governments will (and both the Right & Left have consistently increase the military-industrial complex). We may feel that climate intervention and laws implementing that needs to happen, but it is quite clearly a corporatism partnership with the government where companies are given marching orders with legal regulation, then given incentives to change their behaviour. Oddly enough, I think America is moving towards fascism, but the "anti-fascists" are just as guilty as the war hawks on Wall Street. There are very few people advocating truly a truly free society or scaling back the massive military-industrial complex and surveillance state.
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renewiltord 6y ago
Well, that's obvious. Social sciences that describe societies usually lag behind the events they describe. That's natural. It's also true for other sciences. You won't learn cutting edge Physics in your lecture class. You'll learn the established stuff. It takes a long time till you attend lectures where you'll hear that stuff and it won't be general admission.

dmurray 6y ago

> It states that 12% of voters accounted for 50% of all social-media and Twitter users – and are six times as active on social media as are other sections of the population. That's not a tiny minority: it's a pretty reasonable dispersal of social media use. 12% of the population accounting for 50% of anything is a more egalitarian distribution than we see with, say: wealth, healthcare use, or educational attainment. Public discourse was dominated by a "tiny minority" when the only people with a wide-reaching mouthpiece were a few hundred journalists and a few hundred politicians. I don't really disagree with the article's main claim - that the more extreme views are overrepresented on social media - but it's not a numbers thing.

thinkingemote 6y ago
12% of voters is not 12% of the population. People who didn't vote, People who are too young to vote, People who cannot vote. Etc Voters as a group is meant to reflect that proportion of the population that is involved with the political process at the basic level.
- dmurray 6y ago
  Good point. Only about 50% of Britons voted in the Brexit referendum, for a turnout of 72% [0]. So the inequality is twice what I made it out to be there. I don't think it changes my comparisons all that much: we don't usually consider infants when measuring inequality in wealth or educational attainments either, or we use their caregivers as a proxy. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_Kingdom_European_Union_membership_referendum https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_Kingdom_European...
raverbashing 6y ago
And to add to that, not all of those 12% take hyper-polarizing stances

anarchop 6y ago

Most people are scared of losing their jobs for saying / thinking / doing / being accused of doing the wrong thing by the vocal minority of social justice warriors. This is totally obvious if you’re not part part of the minority, but a bitter pill for the woke crowd to swallow.

mellosouls 6y ago

Somewhat ironic to have the leading liberal culture warrior publication in the UK dismiss the ugliness as some sort of sideline crank affair. The Guardian is as bad as The Daily Mail from the other side, but seems to genuinely believe it's somehow above it all.

Wolfenstein98k 6y ago

This is a surprise only to that tiny minority.

RickJWagner 6y ago

Another interesting factor is the level of excitement found in young people with little experience in the sphere under discussion. (i.e. college campuses are full of zealots who've lived privileged lives and don't really have any contact with many of the subjects they are excitedly concerned about). Last week the internet had a compelling video showing a young white person yelling at a black man trying to cross a BLM barricade. The black man wanted to go on his way, the protester was insulting him and telling him what a terrible person he was. It's completely nuts. But not a new phenomenon.

pessimizer 6y ago

This is "centrist" propaganda. I'm also absolutely sure you'll find that 99% cross-stitch and scrapbooking content online is posted by a tiny percentage of cross-stitchers and scrapbookers. You'll also find that radical centrists (as defined by actual political positions) are an infinitesimal group, and that the vast majority of people will report their beliefs as middle of the road no matter what the actual content. They will also report that they are middle-class, no matter what their income. And what content-free questions: > It concludes that unlike in the US, climate change is not a culture-war issue in the UK. In Britain, it found that 85% of voters believe climate change concerns us all. The most sceptical group were voters described as “disengaged traditionalists”, where the figure was still 76%. Meanwhile, 79% of all voters say gender equality is a sign of progress. Does climate change "concern us all"? Yes, climate change is being used as a weapon to destroy progress and people's livelihoods. Is gender equality a sign of progress? Yes, when the courts stop favoring women, and give me the right to choose who I want to hire regardless of whether they're a man or woman, society will have progressed. > The research also suggested that the Covid-19 crisis had prompted an outburst of social solidarity. In February, 70% of voters agreed that “it’s everyone for themselves”, with 30% agreeing that “we look after each other”. By September, the proportion who opted for “we look after each other” had increased to 54%. I don't even know what this question means, or how it's relevant to the thesis. I think they were searching for people who both had no loved ones, and are not just covid denialists, but not even aware that anything is even going on. Covid denialists have support networks, that's how they keep their businesses open and schedule protests. It's very difficult to phrase a question when the position that you think is the most reasonable is also a very extreme one (that covid is very dangerous and justifies extreme measures.) > More than half (57%) reported an increased awareness of the living conditions of others, 77% feel that the pandemic has reminded us of our common humanity, and 62% feel they have the ability to change things around them – an increase of 15 points since February. Unintelligible. And these are the entirety of the examples cited in the article. edit: also Jo Cox supported BDS, so I guess she was an extremist, too. edit2: missed this > Its polling found that 73% believe hate speech is a problem, while 72% believe political correctness is an issue. Some 60% believe many are too sensitive about race, but 60% also recognise issues around “white privilege”. - looks pretty extreme to me.

