43 ms·

How did we arrive to this point where a huge chunk of the population is in one reality and another huge chunk of the population is in another reality? Segregati

• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• katbyte 6y ago
  freedom of speech to say anything and everything regardless of if it's true or not?
• codingprograms 6y ago
  Nobody trusts the media. So people will believe what they want. There’s no source of truth
  • majormajor 6y ago
    Everybody there has been fed bullshit by the media - talk radio, Fox News commentators, etc - for decades. They eat it up. Big chunks of the media decided a long time ago that they could make money by just pandering to angry people, and here we are.
    • ethbr0 6y ago
      > Big chunks of the media decided a long time ago that they could make money by just pandering to angry people And then social media decided to cut out the cost of producing content, and just put angry people in a cage together.
    • jandrese 6y ago
      In the news it turns out that lies are more profitable than the truth, and the market has spoken.
    • codingprograms 6y ago
      The left is just as guilty
      • cweagans 6y ago
        "the left" didn't just storm the capitol because of a conspiracy theory.
        • A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
          You are right. Both 'sides',however, were incited to act on emotion.
        • thu2111 6y ago
          "The left" has been storming Portland, Seattle and many other places instead, for most of 2020, based on the notion that America is filled with white supremacists and the police are systemically racist. Or put another way, because they theorise that white police are involved in an enormous, coast-to-coast conspiracy against black people. Whether you agree with that belief or not (there was one forlorn WSJ article at the start of all that showing that the data doesn't support it), it is objectively a conspiracy theory in the sense that it posits a conspiracy. And it has led to people repeatedly storming and smashing up not only federal buildings but many others.
          • Falling3 6y ago
            > Or put another way, because they theorise that white police are involved in an enormous, coast-to-coast conspiracy against black people That is a blatant straw-man. The U.S. has a violent, racist history - particularly it's police force. There is no reason a continuation of violence and racism would require a conspiracy.
            • thu2111 6y ago
              There are some good data analyses showing that the US police isn't racist. The belief that it is gets repeated so much, and journalists are so loathe to investigate it, that the claims come to define reality. But it's not actually true.
  • razius 6y ago
    One of the problems, yes. I've witness too many times where they blatantly lied.
    • razius 6y ago
      To add to this, lies with easily proven evidence if they wanted to investigate. Eg. Check report on something from a hearing or court document, checked the hearing or the court document itself and it's completely opposite to what the media is reporting.
      • TeMPOraL 6y ago
        Agreed. Anyone who studied any subject deeply should recognize the concept of Gell-Mann Amnesia; I think anyone who tried to verify anything outside of their domain will quickly confirm that this phenomenon is, in fact, very true.
      • salawat 6y ago
        Not everyone knows how to check public records. I just signed up for PACER this year, and I'm still trying to work out how to access State and local court system's records since they're so distributed. Like it or not, we haven't exactly done a great job at exposing primary sources to everyone. Until that can happen, media outlets who pay for boots on the ground will still have a degree of intutively granted credibility. Once everyone knows how to access it at will (and can be bothered to) we may see some better measurement on the reliabilitt of information sources.
        • razius 6y ago
          Sadly I tend to believe that a very small minority of people will ever bother to access the documents, the rest will just believe whatever the media will tell them.
          • salawat 6y ago
            I just got to the point this year where I finally got fed up with the level of editorial discretion taken with so many hot news takes. Makes me a real stick in the mud because I'm just not comfortable not seeing the primary doc anymore. I want to know what actually happened, not what someone thinks I should know about what happened.
  • starfallg 6y ago
    No. People chose their own truth because they didn't like what the media was saying even though it is much closer to reality than whatever crap they were fed through "alternative" media.
  • polka_haunts_us 6y ago
    This is the answer, I don't have the source in front of me but I remember reading some surveys about American trust in institutions circa 2015 and people who identified as Republican trusted "Media" at a rate of 8%. I can't imagine that number particularly improved since then.
    • jandrese 6y ago
      I'm guessing they don't count Fox News, OAN, Breitbart, etc... as part of "the Media" in that? To be fair, they probably shouldn't be counted in that regard, but it is how they have branded themselves.
  • exclusiv 6y ago
    I started watching news from overseas as they seem to be more objective and professional. Both sides have "news" outlets which are agenda based and profit motivated. And truth doesn't usually sell as well. That's a problem. You can't even trust the fact checker sources as they say "out of context" or "partially true" when it's a fact against their agenda/team. Even the fact checking sites are super biased. If you align with a side, you attach your identity to it like Paul Graham wrote about with Keep Your Identity Small [1]. People don't like their identity criticized, or want to believe they may be wrong, so they believe what they want and create their own distorted bubble. My buddy always said "we're told to not talk about religion or politics. Probably the 2 most powerful and influential topics that exist". Now people have started talking about them, but not in a productive fashion. If you believe someone on the other side is bad based on their views, you can't have a dialogue. This is the greatest tragedy. Disowning family members and friends over their views because you concluded they must be bad people? Very few people on either side are actually bad. They just have a different experience, they've aligned their identity and team, and there's a ton of forces at play (ex: media, special interests, etc) to keep that divisiveness going. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html
    • starfallg 6y ago
      >Both sides have "news" outlets which are agenda based and profit motivated. And truth doesn't usually sell as well. The problem with the both sides argument is that one side is disproportionately loose with the truth and constantly resorting to not just half-truths, but complete fabrications. Without good faith there will be no useful dialogue.
      • exclusiv 6y ago
        The left side is loose with the truth too. They suppress newsworthy stories or do no reporting on things that are against their agenda. Selective reporting is loose with the truth as well. So maybe one side fabricates more and one side withholds more. Two ways to be scandalous. They are both profit driven and aren't truthful any way you slice it. They are not trustworthy with news and cannot be relied upon to be objective. Even the shows positioned as news are super biased and full of opinions. I understand they are entitled to have opinionated segments with personalities. That's fine. But we have regulations around what is Champagne or Bourbon. And you need a license to cut hair. Maybe anything dubbed "news" should have a standard?
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• lookdangerous 6y ago
  Maybe it was precipitated by a breakdown in the shared understanding of what constitutes reality somewhere earlier down the line.
• mhh__ 6y ago
  The defining characteristic of Trump and Brexit is the gradual realisation that you can basically say or do anything and if you go far enough it'll stick.
• Apocryphon 6y ago
  Ah, we've reached the self-awareness in the face of doom part of the Michael Crichton novel.
• dyeje 6y ago
  Social media.
• dontbeevil1992 6y ago
  Hmmm idk... anyway, time to get back to grinding leetcode so I can go work at Facebook and make 200k instead of a paltry 150k somewhere else!!
  • staplers 6y ago
    The Social Dilemma should be watched by all tech developers and designers. The dramatic scenes are a bit campy but the interviews are incredible and biting.
  • salawat 6y ago
    Underrated post. I'm still trying to figure out a way to help a nephew of mine come into political awareness without necessarily tainting him with my biases.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• Zamicol 6y ago
  Many Boomers weren't taught empiricism. They don't know how to do basic fact checking.
  • dang 6y ago
    Good grief, let's not turn this into a generational flamewar of all things—the most arbitrary kind of flamewar and the easiest to avoid. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    • Zamicol 6y ago
      There are very large demographic differences on the lines of age. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/10/26/what-the-2020-electorate-looks-like-by-party-race-and-ethnicity-age-education-and-religion/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/10/26/what-the-20... Could I be more diplomatic? Sure. We have a large number of older people that have no idea how to use the Internet, something my generation, the Internet natives, sometimes take for granted.
    • Zamicol 6y ago
      I'm sorry for my snarky remark. I'm tired of what seems to be fake news coming only form the parents of my friends (60+ group) and that group being unable to reconcile basic, foundational facts. This includes my own father. I'm at a lost how, what seems to be, a generation is so brainwashed they won't believe the sky isn't green because they can Google search and find one wacko that tells them it's green or a "Green Sky" Facebook group has 500,000 members.
      • KLexpat 6y ago
        It's political hyper-reality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality The 60+ generation grew up in a time where the morning tv broadcast and whatever they could read at the town library was concrete black and white truth. There was very tight control over the distribution of any information media Now, everyone has a voice. The problem is that these older people are still socially conditioned to believe that because something is on an expensive computer, or in a book, or a man is saying it on a screen, well - it must be true! Because back in their day in the 70s if you saw a video on a screen it was an exercise that cost thousands of dollars.
• Lammy 6y ago
  The US’ ruling entity (in the collective egregore sense) would cease to exist and would be replaced by another if all of us regular humans weren’t fed constant new ways to divide and hate each other.
• Ericson2314 6y ago
  For one, policing them completely differently?
  • arolihas 6y ago
    So sad I have to scroll down this far to see this be acknowledged. Not surprising though
• hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
  As this is HN, I really believe that this lack of a shared reality is only possible with the Internet. Before the Internet, there were more conservative sources and more liberal sources, but never before could you completely surround yourself with your own version of reality. And more importantly, your version of reality is constantly reinforced by algorithms that are specifically designed to raise your level of rage (aka "engagement"). I certainly don't know what the right answer here is, or even if there is one. The flip side of this polarization is the Internet has allowed discriminated groups to organize (e.g. see the "It Gets Better Project")
  • majormajor 6y ago
    You could do a pretty good job of bubbling yourself up starting in the 90s with talk radio + Fox News... tons of fun vitriol towards Clinton... my parents have been on that train for a while now.
    • ChrisKnott 6y ago
      I think people listening to talk radio on long commutes was a major early driving factor. A pretty good doc about it; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brainwashing_of_My_Dad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brainwashing_of_My_Dad
      • tstrimple 6y ago
        Exactly what I've experienced with my dad. He went from someone I idolized who could fix anything and solve any problem to the guy who rants about Muslims coming to kill us while building up a stock pile of guns.
