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Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

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Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#121

Post by threatofrain »

pmoriarty wrote: post #118
threatofrain wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO it takes serious anthropological commitment to have a non-idiot understanding of a people. I feel this shouldn't be an individual job. Either your entire community has deep, embedded relations with another community or it doesn't. Otherwise it's like asking for better sources to read about Chinese culture, or like visiting China once a year for vacation. You can't read your way into being culturally competent. Yo…

Of course, seeing a movie on the Himalayas is no substitute for visiting the Himalayas, and that's no substitute to living in the Himalayas. But I'd rather have there be movies on the Himalayas than not, even when we are aware it's not a perfect substitute for the real thing. The perfect is the enemy of the good.

The standard here is being barely adequate, not perfect. Anyone who is part of an immigrant community knows how hard it is to be adequate. That's why you pass on this optimism to the next generation while you blindly chase cultural fads, hoping your kids will fit in.

You smile and nod your way through.

Anyways, the call here is for community integration, not for individual action.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#122

Post by abrahamepton »

rhino369 wrote: post #67
abrahamepton wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was it massive? My impression was that it was exactly what you'd expect - basically a nothingburger, a few interesting tidbits, most of the sensational stuff was taken out of context and/or already known and/or flatly misrepresented. What are some things that we should have taken away from the Fauci emails that the broader left/centrist medias missed?

I'm not even sure if its true since most media will barely engage with the issue. But Fauci appeared concerned that Covid-19 could potentially be the result of a gain-of-function research that artificially evolved another COVID strain to increase its effectiveness at spreading. If true, COVID-19 is the biggest scientific fuck up of all time. Fauci had allegedly pushed to resume funding that sort of research. Instead,…

Having worked at a media outlet, it's not particularly credible that they "ignored" it. Maybe some of them did.

But if the Washington Post and Buzzfeed (who are also, uh, media sources themselves) FOIA'ed 3200 pages of Fauci emails, there's a zero percent chance - zero - that someone from a bunch of orgs didn't at least take a look.

The reason it looks like they "ignored" it is because they didn't see a story to report. Which is how the process should work.

So if there were a Fauci email saying, "Yeah, we probably created covid, whoops" there's a zero percent chance you wouldn't see at least someone linking to the email in question. Do you see those links? There you go.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#123

Post by prepend »

robmccoll wrote: post #97
jccalhoun wrote: post #26

I am starting to think that it isn't really the "news" but the commentary. Most sites will cover many of the same events. There will be different focuses but a large percentage of the information is the same. But I recently visited my senior citizen parents and got some exposure to Fox News. During their commentary shows they just throw outrage after outrage at the wall and see what sticks. One example was trying to…

I live in one of the (upper?) middle class parts of Atlanta and I really hope they don't do that. Crime rates are up in a bad way, and the city can be pretty mismanaged, but taking your ball and going home isn't a real option. It's just going to hurt the city that will still be right next door, and that has your sports (some of it, Braves are gone), museums and culture, restaurants, a lot of work spaces and shopping,…

In general, I agree with you, but in the case of Atlanta and Fulton county that narrative is in conflict with repeated poor management. Lots of cities have incorporated over the past 20 years and ended up with better services and lower taxes. Part of that is due to siphoning off funds that would help worse off, but most is just due to more efficient management.

I used to not support the idea of reforming Milton county, but it makes more sense as Fulton funds are focused on Atlanta and away from the tax base. Especially with stupid stuff like no Atlanta police chief for a year, etc. And no Marta in north Fulton. And minimal court services, etc.

I live also live in one of the (upper?) northern burbs of Atlanta. I had to handle some property tax stuff and it was kafkaesque in how out of touch and poorly managed it is. Driving an hour to downtown atlanta to meet with an assessor who has never been to my town. Then meeting with a board of “peers” that also don’t even know the town where I live, listen to my arguments, ask no questions and then rubber stamp the county.

I’m not sure how to fix this and it’s so appealing to just give up and work on local stuff.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#124

Post by sandyarmstrong »

> I would be shocked if 60+% of American film characters are identifiably Christian

How often do you see Christmas used as a plot device? Or a church used as a setting? Or a priest character?

I would be shocked if context didn't imply that > 95% of American film characters are Christian.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#125

Post by helen___keller »

mrfusion wrote: post #93
ProjectArcturis wrote: post #4

I identify pretty closely with one side. But certainly there are Outrage Machines on both sides, a network of media and personalities hyping up the latest calumny that the other side committed, for views and clicks. These machines can't slow down -- even if the other side has been quiet lately, all those people need something to do and talk about. They'll find something.

