8 ms·

In the last 10 years I’ve seen massive buildings constructed in the town I went to school in (Champaign). Literally sky scrapers all over. So yes, we can solve

In the last 10 years I’ve seen massive buildings constructed in the town I went to school in (Champaign). Literally sky scrapers all over. So yes, we can solve a public problem (housing). The question is whether we can recognize and want to solve the problems imo. Today our media seems incapable of highlighting issues. The media pushes a narrative to effect social change (ie political); rather than presents the issues. On the ground most people agree on the issues, but half the population take the narrative at face value and push the same political ideology (which often doesn’t address the root issues). To be frank, we have a cultural issue. Most of our institutions rely on a solid cultural basis. With the degrading of our culture (classically liberal, ie conservative values, but libertarian in policy) we no longer have a conservative value system being presented. So we have the libertarian “you do you” mentality, without the public shame that comes with certain actions (such as public displays of nudity, open drug use, etc). To me, this comes across as many places in the United States have become unsafe for children - SF being one. I can’t let me kids walk down the street with needles, human waste and screaming homeless. We don’t help those people because we don’t have the cultural foundation to. In short, we can solve more problems than before, but the culture itself has the problem.

hotpotamus 4y ago
Do you think returning to god would help solve our cultural issues?
- Kye 4y ago
  Which one(s)? That's always the issue. Even people who nominally follow the same set can't agree on how to apply it down here on Earth. There's a reason the First Amendment says government and religion shouldn't meddle in each other's affairs.
  - hotpotamus 4y ago
    The one true god who created America as a shining city on a hill, through his apostles, the founding fathers. I think you'll find the 1st Amendment says no such thing; that was an interpretation recently corrected by the Supreme Court.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - Kye 4y ago
      This is a great example of the issue. I don't have any issue with you being a bit of a nutter. I don't even mind you having representation in government! I just Don't want people like you you running the whole thing. I'd end up in a gas chamber quick, and I suspect most Christians would fail your test. I appreciate our tripartite system with all its goopy progress-slowing nonsense because while it slows down stuff I want, it gives people time to organize against stuff they don't. Like theocracy. edit: since HN won't let me reply... You misunderstand. It's about holding on to progress. It took decades for conservatives to dismantle the wins of the Civil Rights movement. Decades to start putting cracks in the progress for queer rights. And so on. Those wins were hard, and it took more work to undo them. And the undoing is so slow that there's still time to recover. That's the system your "apostles" created.
      - hotpotamus 4y ago
        I wonder what it is you think you're progressing towards? And what you'd be willing to pay for it?
      - hotpotamus 4y ago
        Have you considered that what you consider progress may be someone else's regress? And perhaps now we're back on the path of progress after decades of diversion?
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  - ethbr0 4y ago
    But at the time the First Amendment was written, the "country" (read: voters) was much more culturally homogeneous and less diverse (effectively: western European, male, land-owning). Which is to say, as a consequence of increased liberty and acceptance over the past 250ish years, we now have challenges that the framers didn't have to deal with.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
      > much more culturally homogeneous and less diverse (effectively: western European, male, land-owning). While I'd agree that this is how we would view the composition of the early colonies today, I somehow doubt that they would have agreed. The very existence of the United States has changed the baseline for what cultural diversity looks like, so that you can now say things like "Western European" without blinking.
      - ethbr0 4y ago
        Does it matter how they would have seen themselves, for the modern outcomes I listed above?
        PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