        • _qulr 6y ago
          How do you know your dad wasn't always that person? Children tend to be pretty naive about their own parents. Children very rarely have a sophisticated understanding of issues such as politics and race, so they wouldn't even notice problematic aspects of their parents until they become adults themselves.
• gorbachev 6y ago
  Decades and decades of making politics about wedge issues.
• saul_goodman 6y ago
  Regardless of what view point you have, it's become painful to watch/consume news on either side if you don't subscribe to their same left/right view point as what is being presented. The MSM has overplayed its hand over the past several years to the point they've been written off by their opposing sides. So that forces a dividing line so you don't even bother looking at the opposing news sources, and when ever you do it's so biased it makes your head spin. But hey, ratings are through the roof! That has allowed traditionally marginalized news sources that embrace less-vetted news to shine. Say what you want about Alex Jones, but he was covering Jeffery Epstein's lolita express/island in 2008 and no one would touch that story back then. So now we have the marginalized news sources ending up larger viewerships than the national evening news. So while you do get real news which is less skewed left or right than in the MSM, it is wrapped with plenty of crap and is less vetted. The news industry, politicians, and big tech censorship has made this problem. Now they get to lay in their beds. It sucks, I'm not a fan of what's going on in DC right now, but I also don't blame those doing what they feel they must for their country. They are merely products of the system that made them. Until the MSM and politicians decide to stop twisting everything for market share or political gain this will continue to escalate. And we know that won't happen sadly.
  • akiselev 6y ago
    Please stop equating the "MSM" with the right wing propaganda machine like FOX. This hyperpolarization is happening in every country that has a sizable Murdoch media machine.
    • zepto 6y ago
      It really isn’t just Fox. They don’t have a lot of shame about their partisanship or desire to hide it, but there is ideological distortion going on everywhere.
      • root_axis 6y ago
        Yes, everyone is biased, this is not a deep insight, it's the common denominator we can subtract from a meaningful discussion about specific events.
• lazyjones 6y ago
  Having a trustworthy election process might go a long way (voter ID, regular verification when doubts arise etc.). As a European I find the images from Georgia's vote counting absolutely astonishing.
  • NOGDP 6y ago
    > As a European I find the images from Georgia's vote counting absolutely astonishing. What images?
    • rightbyte 6y ago
      I guess he means the counting late night in Fulton(?), Atlanta without observers?
  • rightbyte 6y ago
    Where I live we had a reelection becouse 18 absentee votes where counted even thought they were too late and invalid out of 100 000 votes. I could not believe my eyes when I read up to how the US voting system works. No IDs etc ... and recommencing counting after observers are sent home like in Atlanta. I mean it seems like a willy nilly "whatever" system.
  • dghlsakjg 6y ago
    Don't confuse people saying a process is untrustworthy, with the process being untrustworthy. Despite claims of massive voter/election fraud and massive incentive to find it, no credible law enforcement or media agency has been able to prove it at a scale that matters. Maybe a couple hundred fraudulent votes have been proven across the country. There is just no credible evidence
    • xnx 6y ago
      Also no evidence that any fraud would be in favor of Biden and not Trump.
  • AuryGlenz 6y ago
    It’s incredible we don’t have cameras recording every step of the counting process.
• hertzrat 6y ago
  All the social media sites did the research and learned that filter bubbles and outrage drives engagement more than anything else. If you tune your systems to maximize engagement and ignore the side effects, the side effects still happen, whether it’s deliberate or not
  • ocdtrekkie 6y ago
    Indeed, Facebook and YouTube for a conservative and for a liberal are each completely different experiences. This is what blaming the algorithm gets us. It's well past time to start shutting down platforms with algorithmic content systems.
    • tomjen3 6y ago
      Doesn't matter, assuming you allow people to pick who they follow. Try to look at the twitter feed of somebody who disagrees with you on a topic you find important - most the posts will be insults towards those who disagree with that persons POV.
    • andrewstuart2 6y ago
      Or, hear me out, requiring certain levels of transparency from content systems that have started to augment such fundamental constructs as human-to-human communication and information sharing. There's nothing inherently wrong with automating content discovery; it's the cost function being optimized that I think we would almost all take issue with.
      • SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
        Agreed. Much of the problem I see is that people can fall down a rabbit hole of polarization without realizing it; no matter how far into the fringes the recommendation algorithm gets, it'll always feel like "oh everyone's saying this" to you as a viewer.
        • andrewstuart2 6y ago
• ksk 6y ago
  Its happening everywhere, in every political arena. I'm hearing very similar things happening in other countries as well. The hilarious part is every political side believing they are the only ones with facts. It sort of reminds me of how civilizations collapse - esp. the 'barbarians' overpowering 'civilized' Europe. All current mainstream political parties have these barbarians within them. They don't all take violent forms, but they infect people with memes and thoughts that go counter to facts and logic. In general though, I think its the slow decline of hard news with a corresponding amplification of emotional porn/entertainment/opinion/drama. The massive amount of noise that is generated makes it hard to find the signal, and social media isn't helping because they make money when "news" is more entertainment/drama than boring facts. In short, we're f?ked, and we're going to say f?ked for a while.
• diogenescynic 6y ago
  All goes back to Reagan's repeal of the Fairness Doctrine which gave rise to biased political based news coverage a la Fox News. Since then, political polarization has increased each year until we got to the point we're at where both sides see the other as dangerous and lacking legitimacy. It's a lose-lose downward spiral.
  • watwut 6y ago
    Isnt Fairness Doctrine in direct opposition against free speech?
    • dsr_ 6y ago
      Hardly. The Fairness Doctrine is exactly "the cure for bad speech is more speech". https://www.britannica.com/topic/Fairness-Doctrine https://www.britannica.com/topic/Fairness-Doctrine might be useful.
      • watwut 6y ago
        Compelled speech is not free speech.
        • dsr_ 6y ago
          Bzzt. It's not compelled speech. It's compelled airtime.
    • colejohnson66 6y ago
      Yes, but because the radio used public airways, the courts found that the FCC can regulate them. It’s why you can’t swear on the radio (the FCC says so) despite free speech allowing swearing.
      • danbolt 6y ago
        I'd be curious on how this philosophy translates to the internet today. There's lots of public infrastructure that we use, but it's hard to picture surfing the internet or watching Netflix as the same as broadcast television.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• titzer 6y ago
  I would suggest watching Adam Curtis' Hypernormalisation (British spelling). It's mostly about Putin/Gaddafi-style mass confusion as a means to power. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUiqaFIONPQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUiqaFIONPQ
  • mushbino 6y ago
    This was made before Trump was elected and it's amazing how accurate it is in hindsight.
• xyst 6y ago
  It starts with the deregulation of cable news in the 1990s, and creation of mainstream media networks like Fox and CNN. The explosive use of the internet and later social media in the mid to late 2000s only amplified an existing problem of polarization.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• watwut 6y ago
  A lot of lies and intentional attempts to build exactly this situation. Also, issue is not polarization itself. Issue is that chunk of Americans wants to revert election.
• vkou 6y ago
  We got there with brazen falsehoods that don't get punished in the marketplace of ideas, or at the polls, or at the gallows. As it turns out, truth is a thing beyond price - which is to say, it is worthless.
  • A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
    I feel obligated to respond. Accurate information ( research, analysis and so on ) is out there though it usually you have to pay good money for it. "Free" news", as it were, is basically whatever brings attention ( which FB proved oh so very well ). Truth is not worthless. Quite the contrary. Truth is expensive. But a fair chunk of the population subsisted on a rather limited news diet.
• Gwypaas 6y ago
  Single member districts coupled with todays media and social media. This naturally leads to the natural balance being two parties, which has to oppose each other to the extreme in all topics, which then diverges further and further creating the US today. Different variants of multi member districts or proportional representation allows for the both the progressive left and far right which today feel left out to form their own groups. They can then get into congress and slowly let the steam out while likely enacting some change which all can accept.
  • dane-pgp 6y ago
    Thank you for highlighting the need for electoral reform, and pointing towards the "winner takes all" nature of most US elections as being the poisonous tree from which these fruits keep falling. A proportional voting system would both allow new parties to emerge and prevent extremist or divisive candidates from leading those parties. That in turn would give people more options and make them more likely to vote (and less likely to excuse bad actors within their own party). I would be careful about directing the blame at "single member districts", though. In the US, the most popular type of reform seems to be Instant Run-off Voting, which has its flaws, but avoids the potential criticism that multi-member districts face, namely that a voter's elected representative may end up living much further away from them. (Personally I'd rather a representative who is closer to my political viewpoint than to my physical residence, but I think that much of the criticism for multi-member districts are in bad faith anyway, and thus not amenable to reasoned debate).
    • Gwypaas 6y ago
      I'd say the problem with Instant Run-off is that it feels good and tangible but doesn't accomplish anything. A prime example is the Australian parliament, where the lower chamber is essentially IRV while the upper chamber has some variation of multi member districts. The lower chamber has 4.5% of the seats being outside the two major blocks, the senate has 18.5%. I.e., the people want more choice but the system does not allow for it. IRV doesn't solve the problem of gerrymandering either. I'm completely with you on the distance vs. political opinions. There is something extremely powerful in electing one, who has personally convinced you, from your town to go and represent us all, but the world doesn't operate on that scale anymore.
• _qulr 6y ago
  The people do it to themselves. They believe what they want to believe, hear what they want to hear, see what they want to see. This is still largely a free country where there are multiple independent sources of "news", and individuals voluntarily expose themselves or not to whatever they choose. As far as I know, nobody is tied down in a chair and forced to watch certain TV shows or listen to certain radio shows for hours, days, weeks, months at a time, to the exclusion of all else. Maybe in airport terminals, but again, travel is also voluntary. I find the "How did we arrive to this point" question interesting, because for most of recorded history, the masses of humanity have not been so different than they are today. If anything, "enlightenment" is a relatively rare occurrence.
