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No, actually I'm referring to groups on the left _and_ right. While popularizing the attacking of shared society and our systems foundations did start with the

No, actually I'm referring to groups on the left _and_ right. While popularizing the attacking of shared society and our systems foundations did start with the counter-culture left in the 60s, it has certainly become a bipartisan effort in recent decades.

AndrewBissell 6y ago
All the things I mentioned were entirely bipartisan affairs. In fact, we just witnessed the president who initiated the Iraq War feted and lauded by the press for his appearance at the inauguration of a new president from the "opposing" party who enthusiastically endorsed that war as a Senator. The counterculture left is a very broad category, with some legitimate and organic elements mixed up with some very confused, self-indulgent, or aimlessly subversive ones. But it didn't fire the first shots in the attack on trust, not by a long shot.
klyrs 6y ago
Not sure about your timeline; the 60s were predated by the McCarthy era.
AnthonyMouse 6y ago
It would be a lot harder to attack them if they didn't provide such a basis for it. There was a time when journalists at least attempted to be independent: https://conversationswithslava.substack.com/p/coming-soon https://conversationswithslava.substack.com/p/coming-soon Glenn Greenwald: https://reason.com/2021/01/23/journalists-are-authoritarians/ https://reason.com/2021/01/23/journalists-are-authoritarians... > Did you vote for Donald Trump in the last election? > I didn't vote. It's ironic: That's the one old journalism trope that I agree with, which is that if you vote, you psychologically become too connected to a politician. I prefer to just keep my distance. They're a dying breed. And it was never the case that journalists were 100% objective and unbiased. That's impossible. But there was a point in time when they at least made the attempt. Avoided the appearance of impropriety. If you want people to trust you, try being trustworthy.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
  Glenn Greenwald's personal issues with (1) what he considers the appropriate relationship between journalism and "objectivity" and (2) his ability to maintain that relationship if he votes are not my problem. There are dozens/hundreds/thousands of journalists around the world who are perfectly capable of reporting in a way that is useful, insightful, factual, while still voting in elections. I don't want journalists that I read to avoid the appearance of impropriety, I want them to tell me about the world in ways that I can't find out for myself. And I want them to vote. I'm actually generally disgusted by meeting journalists who claim to not have opinions about the things they report on. I would hope that their opinions would be complex, because when you know enough about most things in the world, you realize that most things are pretty complicated and there generally aren't simple answers. But this BS of "I just try to report on what I find out, I don't really have an opinion" is, for me, a shorthand for "I'm too afraid of drawing conclusions about anything, which means I can't help my readers to do that either".
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    It's helpful to distinguish between journalists and historians. Historians have the time and context to make judgments and draw conclusions. Journalists are reporting on things that happened today, and the deadline is in an hour. The story may still be happening by the time the piece is published. You don't have all the information, so any opinion will inherently be misinformed. Report the facts and leave the opinion to someone else. It's possible that what we really need is a separate class of people in between the two. Reporters who provide facts on things that are actively happening, and commentators who provide opinion on things that have finished happening, e.g. a month later once the facts are better established and there has been time to do a thorough investigation, but not years or decades after the fact. The problem is how to prevent the two from merging together and creating what we have now.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
      There are many, many journalists who work on stories that do not have "hour from now" deadlines. People reporting on, for example: the move towards renewable energy supplies, the redistricting/closure of Chicago public schools over the last decade, gerrymandering processes in a half-dozen states ... in fact, I'd wager than the majority of things that journalists write about are not "hot news" at all. You cannot "report the facts and leave the opinion to someone else". Even the order in which you report facts is implicitly an opinion.
dgb23 6y ago
Sustainable trust is earned, not blindly given. It is the responsibility of each participant to criticize the status quo and those who have taken up responsibility and power, or else they keep building on brittle, hierarchical foundations until everything crashes down. Yes, there are populists who spread political lies, insecure managers who default to micro-management, bureaucratic systems that slow everything down and disillusioned workers. Their common trait is mistrust: They often have been hurt by those that they should be trusting, they are not being heard and sometimes they see through the bullshit. The best case is that there is simply a lack of real communication, education and direct involvement, because that problem is solvable. It is very simple: for trust to grow and stabilize, both parties need to care and invest in each other. There is no shortcut, no trick and no amount of marketing, propaganda or talk will get either side out of this. That means both sides need to admit their mistakes, be vulnerable, caring, hopeful and most importantly honest and transparent.
yrimaxi 6y ago
Chomsky has explained that the counter-culture of the 60’s was viewed as the “crisis of democracy” by the Trilateral Commission. An excess of democracy: special interests like women, the elderly, environmentalists, ethnic minorities, and so on were trying to enter the public arena. In short: the general population. (What is a non-special interest? Business interests.) It is completely illogical to immediately conclude that people who are complaining and pointing out that things are not right are necessarily themselves the cause of all that strife. Maybe they were responding to antecedent causes?
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > What is a non-special interest? Business interests. Ironically, business interests are the original special interests that Adam Smith warned about: “The interest of the dealers, however, in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public. To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers. To widen the market may frequently be agreeable enough to the interest of the public; but to narrow the competition must always be against it, and can serve only to enable the dealers, by raising their profits above what they naturally would be, to levy, for their own benefit, an absurd tax upon the rest of their fellow-citizens. The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.” (Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter 9)
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- wahern 6y ago
  > Chomsky has explained that the counter-culture of the 60’s was viewed as the “crisis of democracy” by the Trilateral Commission. An excess of democracy: special interests like women, the elderly, environmentalists, ethnic minorities, and so on were trying to enter the public arena. In short: the general population. The problem is with the rhetoric. You don't need to daemonize the system to reform it. For example, AFAIU the Women's Suffrage movement didn't take that course. Nor did the early mid-century Civil Rights movement. Later in the century (e.g. with the Vietnam War protests) radical Leftist academic discourse went mainstream. Conservative academics and pundits started adopting similar rhetoric not long after (consider Reagan's anti-government slogan), which really went mainstream in the 1980s and, especially, the 1990s with Gingrich's Republican Revolution campaigning strategies. The rhetoric has essentially become nihilistic. People like Chomsky are as much to blame as anyone else. But you don't become someone as famous as Chomsky without radical, absolutist rhetoric. In that sense academia in general is to blame. Though, there were other dynamics, e.g. opinion journalism, that brought the academic discourse into the popular discourse.
InitialLastName 6y ago
I've seen an argument made that people fundamentally need to be able to trust that their government officials are honest (read: acting in good faith) and fundamentally competent. For a certain generation of people, Watergate eliminated any notion of the first, and the Iran-Contra affair blew away the second. The real problem is that both of those needs are self-fulfilling: if people expect their politicians to be tacitly dishonest and incompetent, they're fine with electing openly dishonest and incompetent politicians because "at least they're open about it".