        I think it probably does. If the founders saw themselves as already facing issues with a diverse population ("those scots-irish, jeesh"), then presumably they took that into account with the design of the government. If they didn't, then it would be correct to say that the Constitution (etc.) does not pay any attention to the implications of a more diverse population.
        ethbr0 4y ago
        Ah. I'd say that by any definition of "diverse", we're more diverse now. So whether they saw themselves as diverse or not, they weren't trying to solve the problem to the degree to which it now needs to be solved. Or, in other words, they designed a flexible democracy for the world they perceived and the world they could imagine, but at some point imagination fails.
- protomyth 4y ago
  Churches satisfied our need for tribe that seems to be a need of a large majority of humans. Churches weren't just about teaching values to aspire to, but also providing a ready made community that was stable and provided tribal activities in person. If you intend to turn anywhere, you need to understand what was without the cynicism of non-majority experiences of system breakdowns. Online communities don't do that job well. Worse, online communities are not stable and people are inclined to be more hateful. Humans need both sides of our nature satisfied. We are tribal but we must also have outlets for individual time, activities, and a achievement. We need to own things on our own too.
  - ethbr0 4y ago
    > providing a ready made community that was stable and provided tribal activities in person Exactly! I'd also phrase it as "a consistent, nationally-shared narrative" (consistent, at least in a normal distribution sense). We have effectively excluded god as a unifying cultural force in the West, on both liberal and conservative sides (pop-political "god" is no substitute for an apolitical, moral god). And when our societies have subsequently fractured and cast around for any replacement unifying force, we've been puzzled about what's happening... It may indeed be that religion (or national religion, in the cases of DPRK, China, and Russia) is the worst unifying force, except for all the others.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
      You paint a picture in which religion swept everyone up in its "unification", but this has hardly ever been true. Even in the societies that show the most "unification" around a given religion, there have always been alternatives, and there have always been non-believers. Every human religion has fractured into subsets and schisms (even Buddhism! even Catholicism!). The idea that it's a unifier comes mostly from those who benefit from widespread acceptance of that idea.
      - ethbr0 4y ago
        Religion as a force for cultural homogenization doesn't require a single religion. A Catholic society with a pluralism of sects and opinions is still more homogeneous than a non-Catholic, more individually-independent alternative. Even a Catholic / Anglican split society is more homogeneous in the sense of grand bargains being feasible, in the sense that there are fewer, discrete, and more hierarchical power centers who can bargain with each other. One of the great failures of cultural liberalism in the 1960s to effect more change was an inability to organize into coherent, unified, large groups of voters that could function and bargain within a democracy. If every asshole gets an opinion, it's hard to arrive at a "nobody is happy, but everyone is optimally least-sad" bargain.
- alexashka 4y ago
  No, the attempt to insert God into people's lives would be yet another cultural issue that's irreconcilable.
faceplanted 4y ago
> The question is whether we can recognize and want to solve the problems imo. Today our media seems incapable of highlighting issues. The media pushes a narrative to effect social change (ie political); rather than presents the issues. Interesting. I actually have a completely opposite theory of media. In my experience and research, the way that news media effect change actually _is_ to make narratives and more importantly, bang on and on about them for quite possibly years. Obviously, me being in the UK, it might be different. But I can find countless examples of the media just presenting issues neutrally and absolutely nothing happening. Because people presented with just an issue simply go "damn, that's crazy, someone should do something about that", and then forget it unless it's about dogs. But the success cases of the media truly affecting change (I'd list some example but they're all UK cases. A big one is one of our papers spent years pushing for an investigation into a famous case of a mass death at a football match where the police blamed the victims for looting corpses and attacking people to deflect from them not acting in time.) But they all seem to include specifically _finding_ narratives to frame stories with and basically telling them again and again with constant calls to action and searching out every new detail about the story that can have anything done about it. This is why the NRA are so incredibly effective at making change, they bang on and on about one thing and tell their members whenever anything they can show up to is happening and exactly what to say and do to disrupt or prevent it.