Have you considered not “identifying”? Just choose your opinions on issues a la carte. Or even don’t have an opinion on a bunch of issues. I started doing that and now I’m kind of politically homeless but oh well. I do notice that I can talk to either side now which is cool and no one automatically puts up their defenses.

I went the other way: I started by outright refusing to label or identify myself politically and picking opinions a la carte, and over time most of my opinions on the things I care most about tended to converge on one political ideology, so I've started to generally identify with that ideology as a result. There's notable exceptions, which I do keep in mind, but they tend to be just exceptions.

(Of course, even then it's not simple. There's also party infighting, subparties, etc, so even if my opinion on "what the issue is" lines up, my opinion on "what the solution is" might not.)

Edit: another complication is strength of conviction. For example, standard American left/right dichotomy comes with very strong conviction about guns. I have very very weak conviction about guns. Even though I tend to agree with my ideologies' opinion on what should be done about gun control, I don't really care that much either way whether there's no gun control or super strict gun control. So while I do "identify" as my ideology here, there's clearly a disconnect from the mainstream form of it.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#126

Post by chromaton »

bpodgursky wrote: post #103
throwaway894345 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do the same thing, and I've noticed that this "they don't present the other side" thing is getting worse with time. I recently read [this HuffPo article][0] about how only 1% of American film characters are identifiably Muslim ; however, nowhere in the article does it even mention the share of Americans who are Muslim, nor the share of movie characters that are of other religions. These things are certainly obvious…

Interestingly Mormons are 2% of the US population (twice the Muslim %), and I can't think of a single openly Mormon character in any TV show I've ever seen.

Gary on South Park. Of course, that was 18 years ago. There's also a few very minor Mormon characters on The Expanse.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#127

Post by dandellion »

coding123 wrote: post #99
dandellion wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a non-american, american media does a terrible job of representing anything outside america, so if that's the reason I would really appreciate if they could stop it...

What are you talking about - We have tons of coverage of the following countries in our movies: Genovia, Aldovia AND Belgravia

And don't forget my favourite: Macedonia.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#128

Post by fallingfrog »

What I don’t like about articles like this is that they never ask the obvious question, why?. So people from rural areas are more likely to be conservative. Why? Because in a lot of places, like most of Latin America, the opposite is true. So what are the cultural and material reasons for that?

The most obvious reason here, is that when you go to college it tends to make you more liberal. Because you learn about the world, which makes you more tolerant and less religious.

But I think there are some psychosocial forces beyond that going on too. America was founded on the idea of going out and getting a bunch of free land and being self sufficient, so being godly and being self sufficient and being American all got tangled together. And if you’re wealthy and live in the country, you probably have a lot of property, which makes you conservative too.

Anyways there’s a lot more going on here and nobody ever talks about it, everything gets blamed on whatever the new explanation for every problem is, the internet currently. The internet exaggerates and intensifies these tendencies but it’s not where they come from.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#129

Post by mrfusion »

standardUser wrote: post #108
mrfusion wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered not “identifying”? Just choose your opinions on issues a la carte. Or even don’t have an opinion on a bunch of issues. I started doing that and now I’m kind of politically homeless but oh well. I do notice that I can talk to either side now which is cool and no one automatically puts up their defenses.

It's challenging to not identify with one "side" when the other side loudly and proudly support policies that directly harm (or would harm) many people you care about. It's natural to band together when under attack, and in fact it's really difficult not to.

I can totally see that. I think the portrayal of the other side by the media is more of a parody of them than what they actually are.

As a data point. I moved to a red state and have befriended quite a few republicans. Any of them with a busy life really don’t care about the current hot button issues the media says they do. They mainly seem to want the government to leave them alone. It’s hard to fault them for that.

The only ones that care about the hot button issues are the ones that watch the news several hours a day.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#130

Post by heresie-dabord »

XorNot wrote: post #53
heresie-dabord wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> make money [...] by building a huge social media following being a political outrage merchant. I think you have summarised both the nature of the US "information economy" and the state of political discourse in the US.

When you want to know why Fox News does anything it does, just take a look at it's marketshare [1]. That's why. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/373814/cable-news-networ...

I think this is the real export behind the phenomenon of social memia:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27488950

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