By design. Illusion of choice. Divide and conquer.
New political polarization casts rivals as alien, unlikable, contemptible
91–100 of 171 posts
Re: New political polarization casts rivals as alien, unlikable, contemptible
#92Delete your twitter/facebook/reddit account. Seriously! Go do it now! These sites are built with the goal of pushing people into groups that are always angry at each other. Angry polarized groups spend more time on the site and are easier to sell things to. The only thing ignoring this trash will do is make you a happier, more functional person.
Social media has served as an accelerant for identity politics. The two go hand in hand.
How does civil society survive if we're just a collection of tribal groups pursuing divided interests and throwing rocks at each other?
Re: New political polarization casts rivals as alien, unlikable, contemptible
#93Delete your twitter/facebook/reddit account. Seriously! Go do it now! These sites are built with the goal of pushing people into groups that are always angry at each other. Angry polarized groups spend more time on the site and are easier to sell things to. The only thing ignoring this trash will do is make you a happier, more functional person.
Just deleting social media is not a solution. Divisive otherisum is an attack on the social sensibilities of the the last few decades and a lot of it is being promoted by bots. A better solution is to find ways to disrupt the bots creating or amplifying the hate.
Why poison the well that opened up global communication and brought us closer together? Why promote anti-globalism and distrust in journalism while disrupting the lines of communication? Are we being primed for war? genocide? mass-depopulation? Whatever it is, the last thing people should do is comply.
Re: New political polarization casts rivals as alien, unlikable, contemptible
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
“own the libs” is satire, it’s not literally the political platform
Not exactly a useful claim given it can be made by anyone for any portion of their "team" they're embeeassed by. The core problem is that America uses a two party system and that can only result in heavy partisanship.
One side has prominent interlocutors who routinely call the other side racists, Nazis, and harbingers of fascism in the United States, demanding their “de-platforming”.
The other side sees this as hysterical nonsense spouted by sanctimonious hypocrites and people blind to reality, who deserve to be mocked, hence “own the libs.”
These two sides are not equivalent. One is doing a lot more “othering”. The real equivalent would be some sort of Red Scare accusing the other side of being infiltrated by freedom-hating communist spies, demanding their removal from all institutions and positions of power.
Re: New political polarization casts rivals as alien, unlikable, contemptible
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Uh... is this a clever meta-comment about the kind of nonsense on social media? Poe's law seems to apply extra hard these days.
I’m not joking. Is it your opinion that there were no attempts, from within the agencies, to undermine the president (or his campaign) and that there is nothing corrupt about what the Biden family has been up to?
I'm not going to get sucked down this rabbit hole because there are a zillion other sites where you can have this specific argument, but I will say that if you're voting for Trump because you're anti-corruption then you and I have world views too far diverged for any meaningful communication to take place.
Re: New political polarization casts rivals as alien, unlikable, contemptible
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Computer games with voice chat have helped me weather COVID cabin fever as an alternative to social media. Particularly in PvE MMOs, players are just there to collaborate and have fun, with no room for politics to intrude.
Can you recommend some PS4 titles?
Don’t have a PS4, sorry. World of Warcraft Classic on PC has been fun for me, using Discord for voice chat.
Re: New political polarization casts rivals as alien, unlikable, contemptible
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
One side has literal Nazis marching for it, yelling “Jews will not replace us,” though...
And the other side attacked actual Jews with rocks and bottles recently. What, that's not "your side"? Neither are those guys "their side".
What happened? Antifa?
Re: New political polarization casts rivals as alien, unlikable, contemptible
#98For some fresh breath and broader perspective, much of post war western Europe was extremely polarised between religious and non-religiuous (liberals, but especially socialists).
You may want to watch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Camillo_and_Peppone#Films as an accessible example, but everyone from Western Europe speaking to people who were adults between 1940 and 1960 will dig up countless stories.
Here's some of mine:
- Near where I work, there's a tiny village. Until recently, there were two competing music bands: the "mice" and the "rats". One group was socialists, the others catholics. By 2010, both were largely composed of octogenarians and dying. But don't think they'd ever play one note together!
- After WWII, my grandfather, being very poor and having been in the resistance, had a right to financial assistance. He never claimed it because his wife was catholic and the resistance group he participated in was socialist. Claiming his benefits would have been social suicide.
- My mother's aunt was a catholic nun, and one of the nicest and most welcoming people, widely respectd by all in the village were she lived. Once, she went to the funeral of a local farmer, a socialist. Her going to that funeral was quite out of the ordinary already, to put it mildly. On her return, she said: "He was a socialist, but a very good and decent man."
Re: New political polarization casts rivals as alien, unlikable, contemptible
#99Delete your twitter/facebook/reddit account. Seriously! Go do it now! These sites are built with the goal of pushing people into groups that are always angry at each other. Angry polarized groups spend more time on the site and are easier to sell things to. The only thing ignoring this trash will do is make you a happier, more functional person.
Please, they're not all made for this. Curating subreddits you follow will make reddit pretty much ok and problem free.
Now I still suggest people to reduce online activities as much as possible. It's probably a long term neurological disease.
Re: New political polarization casts rivals as alien, unlikable, contemptible
#100Delete your twitter/facebook/reddit account. Seriously! Go do it now! These sites are built with the goal of pushing people into groups that are always angry at each other. Angry polarized groups spend more time on the site and are easier to sell things to. The only thing ignoring this trash will do is make you a happier, more functional person.
That helps, but it’s impossible to avoid —even if you avoid partisan sites.
Traditional Mainstream media take sides and present one side as orthodox and the other as heterodox.
Google is guilty of soft censorship (either deranks, or with autocomplete refuses to autocomplete search phrases that are contrarian to orthodoxy).