  • danaris 6y ago
    But when media organizations peddling outright lies are allowed to call it "news", and are treated as being just as valid as genuine journalistic organizations by the various institutions of our country, it is, for want of a better term, no longer a "free market" of news.
    • katbyte 6y ago
      People should be held accountable for what they say on media platforms, and lies shouldn't be allowed.. but i can't see that even happening.
      • _qulr 6y ago
        Held accountable by whom? The government? Which is controlled roughly half the time by a party which you probably disagree with vehemently?
        • Barrin92 6y ago
          In countries in which the truth is defended as OP demands clowns don't tend it to make it into government in the first place, but I see your point it's hard to see how the US gets out of this cycle
• AsyncAwait 6y ago
  I am sure there'd be plenty of pundits soon enough blaming China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Syria....anything but a deep reflection upon Americans themselves.
• tomjen3 6y ago
  All of the above, but also politicians who have promised change forever and not much seems to change when one side takes over. Add to that a pandemic lockdown championed by one side who can mostly sit safely behind a screen while the other side loses their livelyhood in small businesses. Something had to give. I hope this will be the limit.
• Simulacra 6y ago
  Political manipulation of the people with the acquiescence and support of corporate-dominated mass media, all driven by profit.
• mistermann 6y ago
  Evolution. We each run a VR inside our minds. When they are synchronized by an external force, the media, very interesting things can happen. If you would like more of this, continue to ignore non-virtual reality.
• mam2 6y ago
  People mistaking reality for what they want it to be, false sense of morality, opposed to the basic survival interest of the other group. Done. You tell me which is which.
• willcipriano 6y ago
  Are they different realities or different people with different wants and needs?
• zmmmmm 6y ago
  I think it's been a long time in the making but the real spark that lit the fire was the media's (and general population's) passive treatment of Trump's lying in the 2016 election period. During that time he was already telling whoppers, and the media sort of humoured it. You can see now four year's later that his version of reality is deeply embedded in a way that is nearly impossible to correct for - this make take a generation now to pass. Simply calmly stating that his words are "without evidence" or "unsupported by facts" etc etc isn't enough. When figures of authority depart from objective reality you have to stop it right there. He should never have been given another interview question other than to question his lies. But that was perceived as partisan at the time so they just let these things slide by.
  • jandrese 6y ago
    Depending on what media you consume they didn't just "humor it", they actively reinforced whatever he was saying, and vice versa. Many organizations were fact checking and calling out the President, but they were part of the "lamestream media" and his supporters were explicitly told not to listen to or trust them.
• chillwaves 6y ago
  This is not the time for "both sides"ing.
• chrischen 6y ago
  Modern social media and the internet is a big part of enabling masses of people to hear what they want to hear, which begets more seeking out and hearing what they want to hear, which reinforces what they've already been hearing. The root of all evil? Unfortunately enough, it seems to be the act of giving everyone an equal voice. Giving a platform for any idea to take hold really means anything ideas can take hold.
• sugarpile 6y ago
  The internet allows for mass influence of the population by third party actors. This is largely China vs Russia. I have trouble not playing this out at scale and drawing the conclusion the internet inherently invalidates a lot of the assumptions democracy (as in the American Experiment™ version of it) requires to function. I hope I'm wrong and overly pessimistic.
  • g42gregory 6y ago
    > This is largely China vs Russia. I would like to question this a bit. If this were true, wouldn't this mean that China won this time since Biden is the President (vs Russia won in 2016 since Trump was the President)? I think there are a lot more internal actors, such as special interest groups, PACs, activist groups, etc..., that may dwarf the external influence. There is so much money involved in politics and elections. I wonder how can we curtail the flow of money to make things more civil in politics?
    • mhh__ 6y ago
      > wouldn't this mean that China won this time since Biden is the President Only if there was interaction between the Biden campaign and the Chinese state, which there was in the case of the Trump campaign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_between_Trump_associates_and_Russian_officials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_between_Trump_associates... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_2016_United_States_elections https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20...
  • tsimionescu 6y ago
    You're forgetting the largest player, which dwarfs all the others 10 times over - the US itself. The US propaganda machine is so far ahead of Russia and China that even discussing Russian and Chinese influence over the Internet of all places is laughable.
    • raxxorrax 6y ago
      Very true. There are huge language barriers that makes this unlikely. You don't get a 5 cent army of people highly proficient in another language and presenting manipulative talking points. There are those people, but they would still have difficulties reaching large audiences.
• odiroot 6y ago
  Not an American, living in EU. It somehow reminds me of Weimar Germany, with two very fringe (sometimes militant) opposing groups radicalising the rest of the society -- or the rest just ignoring the whole mess and going about their lives.
  • x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
    Who are the two fringe groups? By citing Weimar Germany, and then going into "two fringe groups", you are putting Anti-Nazi organizations on the same moral level as Nazis. You do see the problem with that right?
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • bjoli 6y ago
      The left he/she is referring were not anti-nazi, they were pro-communist, and almost uniformly pro-soviet groups that argued that the ruling social democratic government had betrayed the working class. The Nazis weren't the nice guys, but neither were their opposition, at least not the one referred to by the parent.
      • newguy1234 6y ago
        Yup. Remember during the rise of Hitler, he was able to consolidate power because the CENTRIST government at the time agreed to work with Hitler to achieve short-term political objectives.
        • bjoli 6y ago
          Well, now... To be fair the Weimar Republic was a political turmoil. It is not like the Nazis had "gas the Jews" in their party programme. They established themselves over 10 years, and due to the instability f any political coalition in the government they were able to maneuver themselves into a position where they could force events forward. People seem to think the Nazi party showed up on the stairs of the parliament demanding genocide and war. In reality it was a 14 year progression of bad options, political turmoil and very hard choices to defend extremely weak coalitions. Were those choices good? Obviously not. Can we judge them after the fact? I would say no.
• baybal2 6y ago
  > How did we arrive to this point where a huge chunk of the population is in one reality and another huge chunk of the population is in another reality? Segregation of information sources? Politicization of media outlets? Self-reinforcing social bubbles? A combination of all of them and more? No, that has nothing to do with it. Take a look on wide base social polls across Western countries. The seemingly "extreme" right turn in Europe at around the refugee crisis wasn't one unexpected if you count that. It's just that huge social mass was very latent, and quiet as nobody wanted to be stigmatized as a nazi. Now, it isn't. You cannot "deaf it out," and expect the problem to disappear. Terrible social rifts can last centuries in silence. Example: Greek independence war was more than a century ago, and seemingly forgotten before it gave Ottomans the last blow, and then 50 years later, Turkey. And it seems it never really ended given what is going on in the Mediterranean now. In the "peaceful" Western Europe, Schleswig war has ended 150 years ago, nations of Europe embraced in brotherly love, and the legacy of the conflict was ceremonially buried 10 times over, but people of Schleswig still tell of icy silence.
  • herewulf 6y ago
    > people of Schleswig still tell of icy silence. They do? I've spent time in both Kiel and Flensburg and I've seen no indication that anyone would prefer Danish rule. It seems a moot point today with the EU anyway.
• g42gregory 6y ago
  I think it's social media amplifying the divisions through targeting. I also wonder if it's culture of corruption by both political parties that is beginning to come to light? In the old days, you wouldn't read about it in the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, but now, on Twitter and other places, could could see just about anything. There is a difficult task of separating the truth from the fake news, but there is more information available, which was not available before the Internet explosion. Just my guess, though.
• skissane 6y ago
  > How did we arrive to this point where a huge chunk of the population is in one reality and another huge chunk of the population is in another reality? My own impression is that this is far worse in the US than in most other first world countries. If I'm right about that, then explanations based on social media algorithms etc don't really work, because the same algorithms apply in other countries too. It really then needs a US-specific explanation. Maybe, the US has just got too big and too diverse – I am talking here about political/ideological/worldview diversity, not ethnic/racial/etc diversity – to hold itself together in the long-run. Countries don't last forever, and the US isn't going to last forever either. Of course, it isn't breaking up this year, and I think other countries are likely to break up before the US does (such as the UK, Spain, Belgium, Canada). But maybe these current events are bringing that eventuality closer to us.
  • CivBase 6y ago
    The US has a uniquely strong distrust in government compared to other nations to which you are referring. I think as a result, the social media algorithms are particularly potent in the US.
    • deleted 6y ago
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    • malandrew 6y ago
      Anyone who is a student of history should have a uniquely strong distrust of the government. I find that it’s the folks with the weakest familiarity of the history of governments abusing its citizens that have the greatest faith in more and bigger government, especially distant government (i.e. federal government)
  • burlesona 6y ago
    Our single winner first past the post electoral system and the associated two-party dysfunction are more to blame, as they incentive radical schism.
  • yeos_ 6y ago
• jMyles 6y ago
  I don't think we are in that situation at all. I think that everybody - regardless of their politics or candidates of choice - is frequently inundated with the notion that we're very different. But having visited 43 states in the past five years, and making it my business to talk politics and religion everywhere I have gone (especially in the aftermath of the 2016 election), I have repeatedly been surprised by the simple commonness of people's hopes: for peace, justice, security, prosperity. Most people with whom I spend my time seem to think that Trump voters are all just like Trump. But I have not found that to be so whatsoever. I have repeatedly been surprised and sometimes even confused by the reasonableness and sophistication of Trump supporters, especially in the South. And rage at America's institutions - including surely dreams of raiding the Capitol and wrecking havok - is surely not limited to one party of political view. It's not a tactic I favor, though I do certainly hope to see this silly building fade into the irrelevance of the failed state. The incentives of social media algorithms are influential in the way we think about each other. We are constantly shown Trump supporters who can't form a coherent and fact-based narrative. We're shown 'antifa' who seem to prefer roving destruction and mayhem rather than an equitable society. But neither of these tropes reflect anything close to the reality of 2020 America. We are a society of peaceful, educated, hopeful people. Travel. Ask. You'll see.
