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It's a mantra at this point that polarization has gotten out of control, but one of the biggest effects it seems to have is this reverse-psychology effect I'm

• void_mint 5y ago
  > I'm in a big American city, and I remember that until the online kids and snarky liberals started moralizing about mask protocol, there wasn't as much resistance to wearing masks among right-wing crazies. We're living in very different worlds I guess.
  • birken 5y ago
    Yes, don't you remember the early days of the pandemic when Donald Trump was very pro-mask, including regularly wearing a mask himself, and then only when the liberal started moralizing he turned anti-mask?
    • void_mint 5y ago
      Are we talking about political figures or the people that follow them? The poster I'm responding to is talking about the latter. edit Someone already pointed out that this is an obvious biased misinformation post.
    • op00to 5y ago
      Ex-president, twice impeached Trump on April 3, 2020 at the White House: “The C.D.C. is advising the use of nonmedical cloth face covering as an additional voluntary public health measure. So it’s voluntary. You don’t have to do it. They suggested for a period of time, but this is voluntary. I don’t think I’m going to be doing it.” “I just don’t want to be doing — I don’t know, somehow sitting in the Oval Office behind that beautiful Resolute Desk, the great Resolute Desk. I think wearing a face mask as I greet presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens — I don’t know, somehow I don’t see it for myself. I just, I just don’t.” You are delusional.
      • advael 5y ago
        I think they were being facetious. Yes, mask compliance was probably a bad example, because this was politicized from both sides pretty much right away. I think the general point stands though
      • anigbrowl 5y ago
        They're not delusional, they're sarcastic. Like hyperbole, this isn't conducive to good discussions. I'm so tired of internet discourse where people are constantly trying to one-up each other.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • slacka 5y ago
      > you remember the early days of the pandemic when Donald Trump was very pro-mask, including regularly wearing a mask himself, I don't remember it. Because it never happened: https://apnews.com/article/michael-pence-virus-outbreak-donald-trump-ap-top-news-politics-7651589ac439646e5cf873d021f1f4b6 https://apnews.com/article/michael-pence-virus-outbreak-dona... It wasn't until the pandemic was raging in the summer that he wore a mask in public and then quickly stopped doing so. He even put on a show of ripping off his mask after he came back from his Covid hospitalization.
    • mypalmike 5y ago
      Either you are being downvoted for sarcasm, or you're being downvoted for being wrong. Hard to say, but I suspect you're shot by both sides.
  • armchairhacker 5y ago
    I do know some conservative, religious, pro-Trump communities were very focused on stopping the spread of covid and locking down. It wasn’t a partisan issue, it was common knowledge that covid-19 made people sick and we had to stop it. Until Donald Trump decided to say covid-19 is a hoax and preventative measures are unnecessary. Presumably because he‘s so contrarian that anything the Democrats supported he opposed and vice versa. It was a dumb move and many (including me) believe it cost him the election, if he decided to support lockdowns I really think he would’ve won by a long shot. And now it’s too late, since many conservatives got so invested in the fact that covid-19 is fake, and people can’t admit when they’re wrong. I wish liberals were more sympathetic and tried to make it easier for conservatives to accept the vaccine instead of mocking and shaming. But it’s so hard to get people to admit when they’re wrong.
    • midasuni 5y ago
      It’s interesting. Her run the U.K. vaccine take up amongst older demographics is nearly 100%, and the left/right split has major age differences. The right and old are massively pro vaccines because their man in government (Johnson) slapped a flag on it and said it was great. If Corbyn had won in 2019 (from a higher youth turnout and lower elder turnout), there’s no way the press or the elder demographics would be so accepting, and the country would be polarised with covid as a pivot.
      • nicoburns 5y ago
        I don't think so. Healthcare just isn't a politicised issue in the UK in the same way as it is in the US. If Corbyn had won you'd probably have seen a lot of objections to the massive public spending on furlough schemes and the like, but pretty much everyone in mainstream UK politics is onboard with vaccines. And there's much less of a tendency to pick a fight for the sake of picking a fight here.
