31–40 of 77 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps you’re able to detect the potential issues with a denunciation of tribalism made by someone who had a leading role in the homicide of several hundred thousand Iraqis for no apparent reason beyond their regional, ethnic, and religious affiliations.
No apparent reason? What about the “rape rooms”?
Drumpf is finished
This was a good essay: well-written, cogent, and thought-provoking. I know there are a lot of folks that want to take this essay and bash it into some political points. I think that's probably part of the problem Mattis is describing; our desire to make social media hay out of whatever we're given. He does have a point about current politics in there. It's hidden quite a bit. His larger point, though, is about how in…
Neither do I but I see tribalism as one of the most destructive forces of the last decade, responsible for almost all big changes (and lack of change) in the world. Politics spill out to other areas. It is not difficult to connect the dots between rapid clicks-and-likes driven social media to the burning of Amazon forests.
I don't know what the solution is but this is the meta problem. Solving it is likely to start fixing other areas of life.
It's not directly related to General Mattis, but I would recommend reading Evan Wright's book "Generation Kill". Which recounts his time being embedded with the 1st Recon Battalion, which was under the command of Mattis (Callsign Chaos) during Operation Iraqi Freedom. The book even goes briefly into a famous moment in the invasion of Iraq were General Mattis fires one of his commanders during a siege of a city. https…
Rudy is played by himself.
This was thoughtful, measured, wise, well-written, and completely ineffectual. There's no "threat of tribalism". We're living in tribalism. This piece could only be effective in another climate. Ham-fisted, on-the-nose, bluntness is the only way to get your message across to a political audience in 2019.
This was a good essay: well-written, cogent, and thought-provoking. I know there are a lot of folks that want to take this essay and bash it into some political points. I think that's probably part of the problem Mattis is describing; our desire to make social media hay out of whatever we're given. He does have a point about current politics in there. It's hidden quite a bit. His larger point, though, is about how in…
> I don't know what the solution is. Neither do I but I see tribalism as one of the most destructive forces of the last decade, responsible for almost all big changes (and lack of change) in the world. Politics spill out to other areas. It is not difficult to connect the dots between rapid clicks-and-likes driven social media to the burning of Amazon forests. I don't know what the solution is but this is the meta pro…
We've socially evolved as tribal creatures, but odd ones. We're tribal creatures with the ability to freely mingle between various tribes (for the most part). This actually gives us tremendous evolutionary advantages. We evolve first as individuals, then as small groups, then as groups-of-groups, and so on. At any one time there could be millions of various adaptations in the works. As conditions change, various individuals and group succeed and others fall by the wayside. This person-family-clan-tribe-region evolutionary promotion model works for biology, science, social mores, and so forth.
What we tech folks have done, and we had no way of knowing, is flatten all of that out. So now what we see is winner-take-all for all of those things that used to be widely diverse and somewhat chaotic. It would seem to folks who didn't know better that this would be a good thing. After all, isn't standardization good? But in fact it's turning what used to extremely robust and anti-fragile systems into quite brittle and unpredictable ones.
I don't think most people understand the problem, even the ones who complain about it. That doesn't make me optimistic that there's a solution forthcoming.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There's no "threat of tribalism". We're living in tribalism. I understand the point to be "tribalism is great, but we should be one tribe dominating all (or most, with our allies, as long as they are aligned with us) the other tribes". I didn't see any general call against tribalism. "Defending our way of life" is pretty much that: "the tribe's way of life".
> I didn't see any general call against tribalism. "We are dividing into hostile tribes cheering against each other, fueled by emotion and a mutual disdain that jeopardizes our future, instead of rediscovering our common ground and finding solutions." The phrase "defending our way of life" isn't in the article.
exactly: I read We to mean "US-citizens", not "humans". Divide and conquer, be divided and you might be conquered, therefore (internal) division is bad. As soon as some intergalactic threat shows up, the same rhetoric will be heard on a planetary level. "This is no time for internal division while the bugs are trying to wipe us out. You've seen what they did to Buenos Aires."
> The phrase "defending our way of life" isn't in the article.
From the article: "When it comes to the defense of our experiment in democracy and our way of life, ideology should have nothing to do with it."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It has been well over a 100 years since the last time the president didn't get the nomination. It's pretty much going to be Trump vs Biden.
“It's pretty much going to be Trump vs Biden.” A 74 year old vs a 78 year old. Pretty appealing options.
Why do you think it's pretty much just white old dude?