  • clairity 6y ago
    coming to the thread 5 hours after its posting, and seeing this, the first sensible take (comment #140 or so), in a shade of grey is thoroughly disheartening. we need more of this on-the-ground reasonableness to overtake the tribal bullshit we're all wading in up to our eyeballs. it's not simply the media (though they in general are complicit), or just politicians (also complicit), or social tech (super-cash-grabbing complicit), or "the people" (most aren't playing that game, but the 'influentials' certainly are). it's power, consolidating and exerting its will, to subjugate people by any means necessary.
• tomp 6y ago
  The mainstream media did this to themselves. They actively promoted outright lies, conspiracy theories, politically convenient fake facts (“masks don’t work”) and misinterpretations of truth. The end result is, nobody trusts anyone. We’re seeing one side of the story, but I suspect if Trump narrowly won, it would be the same.
  • DanBC 6y ago
    > politically convenient fake facts (“masks don’t work”) As I keep asking you, every time you post this, please can you point to the published studies showing that masks work. These studies should have been published before the WHO / CDC / etc made their recommendations. If you're unable to find those studies you should conclude that WHO were telling you what they knew at the time and this was being accurately reported by the media.
    • tomp 6y ago
      Can you post credible studies that masks don't work? Hint: there aren't any studies credible enough for professionals (doctors themselves) to believe them, hence they all wear masks these days (not just surgeons ostensibly "to protect the patients"). Edit: also, even if scientifically they might have been "correct" (no proven efficacy) the start of a pandemic is not the right time to start pretending medicine is a science and demanding a RCT for each procedure. Medicine was always closer to engineering ("we need results now") than science ("just let these people die until we have 5-sigma scientific proof the treatment works"). WHO made the wrong executive decision.
      • base698 6y ago
        Doctors wear masks for other reasons like blood and other body fluid spatter. They aren't used to stop respiratory virus.
        • tomp 6y ago
          All those are the same reasons between 2 years ago, when they were barely wearing any protection (except in surgery rooms) and now, when they're blowing almost biohazard-level protection (including masks and/or face shields). The only variable that has changed is a respiratory virus.
• maayank 6y ago
  Really liked Hypernormalization by Adam Curtis on the phenomena: https://youtu.be/fh2cDKyFdyU https://youtu.be/fh2cDKyFdyU
• deleted 6y ago
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• friendlybus 6y ago
  Death of god
• CivBase 6y ago
  Social media algorithms are designed to maximize engagement by spoon feeding you content you like. Everyone likes being right, so these algorithms actively create and reinforce echo chambers. Things were going bad enough as they were... then the pandemic hit and people turned to social media as their primary means for safe socialization. The breakdown of social discourse over the last year has been disheartening at best and horrifying at worst.
• simpleguitar 6y ago
  It's a prelude to a "Two State Solution". Probably not a bad idea to keep the peace. Or more practically, greater freedom for the states, and less federal power.
  • clarkmoody 6y ago
    A peaceful separation is the only tenable long-term solution.
• Technically 6y ago
  Corporate media allows both the incentive of manipulating people to increase views and the prospective of buying good press.
• deleted 6y ago
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• simpleguitar 6y ago
  Maybe Trump can swear in at Mar-a-Lago as government/president in exile.
• smoyer 6y ago
  I think that one facet is implied by Dang's post above ... if we're not careful to have a respectful debate, then we'll end up having a shouting match instead. I used to appreciate grid-lock in DC under the idea that the less they got done, the less they'd do to me. Now I recognize that the best outcomes are a) when the lawmakers reach across the aisle and forge what both sides would consider a compromise and more importantly b) when the lawmakers we elect actually enact laws and run the country in a way that benefits the people they represent. I suspect that our best way forward as a nation is to resume carefully growing the middle class. This will by nature mean that the financial elites (some of whom are clearly moral despots) will lose a small portion of their wealth. But it's amazingly analogous to the reforms at the beginning of the last century that started to protect labor from the robber barons. I think the second step is to (yes, at a cost) restore at least some manufacturing capability to the US. This provides jobs to many who are NOT going to be talking tech on HN and also protects us (and the world) against there being potentially a single-source supplier of any given resource.
  • x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
    What does anything you've said have to do with why the Capitol was rushed and occupied by conservatives?
    • smoyer 6y ago
      It was my analysis of "How did we get here" posted by the parent ... I thought it was still relevant to the OP but perhaps not something that anyone is interested in discussing.
  • anigbrowl 6y ago
    if we're not careful to have a respectful debate This is misguided. Respectful debate in general is good, but only when both sides act in good faith. When some act in bad faith, telling outright lies while maintaining a veneer of civility, then you don't have obvious conflict but arguably something worse: corruption. There is some research showing that angry exchanges are in fact helpful in maintaining the integrity of an online community when others are trying to subvert it: https://snap.stanford.edu/conflict/ https://snap.stanford.edu/conflict/
• vulcan01 6y ago
  I'll posit an additional factor: people who are disenfranchised and desperate are more likely to believe conspiracy theories and act on them. Andrew Yang talked about this a lot during + after his campaign, and also this paper: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3791630 https://www.jstor.org/stable/3791630 (sorry to those who don't have jstor... I'll try to find stuff)
  • IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
    Yeah, that’s a myth. Trump voters are more affluent than Democrats. See all those confederate flags today? The gallows? The Auschwitz shirts? When they tell you they are motivated by racism, believe them!
    • vulcan01 6y ago
      That still is compatible with what I said. There is never just one reason to any major social thing.
    • mNovak 6y ago
      I don't think that's true. Trump's base is rural and suburban, white, non-college educated [1]. While income isn't listed here, that does not align with typical wealth distributions. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2018/08/09/an-examination-of-the-2016-electorate-based-on-validated-voters/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2018/08/09/an-examinati...
• fhrow4484 6y ago
  > How did we arrive to this point where a huge chunk of the population is in one reality and another huge chunk of the population is in another reality This isn't an accurate representation of the US. There are 4 sides: - extreme left - left - right - extreme right The proportion of each is probably around: 5%/45%/45%/5% (maybe 10/40/40/10) The 5% on each extreme are the one making the news on the other side to instill fear from the "other side" (fox news depiction of far left Portland, cnn depiction of far right, etc) And logically, the people who consume news the most have the most distorted view of the other side: https://twitter.com/HiddenTribesUS/status/1143146703693975553 https://twitter.com/HiddenTribesUS/status/114314670369397555... Since media get money from more viewers, and since fear sells, unfortunately they have no incentive to make this better. Finding neutral sources while staying informed is a hard problem.
  • taurath 6y ago
    Politics being a single bar is one of the problems. People have values that do not fit in any one place on the bar.
    • TeMPOraL 6y ago
      Yup. Taking a complex, multidimensional space of ideas and beliefs (and by multidimensional I mean something like 100+ dimensions, not 3 or 4) and projecting it into a number line is one of the things that bewilder me about the world the most. Doubly so in countries that don't have a two-party system like the US. And if anything, I think that this classical projected political spectrum isn't a line, it's really a circle. Extreme left and extreme right are the same thing; the particulars of the beliefs don't matter (if you think they do, you can always imagine this being a flat strip of paper glued into a Möbius strip).
      • Izkata 6y ago
        > And if anything, I think that this classical projected political spectrum isn't a line, it's really a circle. Extreme left and extreme right are the same thing; the particulars of the beliefs don't matter (if you think they do, you can always imagine this being a flat strip of paper glued into a Möbius strip). It's not just you - this is named "Horseshoe Theory".
• arminiusreturns 6y ago
  The research done on manipulation of the mind based on the post ww1/2 which most know as artichoke/mkultra/monarch and it's variants in other five eyes have been condensed into a science later solidified and tested in modern wars across the globe (not just GWOT psyops) that is now being exploited on a massive scale via consolidation of power via mergers, aquisitions, and more subtle extension of control over all forms of media (print, tv, radio, and now the internet, as the oligarchs finally recognized it as a primary threat vector), academia, and politics (largely via a progressively worse bribery, coercion, blackmail (Epstein goes here), threats system) that is being used as part of a divide and conquer strategy that enables the hegellian dialectic mostly via limited hangouts and false opositions to create whatever state of reality the supranational elite want. The reality is there is a conspiracy/are conspiracies that are coordinated by various disparate secret and not secret organizations whose goals sometimes don't but most often do overlap, and occurences like Q-anon and these protests are likely psyop techniques to distract potential genuine movements that might respond or create desired counter-responses in order to limit the fallout while the oligarchs catch up in the race against the internet as the last bastion of freedom of speech that could cause a neo-peasants revolt if the people found out the truth.
• wesleywt 6y ago
  Sometimes it's almost as if the people I speak to are from a different planet. I have to explain what Facebook did to their brain.
• staticman2 6y ago
  My take: 1) On web sites like this I've noticed a rule "Assume good faith". But in real life there are lots of people who say things in bad faith. In the case of PR people and trial lawyers and partisan politicians it seems to be in the job description to say things in bad faith. I have no solutions on how to fix this- I don't believe in God but I can imagine a deity punishing people who choose to exercise their free speech to profit on bad faith lies- but I have no theory of government to stop this behavior on earth. 2) We have a society based around money. People in this site like to whine about what Zuckerberg or whomever is doing but the guiding principle of society seems to be "he who has the money makes the rules". So if Zukerberg wants to weaponize Facebook against society the full power of the financial system will help him do it as long as he has the money/ property to control Facebook. I think in theory we could transition to a society where CEO and board members have their shares and/ or control of companies confiscated if they act in ways which harms society. (Perhaps putting things to a vote, i.e. a universal ballet: should Zuckerberg have his shares of Facebook seized and auctioned off under the theory he is harming society y/n)). Since this has never been tried as far as I know I don't know if my solution could even work.
  • TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Hard agree on 1. Don't have an answer other than "superhuman AI ruling humanity", but that is not fun, because at that point we stop being the protagonists of our own story. About 2: > Since this has never been tried as far as I know I don't know if my solution could even work. This was tried, during various revolutions that included the phase of killing the rich people and collectivizing their wealth. I worry your suggestion here would end up being used the same way - with prominent CEOs getting their companies auctioned from under them by angry mobs.
    • staticman2 6y ago
      I'm talking about confiscating property in a banal, rule based democracy sort of way, not by mobs. Humans seem to be wired via evolution to tolerate being controlled by higher status humans otherwise I'd expect confiscation of property to be a popular proposition in a world where high status people own the majority of property and wealth inequality keeps increasing. We'd have more discussions about where institutiins are serving us well and less about "those poor CEOs, think of their feelings" if we weren't seemingly wired to care about high status people's desires more than our own needs.
• esoterica 6y ago
  The reflexive "both-sides"-ism needs to stop. One chunk of the population is (mostly) tethered to reality and the other chunk has descended into insane, delusional, conspiratorial rabbit holes. The two "realities" are not equally valid.
• baby 6y ago
  Education and media consumed
• hyko 6y ago
  The President of the United States can’t admit that he lost, and is evidently willing to throw an entire country and political system under the bus in the service of his ego. One side effect of this personality type seizing power is that the Overton window has been inflated into a vast, festering portal through which our worst nightmares can crawl out. I doubt it was his intent, but it is the result. You’ve almost got to admire the raw primitive energy and boundlessness of that level of id. How very sad that it has been employed to such feeble ends; it will ultimately have to be crushed for democracy to prevail.
  • newguy1234 6y ago
    At this point, Trump has effectively created his own political party. If you look at die hard Trump supporters, they're quick to label many republicans as traitors.
    • dane-pgp 6y ago
      If the moderates in the Republican party and the progressives in the Democratic party could hold their noses long enough to do a deal on bringing in proportional representation, perhaps some good could come out of this.
      • CameronNemo 6y ago
        I admire your optimism, but I am of the opinion that the Senate will never loosen its grip until the day that it is destroyed.
      • raxxorrax 6y ago
        Moderates in the Republican party and moderates in the Democratic party you mean...
• deleted 6y ago
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• Havoc 6y ago
  >Self-reinforcing social bubbles? This mostly I think. It's always been a case of birds of a feather flock together. But internet communication has bridged distance and recommendation engines created echo chambers
• JoshTko 6y ago
  1st amendment did envision the mass personalized misinformation that social networks have enabled. We need to remove all emotion based advertisement in political ads ASAP. No music, no personalities, no scary adjectives.
• valuearb 6y ago
  Lincoln lived most of his life as a Whig but aligned with the new Republican Party in the 1850s during a transitional era in American politics. Northern opinion was turning against slavery, and enslaved people’s efforts to resist and escape bondage kept the issue center stage. Rather than accede to the changing political landscape, Southern Democrats maligned the new Republican Party as an existential threat because it opposed the expansion of slavery in the Western territories. Promoters of secession, called “fire-eaters,” knew they did not command majority support even within the South, so they deployed a rhetoric of fear and anger that condemned Republicans as “fanatics” and encouraged fellow Southerners to regard Lincoln’s election as “an open declaration of war” upon the region. This hyperbolic language left no room for compromise or middle ground; it was intended to terrify voters into opposing Lincoln. The result was that Lincoln was not listed as a candidate in many Southern precincts, and his election, thus, surprised even moderate Southerners who believed he could not command an electoral college majority. By perverting the electoral process, fire-eaters swayed moderates to adopt their conspiratorial approach to politics. Lincoln believed in the protection of minority rights, but he also believed in majority rule. Secession was, in his words, an appeal from the “ballot to the bullet.” That is, because Southern Democrats could not persuade a majority of voters to their standard (as they had for decades), they abandoned the political process altogether. This action, Lincoln felt, made self-government impossible. If the losing side in an election could always walk away, how could a nation ever remain intact?
  • cosmiccatnap 6y ago
    Instead of being curious about this reply, just read the post above me one more time to really let it sink in.
• lumost 6y ago
  Many of the US's problems have been subdivided along political lines such that no solution can be brought forward as both sides benefit from the lack of a solution. 3-4 decades of utter gridlock has left the country with both a power vacuum and many aggrieved parties looking for a break from the status quo.
• deleted 6y ago
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• deleted 6y ago
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• heymijo 6y ago
  I think these three books offer a solid framework for providing an answer to your question: 1) The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It by Robert Reich [0] - Reich drops the buzzword neoliberalism in favor of the word power. I like that as neoliberalism is a terrible phrase for the concept it describes, but make no mistake, it's the insidious, invisible nature of neoliberalism that put our country in a position where neither party served the people well. That is what Reich describes here. 2) The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News-and Divided a Country by Gabriel Sherman [1] - There is also a Showtime miniseries based on the book you could watch. Pair with the movie Bombshell 3) Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer [2] [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52118381-the-system https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52118381-the-system [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15981705-the-loudest-voice-in-the-room https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15981705-the-loudest-voi... [2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27833494-dark-money https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27833494-dark-money
• dleslie 6y ago
  Your news is just flat out awful and has been for a long time. From OANN to Fox to MSNBC; it's all us-vs-them, fear the others, be afraid, be angry, and stay tuned in for more. Every time I visit your country I'm apalled and horrified by your news media. It's blatantly exploiting basic animal instinct and core emotions to hook viewers in order to sell ads. You are a product of your media. And then there's the network effects of Facebook, Twitter and Parlor...
  • newguy1234 6y ago
    Very true, even media like NPR is very biased as well. I've stopped reading main stream media entirely.
  • colinmhayes 6y ago
    Those aren't the news channels. They're entertainment. The news is on PBS. The times and journal are good if you stay away from the clearly marked opinion section.
    • dleslie 6y ago
      I have my qualms with the CBC, but I'll take it over basically any American news media any day. We have a couple of important institutions that safeguard our news media: https://cbsc.ca/ https://cbsc.ca/ https://cbc.radio-canada.ca/en/ombudsman/ https://cbc.radio-canada.ca/en/ombudsman/
• hgsgshs88383 6y ago
  The same way any cult-like phenomenon divorces its followers from reality. In this case a charismatic demagogue (Donald Trump) has built a cult of personality around himself. He and his enablers employ many of the tactics used by other cult-like organizations, such religious organizations (e.g. scientology), or otherwise (i.e. multilevel marketing schemes). These organizations offer the opportunity to be apart of something "great" and "historic", to teach you how to be strong, to transform yourself from "zero to hero", and have fellowship with other like minded individuals who have the will and desire to improve their lives too. In return they demand absolute, unquestioning, and unwavering fealty. This has little to do with political orientation (left vs right) and everything to do with Donald Trump. There is currently a "civil war" going on inside the GOP, and the most vicious attacks from the cult-of-MAGA tend to be aimed at members of the political right who voice even the slightest dissent and are thus deemed "insufficiently loyal" (i.e. counterrevolutionaries).
• CuriousSkeptic 6y ago
  A long, but interesting, take on the issue. Apparently on its way as a book soon https://waitbutwhy.com/2020/01/sick-giant.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2020/01/sick-giant.html
• torsday 6y ago
  There aren't two realities, I would start there.
  • mbrodersen 6y ago
    There aren’t two physical realities but there are many social realities. Borders/societies/cultures/religions/laws/... are invented by humans and become real (as in has real impact on physical reality).
• knodi 6y ago
  This has been America from the beginning. The few have carried the many. Before this was not a major issue because the selection of people on radio or TV to curated to some degree. Now with Social Media, every idiot has a voice and idiots are drowned to other idiots.
• mimog 6y ago
  Its not two realities. Its one population chunk living in reality and one chunk living in a misinformation fueled delusion. Special interests have managed to weaponize social media and misinformation. It started with allowing blatant lying and partisan propoganda to be framed as impartial news because deliberate mass misinformation is apparently free speech. Now the cat is out of the bag and the only way back is strong regulation of social and news media.
• bcherny 6y ago
  I just finished Lippmann’s 1922 classic Public Opinion. In it he argues that different people may draw completely different conclusions from the same facts due to three things: 1. Sampling. There’s a big universe of facts, and each media outlet reports on a tiny piece of this universe. 2. Stereotypes. When you read a news story, you unconsciously pattern match and associate it to related examples you have in your mind. 3. Context. When you read a news story, you subconsciously have some fascet of your own identity in mind (as a Republican, as a pro-choice person, etc.). All three are in effect when stories are reported on and consumed. It’s a series of lenses that samples, then distorts, the truth in a way that given the same real-world event, different people may come to completely different conclusions about what happened. I’d add a #4: fake news. This amplifies #1 significantly. It was less of a problem in Lippmann’s time since the News world was much smaller. He might have called this “rumor”, not news.
  • bjornsing 6y ago
    Reminds me of Jaynes point that IIRC the beliefs of two perfectly rational agents with very different Bayesian priors can diverge even if they are presented with exactly the same facts/information/data...
    • pms 6y ago
      Do you have any sources for this? I'd love to read more about it.
      • bjornsing 6y ago
        I think it’s in Jaynes magnum opus Probability Theory: The Logic of Science.
    • unityByFreedom 6y ago
      Lippmann's time and ours were presenting different facts to different groups. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25667943 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25667943
  • 6y ago
• jimbob45 6y ago
  Well both sides won't admit that they're not totally right, including you. Your question implies that you're 100% right and the opposition is 100% wrong. I've seen compelling evidence on 4chan to make me believe that there was some shadiness going on in this election, perhaps moreso than normal. However, even I can admit that it does not appear to rise to the level of systemic voter fraud that I would need to call this election a "sham", nor does it appear systemic by any measure. Can you see the difference between "everyone I don't agree with is 100% incorrect and racist" and my statement? Can you see how claiming intelligent working people are "in another reality" might be divisive to the people you're (falsely) claiming to want to meet halfway? It goes both ways too - the right still won't admit that climate change is a thing to be combated even though that it is facially obvious to anyone that climate change has at least some negative effects.