    • void_mint 5y ago
      > And now it’s too late, since many conservatives got so invested in the fact that covid-19 is fake, and people can’t admit when they’re wrong. I wish liberals were more sympathetic and tried to make it easier for conservatives to accept the vaccine instead of mocking and shaming. But it’s so hard to get people to admit when they’re wrong. It's interesting that you didn't say "I wish more conservatives would admit they were wrong", but instead put the onus of action on liberals.
• ianleeclark 5y ago
  > It's a mantra at this point that polarization has gotten out of control, but one of the biggest effects it seems to have is this reverse-psychology effect I've long thought the best way of reaching 100% vaccination in the US was to have competing Democrat and Republican vaccines. Democrats could don a dashiki and say one thing while Republicans could put up a crack smoking pillow salesman to say another.
  • eunos 5y ago
    Make 1 vaccine brand "endorsed by Republican" and other brand "endorsed by Democrat"
    • chrischen 5y ago
      I think the vaccine endorsed by the right is called Ivermectin.
      • mardifoufs 5y ago
        Trump has endorsed the vaccine repeatedly and at the time when democrats were literally saying not to trust the vaccine. So I'm not sure about that
        • epakai 5y ago
          Trump has been spouting anti-vaccine rhetoric since before has candidacy. He dismissed the seriousness of the disease, and called other's response part of a hoax. Before the vaccine he made unnecessary endorsements of alternative treatments. His push for vaccine development and encouraging people to get it might be commendable, but they ring hollow and lack effectiveness because of his past stances.
      • supportlocal4h 5y ago
        I consider myself to be on the right. We use Ivermectin. We have stocked it for years. It's a very handy de-wormer. It has served our livestock very well. If you have never used it, and have never treated animals for worms, maybe you should listen more and talk less. Most experienced people I know on the left are fine with Ivermectin. Oh, you mean for Covid? We use BioNTech and Moderna for that. Please stop confusing people on the right with vulnerable uneducated people in general. There are plenty of those on the left and right. Donald Trump does not represent the right. He represents Trumpers. Unfortunately many of those who shape the Republican party are Trumpers. But there are obviously perfectly reasonable people on the right who are not Trumpers. The ignorant are exploited by both sides. Please be careful to distinguish between the exploiters and the exploited.
• jackfoxy 5y ago
  It's pretty easy to find old video clips of both Biden and Harris talking very skeptically about how fast a vaccine could be rolled out, its efficacy, and safety before they won the election. Contrast with the administration's policy today.
  • rjbwork 5y ago
    Being skeptical of a hypothetical like that is fine. Once the vaccine came out and was shown to be efficacious, they updated their opinions with the data. This is exactly the manner in which one would hope, and indeed expect, their political leaders to behave. To do otherwise is pure reality-denying insanity. I was also very skeptical of the speed at which a vaccine could be created and rolled out. But, once it was rolled out and it was shown to be reasonably safe, certainly far safer than actually getting COVID, I went and got the jab. These are not hypocritical or diametrically opposed viewpoints and actions. They are the behaviors of someone living in reality, with all of the uncertainty that entails.
  • mbrodersen 5y ago
    I change my mind when facts/reality change. What do you do?
    • jackfoxy 5y ago
      > I change my mind when facts/reality change. What do you do? Exactly this. Which is why I remain skeptical. My elderly father had a massive stroke 3 days after receiving the second shot, which was administered right after he recovered from covid, which he contracted after the first shot. I'm also certain his care givers did not report this to the FDA's voluntary MedWatch database, which is the only way the government is tracking adverse events.
      • mbrodersen 5y ago
        Do you know the difference between Causality and Correlation?
• eunos 5y ago
  > until the online kids and snarky liberals started moralizing about mask protocol, there wasn't as much resistance to wearing masks among right-wing crazies. Surprising how easy it is to fracture American society then.