- Sir_Liigmaz 4y ago
  The media (assuming were talking news media) needs to be held to a higher standard imo. The search for truth is a difficult, nuanced, and incredibly important to our society. Using it as a tool to push any narrative erodes trust in it and leads to more relativist crap.
  - ethbr0 4y ago
    I opined on this is another thread and essentially despaired of ever being able to hold the media to a higher standard, because of the regulating-the-experts problem. In my thinking, we'll cause more harm than good by trying to adjust the output, so why try? Instead, we should focus on the economic input and make it more profitable to produce quality news. And notably, that is very much not the economic incentives in place for news now.
trasz 4y ago
>I can’t let me kids walk down the street with needles, human waste and screaming homeless. Yet you fail to realize the problems above were caused by the very same “conservative values” you want more of.
- protomyth 4y ago
  I doubt any conservatives politicians have had any influence on SF politics in a long time. SF is multiple shades of blue.
  - andrepd 4y ago
    And "blue" means the same neoliberal way of thinking as "red", just pained with a veneer of progressiveness on non-economic matters.
    - trasz 4y ago
      Yes, in US both parties are conservative, it’s just that one is bit more extreme. Still: not having a proper drug prevention policy, or housing, are both staples of ring-wing philosophy.
PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
> The media pushes a narrative to effect social change (ie political); rather than presents the issues. Ah yes, the beautiful naive dream of "non-political" ways of tackling things. There are very, very few things in this world that are not bound up in one's political views and values. Take your mention of the issue of homelessness and drugs. So there's the surface presentation version of this problem - visibly homeless people, visible drug use, visible drug paraphernalia lying around etc. We can all (more or less) agree that on this. But what are the causes of these issues? What are the best solutions? The answers to these questions are all bound up in political values. So, I happen to believe that the USA has been on a journey for 50 years to transform the narrative about poverty and despair as societal failings into one in which they are personal failures arising from personal choices. If you see the world as I do, then you will see a different set of causes than someone who firmly believes that poverty and despair really do arise from personal failure and weak moral character. And that in turn will imply a different set of solutions. You cannot separate out "issues" from "politics". Even the simple matter of the things you consider to be "issues" is all bound up in your "politics".
- lettergram 4y ago
  > The answers to these questions are all bound up in political values. But they aren’t though, there is an objective truth. To cut through to said truth those with differing opinions have to be willing to accept they are wrong. Due to the media narrative and political leanings people are unwilling or unable to accept they’re wrong. Take gun violence. It’s exclusively a cultural issue in one community in the United States. https://austingwalters.com/firearms-by-the-numbers/#Firearm_Related_Homicides_by_the_Demographics https://austingwalters.com/firearms-by-the-numbers/#Firearm_... To be clear, it’s an issue in the black male population. It’s not gangs generally (Hispanic community has a higher gang rate and lower firearm homicide rate). the white population has less gun violence than almost anywhere in the world; same with Hispanic and Asian. But saying that breaks a narrative and no one will accept that as the truth. Once you can accept the truth, you can resolve the issues one-way-or-another. Try saying what I just wrote in a classroom, town hall meeting, or floor of congress. Watch what the media does to you, watch what your community does to you. It’s the truth. But the media has made it such that we can’t discuss it. If the media presented the truth or even a balanced view, we wouldn’t have so much of the issues because it would be okay to have the view of truth.

