4 ms·
Excuse the rant but i have a working theory that it is an unchecked feedback cycle that's decades old, only now based on political party. People generally hold
by liquidise 5y ago
Excuse the rant but i have a working theory that it is an unchecked feedback cycle that's decades old, only now based on political party.
People generally hold sweeping, often negative, opinions of "those people". Over the decades, "those people" has been defined by race, religion, ethnicity, etc. Today in the US it is which political party people perceive you to be affiliated with.
I call this a feedback cycle because in my experience the people using this sort of rhetoric aren't interested in being proven wrong. They have chosen consciously or otherwise to vilify a group, or buy into preexisting vilification. Undoing that is hard work so it just doesn't happen. Absent any pressure, people assume themselves correct and chalk up another datapoint confirming their own biases.
This is readily apparent in response to any mass killing/tragedy. My more politically extreme friends seem to race for any evidence they can find that they perpetrator is Democrat/Republican. Of course this boils down to pure speculation (gun ownership, smokes pot, etc), but the urgency and desire is there all the same.
In summary it is little surprise that the politicians in Washington are so hardlined on their stances and party affiliations. This is effectively the government the voters have demanded. When the citizens of a country start vilify half the country, their representatives reaching across the isle is political suicide. And thus we sit.
- awb 5y ago> the people using this sort of rhetoric aren't interested in being proven wrong. They have chosen consciously or otherwise to vilify a group, or buy into preexisting vilification. I’d love to be proven wrong on this point. Any data you can share that red/blue is not the most efficient segmentation for pro/anti-vaxx and/or pro/anti-test?
- liquidise 5y agoOff the cuff: Blacks in the US are the lowest vaccinated racial group (44%) in spite of voting the strongest for Biden/Harris (87%)[1]. This is part of the problem with the broad strokes approach, it completely erases trends like this. I tried making a trend line comparing Vax % by state to Biden vote %. Interesting result[1] that i think supports both of our arguments. A trend line exists to support your claim, though i would argue it's not a great fit and the data is quite scattered. I should also say i didn't mean to harsh address your comment specifically. I don't dispute the trend you claimed i was more ranting about the larger categorization that my parent comment was asking about. Linking my sources[2][3] as well. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election#Statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidentia... 2: https://www.dropbox.com/s/3rieowmakzvfzuv/vax%20vs%20demo%20vote.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/3rieowmakzvfzuv/vax%20vs%20demo%20... 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election#Results_by_state https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidentia... 4: https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-states/ https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-st...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]