311–320 of 504 posts
A great article which is ruined by politicising it as a "rightwing problem". Everything the author identifies applies equally to rhetoric from the left, as anyone who has spent time on the r/politics section of Reddit or Twitter will recognize.
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This might be a weird outcome of the inability of large groups to process nuance. Groups seem to struggle with the idea that things can be done one way in one place and another way in another place - and struggle in a way that individuals seem not to. Groups - even small government types, weirdly - seem to fall into a trap whenever something goes wrong. The answer to a challenge is "centralise power, then do things m…
Collectivism, by definition, requires the use of force against people who aren’t complaint with the “collective”, so it requires violence. It’s a lot easier to commit violence against people when you can outsource it to someone else, so collectivism requires a strong, central authority. The less local that authority is, the less culpable we can convince ourselves we are when it goes wrong. The reason we keep building…
Also, by definition, anarchist collectivism has no strong central authority. People who aren't compliant probably shouldn't be living in an anarchist collective in the first place, but choice of social/economic system is sadly not granted as an option. In so much of the world today, people are forced to live under capitalism, like it or not. And people claim that this is "freedom"
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Ah! OK, I don't agree with you in general, but you inadvertently brought up a good point. There's the perception of Americans online and that in person, and I'm sure Russia has done it everything it can to make sure we're hated abroad as much as possible. You have a bunch of friends online who think Americans are all fat, loud, obnoxious and ignorant. Join the club. Most Americans think that as well. Definitely anoth…
Just to add: this was long before Russian propaganda. I'm not saying I agree with it. Just something I have noticed. And my friends aren't online. They say this in person. For example, in a bar and hear someone being loud. American. Seeing tourists making lots of unnecessary noise in the street -> american. This is half joking but also what people seem to actually think a lot of the time.
This is the dumbest thing I have seen come from Jonathan Haidt. If social media is this powerful a destabilizer of societies, I wonder how Haidt explains first world countries like Germany, Canada, and most of the rest of the planet that have social media but haven't fallen into the same sort of divisiveness the US has.
I can only speak for Germany, but Social media here still is much, much less widely adopted than in the US, because sharing one's life with strangers is culturally not as well regarded as it is in the US. This also applied before social media - telling one's life story to strangers was just not done. Now, this is changing for younger generations, but even they are still not nearly as willing to share as their America…
What Germany is lacking in social media it makes up for in WhatsApp status updates and Telegram groups. The landscape is less homogeneous in Germany with only a minute fraction of people using Twitter, Snapchat or TikTok for example, but you're extremely underselling the overall magnitude.
There's a ouroboros of sharepics and clips spreading between Facebook/Instagram and WhatsApp/Telegram and vice versa dragging in additional people in every rotation. Instagram sharepics being shared in Telegram groups, TikTok clips showing up in WhatsApp status updates, and so on, often with direct links back to the source so people can jump right into the funnel.
I've seen it with the anti-mask and anti-vax protesters, now I'm seeing it with pro-Russian propaganda. Meanwhile the Querdenker movement seems to be slowly rebranding as a "peace movement", but always with the same broad strokes messaging to distrust the government and to be critical of every party other than the AfD. Whether it's anti-queer, anti-vax or "anti-war", the ideology is fungible and arbitrary, but the underlying message remains the same.
Haidt makes an excellent observation about the mid-20th century unity being an aberration due to the technology of the time: > Gurri is no fan of elites or of centralized authority, but he notes a constructive feature of the pre-digital era: a single “mass audience,” all consuming the same content, as if they were all looking into the same gigantic mirror at the reflection of their own society. Something I think we o…
During the 2016 election, when I had my ballot, I tried to just Google everything on there. The most alarming thing I noticed was the absolute lack of any press on the House of Representatives candidates. I had nothing to go on except a short biography of each candidate (in one article), and one of them had a YouTube channel of little substance.
In practice, so many of America’s problems, and so many problems that Americans are very conscious of, are local issues over which the president has little to no control. Zoning, rent, real estate, roads, education, policing. Locally governed, locally funded, locally hired.
But the local press is gutted. For any of these topics, the audience is microscopic compared to “the president dumped feed in the Khoi pond”.
Haidt makes an excellent observation about the mid-20th century unity being an aberration due to the technology of the time: > Gurri is no fan of elites or of centralized authority, but he notes a constructive feature of the pre-digital era: a single “mass audience,” all consuming the same content, as if they were all looking into the same gigantic mirror at the reflection of their own society. Something I think we o…
This statement is ambiguous. I see two obvious interpretations:
1. Differences in worldview are less important when the bureaucrats with power over your life live nearby.
2. Differences in worldview are smaller when the bureaucrats with power over your life live nearby.
I think #2 is true and #1 is false.
Haidt makes an excellent observation about the mid-20th century unity being an aberration due to the technology of the time: > Gurri is no fan of elites or of centralized authority, but he notes a constructive feature of the pre-digital era: a single “mass audience,” all consuming the same content, as if they were all looking into the same gigantic mirror at the reflection of their own society. Something I think we o…
> What I see missing from Haidt's analysis is increased federalism and localism as a solution. I'm theoretically in favor of this, but ... one of the reasons we need a bigger, more powerful federal government is to have a governmental entity that can take on the massively more powerful private entities (corporations) that exist. No state government can take on Walmart or Amazon. The federal government can (or could,…
What does this mean? Could a state not pass laws and then force Walmart to comply with those laws while operating inside the state?
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You can absolutely have voluntary collectivism where you simply do not do things unless everyone agrees upon them. This works best in small or medium sized groups and probably does not work for large groups, but your post reads like you think collectivism always necessitates violence and that simply isn’t true.
And what do you do if someone disagrees with the crowd? How do you force him without coercieon? (hint those two words are synonyms).
I think as the parent poster was saying, this is possible with smaller groups. I think the best example would be townships in the US. Different townships decide on the level of tax and investing (especially into school systems.) Then, individuals self-select themselves into groups by choosing where to live.
I have friends upset about how not all schools are "top-tier" schools. I quote "top-tier" as it is in the eye of the beholder what that means. The thing is, not everyone wants their kids to have 5hrs of homework a night. Nor does everyone want to pay 20k+ in annual property taxes. Some would rather home-school or send their kids to private or parochial schools.
People often achieve this by joining a township that agrees with their appetites in spending and other political choices.
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Wanting a powerful federal government to take on Walmart and Amazon seems like burning your house down because it has mice in it. Yeah, you might have some work to do to get the mice under control, but you don’t need to give up your house to do it.
I don't see how that analogy fits unless you think government is dangerous by definition and cannot provide any sort of services or protections for its people. Weakening the federal government in the face of these large multinational corporations because you're afraid of the government flavored corruptions seems more akin to "burning your house down because it has mice in it" from where I stand.