6y ago

godelzilla 6y ago

There's no "culture war". People who oppose science, human rights, etc. are irrational and violent terrorists. Humanity should defend itself both on the internet and IRL.

throwaway2245 6y ago

The idea that it is a culture 'war' comes out of a right-wing framing. A (small) group of Conservative Party MPs in the UK have presented it as such and indicated that it's useful to their cause that there is a perceived enemy to unite behind, whether or not they agree with any particular policies. e.g. https://inews.co.uk/opinion/tories-culture-war-win-back-popular-support-670637 https://inews.co.uk/opinion/tories-culture-war-win-back-popu... similarly referenced from an international perspective on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_war#Artificiality_or_asymmetry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_war#Artificiality_or_a...

notsureaboutpg 6y ago
Eh, communists also portrayed their struggle against the capitalists as not only a political, military war, but also a cultural/social war. That's why it was called the Cultural Revolution after all. The Communist Party of China explicitly mentioned that the bourgeoisie was using old ideas, culture, and customs to stage a comeback after being overthrown. That squarely places culture in the same realm as the military/political in terms of warfare.

bluescrn 6y ago

From The Guardian, a not-insignificant player in those culture wars.

frankish 6y ago
> Tim Dixon, co-founder of More in Common and co-author of the report, said that while there had been an increase in “culture war” politics in Britain, the country was far better placed to avoid further divisions than many other nations: “Both sides of a culture war rely on exaggerating the threat of the other,” he said. “Both sides want us to think that every person who is ‘on the other side’ to them has all these opposing views. The truth is many of these debates just pass most people by, because they are often based on creating false choices.The UK is actually in a better position than many countries and should be more optimistic. It was a very sour taste in my mouth after reading this paragraph near the end and then seeing the exaggerated threats to garner donations. > America faces an epic choice ... > ... in the coming weeks, and the results will define the country for a generation. These are perilous times. Over the last four years, much of what the Guardian holds dear has been threatened – democracy, civility, truth. > > The country is at a crossroads. The Supreme Court hangs in the balance – and with it, the future of abortion and voting rights, healthcare, climate policy and much more. Science is in a battle with conjecture and instinct to determine policy in the middle of a pandemic. At the same time, the US is reckoning with centuries of racial injustice – as the White House stokes division along racial lines. At a time like this, an independent news organization that fights for truth and holds power to account is not just optional. It is essential. > > Like many news organizations, the Guardian has been significantly impacted by the pandemic. We rely to an ever greater extent on our readers, both for the moral force to continue doing journalism at a time like this and for the financial strength to facilitate that reporting. > > We believe every one of us deserves equal access to fact-based news and analysis. We’ve decided to keep Guardian journalism free for all readers, regardless of where they live or what they can afford to pay. This is made possible thanks to the support we receive from readers across America in all 50 states. > > As our business model comes under even greater pressure, we’d love your help so that we can carry on our essential work. If you can, support the Guardian from as little as $1 – and it only takes a minute. Thank you.