  • advael 5y ago
    I would have been surprised even as recently as ten years ago. Now, I am not. American society has been fractured for quite some time, and is only growing more fractured, exactly because of how easy it is in the current political climate and with current technology
    • Aeolun 5y ago
      After Trump nothing surprises me any more.
      • iammisc 5y ago
        The only people who think Trump was the source of the division are out-of-touch liberals. I don't even mean this pejoratively. I just encourage you to look beyond the current predominant media narratives. This society has been breaking apart for a while. All the signs have been there. Trump shocked the liberals, but Obama shocked the conservatives before him, and we can ping pong back and forth for a while I'm sure. (And yes, conservatives who believe Obama was the sole source of division are also out of touch. People really need to try to understand the other side).
        • eunos 5y ago
          I just puzzled how did Obama win with a landslide yet very divisive (not Obama fault).
          • dham 5y ago
            Hint it's the internet, mainly social media. It's a poisonous parasitic infection that oozes puss throughout society. If the 2000 election happened in this era, America would have been blown up by now.
• Thorentis 5y ago
  The scary part is that it's impossible to verify where most of the online content on both sides come from. The enemies of the West must be having a field day with how easy it is to insert radically opposite and polarising views into each side and then watching big issues become quashed, and little issues become magnified beyond proportion.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • imnotreallynew 5y ago
    > The scary part is that it's impossible to verify where most of the online content on both sides come from. The enemies of the West must be having a field day with how easy it is to insert radically opposite and polarising views into each side and then watching big issues become quashed, and little issues become magnified beyond proportion. I have a theory that I cannot provide verifiable evidence for, but due to the technical fluency of the readers here I believe it may be interesting to some. I run a small marketing service that ingests new content submitted to a number of social media sites (colloquially known as “social listening”). We run text analytics on the content, primarily to find marketing opportunities for customers. That system also has very rudimentary checks for “bot” accounts. Starting in early 2020 there was a massive, massive spike in the number of bot accounts creating and responding to content on reddit. Our system doesn’t “cross-reference” flagged accounts very well, but I manually went through the post history on a few of those accounts and found that many of them had responded with congruent comments to submissions of other flagged accounts. Furthermore, most of the flagged accounts had a similar pattern in the timing of their posts. Posts and comments were relatively irregular and sporadic near the start of the accounts’s history, indicative of a real user. Then, submissions completely stopped for a number of months. After the pause, the account would resume submissions and comments with far more regularity. The patterns exhibited by those accounts may indicate that they were overtaken and sold in bulk accounts lists for use as bot accounts. Every account that I checked was posting content with a clear narrative. I believe these are very large bot networks upvoting and submitting content of a particular nature in order to sway popular discourse and give an appearance of a particular consensus among conversation participants. The plausibility of my theory has been augmented by the fact that rudimentary software for creating reddit bot networks can be found for sale on various “botting” forums. Furthermore, I was accepted into the OpenAI GPT-3 beta a few months ago; the capabilities of that model have further convinced me of the validity of my theory. If you have experience with bots, natural language processing, or another related field, please feel free to point out flaws in my theory!
• titzer 5y ago
  As an American who has lived abroad for a significant number of years and returned recently, it becomes abundantly clear, that if we only measure by the amount of time spent bitching, moaning, and fighting, Americans hate each other more than anything else on this planet. Disease, war, famine, injustice, genocide, plague? None will garner as much sincere unflagging burning rage as what those other fuckers did or said, or would do or say, because hate, hate, hate, hate. It's worse than football teams or some rivalry with the neighboring state. At this point, people are literally killing themselves and others to own the other side. And maybe both sides are enjoying this thrill a little too much.
