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

theatlantic.com

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

#451

Post by maxfurman »

pas wrote: post #445
maxfurman wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Occupy failed because the organizers were systematically jailed on the eve of the major protests, preventing them from coordinating and establishing goals like the ones you are looking for.

They were out days later, no?

Exactly! They were pulled off the street hours before the major marches/protests/actions, and released the next day when it was too late to participate on the ground.

So someone would post an event on Facebook, get 1000 people to show up at the Brooklyn Bridge or what have you, and then all 1000 of them would stand around saying "who's in charge here?" because the actual organizer was in police custody! Occupy was dismantled in the public eye very effectively using this tactic.

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

#452

Post by quantified »

mathlover2 wrote: post #17
pzduniak wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much. If you look at other EU countries, social media was essential in dividing the populations and promoting populist, nationalistic and xenophobic parties.

Was social media the cause of the division, or did it merely allow people to exploit existing problems? Assuming that social media is a primary factor, for the sake of argument, the solution to this problem isn't regulating the platforms via Haidt's proposals (which I should add seem to be too limited in effect). Instead, we should decentralize the platforms into protocols. While this will still allow stupid people t…

Does media influence people, or is simply an expression of people?

As ever, the answer is “Yes”.

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

#453

Post by wallacoloo »

i feel like i'm out of touch. the premise is that most Americans don't like/agree with the political aspects of their social media: to which i wonder, why don't they disengage? even in 2022, it's not hard to find people who don't talk partisan politics. it's not hard to find people who value epistemics. the web-like portions of the internet make this easy. Google "rationalist community" and the first result is LessWrong. Google "neutral political news" and you get allsides.com. moreover, find just one person associated with a single thing you value and you can connect with them, chat with or browse who they're following, and recurse connections until you've embedded yourself in an environment of people you enjoy associating with.

this stuff is in easier reach than it's ever been. if you expect to consume the firehose and enjoy it, you're disillusioned: never has a single source appealed to every individual on the planet. you have to select your peers. curate your connections. if a friend repeatedly blasts you with bad political takes, cut or reduce the connection. the digital web isn't that different from the irl web in this aspect. it's your responsibility to craft connections that benefit your life. FB/Twitter/etc are tools to use in that (and far from the only ones), but you cannot abdicate your responsibility and expect good results.

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

#454

Post by Spooky23 »

rayiner wrote: post #391
Spooky23 wrote: post #350

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…

> The more moderate side is a different kind of coalition driven by different goals and ideas. Black and Hispanic voters are socially conservative, and don’t care about LGBT issues. That’s not true. About half of Black people oppose same sex marriage, about the same as republicans. But they go along with white liberals on social issues in exchange for getting their support on civil rights issues. But, for example, th…

Remember that all voters are people but not all people are voters.

When you look at the older voting population, numbers skew different.

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

#455

Post by s1artibartfast »

engineeringwoke wrote: post #392
cle wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Oh, our country is "too big". Oh my god, stop. I wouldn't gloss over this, the US presides over 330 million people across 3.8 million square miles, whereas the Netherlands has 17 million people across 16,000 square miles. This size and diversity of the US is a significant contributor to the national political dynamics IMO.

Yet the EU has better standards and works better for all citizens of the EU in comparison to the United States, despite the cultural and language barriers. You could have definitely said this twenty years ago and I wouldn't have blinked an eye, but times change. They are doing it... technology and data help governments administrate more efficiently over large land masses. Italy and Germany also have similar federal s…

The EU did not arrive at those standards together or not implement them from a central authority. If anything, the EU serves as a success story of allowing states to implement their own changes and slowly converge at a target.

The Netherlands and Romania do not need to have a shared approach and timeline for dealing with homelessness. the Dutch can do it specifically because they don't have to get 27 states and 440 million people on board with their policy.

Similarly, Abortion rights vary widely throughout the EU, and are generally more restrictive than the US. This is understood as a state issue, and is not a perpetual wedge issue for EU policy.

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

#456

Post by defterGoose »

coldtea wrote: post #424
defterGoose wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> We're talking about social science, not biology here, so the individual is the atomic unit. Not every observable property is available on the "atomic unit". Some only appear (emergent properties) after the association and observation of many such units, that is, in a group. In particle-terms, a single atom can't be a crystal. Or a living organism. But there are absolutely things that happen at the level of crystal…

> Not every observable property is available on the "atomic unit". Some only appear (emergent properties) after the association and observation of many such units, that is, in a group.

