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Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid

theatlantic.com

411–420 of 504 posts

Re: Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid

#411
I think a good name for this is 'discontention'. Discontent + contention. People are now dissatisfied with their view of reality being challenged by people they know and talking heads, and because of that there is major contention (in the computer science sense) over what people want the narrative to be, and what decisions they want the people in power to make.

For a long time I have thought Trump being elected was the greatest psy-op of all time. Do you have any idea how much time people spent talking about him, thinking about him, etc? I mean his presidency could have slowed down progress because of that by a percentage point even if you ignore every policy decision he made or opinion he shared. Now people are even more emotional, thus more irrational, and now you are looked down on for not having a strong bias.

There are people who want to centralize power with the unitary executive theory, and make the president even more powerful, because then the president can bypass any level of 'discontention' by the public or other officials. So, basically, my theory is that by creating 'discontention', with either a left or right wing policies or presidents, will always lead to more centralization of power.

Most people define power as the ability to control and influence others. Personally, I define it as resource allocation.

Re: Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid

#412
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> huge growing divisions within the united States well before Putin Of course I'm not saying Russia created our national schizophrenia, which stems literally from the birth of the nation, but they sure as hell helped exacerbate the condition. Russia deliberately amplified and inflamed the culture wars so that they could corrupt and weaken the US from within without being noticed. From fake online accounts, to financi…

I agree with you. And yes I could and probably am manipulated to an extent. But... I have noticed this before 2016. Years before. Example of bad American institutions: physical therapy, high schools, colleges for physical therapists. Food. Look at how horrible people eat in America. You'd expect the best country in the world to have a little bit more education when it comes to their bodies and the filth (food, pollut…

> But... I have noticed this before 2016. Years before.

I wrote 'decade' for a reason. :-) The push started during the Obama administration. Before Russia invaded the Crimea, Putin was laying groundwork to soften US resistance.

Study Exposes Russia Disinformation Campaign That Operated In The Shadows For 6 Years: https://www.npr.org/2020/06/16/878169027/study-exposes-russi...

Re: Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid

#413
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Large groups cannot “process” anything; individual humans do that. Maybe what you mean is simply that humans act tribally, and most of the traditional tribe proxies (clubs, churches, etc.) have weakened or died off in modern society so we are left only with borderless ideologies as tribal allegiances.

Groups absolutely have an emergent consciousness, whether it is based on consensus or tyranny. Even a "human self" is ultimately a symbolic, higher-order complex formed from separate, often competing cognitions. In a very similar way, a group forms a mind and thinks, even if only one person is calling the shots: your conscious awareness will likely tend towards the cognitions created by your core beliefs, but that doesn't mean the others aren't there. They're just less conscious.

Re: Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid

#414
post #409

I just want my own land, to do my own shit on, not bother anyone, and not be bothered by anyone. Why is this so hard? Why do we want to be controlling other's actions so greatly through the implied threat of government violence? Edit: why disagree?

Because both the left and the right want to control what you do for your own (or "society's") good.

Ah, so I'm just a nitwit who is a danger to himself. Got it. That must be why they tax me - they know I can't responsibly handle having disposable income to spend on vices.

Re: Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid

#415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are legit issues, and wedge issues aren’t necessarily bullshit. But the right-wing playbook is the same everywhere , frame these issues in a way to maximize fear and link that fear to nostalgia of a better past. In the US guns are big. In Russia there’s an appeal to the bygone Soviet era where all Russian speakers were under one flag. In the US, the gun argument is the most transparent. Gun marketers evoke (mos…

To add a counterpoint - it seems to me the main reason the democrats are antigun is that is where most of their funding comes from. When you take money from Bloomberg or Soros you agree to be antigun. This is not something that is controversial to say, Bloomberg and Soros are very proud of it. They directly inject vast sums of money into local elections to force in anti-gun candidates, and they have been very success…

Agreed. Urban democrats drive the anti-gun stuff. I’ve belonged to the same gun club since I turned 13.

I had a weird upbringing. One side of my family was big in county republican politics, the other were unionists and involved in democratic politics. Nobody talked about any of this crap growing up.

What did change is crazy people become prominent starting around Obama times. People I’ve known for years are now difficult to talk to as they have been pulled into a world of paranoia and crazy.

Re: Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid

#416
post #304

He's putting the cart before the horse. The problem is the stupid bankrupt politics in the USA. Social media is just gasoline being thrown onto the fire, with the billionaire class pumping as much gas into it as they can. I think there's one throwaway paragraph in the middle of the whole article that addresses the political shift in the 90s that led us to where we are. That should have been front and center. The USA…

France, Canada, Britain and many other countries in the West that have everything you listed are also showing the same signs of division, all emerging in the same timeframe described by Haidt.

And "third way" neoliberalism took off in the US and the UK with Clinton and Blair in the 90s.

