How can we break our addiction to contempt? • Hacker News Board

Re: How can we break our addiction to contempt?

#101

Post by iammisc » Thu, Oct 21, 2021, 8:33 PM UTC

mrtesthah wrote: post #80

BitwiseFool wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very likely to devolve into a partisan squabble, so I don't want to keep going back and forth on this. I was ready to cite examples of the left playing fast and loose with the truth but I sense it will just create hostility. If I pick only one example, it looks like I'm not prepared and have nothing substantial to counter with. If I list multiple examples, it will look like I came here prepared for a fight as…

Can you cite an example of left-wing news outlets playing "fast and loose" in a way that literally jeopardized the foundation of US democracy and incited mass violence? Even if you think the investigation into Trump's ties to Russian influence was unjustified, it relied on democratically-elected representatives to impeach him, and it never undermined the rule of law itself. I'm sure you can find examples with lesser…

Hunter biden tapes jeopardized the purpose of a free press to report on news, regardless of how it affects the outcome of elections.

Re: How can we break our addiction to contempt?

#102

Post by tombert » Thu, Oct 21, 2021, 8:35 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #92

tombert wrote: post #20

At some level I will be a permanent victim of movies and media, and as such there are absolutely politicians that I hate, but I've been trying to acknowledge to myself that, generally speaking, most of their voters mean well [1], even if they are voting for politicians that I think are disgusting. As such, I've tried to not "hate" them, even if I don't particularly like a good chunk of them either. [1] Though I have…

> but I've been trying to acknowledge to myself that, generally speaking, most of their voters mean well [1], even if they are voting for politicians that I think are disgusting. Some remedies: (1) Actually talk to those voters and get to know them at a human level, don't just group them as an undefined mass of "people who vote badly". (2) Try a mental game where you imagine your side has the wrong arguments or is ta…

I think what you're saying it totally reasonable, I don't think I disagree with any of it, except one small point in your edit about my note.

The thing I was referring to (and this is my bad for not being more clear) in regards to the "build the wall" rhetoric wasn't actually specifically about the wall exactly, but more of the surrounding anti-immigrant sentiment that followed. My wife (a Mexican immigrant) had to deal with an increased level of horrible stuff being said to her after the "build the wall" stuff started, and it did seem to correlate as a dogwhistle. That's why I said it gave me a bit of pause about the intentions of some voters: it really seemed to bring out the worst of people, and it did seem like there were a lot more "worst of people" than I thought. It didn't seem like a lot of them really cared about "a wall", they just didn't like people who didn't look like them.

Re: How can we break our addiction to contempt?

#103

Post by tremon » Thu, Oct 21, 2021, 8:35 PM UTC

tombert wrote: post #78

fighterpilot wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you share that hypothesis? You are obviously contributing to this thread in a balanced way and in good faith and I really want to hear it. I know two anti-vaxxers. One is not political at all but isn't that smart. Very nice and generous person. Bit prone to conspiracy thinking and bought into fake news on Rumble or something. The other is very conservative and it's a team/tribe issue with him. He has a strong dis…

Ok, just to be clear I want to preface this by saying "not all conservatives". I know plenty of conservatives who are lovely and intelligent people. ------- Basically, I think that rabid anti-vax sentiment is a natural conclusion to roughly ~40 years of near-constant levels of conspiratorial thinking from conservative circles. I think folks like Jerry Fallwell started it, and subsequently Ronald Reagan and most of th…

There's another part to this same equation: the "institutions" have very little credibility left. Whether it's about the health risks of tobacco, the environmental risks of fossil fuels, the addiction risks of opiates, the security of mortgage lending, or (recently added) the safety risks of flying, we constantly see the same pattern of officials being undermined by paid-for scientific studies that are aimed at undermining or thwarting policy.

Given that adversarial dynamic between business and policy, I can't bring myself to fault even a single person for refusing the vaccine (I can still fault someone for publicly speaking against vaccinating others on invariably shaky arguments though). There is no public institution that I would trust to act towards any common good, that's how much public trust has been eroded in the name of "good business".

Re: How can we break our addiction to contempt?

#104

Post by BitwiseFool » Thu, Oct 21, 2021, 8:38 PM UTC

mrtesthah wrote: post #80

BitwiseFool wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very likely to devolve into a partisan squabble, so I don't want to keep going back and forth on this. I was ready to cite examples of the left playing fast and loose with the truth but I sense it will just create hostility. If I pick only one example, it looks like I'm not prepared and have nothing substantial to counter with. If I list multiple examples, it will look like I came here prepared for a fight as…

Can you cite an example of left-wing news outlets playing "fast and loose" in a way that literally jeopardized the foundation of US democracy and incited mass violence? Even if you think the investigation into Trump's ties to Russian influence was unjustified, it relied on democratically-elected representatives to impeach him, and it never undermined the rule of law itself. I'm sure you can find examples with lesser…

>"in a way that literally jeopardized the foundation of US democracy"

What does this even mean? This is way too vague and nebulous to ever get a grip on. I'm guessing you're talking about members of House/Senate contesting the results of the election, which they had a right to do, and followed the constitutional procedure for. You could also say this relied on democratically-elected representatives and wasn't undermining the rule of law.