clydethefrog 6y ago

Reminds me of the research NPR did before closing their comments section. >In July, NPR.org recorded nearly 33 million unique users, and 491,000 comments. But those comments came from just 19,400 commenters, Montgomery said. That's 0.06 percent of users who are commenting, a number that has stayed steady through 2016. https://www.npr.org/sections/publiceditor/2016/08/17/489516952 https://www.npr.org/sections/publiceditor/2016/08/17/4895169...

dugmartin 6y ago
That pretty well matches the 90-9-1 rule: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/participation-inequality/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/participation-inequality/
- ciarannolan 6y ago
  I wonder if dang or others could comment on whether this is true of HN too.
  - Cactus2018 6y ago
    Dang comment about the 1% rule from 7 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22622983 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22622983 > The number of accounts that have posted to HN this year, divided by the number of IP addresses that have accessed HN, is 0.008. How close that is to the '1% rule' ratio depends on which is the bigger factor: users with more than one IP or IPs with more than one user. We don't know. If the former is bigger, then 0.008 is a lower bound. > Here's another way. The number of accounts that have posted this year, divided by the number of accounts that have viewed HN while logged in, is 0.36. That doesn't tell us much, but we can estimate the ratio of logged-in users to total users this way: logged-in page views divided by total page views. That ratio is 0.23. We can multiply those two to estimate the ratio of posters to total: > So the two ways of estimating produce 0.8% and 8% respectively. Both ways are bogus in that they assume things we don't know and mix units that aren't the same, but they're the two I came up with and I don't remember how I did it before. It's interesting that they're almost exactly an order of magnitude apart. That makes it tempting to say the number is probably in between, but that's another cognitive bias talking.

overlyresucpp 6y ago

Similar result on Twitter from a year ago: https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/23/just-6-of-u-s-adults-on-twitter-account-for-73-of-political-tweets-and-they-disapprove-of-trump/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/23/just-6-of-u-s-adults-on-tw... It’s just text. Copy-paste is the first computer user habit anyone learns. The idea machines are learning is nuts. Sorting the same old human copy-pasta isn’t learning. What is there to learn about vanilla ice cream? It’s all in eating it. What a shock we’re just more efficiently eating shit

TulliusCicero 6y ago

Culture wars are fought by tiny minorities, but they're fought over the large majority. The issue of gay marriage in the US was fought mostly by progressive and social conservative activists, but the people they were trying to convince were those in the middle. The reason the progressives won is that the middle became increasingly convinced that banning gay marriage was immoral for the government to do.

john_moscow 6y ago
There's a very disturbing difference between the gay rights movement and the current social justice people. In the case of a gay marriage, a small minority was directly affected by a tangible and quantifiable problem: not being able to have the same legal status as straight families. It wasn't about taking something from the majority, or guilt-tripping others. So adopting what they asked for had a net-positive effect: straight people were unaffected, while the gays got perks previously unavailable to them. The current trends are different. Climate change and social justice issues don't personally affect most the people who are vocal about it. Interestingly, most of them do have one thing in common: lack of highly marketable skills or professional weight. Most of them are priced out of property ownership or retirement. Many are depressed to a point where they cannot find anyone to make family with (in my experience, strong marriages boil down to having common constructive interests, working on the same goal together and relying on each other). Except, they are not addressing the quantifiable problems. Instead, their fury got redirected to much broader problems that are almost impossible to quantify or address in a measurable way. So now it's a fight with no winning, it keeps people busy blowing their steam off at random strangers who dare to disagree with them, but all it does in the long term is increases the divisiveness of the society and makes fear and anger the new normal.
- TulliusCicero 6y ago
  > Climate change and social justice issues don't personally affect most the people who are vocal about it. Okay, I'm stopping reading here to start replying, because there are already numerous problems with your reasoning: * In the case of gay marriage, many of the people fighting for it were not, in fact, gay, and were not personally affected. Why does that matter? There were white people fighting in the civil rights movement for black rights, is that somehow lesser? Why is fighting for others a problem? * Climate change already has, in fact, displayed some impact on most people by now. * The fight over climate change is focused on the future, it's focused on prevention of larger harms, we're talking about a timeline that includes decades. Waiting until things are already a total, unmitigated disaster and then doing something about it would obviously be deeply stupid. * Social justice issues actually do affect tons of people -- my wife, being a woman, is affected by various problems of sexism. Women and girls comprise half the population, add in basically any ethnicity or sexual minority and you're already at a majority of people. * Again, even if you're personally the whitest, straightest, cis-est, male-st person possible, what's wrong with standing up for the rights of others? How is that disturbing in the least? I think you may be confusing "disturbing" with "encouraging" or "inspiring". > Interestingly, most of them do have one thing in common: lack of highly marketable skills or professional weight. Imagine someone making an identical argument for MLK's march on Washington DC, or for the broader civil rights movement at large. This is basically a character attack designed to deflect from the actual problems they're protesting. "These people only protest because they're losers!" is basically the message you're sending here. If you look at social conservatism as a whole, this is basically always the argument, the way that history is rationalized. As soon as they lose one fight -- women being able to vote, civil rights movement, gay marriage, etc. -- the mantra suddenly goes from "okay okay, fine, [last change] was totally a good thing after all, but [new change] is completely crazy! For real this time!"