  • civilized 5y ago
    A lot of people seem fundamentally ridiculous these days. Silly, frivolous, unserious, out of touch with reality. They should know better, and they don't care that they should know better. They're motivated by something else. I don't know if that's a new thing or not, but that's how it has seemed to me during this pandemic. Quite a few people have gone without an easy, safe, miraculously effective vaccine - a marvel of the latest science, freely available at their fingertips - and literally died. As far as I can tell, their deepest motivation to do this was to express their distrust of the establishment and/or stick it to their political opponents. In a "lol nothing matters" world, all that matters to these people is whether they get to stick it to the man. Nothing bad can really happen, so no real thought is needed to stay safe. It's fine to just believe the first entertainingly outrageous quack theory that flatters your sentiments or ideology or tribe. It's as if they were interrupted by a gunman while watching TV, and made no motion to defend themselves, assuming the gun pointed at their heads was part of the show.
    • TheBlight 5y ago
      I don't think you have a complete understanding of the larger opposing point of view that you think you do. What you're regurgitating is a media enhanced narrative. You are upset with a caricature.
      • civilized 5y ago
• memling 5y ago
  > I'm in a big American city, and I remember that until the online kids and snarky liberals started moralizing about mask protocol, there wasn't as much resistance to wearing masks among right-wing crazies. The Law always provokes its opposite.
  • wolverine876 5y ago
    It happens occasionally, but rarely.
    • memling 5y ago
      > It happens occasionally, but rarely. For some definitions of "law" this is probably true. But I think under the more general principle it's much more likely to happen than not. If you look at the law as any set of rules, you find that they generally accuse you (it is not the subjunctive mood, but the imperative that is the mood of least reality): why do I have to tell my kids to wash their hands after going to the bathroom? Because they don't. It's the law of hand-washing. (For a more humorous take, Gary Larsen forever immortalized the idea with the alarm + light over the men's room.) COVID's hand-washing suggestions are the grown-up version. And the way my kids resent it when I tell them to go back and wash their hands is not much different than the way some of my otherwise reasonable co-workers reacted. Of course not everyone reacted this way, but if the messaging were somewhat different I wouldn't be surprised to have found compliance higher. Law is always paired with a consequence. For my kids, it's a short trip back to the washroom and possibly a haranguing depending on whether I'm extra irritable. For our society, it's sometimes death and/or being subjected to schadenfreude (haha, stupid rednecks took ivermectin and not only poisoned themselves but also died of COVID). YMMV, but I have found this basic principle explains a lot: the law always accuses, and it always provokes its opposite. Moreover, people are really good at hearing law even if that's not the intent of the speaker. Communicating is hard. A friend was a climbing instructor for awhile, and she related that when teaching people who were scared of heights to climb that the phrase "don't look down" (the law of "don't look down") was verboten. Instead, the command was "keep looking up." The difference between the two phrases was illuminating.
• briandear 5y ago
  > there wasn't as much resistance to wearing masks among right-wing crazies. Maybe because data started showing that masks aren’t reducing infections? Or Gavin Newsome and London Breed partying like rock stars without masks. Or the Met Gala where only the servants wore masks? Or the data (from schools,) that show the masks weren’t affecting infection rates? Or Fauci saying “no” privately? Then yes publicly? Or the insanity of people wearing masks when driving alone in their car? Or running in the woods? Nothing about mask policy has been sane.
• iammisc 5y ago
  Everyone's a reactionary.
  • wolverine876 5y ago
    It's an important statement, but because it's the self-justifying propaganda of reactionaries. People work together and get things done; I see it all the time; in fact, that's how democracies - by far the most successful form of government in human history - that's how they work.
    • iammisc 5y ago
      How could you possibly say democracy is the most successful government system in history? There is little reason to believe that. These sorts of kitschy phrases being substituted for real discourse is why were here. Democracy is nice, but historically it leads to very bad outcomes in a few hundred years. What remains to be seen is whether or not this democracy will sustain itself.
      • raxxorrax 5y ago
        It is the most stable form of governance that doesn't require subjugation of citizens and has the ability to self-correct because election disallow personal Democacies are indeed young so I don't get your point that it will lead to something "very bad".
