|
Bodyholes posted:On topic for the thread Dems got flattened in Louisiana. Black voters stayed home. You drove me to look this story up. https://www.npr.org/2023/11/11/1212055152/louisiana-democrats-analyze-big-defeat-in-gubernatorial-race quote:"In Orleans Parish, there was a noticeable absence of Democratic party mobilization, and turnout among key demographic groups was relatively low," said Brian Brox, a professor of political science at Tulane University. Sounds like a party apparatus withered by years of regular defeats and neglect.
|
#
?
Nov 20, 2023 22:44
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 27, 2024 16:25 |
|
|
Misunderstood posted:
Amusingly they probably don't know each other exists but they are the only two people I know who are posting constantly on Instagram so they always end up side by side in my stories feed.
|
|
#
?
Nov 20, 2023 22:45
|
|
|
I guess growing up it feels like I've heard the same complaints about nightly news vs newspapers, cable news networks vs nightly news, and now social media, so I'm not sure about assigning broader cultural trends to a result of media. Like it's always been a thing that fresh undergrads for whatever reason become more impassioned politically. Which isn't to say that media doesn't have an impact, but just like Trump being president, I'm not sure if we can squarely place that entirely on Twitter or what have you. My pet theory is that some part of it is people feeling more isolated inter-personally and driven to find a tribe identity which causes more intense polarization.
|
|
#
?
Nov 20, 2023 22:50
|
|
|
WarpedLichen posted:I guess growing up it feels like I've heard the same complaints about nightly news vs newspapers, cable news networks vs nightly news, and now social media, so I'm not sure about assigning broader cultural trends to a result of media. Like it's always been a thing that fresh undergrads for whatever reason become more impassioned politically. that wouldnt shock me. I wouldnt be shocked is if part of it is because people use discord groups now as friend hangouts and so you get alot of self selecting stuff and you end up getting smaller and smaller pools. I know alot of discords ban politics or make it seperate parts of the group so you dont get insane fights or blow outs. Most of the groups i am in are mostly chill still.
|
|
#
?
Nov 20, 2023 22:58
|
|
|
Outside of here and like, two other pretty private spaces, i just don't mention or engage on the subject because it's not just polarization, its mind-obliterating fanatical stupidity, and i truly don't have the mental fortitude for it anymore. Friday or so some friend of the family called me over to look at their phone going "look, look what they do! Someone must stop them" and i shuffle my dumb rear end over to stare at it while they hold it in front of my face and it was a tiktok video about israel kidnapping palestinean children to harvest their skin and i got legitimately heated about telling this guy: don't you dare show me this dim poo poo you can't even fact check and you loving know it, i didn't consent to come have you come flash me with conspiracy elders of zion poo poo. And everything immediately went off, like my even saying this autotranslated into that i was therefore part of team b. so in five minutes someone else is happy to share that they're pro israel bombing Gaza into paste, like I'm going back him up on it I got an actual headache. Didn't even take a position and people already got me 2 tylenol into this "I can't do this to myself so I'm a stay out of this forever" is really becoming a huge way that subjects like this become disengaged or shunned by huge numbers of people, which totally feeds back to questions about complicity or silence in the face of evil
|
|
#
?
Nov 20, 2023 23:09
|
|
|
WarpedLichen posted:I guess growing up it feels like I've heard the same complaints about nightly news vs newspapers, cable news networks vs nightly news, and now social media, so I'm not sure about assigning broader cultural trends to a result of media. Like it's always been a thing that fresh undergrads for whatever reason become more impassioned politically. The particular wrinkle with the current era is the type of information bubble someone can shrink themselves down to if they so prefer, and still find a thriving community of people who they are in broad agreement with, even if what they think is insane and stupid. (This isn't even something most people do consciously but the current format of the internet almost inevitably makes it happen.) With radio and TV the concern was too much consensus, too much centralized social control, too much homogenization. We are now very much dealing with the opposite issue, where people are on the verge of disagreeing on the color of the sky. Paradoxically, though, this is not leading to more independent thought. It's just making it easier for people to find the thought leaders they follow to be more individually tailored to their cultural tastes. A lot of people, it turns out, have really really bad preferences about who those leaders are! And since people are in strong agreement with those thought leaders, they are actually able to be influenced by them in a far more profound way than CBS News was ever able to entrench a capitalist liberal worldview or whatever. It's just that today, the influence is coming from a million different directions, so we have a situation where the rear end in a top hat party can't even agree on which rear end in a top hat should get to poo poo on everybody, because one of them likes Bongino and one of them likes Shapiro or whatever the gently caress. And these to-the-death disagreements are among the very narrow subset of the population (40+, white, male, rear end in a top hat) that ends up among the Republican caucus, so just think of that blown up society-wide. (It's like everybody is a leftist!  )People are becoming more AWARE, just like after the press or radio or TV, but they're becoming aware of a lot of different things and a lot of different versions of things at the same time. tl;dr I dunno man the internet's a pretty big deal Misunderstood fucked around with this message at 23:19 on Nov 20, 2023 |
|
#
?