• newguy1234 6y ago
  Social media censorship has pushed the right-wing to go to alternate sources for information. For example, after extensive censorship and harassments on reddit, the Donald sub simply created their own separate website, thedonald.win, and now it is ranked at #430 for traffic rank in USA by Alexa. That's a huge website considering it was just a sub on reddit at one point.
  • sillysaurusx 6y ago
    I think this is a valid point that no one wants to hear. I've argued from the beginning that closing our eyes and ears to the problem isn't an effective solution. Banning them from Reddit simply whisked them away to an even stronger self-reinforcing bubble. It's a powerful bubble, too. I checked in on thedonald.win at Thanksgiving, and they had a meme aimed directly at me: "So glad you could come take some time off during your busy day to come make fun of us. You must be a real piece of work" or something along those lines. I burst out laughing. But the other side of it is valid too: People say that there's no point in debating with folks who are "True Believers," since it merely gives them credibility and legitimacy. It's valid; I just don't personally buy that. The way to change someone's mind is to try to see things from their point of view, and really walk in their shoes, i.e. allow yourself the possibility of you changing your mind. At that point, it seems like both people are in the right mental space to be willing to change. Tough problem all around. I'm not sure there's any effective solutions, so maybe both sides banning each other and enjoying their respective bubbles is the best we can hope for, given human nature. I just try to take a positive view. The country will likely settle down in a few months, so this too shall pass. It raises question marks about the next cycle, but at least it's four years away.
    • newguy1234 6y ago
      Yup, that's why I left reddit and now read/post somewhat regularly on thedonald.win. The last straw for me was when I was banned from a few subs on reddit. People on reddit don't want to have a debate. They just want confirmation bias to be reinforced. Also, there will be no unity. Everyone on the right-wing is doubling-down to oppose anything Biden plans on doing. This Jan 6th march was actually planned weeks prior and many people were calling "for every able bodied man" to go to DC for the march. Many more are planned.
• chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  Social and technological forces. Specifically the interplay between the regulatory and economic spheres leads people to take a survival interest in regulation. But voters are rationally ignorant because the bandwidth of the electoral box is less than one bit per year in most cases. So they're interested, but not informed. Furthermore the world is so complicated and technology is so powerful that people are more affected by simulated reality than real reality. Major events that affect people's lives are mediated by technology that can be used to convey falsity as easily as truth (perhaps easier).
• imgabe 6y ago
  Advertising-sponsored news media that panders to what their audience wants to hear.
• tathougies 6y ago
  Some people don't want Biden as president. That's their opinion and they have every right to protest. Regardless of what their opinion is though, everyone should agree that this particular behavior is unacceptable. Unfortunately, we could not come to an agreement on that just this summer, and this is the natural end result of a country where large swaths of the population are unwilling to call out political violence when 'their side' are the ones committing it. At this point, even Trump telling people to stop (which, to his credit, he has) will not help, in the same way that democrats telling Antifa to stop will not help (I mean Biden has asked them to stop for months now, and they're still launching fireworks at the courthouse in Portland to the point the mayor is now begging for federal help). Political violence has been normalized by the media (both social and not) to the point where, even popular politicians who disagree with the mob will become its victims. The scary part is that some people perpetuated all this polarization and rage for money.
• xiaodai 6y ago
  It's the freedom to choose. People can chooose what they consume. It's right that it's a right. But this "right" has been exploited by media $$$ to manipulate the gullible and unlearned. Sad.
• Triv888 6y ago
  Search bubbles by Google and others probably don't help.
• userbinator 6y ago
  Seeing things like this make me wonder how long it will be until the US splits into two roughly equal-sized countries.
  • finndark 6y ago
    But when you try to imagine how it could be split up there are all kinds of problems. e.g., obviously CA + NY makes sense plus some large cities(e.g., Chicago). It all seems untenable w/o excessive relocation a la Stalin. Truly splitting up the USA would require a war and that's more trouble than its worth in most peoples' opinions: I've kinda grown fond of letting my neighbor's kid cut the lawn for $25, even though he is a Democrat. Now, OTOH, spinning off a state or two is within reach: e.g., giving CA and NY their independence would be fine with me. But then that's just me!8-))
  • inglor_cz 6y ago
    More like twenty. Latin America is splintered in a similar way.
• disown 6y ago
  > How did we arrive to this point where a huge chunk of the population is in one reality and another huge chunk of the population is in another reality? It's always been that way. We've been at war with each other since the very beginning. North vs South. Federalists vs Anti-Federalists. Nativists vs Pro-Immigration. Protectionist vs Free Trade. Heck, just a decade or so into the republic a vice president and a secretary of treasury had a duel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burr%E2%80%93Hamilton_duel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burr%E2%80%93Hamilton_duel The easiest tell is in the name. "United" States of America. If we were so united, we wouldn't have the need to put united since it would be self-evident. The only times we've come together, briefly, is when we have a common enemy - whether it is natives, blacks, germans, japanese, russians, chinese, mexicans, etc. For a brief few weeks, the country was united after 9/11. > Segregation of information sources? Politicization of media outlets? Self-reinforcing social bubbles? A combination of all of them and more? Nope. You can have the same information and two people are going to come to two different conclusions. Forcing the entire country to watch CNN or Foxnews isn't going to solve the problem. It is just going to antagonize one side even more. You can argue that it is impossible for a country as large as the US ( or china, russia, india, etc ) to be "united". Too many people across too vast a territory to keep everyone's interests aligned. Heck, you can argue that these aren't really countries but empires too. And all empires eventually crumble. But the truth is that huge chunks of the population have lived under different realities in the US since the very beginning and has continued ever since.
• harmmonica 6y ago
  I'm sure in this very long thread some folks believe that those items you list are symptoms of the problem and that the root causes are much more simple. That huge chunk (I'd estimate it at well into the tens of millions of US adults) feels disenfranchised (right now they literally feel that in way in that they believe their vote doesn't count, but also figuratively) because opportunity has been "taken" from them. Taken is in quotes because though it's partially true it's also a victim mentality. The rioters/protesters are largely white as opposed to the more-diverse BLM protesters (more on that later). These people feel like the US Government, in general, and that includes moderate republicans, has failed them in the past several decades by sending their jobs overseas, or by allowing immigrants into the country who have taken their jobs. They feel like they're being left behind, which, in truth, they are. Blue collar jobs have been exported, en masse, over the years, and that's been a bi-partisan effort resulting in lifting countless people out of poverty outside the US, but putting incredible pressure on people inside of the US, particularly the middle class, who feel like they have few or no prospects. And of course the irony here, when compared to the BLM protests, is that if a sizable segment of these rioters/protesters weren't racist they would understand that this is how Black American have felt _for a couple of hundred years_. Important note: this is not to say that these rioters/protesters are even close to being as poorly treated as the black community. Outsourcing their jobs and giving their former wages to owners/capital in the form of profits is SO FAR from the historical treatment of black Americans that someone will read this and consider it laughable to even compare the two. But they are getting a taste of what it's like when the government stops working for them, the formerly very privileged (not relative to the 1% but certainly to black americans) white middle class. All of the polarization stems from that. "You've taken my opportunity and everyone else seems to be getting theirs and I no longer have mine. Fuck you. I'm going to break shit until you listen up."
  • Decker87 6y ago
    Great analysis, although I think it's important to understand all the outsourcing of blue collar jobs and manufacturing was mostly driven by consumer demand for low prices. It's still true today. Most people can pay 2x as much for something made in the USA, but choose not to.
• thrwn_frthr_awy 6y ago
  Personalized ads.
• IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
  Only one chunk is living in one reality. The other is “living” in their little Jim Crow fantasyland. What’s happing today is the result of reality intruding on their fantasy. It’s the same mechanism that causes earthquakes, or psychotic breaks when people can no longer keep up the appearance of being that up-and-coming Hollywood screenwriter. Even Pence, McConnell, and Mattis are calling this what it is: a fascist insurrection, led by a failed President. So congratulations on the audacity to both-side this.
• worik 6y ago
  Being a member of the "liberal elite" (I think I am) I think it is our fault. We lost our mojo. We forgot that leadership is not leaving anybody behind. We left a lot of people behind, then we blamed them for not keeping up. Sorry, on behalf of my class, I really am sorry. The consequences, when we face ecological catastrophe, could be very serious indeed. Stay safe, people, and be kind
  • salawat 6y ago
    Well, at least there's one sensible person here, but don't look at yourself as an Atlas. Like it or not, it's one of these dirty collective behavior issues we haven't all come to terms with yet.
  • api 6y ago
    I think it goes back to how the culture war split the working class from the left and led the left to become associated with rich coastal mega-cities. The working class is predominately socially conservative.
    • worik 6y ago
      Is there data to support the claim that working class people are more (or less) socially conservative than others?
  • flukus 6y ago
    > We left a lot of people behind, then we blamed them for not keeping up. Haven't they been demanding to be left behind every step of the way? For decades they've opposed minimum wage, socialized healthcare, welfare, unions and just about anything "socialist" that would have helped them. Couple that with ever increasing urbanization that is not going to be reversed anytime soon, what could you possibly do to help them not be left behind?
