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Our Culture of Contempt

nytimes.com

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Re: Our Culture of Contempt

#101

Post by troyatlarge »

towaway1138 wrote: post #3

As a lifelong liberal, I've sunk into despair at the firehose of hatred coming from the left these days. And I talk to far fewer of my old lefty friends anymore--if they've made themselves awful, I just don't want to know. I'd prefer to remember them as they were. Maybe this is just a phase, but it feels like we're going to a place from which we won't return.

I agree with you on that point 100% - its really sick whats been going on in that way and i feel much like you do about it as i stand sickened by so much of the hate i see pouring so freely out of what had been my side.

Re: Our Culture of Contempt

#102

Post by RugnirViking »

mmsimanga wrote: post #99
elefanten wrote: post #13

All political mud-slinging aside, all weighing and apportioning of blame withheld, the main suggestions of the article are worthwhile. 1. Don't allow yourself to slide easily or prematurely into contempt. We do it too often these days. 2. Disagree better. You can disagree, but make your case and engage in the responses. Rhetoric has a place but it's being overused.

I wonder how much of all these issues is due to Twitter. 140 characters isn't enough for nuanced conversation.

Twitter is a weird site. It's got a core of extremely active users who are almost entirely people who are famous or journalists. I'm at university - probably the place where the concentration of twitter users is likely to be highest, and hardly anybody I know has an account or if they do, doesn't use it for anything except occasionally reading something they got linked to.

It's almost like a kind of echo chamber for the media and famous people imo - I don't know if thats nessacarily a bad thing entirely, so long as people are aware on some level of that. There just aren't the opinions of suburban moms on twitter. There aren't plumbers on twitter. Cleaners.

Opinions might not matter, but it does bother me quite a lot when you see companies not caring on their support phone lines, on their facebook. There's almost no way to usefully get through to these copanies, but then one journalist idly tweets that they're having a problem with something suddenly you seem to see a dev team drop what they're doing and fix the problem. It's concerning that such behaviour benefits those who need it least.

Re: Our Culture of Contempt

#103

Post by timthorn »

discard0000 wrote: post #24
vore wrote: post #14

This is an argument you can make regardless of what is actually going on on the ground. "The problem isn't policy, it's actually polarization" -- but the article completely fails to examine the causes of said polarization: What are people feeling angry about? Which people feel angry about what? Are those people justified in feeling angry? Are those angry people just doing it for show or are their lives being actively…

Created a throwaway account for this. As a foreigner who has spent significant time living the US, indeed this seems like the kind of mealy-mouthed, somewhat vapid meta-commentary about "unity" that offers nothing more than some soundbyte call for some abstract value (in this case "better disagreement"). It doesn't address, for example, the fact that the two political factions in America now accept different versions…

> It doesn't address, for example, the fact that the two political factions in America now accept different versions of reality. You cannot square that circle with "better disagreement".

You can't square the circle, but you can have a better discourse that recognises the fact. Abortion has been an issue like this for years - one side believes it is murder, the other believes it is fundamental to women's rights. But in the main, debate has been civil and about the issue rather than the people. That might be changing, of course - but it demonstrates that you can have a better discourse.

Re: Our Culture of Contempt

#104

Post by claudiawerner »

towaway1138 wrote: post #3

As a lifelong liberal, I've sunk into despair at the firehose of hatred coming from the left these days. And I talk to far fewer of my old lefty friends anymore--if they've made themselves awful, I just don't want to know. I'd prefer to remember them as they were. Maybe this is just a phase, but it feels like we're going to a place from which we won't return.

I'll give you a perspective from the other side of the fence: I used to be a liberal (and by this I do not mean as the "opposite" of conservative, I mean in the sense of "classical liberalism", the system of rights etc.) but now after reading critiques of its theory and practice and doing more investigation into the historical left movement (19th century figures who are unnameable on HN) I have turned much more to the left. I am a skeptic of the right to free speech (since I cannot find any logical basis for why it should be privileged over other rights or differentiated from other forms of action), for example, and I am against the private ownership of capital.

I've seen a significant number of posts like yours, all with the same gist, but they always make me smile; by describing yourself as a "liberal" as something akin to "left of center", i.e opposite of a "conservative", such people actually often really are liberals (in the political philosophy sense) themselves, the exact position that the left has been critiquing since the turn of the 19th century and what continued to be fashionable until about 1970.

The left has never been on the side of property rights, the system of rights in general (which they decry as bourgeois rights), the current form of the state, the existence of capital, income inequality, neoliberalism etc. and the appearance of the Left in the US as "liberal" as manifested in the Democratic Party for instance is in stark contrast to some leftist parties in Europe to whom "liberal" always meant center or center-right.

So you were always a liberal, and you still are, just not in the sense you thought.

Re: Our Culture of Contempt

#105

Post by DanBC »

RugnirViking wrote: post #102
mmsimanga wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how much of all these issues is due to Twitter. 140 characters isn't enough for nuanced conversation.

Twitter is a weird site. It's got a core of extremely active users who are almost entirely people who are famous or journalists. I'm at university - probably the place where the concentration of twitter users is likely to be highest, and hardly anybody I know has an account or if they do, doesn't use it for anything except occasionally reading something they got linked to. It's almost like a kind of echo chamber for…

> There just aren't the opinions of suburban moms on twitter.

Surburban moms are also nurses, doctors, teachers, engineers, programmers, etc etc, and all of these groups are active on Twitter.