AndrewBissell 6y ago

All the things I mentioned were entirely bipartisan affairs. In fact, we just witnessed the president who initiated the Iraq War feted and lauded by the press for his appearance at the inauguration of a new president from the "opposing" party who enthusiastically endorsed that war as a Senator. The counterculture left is a very broad category, with some legitimate and organic elements mixed up with some very confused, self-indulgent, or aimlessly subversive ones. But it didn't fire the first shots in the attack on trust, not by a long shot.

klyrs 6y ago

Not sure about your timeline; the 60s were predated by the McCarthy era.

AnthonyMouse 6y ago

It would be a lot harder to attack them if they didn't provide such a basis for it. There was a time when journalists at least attempted to be independent: https://conversationswithslava.substack.com/p/coming-soon https://conversationswithslava.substack.com/p/coming-soon Glenn Greenwald: https://reason.com/2021/01/23/journalists-are-authoritarians/ https://reason.com/2021/01/23/journalists-are-authoritarians... > Did you vote for Donald Trump in the last election? > I didn't vote. It's ironic: That's the one old journalism trope that I agree with, which is that if you vote, you psychologically become too connected to a politician. I prefer to just keep my distance. They're a dying breed. And it was never the case that journalists were 100% objective and unbiased. That's impossible. But there was a point in time when they at least made the attempt. Avoided the appearance of impropriety. If you want people to trust you, try being trustworthy.

PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
Glenn Greenwald's personal issues with (1) what he considers the appropriate relationship between journalism and "objectivity" and (2) his ability to maintain that relationship if he votes are not my problem. There are dozens/hundreds/thousands of journalists around the world who are perfectly capable of reporting in a way that is useful, insightful, factual, while still voting in elections. I don't want journalists that I read to avoid the appearance of impropriety, I want them to tell me about the world in ways that I can't find out for myself. And I want them to vote. I'm actually generally disgusted by meeting journalists who claim to not have opinions about the things they report on. I would hope that their opinions would be complex, because when you know enough about most things in the world, you realize that most things are pretty complicated and there generally aren't simple answers. But this BS of "I just try to report on what I find out, I don't really have an opinion" is, for me, a shorthand for "I'm too afraid of drawing conclusions about anything, which means I can't help my readers to do that either".
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  It's helpful to distinguish between journalists and historians. Historians have the time and context to make judgments and draw conclusions. Journalists are reporting on things that happened today, and the deadline is in an hour. The story may still be happening by the time the piece is published. You don't have all the information, so any opinion will inherently be misinformed. Report the facts and leave the opinion to someone else. It's possible that what we really need is a separate class of people in between the two. Reporters who provide facts on things that are actively happening, and commentators who provide opinion on things that have finished happening, e.g. a month later once the facts are better established and there has been time to do a thorough investigation, but not years or decades after the fact. The problem is how to prevent the two from merging together and creating what we have now.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
    There are many, many journalists who work on stories that do not have "hour from now" deadlines. People reporting on, for example: the move towards renewable energy supplies, the redistricting/closure of Chicago public schools over the last decade, gerrymandering processes in a half-dozen states ... in fact, I'd wager than the majority of things that journalists write about are not "hot news" at all. You cannot "report the facts and leave the opinion to someone else". Even the order in which you report facts is implicitly an opinion.

dgb23 6y ago

Sustainable trust is earned, not blindly given. It is the responsibility of each participant to criticize the status quo and those who have taken up responsibility and power, or else they keep building on brittle, hierarchical foundations until everything crashes down. Yes, there are populists who spread political lies, insecure managers who default to micro-management, bureaucratic systems that slow everything down and disillusioned workers. Their common trait is mistrust: They often have been hurt by those that they should be trusting, they are not being heard and sometimes they see through the bullshit. The best case is that there is simply a lack of real communication, education and direct involvement, because that problem is solvable. It is very simple: for trust to grow and stabilize, both parties need to care and invest in each other. There is no shortcut, no trick and no amount of marketing, propaganda or talk will get either side out of this. That means both sides need to admit their mistakes, be vulnerable, caring, hopeful and most importantly honest and transparent.

yrimaxi 6y ago

Chomsky has explained that the counter-culture of the 60’s was viewed as the “crisis of democracy” by the Trilateral Commission. An excess of democracy: special interests like women, the elderly, environmentalists, ethnic minorities, and so on were trying to enter the public arena. In short: the general population. (What is a non-special interest? Business interests.) It is completely illogical to immediately conclude that people who are complaining and pointing out that things are not right are necessarily themselves the cause of all that strife. Maybe they were responding to antecedent causes?

dragonwriter 6y ago
> What is a non-special interest? Business interests. Ironically, business interests are the original special interests that Adam Smith warned about: “The interest of the dealers, however, in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public. To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers. To widen the market may frequently be agreeable enough to the interest of the public; but to narrow the competition must always be against it, and can serve only to enable the dealers, by raising their profits above what they naturally would be, to levy, for their own benefit, an absurd tax upon the rest of their fellow-citizens. The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.” (Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter 9)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
wahern 6y ago
> Chomsky has explained that the counter-culture of the 60’s was viewed as the “crisis of democracy” by the Trilateral Commission. An excess of democracy: special interests like women, the elderly, environmentalists, ethnic minorities, and so on were trying to enter the public arena. In short: the general population. The problem is with the rhetoric. You don't need to daemonize the system to reform it. For example, AFAIU the Women's Suffrage movement didn't take that course. Nor did the early mid-century Civil Rights movement. Later in the century (e.g. with the Vietnam War protests) radical Leftist academic discourse went mainstream. Conservative academics and pundits started adopting similar rhetoric not long after (consider Reagan's anti-government slogan), which really went mainstream in the 1980s and, especially, the 1990s with Gingrich's Republican Revolution campaigning strategies. The rhetoric has essentially become nihilistic. People like Chomsky are as much to blame as anyone else. But you don't become someone as famous as Chomsky without radical, absolutist rhetoric. In that sense academia in general is to blame. Though, there were other dynamics, e.g. opinion journalism, that brought the academic discourse into the popular discourse.

InitialLastName 6y ago

I've seen an argument made that people fundamentally need to be able to trust that their government officials are honest (read: acting in good faith) and fundamentally competent. For a certain generation of people, Watergate eliminated any notion of the first, and the Iran-Contra affair blew away the second. The real problem is that both of those needs are self-fulfilling: if people expect their politicians to be tacitly dishonest and incompetent, they're fine with electing openly dishonest and incompetent politicians because "at least they're open about it".