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‘Culture wars’ are fought by tiny minority – UK study

theguardian.com

671–674 of 674 posts

Re: ‘Culture wars’ are fought by tiny minority – UK study

#671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think the main culprit exacerbating this is the main stream media. I understand your argument but I also in no way want to distract from the culpability owned by social media companies, their product designers and managers, and the people who wrote the code to implement their desires. They are ultimately guilty for the damage they have wrought on our societies. Traditional media companies may have exacerbated the…

Do you have any evidence for that point? Like sure, I'd love to blame Twitter and Facebook for all of our societal ills, but they aren't new. Culture wars didn't just suddenly happen in the early 00s. Cue the 1960s and 70s long before any social media and the amazing amount of not just protests but bombings, assassinations and so on that make the current culture war seem like a mere shouting match.

What's new is the ability to quickly spread information. In pre-social-media age, we had "fake news", but outside of newspapers and TV, any rumor would have to spread by word of mouth - and even with phones, it places a significant upper limit on the number of people one person can spread it to.

But with modern social networks, a single mouse click can send it into dozens of feeds; hundreds, for some people. And then you get this effect magnified manyfold:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc

Re: ‘Culture wars’ are fought by tiny minority – UK study

#672

I think the main culprit exacerbating this is the main stream media. "Vox pops" have formed part of filling air-time or column inches for a long while, but this is largely replaced now by journalists looking at Twitter and either a) using that as a stand-in for 'this is what the public think' or b) making it the story itself. Social media is no longer just "second screen" below-the-line commenting on events, it's hel…

In Orwell's Oceania, the inner and outer party made up around 10% of the population. Minitrue was a small subset of that apparatus, and developed such wonderful products as "the two minutes hate". It's not like we weren't warned.

And 1984 is not just about totalitarianism.

"I must say I believe, or fear, that taking the world as a whole these things are on the increase. Hitler, no doubt, will soon disappear, but only at the expense of strengthening (a) Stalin, (b) the Anglo-American millionaires and (c) all sorts of petty fuhrers of the type of de Gaulle. All the national movements everywhere, even those that originate in resistance to German domination, seem to take non-democratic forms, to group themselves round some superhuman fuhrer (Hitler, Stalin, Salazar, Franco, Gandhi, De Valera are all varying examples) and to adopt the theory that the end justifies the means. Everywhere the world movement seems to be in the direction of centralised economies which can be made to ‘work’ in an economic sense but which are not democratically organised and which tend to establish a caste system. With this go the horrors of emotional nationalism and a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the words and prophecies of some infallible fuhrer. Already history has in a sense ceased to exist, ie. there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted, and the exact sciences are endangered as soon as military necessity ceases to keep people up to the mark. Hitler can say that the Jews started the war, and if he survives that will become official history. He can’t say that two and two are five, because for the purposes of, say, ballistics they have to make four. But if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could become five if the fuhrer wished it. That, so far as I can see, is the direction in which we are actually moving, though, of course, the process is reversible. ... Secondly there is the fact that the intellectuals are more totalitarian in outlook than the common people. On the whole the English intelligentsia have opposed Hitler, but only at the price of accepting Stalin. Most of them are perfectly ready for dictatorial methods, secret police, systematic falsification of history etc. so long as they feel that it is on ‘our’ side."

(https://libguides.timberlane.net/c.php?g=801142&p=5725782)

Re: ‘Culture wars’ are fought by tiny minority – UK study

#673
post #7

Almost any war is fought by a tiny minority, which is backed by large majority.

Almost any war is fought by a tiny minority, which is backed by large majority. While technically true, in a real war the “tiny minority” (the military) don’t choose when or where or why to fight, that is done by the “large majority”, the voters electing a government.

That's a discussion on the efficacy of representative democracy, which is a whole other thing in my opinion.

Re: ‘Culture wars’ are fought by tiny minority – UK study

#674
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I had to "confess" that I'm racist and promise to do better or it would have consequences for my career. So, basically inquisitor wannabees and pseudoscience cultists. Your colleague dodged a bullet. The idea that claiming that you are racist makes you not racist is totally gaga, random, and based in magical thinking, not in science. It only helps to hide in plain sight the real racists making much easier to admit…

He signed the document to stay at the institution. I wouldn't call it "dodging a bullet" I'd call it "securing his own yoke".

(It feels important to point out that my post is based on the text above, not based on having read the document being referred to nor the full context of the document. A company that would, say, require 100% of the employees to sign a document saying, in effect, that "everyone has inherent predilections towards folk they most relate to" and that "here we expect everyone to rise above that" would be pretty cool but what was described seemed weird to me.)
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