But if you want a community of mums who are there as mums you could look at #netmums and #mumsnet. Here's one example: https://twitter.com/search?q=%23netmums&src=typd

> There aren't plumbers on twitter.

There are plumbers on Twitter. Twitter doens't do a good job of surfacing different communities, especially for new users. When you join the site Twitter makes stupid suggestions for celebs, and makes no attempt to find out what you're actually interested in. But you can ignore those selections and find, and follow, people who you're interested in.

> Cleaners.

This is a good point. People on low incomes are excluded from digital life, and we should probably work out ways to help them access tech.

> There's almost no way to usefully get through to these copanies, but then one journalist idly tweets that they're having a problem with something suddenly you seem to see a dev team drop what they're doing and fix the problem.

So, this isn't quite what you've mentioned, but using Twitter is sometimes a useful way to get customer support. "This happened, what do you suggest, @CompanyName?" will usually get you the right number to call.

Re: Our Culture of Contempt

#106

Post by pjc50 »

FakeComments wrote: post #87
_bxg1 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I support most of the liberal platform, but in recent years a large portion of the party's base has turned into a cesspool of hatred, cynicism, and thoughtless reactionism. We used to be the party of idealism and belief in people's basic goodness. What the hell happened?

It became more important to hate white people and what they stood for than participate in Enlightenment culture, so they happily regressed to the cultural norms of, say, the Middle East or South America. Multiculturalism and post-truth thinking was always insane nonsense, and the leftists have been drinking that koolaid for two decades, at least. To hold up cultures that cut off clitorises in the bush and burn witche…

Aaand this is why we can't have nice things.

Re: Our Culture of Contempt

#107

Post by fallous »

unclebucknasty wrote: post #16
elefanten wrote: post #13

All political mud-slinging aside, all weighing and apportioning of blame withheld, the main suggestions of the article are worthwhile. 1. Don't allow yourself to slide easily or prematurely into contempt. We do it too often these days. 2. Disagree better. You can disagree, but make your case and engage in the responses. Rhetoric has a place but it's being overused.

Your comment assumes good faith.

That's kind of the point. Assuming good faith is akin to not ascribing to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence (or ignorance). Note that the incompetence or ignorance is not assigned so it may be either or both sides, which places a certain burden on you to try to evaluate and correct at least your part of that failure.

Re: Our Culture of Contempt

#108

Post by pjc50 »

elefanten wrote: post #13

All political mud-slinging aside, all weighing and apportioning of blame withheld, the main suggestions of the article are worthwhile. 1. Don't allow yourself to slide easily or prematurely into contempt. We do it too often these days. 2. Disagree better. You can disagree, but make your case and engage in the responses. Rhetoric has a place but it's being overused.

There's a real prisoner's dilemma phenomenon going on here. If the two options are "respect" and "contempt", and one side has ramped the contempt up to 11 and won the elections, what should the other side do?

I'm all for a winding-down of this process, because eventually it could escalate all the way up to violence, but like nuclear disarmament, you first. Or at least some plausible commitment to de-escalation that can be observed to actually happen over a period of time, as a signal of good faith for the next round of talks.

I think this is partially why people like AOC or Ilhan Omar have suddenly achieved success; they know that, regardless of what they do or say, they will never get anything less than total disrespect from Republicans and a large segment of the media; so they're free to ignore that contempt. This comes across in the other direction as contempt, when really it's just a refusal to be intimidated.

Contempt is also being manufactured by a variety of media sources from foreign intelligence agencies to all-American fraudsters like Alex Jones.

Re: Our Culture of Contempt

#109

Post by specialist »

discard0000 wrote: post #24
vore wrote: post #14

This is an argument you can make regardless of what is actually going on on the ground. "The problem isn't policy, it's actually polarization" -- but the article completely fails to examine the causes of said polarization: What are people feeling angry about? Which people feel angry about what? Are those people justified in feeling angry? Are those angry people just doing it for show or are their lives being actively…

Created a throwaway account for this. As a foreigner who has spent significant time living the US, indeed this seems like the kind of mealy-mouthed, somewhat vapid meta-commentary about "unity" that offers nothing more than some soundbyte call for some abstract value (in this case "better disagreement"). It doesn't address, for example, the fact that the two political factions in America now accept different versions…

One of my brothers studied to become a marine biologist. He then found Jesus. Now he's a creationist. Amongst a dozen other proclaimed beliefs.

Does my brother really, truly believe that the earth is 6,000 years old? Really?

One of my besties just revealed that she's an anti-vaxxor. Um, okay. Honestly, I can't even look at her the same way.

I now favor the theory of belief as attire. Every day is Halloween and people dress up aspirationally. Because reasons.

Whatever my brother (and others) now claim to believe, I've no idea how to relate, so I've given up trying to have meaningful, sincere conversations about anything substantial.

To keep things civil and pleasant, it's all just chitchat. With familiar strangers.

Re: Our Culture of Contempt

#110

Post by specialist »

throw2016 wrote: post #86

This is rich coming from the head of AEI, an organization which is part of a network of think tanks funded by the likes of Koch that have been bootstrapped to promote corporate interests and a worldview where there is no society only 'wealth creators' and workers. [1] Wendy Brown, Philip Mirowski and Nancy Maclean [2][3][4] have gone into immense detail on how these organizations are created and operated behind the s…

The appeal to civility is the last step before starting the cycle of rhetoric anew. Rinse, lather, repeat.
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