>"and incited mass violence?"

Again, what qualifies as "mass violence"? I assume you're alluding to January 6th, which I hardly consider "mass violence" as it was very much localized and was over within a few hours. Surely the summer riots are more deserving of a term like "mass violence", no?

If we're talking about vigilante violence / decentralized intimidation, Maxine Waters told people to harass Trump staffers: "“They’re not going to be able to go to a restaurant, they’re not going to be able to stop at a gas station, they’re not going to be able to shop at a department store... The people are going to turn on them, they’re going to protest, they’re going to absolutely harass them.”"

As for your four bullet points, I am confident you can get the same kind of result (eroded faith in Democracy) by tweaking the questions to appeal to the sensibilities of people on the left. Just imagine flipping a few them by asking if a liberal agrees with "The rights of women and minorities are disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save them" and "It is hard to trust the results of elections when so many people have been victims of voter suppression".

Re: How can we break our addiction to contempt?

#105

Post by tremon » Thu, Oct 21, 2021, 8:43 PM UTC

caylus wrote: post #68

Pxtl wrote: post #34

What's notable is where you can see reality come crashing into people who treat policy like it's a simple team sport. COVID doesn't care about your feelings, and the very real impact of higher infection rates and lower vaccination coverage is demonstrating who exactly has so dug-in on their position so far that they've become utterly disconnected from reality.

Are you implying that areas of lower vaccination coverage are seeing higher infection rates? That does not seem to be the case under rigorous analysis: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8481107/ That's the problem with "reality" - the reality you see is driven by the media that reports the reality to you. Presumably the media you read likes to run stories like "lots of cases in Florida" to score points aga…

I would expect areas of lower vaccination coverage to show higher hospitalization rates, not necessarily higher infection rates. Got any studies on that statistic perchance?

The infection rate is unreliable because it requires people allowing themselves to be tested when sick, and I would expect people that refuse to be vaccinated also refuse to be tested, on the same grounds.

Re: How can we break our addiction to contempt?

#106

Post by md8z » Thu, Oct 21, 2021, 8:49 PM UTC

etherael wrote: post #90

newbie789 wrote: post #82

>…He has come to believe there is only one weapon that can defeat our extreme political polarization: love. Oh my, what a silly way to pitch a possible reader on your book. There is a (VERY conservative) town in my state where every single employee of the local department of transportation has quit over the vaccine mandate. Now the former employees and their conservative allies are gleefully posting about how “the li…

Isnt this argument predicated on the supposition that the only reason they are opposed to coercive experimental gene therapy is because they want to "own the libs?" I mean, maybe that's right but it seems unlikely when there are other much more obvious things to explain the reasons for the actions in question. That they then post hoc express schadenfreude for the party who they perceive to be responsible for the situ…

I'm not sure if you're saying this is your opinion, but just to be clear: Vaccine mandates are not coercive, the vaccine is not experimental, and vaccines in general are not gene therapy.

To elaborate: You can consider work vaccine mandates to be similar to any other job requirement. The COVID vaccines have received a huge amount of studies and trials. And "gene therapy" usually refers to use of things like CRISPR-Cas9 or other methods of delivering DNA into the cell which are able to modify genes. mRNA vaccines do not modify genes. (I'm not a biologist so you should ask one if you want more information on this)

Re: How can we break our addiction to contempt?

#107

Post by coffeecat » Thu, Oct 21, 2021, 8:51 PM UTC

CoastalCoder wrote: post #26

at_a_remove wrote: post #13

What's the Matter with Kansas? is a lovely example of contempt disguised as gentle inquiry, with a touch of worry over another, and it starts even with the title itself. "Why those poor, naive, uneducated conservatives in the flyover states, they simply do not understand that they are voting against their own interests." It's concern-trolling with a mask of pity. Once you begin looking for it, you can see it more and…

I find those two forms of contempt to be equally frustrating, because (AFAICT) they have the same root cause: Judging an un-nuanced, possibly straw-man version of another's views. Without any effort to check that they truly understand what the other person believes, let alone what reasons that person has for holding those views. I've seen this from both conservatives and liberals, and especially from those with mass-…

It's impossible for us to understand the beliefs/priorities/values of others from any perspective other than our own. Actually, my conjecture is that the only way to see things from another perspective is to internalize some aspects that perspective.

Let's say Alice holds some internalized ideal of traditional family values, and Bob holds some internalized ideal of tolerance and inclusion of LGBT people. When Alice looks at Bob's views, all she sees is that it's an affront to an ideal that she cares about, and when Bob looks at Alice's views, all he sees is that it's an affront to an ideal that he cares about.

But how can Alice possibly understand Bob's point of view, unless she's able to tentatively drop her concern for traditional family values? I expect that even with effort to understand the other's perspective, unless that other perspective is internalized, Alice's thoughts on Bob's views will be centered around what she cares about: "I guess I understand what motivates Bob to hate family values", "I guess I understand what motivates Alice's bigoted views on LGBT issues", etc.