    • inglor_cz 6y ago
      "minimum wage, socialized healthcare, welfare, unions" We have those things in Europe and yet our economic periphery (Italy, Spain, Greece, to a degree France and former East Germany) is very similar to American rust belt. High unemployment, numerous industries collapsed, bitter voters casting their lot with populists and extremists. The Yellow Vests in France were much more violent than anything that happened in USA recently, and they were driven by the same combination of economic uncertainty and alienation from the political elite.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• toomanyrichies 6y ago
  To me it feels like a multi-step process, caused by a mix of our worst human tendencies: 1) People prefer news coverage which confirms their previously-held beliefs (aka confirmation bias). 2) News outlets are financially incentivized to deliver news which confirms whatever beliefs we may have, since if we don't then viewers will change the channel. This causes news outlets to balkanize along various points on the political spectrum, ranging from extreme right-wing to extreme left-wing. 3) News outlets receive 100% of the gain of confirming our biases, but pay less than 100% of the total cost of doing so (aka "the tragedy of the commons"). 4) Viewers end up consuming primarily (if not exclusively) media which confirms their biases. This becomes a self-reinforcing echo chamber. 5) Simultaneously, there has been a proliferation of media outlets. In the 1950s, there were 2-3 TV channels from which one could consume news. Today, there are 500 channels on DirecTV, and any number of internet news sites / Twitter accounts / etc. where you can get your fix. 6) In the old days, news outlets had to be moderate in their reporting, in order to appeal to the broadest possible audience. Conversely, the more sources of information there are, the louder any individual source must become, in order to stand out from the crowd. 7) With the internet, it's possible to create news outlets which cater to a minority of people who hold extreme viewpoints (aka capturing the long tail of the media market). 8) Over time, there are more and more outlets delivering more and more extreme reportage, and the news we consume becomes more extremist in nature. 9) Since our news diet plays a big part in shaping our worldview, over time we ourselves become more extreme. I'd love to be wrong about this, since it doesn't bode well for the future of the human race. Someone please restore my faith in humanity by effectively rebutting the points above.
  • peter_d_sherman 6y ago
    1950: The Media is news, and Politicians are political. 2020: Politicians are news, and the Media is political.
• heresie-dabord 6y ago
  The people who are in the sacrifice zone of US capitalism have been groomed in their ignorance by the Republican party. Now even the reality that they are not a majority is too hard for them to understand.
• tboyd47 6y ago
  Smith-Mundt Act repeal in 2010 leading to the flood of CIA propaganda directed at citizens. As a wise man once said, the chickens have come home to roost.
• ImprovedSilence 6y ago
  Its just easier to believe what you want to believe. Than what really is.
• nauvis 6y ago
  1. The rise of mass media, and a mass media culture that promotes scare news. 2. The rise of social media which allows people to tailor their content to what they want to hear, including conspiracy theories 3. A general trend over the last 20 years of Americans becoming more isolated in their own communities from one another, leading to distrust of others 4. Various individuals and groups have an interest in keeping the US government divided and gridlocked to avoid legislation damaging their interests. 5. Trump. Trump has promoted this, directly and indirectly, throughout 2020.
• wolco2 6y ago
  Mainstream media started killed credibility in the 80s and what we see is the result of a media that thinks it speaks for all but represents only half at best.
• tw04 6y ago
  We eliminated the fairness doctrine, and Roger Ailes swore there would never be another Watergate because he would create a media organization to prevent it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/06/roger-ailes-nixon-gawker-documents/352363/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/06/roger-a... This wasn't by mistake, or stumbling into it. It was a very purposeful attack on our democracy.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• proc0 6y ago
  One side does not want to hear the other side's version. Communication did not happen because: 1) cancel culture 2) snowflake culture 3) main stream media bias, completely shutting down one side, and lying often There has been a huge decline in how people are able to deal with uncomfortable conversations, so it's not surprising there is widespread confusion and frustration. We're all somewhat guilty of sometimes not communicating perfectly, but which culture over the past four years promoted censorship? which culture promoted shutting people up and demonizing them? We will see these times very differently in the near future, I think. edit: and of course this gets downvoted lol. When are we ever going to at least start listening without visceral emotional reactions, I wonder.
• intended 6y ago
  > Politicization of media outlets Start there, since that is the historic start point. Many of these things are side effects of how networks of people propagate information, and where the people can be co-opted using specifically coded content. The rest of it can also be seen as a trade off between 1-on-1 communication and Many-to-Many communications + speed of interaction.
• AuryGlenz 6y ago
  I fully blame the media for this. When the sitting President claims that voting fraud happened they should investigate it, not instantly claim it’s not true because they don’t like him. It lead to these protesters feeling like nobody was taking the claims seriously, and felt that they must do something. I don’t know if there was or wasn’t significant fraud, but the way the media handled it was disgusting. The past 4 years has given half of the country no reason to trust them, and this last hurrah cemented that fact.
  • chidg 6y ago
    I'm from a different country, so I get exposure to different media sources, but from my position, this sounds very strange. The media has been absolutely complicit in enabling Trump and the far right over the past four years, so while I agree that there is no reason to trust them, it's not because they aren't fair to Trump.
    • shripadk 6y ago
      > it's not because they aren't fair to Trump. You must be living in an alternate reality but whether you like Trump or hate him you can't deny the fact that the media was completely against Trump from the very beginning. No doubts about that!
    • reader_mode 6y ago
      I'm not from the US either but from what I've seen the media and the sites I visit - they were largely bashing his every move indiscriminately. I mean this was always the game in politics, right media hated on every Obama move, left attacked Bush, etc. But Trump really lowered the level at which the game is played, and the opposition followed right down - so everything became ridiculous, infuriating, simplistic talking points and tribalism.
  • mightybyte 6y ago
    More than that...I think personalized media recommendations are a significant contributing factor here. I think the prevalence of this approach to curation is a big part of why we see so many echo chambers. The tech industry needs to take a good hard look at itself and the kind of patterns its business incentivizes. Of course, ultimately one could make the argument that it's just human nature. It's not the tech companies, they're just trying to make a profit. That's when it might make sense for governments to step in with regulations--to push things n a positive direction where the free market can't. It seems to me that we're still figuring out as a species how to handle this information deluge we've started to experience in the last 20-30 years. Like any powerful tool, it can be used for good as well as for harm.
• anonuser123456 6y ago
  Arnold Kling's "The Three Languages of Politics" has a good answer to a piece of this puzzle. In short, the major political 'camps' think about events with a different dimension. Conservatives think in the 'civilization vs barbarism' axis. Progressives think on the 'oppressed vs oppressor' axis. Libertarians think on the 'authoritarian vs freedom' axis. The same event, when viewed through the corresponding filter, has different interpretations.
• yashap 6y ago
  I know it’s cliche to blame the internet, but ... the internet is a big factor. Previously, there were only a handful of big media outlets that everyone read/watched, they kept decently to journalistic integrity principles, and made some effort to be balanced and not overly biased. No OANN or Newsmax there. But the internet allowed anyone to be a “journalist”, and as fringe media started to gain in popularity, mainstream media started getting more polarized too, to keep market share. Going back further, before the existence of mass media, everything was more in-person/local. When you have a small community of people you talk to in-person, you’re going to be way more reasonable than on some global, anonymous, online community. Social media is a great example - it’s a breeding ground for arguments, conspiracy theories and extremism. People who would be perfectly civil to each other in person can be absolute assholes to each other online. How many email/Slack disagreements have you been in at work that instantly resolve the moment you move to in-person or video chat? Some will say this polarization always existed, but I do feel it has gotten significantly worse. I don’t remember the 90s feeling this polarized, with people so unable to agree upon basic facts about current events. And I’m guessing the 90s were more polarized than the 50s. One good thing - hostilities BETWEEN nations seem to be decreasing. I don’t think we’re on the cusp of World War 3 or any such thing, but hostilities WITHIN nations seem to be on the rise, at least from my “gut feel” view of my life so far. On that note, life has been good for a long time in the west. War is an absolute atrocity, but it does put petty disputes into perspective, and build some sense of national unity. Since World War 2, life has been pretty cushy and safe in western democracies, so maybe we’re starting to make enemies of each other to fill the void?
• agumonkey 6y ago
  A boiling frog variant of social scale depression. Not enough positive news, too many cracks, doubts. The rest is human nature regressing due to this imbalance. Absolutely not helped by hectic shallow news and social tissue of the day. My 2 cents
• teunispeters 6y ago
  Future Shock (or re book Shockwave Rider) There's too much truth for most of us, so we hide in the comforting illusions of conspiracies and deception. (especially when in some countries, like the US, there's no checks on whether the information shared is accurate or not, and there's a shortage of fact checking even among the professionals....) Most people do to one extent or another, just it might be wiser to vett them from time to time. It's a way of dealing with overwhelming information.
• zthrowaway 6y ago
  I believe the Social Dilemma documentary on Netflix answers this question pretty well.
• u801e 6y ago
  This has always been a tendency for humankind: 1. Gangs 2. Ethnicity 3. Nationalism 4. Religion Groups of people latch on to an ideology and act on whatever the leader tells them to do or what they see others do. You can observe this when looking at videos of riots or other mob like behavior.
  • raxxorrax 6y ago
    I doubt it, but the accusations of it drove people in opposition, especially those that did not care about it. Of course not caring about it was decried as privilege. This was self-victimization to a large degree. People in western nations overwhelmingly did not care about any of these things anymore.
• adamsea 6y ago
  IMHO we need government regulation around social media. They’re publishers, in some new and novel form. Right now no social media company will get serious about targeted propaganda because it would cut into their profits. But regulation can create a level playing field - the rules apply to everyone, so, more-or-less, everyone’s profits take a hit and now you’re not putting yourself in a weaker position vis-a-vis your competitors by addressing all these issues we are seeing. Regulation can create a level playing field and solve the collective action problem by making all companies do the same thing at the same time, more-or-less.