Re: Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid

#417
post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something else happened around 2010 -- we elected a black president. Frankly that made a lot of people lose their minds. I think there's a lot of folks out there who don't mind black people exactly, but absolutely abhor the idea that a black person might be in a position of power over them. Witness the commentary from the far right on the new Supreme Court Justice: "Your children and your grandchildren are going to h…

It's kinda hard to untangle, unfortunately. Like to contrast your point of view about people not liking to see a black person in power over them: perhaps a black person in a position of power was the catalyst by inciting racial discord (not just among whites, but black people too). I wouldn't be surprised, as a black person he was expected to promote issues affecting black people.

Can you get more specific? What did Obama do to incite racial discord? From my view he worked very hard to promote harmony.

Re: Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid

#418
post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I'm conservative, but my friends are liberal, am I a liberal? Or maybe I'm not a conservative, and they're not liberals: we all hold different nuanced opinions based on our own life and personal experience. Binning someone based on a subset of the company they keep is dismissive at best and purposefully malignant at worst.

I’m binning a talk show host who dabbles in politics into a political bin based on their political guests. Judging them on the people they platform is explicitly what you should do. This isn’t his private life with friends and family I’m judging him on. This is especially in light of the fact that he claims to be moderate because he “has anyone on” while his actions do not show that to be true. I don’t mean to single…

I'll bite, but I'd like to preface my response by saying that I'm not particularly a fan of Joe Rogan, even having watched a couple of his shows. The issue with saying that someone is a 'moderate liberal' is that that implies that there is a center to the extremes of the political spectrum somewhere; as the Overton window shifts (especially in the context of, say, hosting a very conservative guest) the relative political leanings of the people involved in the conversation will shift as well. (Thus if Joe Rogan is a moderate conservative who hosts a lot of extreme conservatives, he may come off of as a moderate liberal to his audience).

So with that out of the way, here's my response:

If you're familiar with the issues of Nash equilibriums and Mesa-alignment, you should know that a person's actions will sometimes contradict their inner motivations (e.g. peer pressure), or that people will compromise on their beliefs in the short run in the interest of preserving their beliefs in the long run (e.g. expressing moderate political beliefs when one's convictions run much deeper).

So in one sense, you're right: we can never know the 'true' inner motivations of somebody else. This is why we say "actions speak louder than words" (or thoughts); ultimately, the rubber hits the road we have to equate one's external actions with their internal beliefs.

I would say it's your right to express your opinion about what you think of others. I'm not arguing that 'because we don't know Joe Rogan's inner alignment, we can infer his political leanings at all.' What I am saying, though, is that Joe Rogan is not his podcast, and there are a number of reasons why a liberal talk show host would host more conservatives than liberals. I think it would be fair to say that Joe Rogan is generally in favor of free speech, and surrounding oneself with opinions that contradict one's own beliefs are a good way to refine how you express the beliefs you hold. Belief is ultimately determined by experience, but the same experience may result in different beliefs in different people (again, boils down to inner alignment).

While the people you surround yourself may affect your beliefs and political leanings in the long run, I believe that the guests on Joe Rogan's show vary wildly in their beliefs (e.g. he's hosted both Bernie Sanders and hyperconservatives) and Rogan's role in the podcast is mostly to act as a sounding board to help the other person express their opinions; therefore I feel that Joe Rogan's action of (supposedly) hosting more conservative guests than liberal ones does not imply that Joe Rogan is conservative.

But on top of that, the original spirit of my comment was to point out that the political lines we usually draw completely discard the nuance present in the real world. Some of the beliefs may be perceived as conservative, and others liberal. Projecting someone's complex (often hidden or inferred) political beliefs onto a relative political spectrum (e.g. liberal vs conservative) is a poor measure at best and purposefully tribalistic and reductive at worst.

Re: Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid

#419
post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Large groups cannot “process” anything; individual humans do that. Maybe what you mean is simply that humans act tribally, and most of the traditional tribe proxies (clubs, churches, etc.) have weakened or died off in modern society so we are left only with borderless ideologies as tribal allegiances.

No. Groups process things, but you must frame your question in terms of things you can measure about a group. An individual is a system; using your own logic it is inappropriate to talk about how a human feels. One must talk about each individual neuron and cell.

That's a very reductive take on what OP said. We're talking about social science, not biology here, so the individual is the atomic unit. Individual=Indivisible.

You can talk about tendencies across a group, but cognition is inherently done on an individual level, even accounting for network effects.

OTOH if what you're saying is that large groups of people can tend to share the same psychoses, well, that's a totally different statement.

Re: Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid

#420
post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Youre skipping the criticism of his guest list. He's had Bernie Sanders on what, once, twice? Then he's had no other major leftist political figures or commentators but has has loads of extreme right wing figures including crackpots like Alex Jones. Joe Rogan can claim he is a moderate leftist all he wants, but his guest list on JRE does not support that

I don't watch and don't know much about Joe Rogan, but what would be the point of inviting guests that share your viewpoint? You already know what they're going to say, and so do your watchers. It seems more beneficial to legitimate inquiry to invite moderates with an opposing viewpoint, and more conducive to ratings (drama) to invite polarizing figures of all ilk (Alex/Bernie) but particularly those whose viewpoint…

That is an argument with some merit, but I don’t believe it applies here. Rogan brings on many polarizing guests, they happen to be mostly conservative. It’s not like he’s bringing on only moderates from all branches of politics
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