o_class_star 6y ago

The cultures wars are stoked by the 0.01% because they want working people divided against each other. If "blue state" workers think their red-state brethren are incorrigible racist assholes, and "red state" working people think the blue states are full of virtue-signaling effete hypocrites... then capital wins because, even though 75% of the American public likes socialist economic ideas (when stated plainly and without a "socialist" label) they are all fighting each other over unrelated stuff, like whether J.K. Rowling's latest misinformed comment means we should stop reading her.

WhompingWindows 6y ago

Any diverse media ecosystem is going to have a wide variety of quality and stance of writings and media, the issue is: is our populace well-educated enough to contextualize and understand it? What if we levied an information fee -- any entity which dispenses information for profit must then pay into public education tax funds to enhance the discerning capabilities of the populace.

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crazygringo 6y ago

It's good to get every bit of confirmation we can of this, but the "myth of polarization" has been known for a long time -- best described in Morris Fiorina's 2011 book Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America. There is overwhelming evidence that at the end of the day, people's political and issue views are overwhelmingly bell curve-shaped. The issue is that the bell curve gets split into categories. American voters are given two options, so people get split into "right" and "left" even when the mode is in the center. Or academics define the "center" extremely narrowly and therefore claim a majority of citizens are polarized. [1] https://www.google.com/books/edition/Culture_War/s5YZQQAACAAJ?hl=en https://www.google.com/books/edition/Culture_War/s5YZQQAACAA...

k__ 6y ago
I had the impression, that the center is exactly the problem because it's always looking away. Hook-theory, etc.
- crazygringo 6y ago
  You mean "fish hook theory", the idea that centrism is somehow inherently ideologically aligned with the far right? AFAIK that's simply a fantasy promoted in certain corners of the internet (like the ironically-named r/EnlightenedCentrism). It's not supported by any actual quantitative evidence at all, nor am I aware of any credence given to it in academia. It's essentially made-up. There is no political scientist I'm aware of who takes it seriously. To my knowledge, it's nothing more than a talking point invented by progressives to try to convince other progressives not to be pulled to the center.
  - bigbubba 6y ago
    Fish hook theory is perpetuated by some among the far right in an attempt to rebrand their ideology to give it more mainstream appeal.
  - k__ 6y ago
    I don't know. The center is pro police, which is known to the other way for right terrorism.

yters 6y ago

What happens if culture warriors make everyone hate the position they are fighting for by using really annoying methods?

crocodiletears 6y ago
People like Trump.

whywhywhywhy 6y ago

This should come as a surprise to nobody, unless you happen to be in the bubble that believes Twitter is the real world.

DevX101 6y ago

The Enlightenment was also a "culture war" fought by a tiny minority.

shadowgovt 6y ago

That's not particularly surprising. The core of the US Revolutionary movement was very small relative to the total population

toyg 6y ago
Indeed. I mean, one guy made a system out of the concept, and ended up taking over one of the biggest countries on the planet some 100 years ago. Anyone serious about political technique has known this since forever.
Barrin92 6y ago
I was about to say, isn't virtually everything fought over by a tiny minority? Like was there ever a point in history when culture wasn't determined by either elites or revolutionary groups? The indifferent, amorphous general population just swings wherever successful opinion-making moves, that's not news, and also not really relevant.