Re: How can we break our addiction to contempt?

#108

Post by msandford » Thu, Oct 21, 2021, 8:52 PM UTC

Pxtl wrote: post #42

tombert wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't necessarily break with my reasoning, right? They might still actually think that the vaccines are worse than the disease. Obviously they're wrong, and they should get vaccinated, but they might be fundamentally "good" but also misguided people. I have my own hypothesis about the COVID vaccine denialism in particular, but I am afraid that it might come off as a bit too political for HN and Dang would lock…

The challenge is that historically the political mainstream has been endlessly assuming good faith on obvious bad actors, to the point that Trump's obvious racism was controversial to point out because he didn't literally dress up as a Klansman wielding a noose. As a reaction to this problem you see the basic approach that the social justice wing has basically declared that intent doesn't matter . No more excuses. An…

> If somebody is doing something destructive and the stakes are high, wasting time being nice about their feelings seems thoroughly counterproductive

Playing devil's advocate here let's imagine that someone from a political party that is probably not yours (just guessing!) might use your same logic and apply it.

Abortions. They're killing people. High stakes? Check.

Abortions. They're killing defenseless humans. Destructive? Check?

You don't have to agree with these definitions for people on the political right to define things this way. And were they to take their definitions and use your logical template and then react in the way you're suggesting might be OK with your definitions, what you're left with is something that looks an awful lot like the Texas abortion ban right now.

The point I'm trying to make isn't that you're wrong and bad and should feel bad. The point I'm trying to make is that a person needs to think very long and very hard about situations in which polite deference isn't warranted.

Because with the team sports politics we've got going on right now it's super easy for one side to look at the template the other side is using and reappropriate it for their pet issues and then things which are "settled" suddenly get very exciting indeed.

Re: How can we break our addiction to contempt?

#109

Post by DFHippie » Thu, Oct 21, 2021, 9:05 PM UTC

iammisc wrote: post #99

DFHippie wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The two sides don't react to contempt symmetrically. The left doesn't care if Trump insults them. It only has any bearing if it leads to policy changes they hate. The right, on the other hand, really, really hates to be made fun of, to the point where they'd rather destroy the country (see the Civil War or the Jan 6 insurrection) than leave an insult unaddressed. The right believes the left is as sensitive as they ar…

> The left believes compassion, ideals, rational argument, and consideration of material self-interest My goodness.. this comment is so full of itself I can't even. Yes, us right wingers believe it's good to be uncompassionate. > they write endless tracts trying to prove their point, appealing to science and founding principles and so forth And yet, most left wingers are so disconnected from the reality of people on…

> Portland decided to encourage blacks to get vaccinated by putting ads of black drag queens up.

This is called nutpicking. You claim this example is representative (and you claim you have adequately represented who did what for what purpose). I claim it is confirmation bias. We could settle this with statistics.

> The left screamed for years about Trump's manner of speech (not his content, simple the manner). For example, Trump's big talk on immigration through the southern border was met with outright hostility, despite the current administration now keeping the EXACT same plan (the remain in mexico policy). Or, for example, when Trump insulted Antifa, we had to hear on end how Antifa was just an idea, and how being against Antifa means you're a fascist or something.

Setting aside your characterization, which again I believe is self-serving and inaccurate, the point is the left weren't upset at being insulted, they were upset that Trump was using lies to justify harmful policy and to promote vigilante violence against various groups the right hates, including, strangely, anti-fascists. You haven't actually addressed this point.

Perhaps I wasn't clear, so, to restate my thesis: the right cares a lot more about contempt than the left. It bothers everyone to be insulted, but it bothers the right a lot more, to the point that revenge is more important to many of them than any policy goal. The right assumes the left thinks like them and acts accordingly. The left assumes the right thinks like them and acts accordingly. Each side misinterprets the other. Though, again, I don't think this is symmetrical either. I think the right misunderstands the left more than the reverse. So, for instance, the right assumes that the positions people on the left take are insincere "virtue signaling" because they can't believe someone would sincerely hold these positions. The left knows that arguing policy with statistics, studies, and appeals to claimed national values isn't going to work with most of the right, but they don't really have a better strategy.

Re: How can we break our addiction to contempt?

#110

Post by wara23arish » Thu, Oct 21, 2021, 9:05 PM UTC

Jtsummers wrote: post #89

wara23arish wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On that note, I recently found out about a term “Tittytainement”, coined by Zbigniew Berzinski, a national US security advisor in the 90s. Message was that due to globalization, a 20/80 split in the job market was inevitable. So there needs to he work done on placating and nursing unrest by distracting people with movies, sports etc.. This was during the 1995 World State Forum. I tried to look up any more material wh…

That's a similar premise to the Roman notion of bread and circuses. Given the when for this that you provided, there was apparently a book in 1996 that describes the 20/80 society. The term "tittytainment" was, per wiktionary, coined by Brzezinski, but he was not in any kind of public office in the 1990s, he held the National Security Advisor position in the 70s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Global_Trap

Thank you for the correction and the reference.