One thing that comes to mind on this topic is that I neve rhear anyone discuss the genealogy of moral outrage in recent America culture. Daytime TV in the 90s was _all_ moral outrage and proto-reality TV as theatre of legalo-moral adjudication: Jerry Springer (the vulgar pinnacle of it), The People's Court, Judge Joe Brown, Riki Lake, etc etc. Americans had already proven market fit for "outrage media" a long time ago.
Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers
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Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
> The point is that Christianity has become so normalized to you that you don't recognize Christian celebration as religious.
So? Doesn't that just serve to lessen its overall religiousness? I mean, Christmas's traditions are themselves derived from pagan solstice celebrations. Wouldn't that make it a pagan institution by your reasoning?
Much like how Christians adopted pre-existing traditions and slapped a Jesus-shaped label on them, people are now slapping a secularity (or, I would argue, consumerist) label on to Christmas traditions.
Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers
#253Haidt'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.
It’s quite hard to reason with a political movement in which half don’t believe the guy that got 51% of the vote and 306 electoral votes isn’t the president, to the extent of sympathizing with an attack on the electoral vote count and “auditing” the ballots repeatedly. A majority of the house republicans caucus effectively voted to bypass the will of the people during the electoral vote count - makes the Democratic o…
to the extent of sympathizing with an attack on the electoral vote count
The Left thought it was hilarious when Trump's Secret Service moved him to the bunker when violent protesters were threatening to breach the security of the White House. I remember late night jokes, CNN/MSNBC mocking of how big a coward Trump was, etc. It was a great deal of fun and tied in with the lies about how supposedly Trump had peaceful protesters cleared out of Lafayette Park for a photo op. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/06/09/lafa...
"HRC never said she’d be reinstated by August."
Hillary Clinton spent years claiming that the election of Trump was illegitimate.
Has Stacey Abrams even conceded the Georgia gubernatorial election yet?
It's pretty rich for a party that claimed that George W. Bush was the "Commander in thief" and has Congressionally protested all the recent elections gets upset when Republicans did the exact same thing for even better reasons. The 2020 election was ridiculous. Democrats used the excuse of COVID to change election laws in multiple states while mass-mailing millions of ballots. They created an environment that was ripe for corruption and then assumed shocked faces as corruption was alleged.
Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
Christians are a plurality of the world population but far from a majority. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_religious_populations
My mistake, but would it change the calculus if they were a strict majority?
Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
I highly recommend the Economist . Their articles mostly follow a dialectical format -- thesis, antithesis, synthesis, with about a third of the article spent on each one. I don't know of any other publication whose house style is so rigorous in this. It's also highly editorialized, but very open and transparent about the positions it takes -- any bias they have is in the open, but is in the final synthesis after the…
I like their articles, but I can’t recommend the Economist after attempting to cancel my subscription the last time I had one. It took me over an hour of digging through the website, and then phone calls where they tried to up-sell me, side-sell me, every-way-sell me on discounts and different packages no matter how many times I said I just wanted to cancel my account. It’s possibly the worst experience I’ve ever had…
Just use a privacy.com card and cancel the card when you're done with the subscription. I agree that it's trash to have to do something like that, but it's a pretty easy solution.
Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers
#256> "Until you can passionately make arguments for both sides," she says, "you don't understand the issue." I think this is the key quote. It should really be taboo to have an opinion without an understanding of how the other side argues. (Ironically the search for counterarguments would often strengthen my position because they would turn out to be quite weak. Nevertheless I think that the exercise is important.) I th…
> I think this is the key quote. It should really be taboo to have an opinion without an understanding of how the other side argues. It's a nice quote, but I don't find it accurate for all topics. Should I be trying to figure out how to make passionate arguments for the Q Conspiracy nuttiness? There are lots of antivaxx conspiracy theories that are pretty close to mainstream in parts of the US - should I be trying to…
It's not accurate for all topics. Can you make a passionate argument for a flat Earth? One that isn't rooted in ignorance or denial of something basic?
So obviously there are some topics in which you can understand the issue well, but still not be able to make a credible defense of the other side.
Now, the point of the exercise is valid. We should always be approaching an issue from the perspective of "What am I missing?" or "How am I wrong?"
Of course, bad faith debaters will ask this of you while not doing it themselves. Or they will do so only superficially. They won't actually try to disprove themselves.
Which makes discussing things with such people exhausting.
Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers
#257The problem of course is that not every issue needs a "both sides" treatment. Sometimes there are questions of objective facts that reading lies from alternative sources do not actually help you in understanding the truth of the world. The person who desperately tries to cite "50/50" liberal and conservative sources in the article is the worst kind of fence sitter. Sometimes, one side or the other is just wrong, or t…
> The problem of course is that not every issue needs a "both sides" treatment. Exactly. Imagine saying that it's important to be able to make an impassioned argument for slavery? To make it contemporary: Should I be trying to get into the mind of a Q Conspiracy theorist? An Antivaxer? How many conspiracies do I need delve into and understand such that I can make a passionate argument for them?
How are you supposed to argue against something if you don't even understand why someone supports what they support? All you will end up doing is strawmaning their views which won't convince anybody to change their views.
Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
> To make it contemporary: Should I be trying to get into the mind of a Q Conspiracy theorist? An Antivaxer? How many conspiracies do I need delve into and understand such that I can make a passionate argument for them? Yes and it's disturbing that you (and many others) have no interest in understanding other people.
There is no end to conspiracy theories. Why should I be obligated to delve into other people's psychosis? I'm not a psychiatrist. There are many more constructive things to spend time on.
If you were a little more curious, maybe you wouldn't dismiss large swathes of the population as psychotic.
Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers
#259Earlier 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…
christianity, islam, hinduism, along with the eastern constellation of buddhism/confucianism are the 4 world religions. people of color are roughly 4/5 of the world population. even while christianity and white folks are the majority in the US, it makes sense numerically to have these other aspects of humanity well represented, in addition to white and/or christian. what's puzzling is the outsized representation of j…
> even while christianity and white folks are the majority in the US, it makes sense numerically to have these other aspects of humanity well represented, in addition to white and/or christian.
I’m not white, Christian, or Jewish, and this sentence does not make sense to me. Making entertaining is a business, and it has nothing to do with what percent of people worldwide have what skin color or tribal affiliations.
If people making entertainment predict that they will earn the most money by targeting white, Christian, or Jewish populations, then they should if making the most money is their goal. Have you noticed how every big movie of the last 10+ years has a Chinese character? And a scene in Hong Kong or Shanghai? Many have Latin American characters as well, and Indian, and so on.
Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers
#260I think this is missing the darker point, which is that the main stream media along with the political parties that support them, are the the echo chamber. It’s not that we are caught in an echo chamber, rather it’s the information from mass media corporations that has created the echo chamber. If anything, to break out so to speak, is perhaps as easy as simply turning off all news, and paying more attention directly…
Better to pay attention to what politicians are doing rather than what they are saying. Take a look at who donates to their campaigns, how they vote, and who they hang out with on a regular basis.