offtop5 6y ago

This is why it's impossible to have a nuance discussion online. The vast majority of people who heavily use social media, are much more likely to have much stronger beliefs one way or another than people who don't. I even have a theory much of this is driven by social isolation, mostly young men with nothing better to do. So these young men go on tirades about how the Last of Us Two is a feminist plot to destroy masculinity or something stupid like that. Normally if you have stuff going on you won't waste your time being angry about a piece of media. Society is going to need to find a path for these left over men, self worth shouldn't be tied into your income after all.

sakopov 6y ago
> Normally if you have stuff going on you won't waste your time being angry about a piece of media. I'd wager that boredom and, more importantly, lack of purpose fuels most of the hate and insanity we see today on the internet. This impacts all genders equally and our society is going need to think real hard how we go about tackling a growing number of young people struggling with existential angst.
toyg 6y ago
Way to overgeneralize. Women go on tirades too.

JoeAltmaier 6y ago

I recall when movies were condemned by the Catholic Anti-defamation League, it was one rich old woman and her priest. And they didn't watch the movies.

eurekasurveys 6y ago

Intolerant Minority rule by Nassim Taleb.

monoideism 6y ago

This is not my experience in the US. Culture wars have invaded both work and family life. It's not a tiny minority, it's many, if not most, Americans. I feel sure most Americans have the same experience, but perhaps I'm an outlier?

standardUser 6y ago
I'm curious how culture wars have impacted your work and family life. I've lived most of my life in large metro areas, so from my perspective "culture wars" are mostly people in far away towns waving fists at us city folk. The actual impact on my life is minimal.
- stale2002 6y ago
  The way that this usually effects people's personal lifes, is when there are individuals who care way to much about abstract politics, turn it into a moral cursade, and think that if you don't agree with them on every single issue then this is some huge judgment on you as a person. Basically, it is with us or against us mentality. Even not having an opinion on some abstract idea, means that you are therefore a perpetrator of this moral wrong. Not caring about politics is often the worst sin that you can commit to those people, no matter what other actions you have taken in your personal life regarding them or the community. This is less common in person, and more common with individuals who have arguments with their "friends" on Facebook and the like. Anyone who makes a post like "If you don't agree with me on X, then unfriend me, as I don't want any people like you in my life!"
  - gsk22 6y ago
    Apathy and centrism are friends of evil governance everywhere. To quote Howard Zinn (even if you disagree with his politics - it applies to both sides of the aisle): "You can't be neutral on a moving train. Events are already moving in certain deadly directions, and to be neutral means to accept that." Being "above" politics is not a virtue when the politics in question are harmful - thus, the "moral crusade".

ehnto 6y ago

I think that's why it catches "the rest of us" off guard when the media portrays this intensely divided community.

reccanti 6y ago

From my perspective, it doesn't really matter to me what percentage of the population holds what beliefs, or how many different political stances they're balancing. What matters is the beliefs they have and the outcomes of these beliefs. For example, if you think about support gay marriage and LGBT nondiscrimination protections, these are things that would have been framed as fringe progressive ideas a few decades ago, and in the US it's still framed as a "culture war" issue. However, if you are in the LGBT community, these things DO have an impact and will affect your life. It doesn't really matter whether 30% of the population supports these things or 60%.

throwaway2245 6y ago
> It doesn't really matter whether 30% of the population supports these things or 60%. In two-party democracies, 30% and 60% are exactly the percentages that do matter. At 30% support you can expect no change - even human rights violations will scarcely be considered a relevant political issue with such a level of support. Once you hit 60% support, you can expect reform that won't be rolled back. Exactly as we have seen with gay marriage in the USA. Support for gay marriage reached 40% around 2005 - I can't establish when it hit 30%, as it was rarely polled in the decade before this. Support reached 60% for the first time in 2015 - the year when the Supreme Court ruled it a constitutional right.
- reccanti 6y ago
  It’s true that these numbers do matter when it comes to _implementing_ these laws, my argument is that it isn’t a useful barometer for the quality of the ideas. In your example, 60% of people didn’t support gay marriage in 2005. I would argue that gay marriage didn’t become a “better” idea between 2005 and 2015. It was always a good idea that provided tangible benefits to gay people, public opinion didn’t just reflect this. This is sort of aimed at other comments in this discussion, which seemed to be lamenting that the “polarizing” ideas were being pushed in people. I don’t really care if something like, say, a “bathroom bill” is considered a polarizing culture war issue or how many people support it. It has an effect on me and the other trans people in my life, and I don’t feel any inclination to compromise on my position

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jjones2 6y ago

You can tell that much of it is paid and bots. Social media spreads a lot of negativity.