        • iammisc 5y ago
          Democracies are not 'young'. Rome was a democracy for four hundred years before falling into autocracy and empire. As was Athens and some other Greek cities. Many 'barbarian' tribes were democracies as well. Democracy is not something invented in 1776. All experiments in democracy have so far failed. Most fail spectacularly and devolve into authoritarianism (see the 1st French Republic). There has never been a long-sustained democratic government. The most stable forms of government is a representative monarchy or an empire. In 2066, the monarchy of England will celebrate 1000 pretty-much contiguous years. There are actually monarchies that have lasted longer (like the Eastern half of the roman empire which lasted more than 1500 years, as well as the pharaohs of Egypt or the empires of China). There is no democracy that has lasted that long. And to say that the English monarchy requires 'subjugation of its citizens' is quite silly, or even that the Roman empire under Caesar required constant human rights abuses of its citizens (it didn't... roman citizens had lots of rights we enjoy today). Look.... I believe in democracy, but I don't have a religious fervor over it. I am shocked when my fellow Americans seem so unschooled in basic history. Indeed, many of the undemocratic things put into our constitution (like the much maligned electoral college) were put there by our founders hoping to avoid the pitfalls of democracy. They were very aware that democracy typically fails spectacularly, and put in many anti-democratic things into the constitution to avoid it.
• howaboutnope 5y ago
  > I'm in a big American city, and I remember that until the online kids and snarky liberals started moralizing about mask protocol, there wasn't as much resistance to wearing masks among right-wing crazies. In Berlin, you could see graffitis such as "we will vaccinate you all!" or "covid deniers out". If there was any way to measure it, I'd bet that the net effect of that is negative.
• sleepysysadmin 5y ago
  >It's a mantra at this point that polarization has gotten out of control, but one of the biggest effects it seems to have is this reverse-psychology effect Covid19 is a religion. You cannot question religions. It's also not a problem until something goes beyond. >I'm in a big American city, and I remember that until the online kids and snarky liberals started moralizing about mask protocol, there wasn't as much resistance to wearing masks among right-wing crazies. Until it became a religion. Those right-wing crazies are religious seeing it as religion vs religion. Compared to the flu seasons, which we go get a shot and then do nothing else. Covid for ages 25-35 is 40 times less likely to harm you compared to the regular flu season. If you are 25-35, you go get the shot and then stop giving a shit about covid because it's virtually no risk. By all measures soon as the covid shot was available. You offer it as the flu shot and tell people to get it and you go back to flu season measures. Which is basically nothing. Yet I know how many people who will drive 100km/h in a school zone are scared shitless by covid. The risk mismatch is not because of actual risk but rather because it's a religion. Morality tells them they need to be scared. >It reminded me of the time people were worried about pollutants causing hormonal changes in indicator species, and then Alex Jones started talking about how "they're turning the frogs gay" and the meaningful version of that discourse vanished too. There are 9 confirmed estrogens in our drinking water. Especially true of salt-water coastal cities. Hence why you pretty much MUST have water filtration. How well would society function if we were doing mass hormone replacement therapy on everyone? Would people start being far more likely to be gay frogs or trans or just emotional messes like typical HRT symptoms. Especially if you aren't aware HRT is occurring. Why the huge increase in trans people? Is it because of these estrogens in our drinking water? Nestle and others approve though. > It's made me wary of the sport of finding what crazy things my political enemies believe to make fun of them, because it seems like the net effect of this is creating "opposite" erroneous beliefs with no evidence We are on this world together. Finding 'crazy things' or trying to start fights by calling people names does not benefit anyone.
  • coffeemig 5y ago
    Is there a cheap way to test my tap water for said estrogens?
• TheFreim 5y ago
  > polarization has gotten out of control > right-wing crazies Seems to be a bit hypocritical, no?
• coffeemig 5y ago
  Is there a term for this phenomenon yet? I’ve had these same thoughts.