hotpotamus 4y ago

Do you think returning to god would help solve our cultural issues?

Kye 4y ago
Which one(s)? That's always the issue. Even people who nominally follow the same set can't agree on how to apply it down here on Earth. There's a reason the First Amendment says government and religion shouldn't meddle in each other's affairs.
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  The one true god who created America as a shining city on a hill, through his apostles, the founding fathers. I think you'll find the 1st Amendment says no such thing; that was an interpretation recently corrected by the Supreme Court.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - Kye 4y ago
    This is a great example of the issue. I don't have any issue with you being a bit of a nutter. I don't even mind you having representation in government! I just Don't want people like you you running the whole thing. I'd end up in a gas chamber quick, and I suspect most Christians would fail your test. I appreciate our tripartite system with all its goopy progress-slowing nonsense because while it slows down stuff I want, it gives people time to organize against stuff they don't. Like theocracy. edit: since HN won't let me reply... You misunderstand. It's about holding on to progress. It took decades for conservatives to dismantle the wins of the Civil Rights movement. Decades to start putting cracks in the progress for queer rights. And so on. Those wins were hard, and it took more work to undo them. And the undoing is so slow that there's still time to recover. That's the system your "apostles" created.
    - hotpotamus 4y ago
      I wonder what it is you think you're progressing towards? And what you'd be willing to pay for it?
    - hotpotamus 4y ago
      Have you considered that what you consider progress may be someone else's regress? And perhaps now we're back on the path of progress after decades of diversion?
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
- ethbr0 4y ago
  But at the time the First Amendment was written, the "country" (read: voters) was much more culturally homogeneous and less diverse (effectively: western European, male, land-owning). Which is to say, as a consequence of increased liberty and acceptance over the past 250ish years, we now have challenges that the framers didn't have to deal with.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
    > much more culturally homogeneous and less diverse (effectively: western European, male, land-owning). While I'd agree that this is how we would view the composition of the early colonies today, I somehow doubt that they would have agreed. The very existence of the United States has changed the baseline for what cultural diversity looks like, so that you can now say things like "Western European" without blinking.
    - ethbr0 4y ago
      Does it matter how they would have seen themselves, for the modern outcomes I listed above?
      - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
        I think it probably does. If the founders saw themselves as already facing issues with a diverse population ("those scots-irish, jeesh"), then presumably they took that into account with the design of the government. If they didn't, then it would be correct to say that the Constitution (etc.) does not pay any attention to the implications of a more diverse population.
        ethbr0 4y ago
        Ah. I'd say that by any definition of "diverse", we're more diverse now. So whether they saw themselves as diverse or not, they weren't trying to solve the problem to the degree to which it now needs to be solved. Or, in other words, they designed a flexible democracy for the world they perceived and the world they could imagine, but at some point imagination fails.
protomyth 4y ago
Churches satisfied our need for tribe that seems to be a need of a large majority of humans. Churches weren't just about teaching values to aspire to, but also providing a ready made community that was stable and provided tribal activities in person. If you intend to turn anywhere, you need to understand what was without the cynicism of non-majority experiences of system breakdowns. Online communities don't do that job well. Worse, online communities are not stable and people are inclined to be more hateful. Humans need both sides of our nature satisfied. We are tribal but we must also have outlets for individual time, activities, and a achievement. We need to own things on our own too.
- ethbr0 4y ago
  > providing a ready made community that was stable and provided tribal activities in person Exactly! I'd also phrase it as "a consistent, nationally-shared narrative" (consistent, at least in a normal distribution sense). We have effectively excluded god as a unifying cultural force in the West, on both liberal and conservative sides (pop-political "god" is no substitute for an apolitical, moral god). And when our societies have subsequently fractured and cast around for any replacement unifying force, we've been puzzled about what's happening... It may indeed be that religion (or national religion, in the cases of DPRK, China, and Russia) is the worst unifying force, except for all the others.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
    You paint a picture in which religion swept everyone up in its "unification", but this has hardly ever been true. Even in the societies that show the most "unification" around a given religion, there have always been alternatives, and there have always been non-believers. Every human religion has fractured into subsets and schisms (even Buddhism! even Catholicism!). The idea that it's a unifier comes mostly from those who benefit from widespread acceptance of that idea.
    - ethbr0 4y ago
      Religion as a force for cultural homogenization doesn't require a single religion. A Catholic society with a pluralism of sects and opinions is still more homogeneous than a non-Catholic, more individually-independent alternative. Even a Catholic / Anglican split society is more homogeneous in the sense of grand bargains being feasible, in the sense that there are fewer, discrete, and more hierarchical power centers who can bargain with each other. One of the great failures of cultural liberalism in the 1960s to effect more change was an inability to organize into coherent, unified, large groups of voters that could function and bargain within a democracy. If every asshole gets an opinion, it's hard to arrive at a "nobody is happy, but everyone is optimally least-sad" bargain.
alexashka 4y ago
No, the attempt to insert God into people's lives would be yet another cultural issue that's irreconcilable.