DenisM 6y ago
Any reading material you would suggest? I do wonder how much of the raging conflict is organic vs paid, and how much organic afterglow one gets from paying for a certain campaign. If your theory is correct much of this kerfuffle will dry up right after the election, along with the funding.

da39a3ee 6y ago

The claim that it is a tiny minority is not very relevant considering the recent dominance of intolerant identity-politics type views in the media. For example, read Matt Taibbi on the US media: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-news-media-is-destroying-itself https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-news-media-is-destroying-i...

bfrydl 6y ago

One issue I have with this is that on many of the “battlegrounds” of the “culture wars”, non-participation is effectively the same as fighting for one particular side.

nooyurrsdey 6y ago

> It states that 12% of voters accounted for 50% of all social-media and Twitter users – and are six times as active on social media as are other sections of the population. The two “tribes” most oriented towards politics, labelled “progressive activists” and “backbone Conservatives”, were least likely to agree with the need for compromise. However, two-thirds of respondents who identify with either the centre, centre-left or centre-right strongly prefer compromise over conflict, by a margin of three to one. Really telling. These fringe groups are taking over our political discourse and online discussion. They are driving a societal wedge.

bobthechef 6y ago

First, the Guardian is one to talk given they've fueled and capitalized on the culture war themselves. They're not the only ones, of course. Mainstream media outlets are propaganda outlets. They all have a POV that the owner and editorial staff enforce through hiring, company culture, what they accept for print, etc. Second, culture wars are always fought by minorities. It doesn't take a large number of people to change the status quo. This applies as much to revolutionaries (communists, Nazis, etc) as demographics (Taleb once gave the relatively innocuous example of kashrut classifications on food in the grocery store as an example of how a tiny minority can impose its sectarian norms on an agricultural industry that serves a majority that probably doesn't even know what kashrut is; he used this, I believe, to illustrate that the argument that you don't need a majority of devout, Sharia law-following Muslims for Sharia to become a realistic possibility). Third, the current culture war is real. Even if it is led and actively propelled by a small minority, it nonetheless embroils everyone. It's difficult to give a single date of birth for the current culture war, and in some sense, the world has always been in a state of cultural war. But what people typically have in mind is the deep-cutting revolution that has been escalating since the 1960s. Like newborn fish that don't know what water is and have no memory of things past, many fail to grasp the revolution taking place. Perhaps people expect revolutions to look theatrically dramatic. But there is a culture war taking place. In the last 20 years along, we have seen changes that were unthinkable across human history. The stakes are high and the multitudes will be led by whoever is the victor. The media are instruments of different factions in the war. Some are looking for a seat at the table when the dust has settled Other look to wage total cultural war against their opponents. Some are fighting to preserve what's left. Others seek to counteract the entire rebellion. It may be better to call this a culture battle. I claim to know the victor of the war. I just don't know who will win the battle, or how much blood will be spilled.

platz 6y ago

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/01/16/the-internet-of-beefs/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/01/16/the-internet-of-beefs/

bla3 6y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) too.

lki876 6y ago

Like journalists at the guardian...

SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago

It is a minority until people start to see a direct impact an issue has on their lives. I know it is de rigueur to bash the minority of liberals at the forefront of these "wars" (as opposed to the conservatives pushing back to "conserve" the cultural status quo, hence the names), but this article kinda shoots itself in the foot when it shows the increase of of awareness around issues that used to be fringe, like Climate Change, that are now regarded as a main-stream threat and not a "culture war", which is what conservatives have tried to paint it as for 30+ years. Or consider gay marriage. In the 80's this was heretical on both sides of the pond, now it is close to being the law of the land in the US and no longer a "culture war". But thankfully the minority fought for what is now majority.

idiocrat 6y ago

There is also a Paradox of Tolerance, as from Wiki: The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly paradoxical idea that "In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

srtjstjsj 6y ago

I don't see how the article's data supports the headline at all.

rev0lutions 6y ago

yes. its called the cia