Name a property of the group that's more than a sum of the properties of the individual. Population, for instance.

The crystal analogy, again, isn't helpful because we're talking about social science, not physics.

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

#457

Post by ameister14 »

engineeringwoke wrote: post #384
ameister14 wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I want to house the homeless. The Dutch can do it, but somehow in the discourse here, it's "impossible" I mean the Dutch don't do that. Homelessness in the Netherlands has been rising for years and is higher per capita than the US. It's also one of those "very hard" problems - SF spent something like 300 million a year to try and house 8,000 homeless people and failed at it.

I have argued at length with people on this board about this very subject, and the answer is the way that the problem is measured in either country. The HUD survey is a farce; it's designed to underestimate the problem. You could easily infer with data who is homeless and who is not, and that's what the Dutch do. Maybe you are Dutch and unaware of the discrepancy, not sure. Housing and the tax benefits are very hot b…

>I also find it hard to believe that you could accept a fact like this so easily.

What does this mean?

I've looked at the OECD data generally, looked most closely into France but definitely into the Netherlands - the Netherlands actually has pretty good data over time. In both places though there is a significant secondary problem with undocumented homelessness. It's one of the major reasons the number appears so much lower than Germany or Luxembourg, for example.

Even with that, youth homelessness doubled in the Netherlands between 2010 and 2020. Homelessness generally grew by over 25% from 2016-2018, according to OECD data.

The Netherlands as of 2017 had about 70,000 people living in homeless accommodations according to federatie opvang and 30,500 either sleeping rough or in uncertain temporary shelters. According to the CBS it increased to 38,000 by 2019. Yeah, there's been a major decline in youth homelessness during Covid and that's great but it's not a solved issue.

BTW for comparison, France - same time period: 100,000 in accommodations, roughly 18,000 rough sleepers/people in uncertain temp shelters.

>the answer is the way that the problem is measured in either country.

No, no it isn't. The Netherlands does not claim to have solved its homelessness issue, because it has not solved it. How you slice the data between there and the US has nothing to do with the domestic issue.

>There is a very visible homeless problem in every large American city that you don't see in the Netherlands. And Amsterdam used to have a very similar problem that was only recently cleaned up in the mid-2000's.

Not to be snarky but visibility doesn't actually mean anything.

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

#458

Post by Kon-Peki »

RajT88 wrote: post #377
rayiner wrote: post #11

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…

In Illinois there's a pretty major divide between Northern and Southern IL. A lot of people draw that line well north of Springfield. I would say it broadly follows what some are calling the "Rural-Urban divide" - certainly the suburban areas are included. With some wrinkles of course. DeKalb is definitely "northern", but Mendota is definitely more "southern".

> DeKalb is definitely "northern", but Mendota is definitely more "southern".

Well, one of those towns has a 16000-student public research university with over 1000 doctoral students and participates in the management/operation of FermiLab. The other one is at the junction of two railroad lines, surrounded by farms and approximately the same population over the last 100 years. I would expect that they feel extremely different, and that's not a bad thing at all!

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

#459

Post by s1artibartfast »

magicalhippo wrote: post #354
ProjectArcturis wrote: post #205

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…

I recall the news here (in Norway) covering a demonstration against Obama during the elections. They interviewed a woman who was in tears because she, apparently, really thought Obama would kill her kids if he got elected. To me it seemed so utterly bizarre I had problems processing it.

I had a similar experience catching a bit of Alex Jones when switching through the channels at the beginning of the pandemic.

He was ranting about how the police were rounding up the homeless, chaining them to beds, and then "blowing up their lungs".

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

#460

Post by TimTheTinker »

barrkel wrote: post #267
TimTheTinker wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Is bigger government more able to do this? It already has the power it needs -- the legislature can outlaw undesirable corporate behaviors, the justice department can pursue litigation (including antitrust litigation), and fed…

Beggar thy neighbor policies require higher level coordination to escape. E.g. tax competition between states to attract large companies, which not only reduces public funds but also disadvantages smaller local companies, is hard to prevent without agreements between states, or policies at a superstate level. Replace taxes with permission to pollute, or worker rights, or other regulations, if you don't see a problem…

Agreed, and I'm not suggesting regulation of multi-state (or multi-national) corporations ought to fall to individual states in the US.
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