faceplanted 4y ago

> The question is whether we can recognize and want to solve the problems imo. Today our media seems incapable of highlighting issues. The media pushes a narrative to effect social change (ie political); rather than presents the issues. Interesting. I actually have a completely opposite theory of media. In my experience and research, the way that news media effect change actually _is_ to make narratives and more importantly, bang on and on about them for quite possibly years. Obviously, me being in the UK, it might be different. But I can find countless examples of the media just presenting issues neutrally and absolutely nothing happening. Because people presented with just an issue simply go "damn, that's crazy, someone should do something about that", and then forget it unless it's about dogs. But the success cases of the media truly affecting change (I'd list some example but they're all UK cases. A big one is one of our papers spent years pushing for an investigation into a famous case of a mass death at a football match where the police blamed the victims for looting corpses and attacking people to deflect from them not acting in time.) But they all seem to include specifically _finding_ narratives to frame stories with and basically telling them again and again with constant calls to action and searching out every new detail about the story that can have anything done about it. This is why the NRA are so incredibly effective at making change, they bang on and on about one thing and tell their members whenever anything they can show up to is happening and exactly what to say and do to disrupt or prevent it.

Sir_Liigmaz 4y ago
The media (assuming were talking news media) needs to be held to a higher standard imo. The search for truth is a difficult, nuanced, and incredibly important to our society. Using it as a tool to push any narrative erodes trust in it and leads to more relativist crap.
- ethbr0 4y ago
  I opined on this is another thread and essentially despaired of ever being able to hold the media to a higher standard, because of the regulating-the-experts problem. In my thinking, we'll cause more harm than good by trying to adjust the output, so why try? Instead, we should focus on the economic input and make it more profitable to produce quality news. And notably, that is very much not the economic incentives in place for news now.

trasz 4y ago

>I can’t let me kids walk down the street with needles, human waste and screaming homeless. Yet you fail to realize the problems above were caused by the very same “conservative values” you want more of.

protomyth 4y ago
I doubt any conservatives politicians have had any influence on SF politics in a long time. SF is multiple shades of blue.
- andrepd 4y ago
  And "blue" means the same neoliberal way of thinking as "red", just pained with a veneer of progressiveness on non-economic matters.
  - trasz 4y ago
    Yes, in US both parties are conservative, it’s just that one is bit more extreme. Still: not having a proper drug prevention policy, or housing, are both staples of ring-wing philosophy.

PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago

> The media pushes a narrative to effect social change (ie political); rather than presents the issues. Ah yes, the beautiful naive dream of "non-political" ways of tackling things. There are very, very few things in this world that are not bound up in one's political views and values. Take your mention of the issue of homelessness and drugs. So there's the surface presentation version of this problem - visibly homeless people, visible drug use, visible drug paraphernalia lying around etc. We can all (more or less) agree that on this. But what are the causes of these issues? What are the best solutions? The answers to these questions are all bound up in political values. So, I happen to believe that the USA has been on a journey for 50 years to transform the narrative about poverty and despair as societal failings into one in which they are personal failures arising from personal choices. If you see the world as I do, then you will see a different set of causes than someone who firmly believes that poverty and despair really do arise from personal failure and weak moral character. And that in turn will imply a different set of solutions. You cannot separate out "issues" from "politics". Even the simple matter of the things you consider to be "issues" is all bound up in your "politics".

lettergram 4y ago
> The answers to these questions are all bound up in political values. But they aren’t though, there is an objective truth. To cut through to said truth those with differing opinions have to be willing to accept they are wrong. Due to the media narrative and political leanings people are unwilling or unable to accept they’re wrong. Take gun violence. It’s exclusively a cultural issue in one community in the United States. https://austingwalters.com/firearms-by-the-numbers/#Firearm_Related_Homicides_by_the_Demographics https://austingwalters.com/firearms-by-the-numbers/#Firearm_... To be clear, it’s an issue in the black male population. It’s not gangs generally (Hispanic community has a higher gang rate and lower firearm homicide rate). the white population has less gun violence than almost anywhere in the world; same with Hispanic and Asian. But saying that breaks a narrative and no one will accept that as the truth. Once you can accept the truth, you can resolve the issues one-way-or-another. Try saying what I just wrote in a classroom, town hall meeting, or floor of congress. Watch what the media does to you, watch what your community does to you. It’s the truth. But the media has made it such that we can’t discuss it. If the media presented the truth or even a balanced view, we wouldn’t have so much of the issues because it would be okay to have the view of truth.