• JamisonM 6y ago
  The question here kind of implies that there are two kind of equal realities that these chunks of the population occupy but I think that is not a great framing for understanding what is going on. The vast majority of the US population live in a very normal a-political reality that is largely untouched by narratives that drive the higher-engaged folks' perception of what is going on. The sliver of the US population that genuinely occupy a different reality is dominated by people that occupy an almost exclusively right-wing media reality. (There is a left-wing media reality for sure, but it is microscopic, counterpunch is just not that highly trafficked!) The riots in the capitol today demonstrated this quite clearly when contrasted with the protests that kick off the Trump presidency. The "women's' march" was a fairly clear statement in acknowledgement of Trump's presidency but a denial that it was truly representative of popular will. Today's demonstration & riot was populated by a mix of people consuming non-facts and fabulists exploiting those people. QAnon followers were prominent and appeared to be at least a plurality if not a majority of the participants. The people filming themselves in Nancy Pelosi's office were prominent neo-nazis or YouTube provocateurs (Fuentes and BakedAlasaka). A few thousand people on the capitol overwhelmed a police force that was at least partially sympathetic and was certainly understaffed, in the alternate reality where the opposition to Trump were anti-democratic in the same way they would overwhelm any force arrayed against them in a similar way much more easily through sheer quantity, but they don't hold those views or endorse those methods. Roughly 1/3rd of voters thing the presidential election was fraudulent, but closer to 1/5th think Trump really won according to Morning Consult, some of this is just facing the fact that the US has always been a bit of a low-trust/conspiratorial society. Some of what is going on is certainly better reporting on what is really happening - things that have actually always happened. Some of what is happening is just good old fashioned bad leadership!
• trub 6y ago
  deregulation of the media
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• jolincost 6y ago
  It's called democracy. Moreover my analysis and reflection of the last 4 years where in I awakened and gained a sort of political consciousness after previously in my life having zero care for politics in any way is This is a particular evolution of democracy which I call Democratic theater and it relies on deceptive control of the population by the media and the intelligence and security apparatus to provide the illusion of freedom to prevent the need for delivering real results by keeping the population in a constant state of confusion and conflict by supporting both sides of an artificial divide to prolong the state of conflict I guess some of the beneficiaries of this are upwards who can benefit from the enhanced media appeal of this division but I think the primary beneficiary is the status quo and it's done to preserve power in a system where people expect to be free but are basically constrained but given this outlet which is a sort of cathartic entertainment, the purpose of which is to channel genuine to satisfaction into controlled avenues so that it never actually emerges as revolution or organized political action that has any chance of disrupting the status quo in a meaningful way I believe it's a form of controlled opposition where a cabal of intelligence security and media interests control both sides of the conflict and I believe these sort of mass phenomena are driven by masters of narrative control psychology sociology. I started off believing that Trump would do what he said and kind of save America and root out these shackles and the cabal of interest that keeps them in place but it seems he was just a charlatan who couldn't deliver and perhaps never intended to. I now believe it's likely that Trump was probably compromised by the very same cabal of interests who got him to dance to the tune they wanted as a puppet for 4 years as part of his great charade In essence all of this Democratic theater is more window dressing for business as usual. I'm happy to hear different opinions and to update my own perspective but I'm not going to debate this it simply the belief that I've arrived at at this time after many years of reflection and thought.
  • jolincost 6y ago
    Edit restriction, s/upwards/corporates/
  • JamisonM 6y ago
    I am very interested to hear about this cabal that controls both Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell - how does that work? How did the ACA get passed in such an environment? How did the Trump Tax Cut get passed? NAFTA? The failure of the TPP? What about the provisions in the recent omnibus that contained all sorts of support for green energy? What are the mechanics of this system?
• tonfreed 6y ago
  I blame the internet. Back in the days before it, we had to learn to live with those around us, now you can just go out and find someone as equally stupid as yourself. I call it the toaster fucker problem. Man wakes up in 1980, tells his friends "I want to fuck a toaster" Friends quite rightly berate and laugh at him, guy deals with it, maybe gets some therapy and goes on a bit better adjusted. Guy in 2021 tells his friends that he wants to fuck a toaster, gets laughed at, immediately jumps on facebook and finds "Toaster Fucker Support group" where he reads that he's actually oppressed and he needs to cut out everyone around him and should only listen to his fellow toaster fuckers. Apply this analogy to literally any insular bubble, it applies as equally to /r/thedonald as it does to the emaciated Che Guevara larpers that cry thinking about ringing their favourite pizza place.
  • top_post 6y ago
    I completely agree with you.
  • sebmellen 6y ago
    The Social Dilemma movie highlights this brilliantly, as does Tristan Harris in his Joe Rohan interview https://youtube.com/watch?v=OaTKaHKCAFg https://youtube.com/watch?v=OaTKaHKCAFg
  • andrewon 6y ago
    I would add that the pandemic make us skip the part of telling friends. And the invention of twitter... most sane people don't talk. If they ever say anything, it is too common sensual to be retweeted. But if someone say something explosive it got exponentially retweeted. The character limit also eliminate the possibility of any nuance in position.
    • vitiral 6y ago
      sensual -> sensical I like the idea of common sensual, but I think we all might have slightly different tastes :D
      • 6y ago
• 8bitsrule 6y ago
  The two realities existed at the founding of the country (probably since forever). One reality requires evidence, one requires belief. They are hard to reconcile. Galileo vs The Pope.
• boh 6y ago
  I don't see section 230 lasting much longer
• charlieflowers 6y ago
  I think it turns out that it is relatively easy to divide any culture into two polarized groups if you have learned how. There is a certain set of intrinsic values which can be grouped together through something of an engineering process to create maximum polarization, and there are fields which have now figured out how to do it.
• djsumdog 6y ago
  I just wrote a full post on this: https://battlepenguin.com/philosophy/the-fracturing-of-the-human-mind/ https://battlepenguin.com/philosophy/the-fracturing-of-the-h...
• zw123456 6y ago
  https://www.britannica.com/topic/Fairness-Doctrine https://www.britannica.com/topic/Fairness-Doctrine Fairness doctrine, U.S. communications policy formulated by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that required licensed radio and television broadcasters to present fair and balanced coverage of controversial issues of interest to their communities, including by devoting equal airtime to opposing points of view. Repealed in the 1996 telecom deregulation bill that cleared the way for the internet also took away the responsibility of the media to provide truth in the news. Instead of charging for use of spectrum, it was given to TV and radio networks but they were required to provide responsible and truthful news. Maybe that was a good idea ? Perhaps, the old timers knew a thing or two about how to keep an informed public so that democracy would work. Go ahead and down vote me like usual. But I am not wrong.
• AviationAtom 6y ago
  I just want to comment that I though you posed your question in a reasonably eloquent way. That is a rarity these days, and probably partially explains why you have arrived at a point of needing to ask your question.
• mparramon 6y ago
  https://waitbutwhy.com/2020/01/sick-giant.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2020/01/sick-giant.html
• MichaelMoser123 6y ago
  https://nationalpost.com/opinion/peter-turchin-how-elite-overproduction-and-lawyer-glut-could-ruin-the-u-s https://nationalpost.com/opinion/peter-turchin-how-elite-ove... I think the internet is only being used as a tool; Peter Turchin says its overproduction of the elites, too many lawyers and managers chasing too few positions leads them to fight more vigorously over a limited turf. It's turf wars gone bitter.
• lavp 6y ago
  The creation of the internet is undoubtedly the biggest factor in this. It created a paradox in people's consumption of information. You not only had the ability to choose what to listen to, you could choose what not to listen. Another ability the internet has allowed is the creation of communities based around the type of information they consumed which always creates echo-chambers like you pointed out. It's because of this that many have lost sense of the realities of other people and manifests its own distorted reality. Not to mention, you also have multi-billion dollar companies utilizing algorithms to keep you there as long as possible, further propagating this effect.
• BatteryMountain 6y ago
  It looks even worse and obvious when looking from outside. As a non-American, when reading news from the US, I use a few different sources with different political leanings. To say there are 2 realities in America is putting it lightly. It's like watching two unrelated movies about the same theme/place, but with vastly different histories that resulted in each reality. Almost like having two cultures, two countries. I don't know what point I'm trying to make but it is really unnerving to watch. It seems that the media in America has zero integrity and face zero consequences. Maybe it is social media's fault. Maybe, just maybe, social media and information overload (which reduces critical thought in that moment) is the problem. Nevermind propaganda & conspiracies - just the bubble effects + overloaded conflicting information causes some kind of mental disorder but on a national scale. Too much nonsense being internalize and associated with, on a weekly basis, at some point America will have to ask itself if it is all worth it (social media, 24/7 news & streaming (and not to mention porn and the warping of minds)). Maybe it is just a result of your political system, that this was always the outcome, because you only have 2 sides. Our world and human life/culture cannot just be boiled down to 2 options. There are so much complexity, nuance and scope context that gets ignored if you are forced to pick 1 of 2 options. Maybe it is just a result of your economic system & regulations and related social structure & social programs. Maybe, just maybe your people are so badly squeezed to live decent lives (esp when it comes to wages/labour vs the cost of living and your bizarre take on healthcare). Maybe it is the greed and tax system favouring "the already rich". Maybe it is because your political system has too much money flowing through it (much of your political practices are illegal elsewhere). How can you convince a group of people that they are wrong or doing the wrong thing? When the battlefield is rooted in idealogical is very difficult to convince people otherwise (see religions). Trying to convince the people that invaded your capitol will be fruitless. Punishing them will be fruitless too. Nothing you do will change their minds, cause their minds have been warped to believe in a different reality to what the rest of the world sees. All I know is that America has a lot of reflecting to do to find/re-find your national identity and to decide if the dragon you've been chasing is the right thing. I truly hope you can find a way without thousands of people dying in civil wars etc (nevermind covid).
• teloli 6y ago
  All these years exporting democracy, you just might have run out
• nswest23 6y ago
  The thing about reality is that there's actually only one. Some of us have come unmoored from it.
• mbrodersen 6y ago
  Denialism. Wanting something so badly to be true that you try to change the world to make it true. Humans have a unique ability to shape their world with thoughts alone. Borders, nations, cultures, laws etc. are humans making up stuff that then becomes real (as in having real consequences).