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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

#201

Post by cm2012 »

whimsicalism wrote: post #194
cm2012 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew up going to a school maybe 20% practicing Christian. Everyone celebrated christmas, got and gave gifts, had family dinners around then, etc.

If by practicing, you mean "going to church weekly" then sure, but that is not the necessary condition for christmas to be a religious thing . It is extremely common in religions to have a large majority of people only doing the most visible festivals, not the daily/weekly things, that doesn't mean that the festivals are no longer religious.

Probably 70% of the student body was hindu, muslim, or jewish. But they still participated as an american cultural thing, they just didn't do anything church related with it.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#202

Post by throwaway894345 »

whimsicalism wrote: post #189
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, not really. Christmas may have been a product of Christianity (hijacking a pagan holiday...), but it has long since become just a western culture tradition with no particular religious significance for a lot of people. Most Christmas movies don't even mention Christ.

> it has long since become just a western culture tradition with no particular religious significance for a lot of people I think that people have a tendency to underestimate the degree of Christian influence on their way of life, and the vast majority of people who practice xmas are Christian, even if they are not weekly church attendees. I was raised in an atheist household, we definitely viewed Christmas as a reli…

> I think that people have a tendency to underestimate the degree of Christian influence on their way of life,

One is not a Christian because Christianity influenced their culture.

> and the vast majority of people who practice xmas are Christian

The vast majority of people on the planet are also Christian. Does that make "humanity" a Christian institution?

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#203

Post by whimsicalism »

cm2012 wrote: post #201
whimsicalism wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If by practicing, you mean "going to church weekly" then sure, but that is not the necessary condition for christmas to be a religious thing . It is extremely common in religions to have a large majority of people only doing the most visible festivals, not the daily/weekly things, that doesn't mean that the festivals are no longer religious.

Probably 70% of the student body was hindu, muslim, or jewish. But they still participated as an american cultural thing, they just didn't do anything church related with it.

Interesting. Where exactly was this?

I grew up in a major Jewish population center in the United States, most jews did not celebrate christmas outside of the ceremonial going out for chinese food.

Muslim students also did not celebrate xmas.

This is an urban center on the east coast.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#205

Post by myfavoritedog »

Impassionata wrote: post #88

Haidt's work gets trotted out a lot, but it was prior to the fascist turn of the Republican party. Now Republicans live in a mostly imagined political reality.

fascist turn of the Republican party

This is just projection from the Left that is working so hard to cancel anyone who steps politically out of line. They think that calling a group "Antifa" makes it anti-fascist, despite their tactics of violently terrorizing anyone with whom they politically disagree - even to the extent of their attacking journalists who simply document their activities. But somehow Republicans are fascists.

Now Republicans live in a mostly imagined political reality.

Imagined, like that Putin had a video of Trump being peed on by hookers and that Trump was a cat's paw of Russia? That Russia was paying a bounty to have American's assassinated in Afghanistan with Trump's full knowledge? That the BLM protests last year that injured and killed so many were "peaceful"? That an attack on the White House, necessitating Trump's evacuation to a bunker was funny and peaceful, but that there was an "armed insurrection" on the Capitol on 1/6 where no guns were confiscated and the only person killed was an unarmed protester climbing a barricade? That it was a conspiracy to speculate that the corona virus probably came out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology? That Hunter Biden's laptop showing how the Biden family used its political influence for their financial gain was Russian disinformation?

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#206

Post by at_a_remove »

If I read something and it's just super-intense wow how can you doubt me you scumbag, I immediately attempt to find evidence disproving it. Generally, I look for something that will contradict the stance, and the more intense the stance, the more I will look.

If I find a source has been manipulative in the past, I lower the faith I have in them to be objective in the future.

If someone makes some kind of desperate reach or strawman to "win," I wonder what else they are reaching about.

The shorter the quote, the longer the original source text I want to find from which it was drawn, because so much gets taken out of context.

Similarly, Twitter is too short to allow for nuanced commentary.

If I can find notable hypocrisy from someone, well ... their worth goes to about zero.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#209

Post by whimsicalism »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #202
whimsicalism wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it has long since become just a western culture tradition with no particular religious significance for a lot of people I think that people have a tendency to underestimate the degree of Christian influence on their way of life, and the vast majority of people who practice xmas are Christian, even if they are not weekly church attendees. I was raised in an atheist household, we definitely viewed Christmas as a reli…

> I think that people have a tendency to underestimate the degree of Christian influence on their way of life, One is not a Christian because Christianity influenced their culture. > and the vast majority of people who practice xmas are Christian The vast majority of people on the planet are also Christian. Does that make "humanity" a Christian institution?

> The vast majority of people on the planet are also Christian. Does that make "humanity" a Christian institution?

The point is that Christianity has become so normalized to you that you don't recognize Christian celebration as religious.

The fact that you incorrectly think that the "vast majority of people on the planet are also Christian" proves my point.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#210

Post by losvedir »

vsskanth wrote: post #8

I tried this experiment: read nytimes, wapo, fox, national review and politico. I wanted to get different perspectives. However, I encountered a bunch of issues: They dont talk about or even cover the same things, which makes it hard to compare liberal vs conservative perspectives. This is the most common form of bias I've come across. In the rare case they do cover the same thing, many articles either simply do not…

> They dont talk about or even cover the same things

Yeah, this is a key thing to realize. People seem to think that Fox News, for example, just trots out falsehoods all the time, but if you skim the news, I'd say very little is actually factually incorrect. It's more about the story selection, who they choose to interview to get the quote, how they contextualize (or don't) statistics, etc.

But once you realize that, you realize it can apply to, e.g. WaPo, which many Republicans say is very left-biased, while many Democrats say it's neutral.

I think an amusing non-partisan example of how story selection biases viewpoints is the so-called "Summer of the Shark"[0] where for whatever reason shark attacks became a part of the summer's zeitgeist and got extensively covered. Meanwhile, shark attacks weren't at any particularly elevated level, contrary to what many people ended up believing.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_of_the_Shark

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