Nov 20, 2023 23:12
|
|
|
The Internet definitely facilitates arguing and fighting because, well, it's a mass communication medium so it quite literally exists to facilitate communication. I'm not sure if we can say that something has changed in platforms used or social media trends have sharpened division, though, because that may be eliding the possibility things are more heated because things in the Middle East are way more serious than any previous incident while the Internet was widely available. October 7th was a tremendously destructive event that has clearly been traumatizing as gently caress to many Jews worldwide, and the IDF response is likewise far greater in scope than any previous actions. As horrible as eg Cast Lead was it lasted three weeks, displaced 50,000 people, and killed around 1100 to 1400. The current war is literally a full order of magnitude worse and there are no signs Israel is slowing down. Honestly from the article zoux posted it doesn't even seem that the disagreements are coming from seeing much different information (There is some, but it reads like things being brought up to support existing positions), it's that there are vastly different understandings of why various incidents have happened, and what it means to express any given opinion or raise any particular incident. Al-Shifa? Well, hostages. Music festival? Well, airstrikes on refugees. And just bringing things up is taken as proof of a fanatical apologia for one side or another, even though you could absolutely support one side as a whole but decry certain things it does as immoral or just counterproductive.
|
|
#
?
Nov 20, 2023 23:51
|
|
|
Ms Adequate posted:The Internet definitely facilitates arguing and fighting because, well, it's a mass communication medium so it quite literally exists to facilitate communication. I'm not sure if we can say that something has changed in platforms used or social media trends have sharpened division, though, because that may be eliding the possibility things are more heated because things in the Middle East are way more serious than any previous incident while the Internet was widely available. I think what might be the novelty is actually the era of relatively low disagreement we're coming out of. When a small, and then increasingly smaller number of companies (and people) were setting the tone for gigantic swathes of the media landscape, people tended to agree on a lot of poo poo. (For example, "racism is bad" was able to sink in really, really well in the 70s-90s, even if it turned out a lot of people were just faking it. And even if it turned out most people just reacted by changing their definition of what racism was rather than changing their views...) But before that you'd have two hundred penny press newspapers in a city all putting forward their own slant of varying degrees of crackpottery. It's possible that we could make social adaptations to the new reality of how we tell other people to go gently caress themselves, or the pendulum could swing back towards a monoculture (hard to imagine right now, but I dunno poo poo happens.) People have always argued the same amount, and with about the same hostility, it's just that a lot more of it used to be about sports. Nowadays all anybody really cares about in sports is beating the spread. Misunderstood fucked around with this message at 00:14 on Nov 21, 2023 |
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2023 00:09
|
|
|
Incidentally, the first story in that article is from a mom who is friends with her daughter's currently-in-college friends (?) and then called one of them on the phone to confront them about social media posts (???) which is the most absolutely insane poo poo I've ever heard of.
|
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2023 01:27
|
|
|
Kchama posted:That's a poll from 2003, not 2023. Don't you see how that might be a touch outdated and misleading? No? I specifically left the date in so posters wouldn’t be confused. Apologies if you were misled. I may have my quibbles with some other posters here, but I don’t doubt that they will see the 49% figure for terrorism and the 46% figure for Iraq and recognize that this is not a recent poll 
|
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2023 01:41
|
|
|
The Top G posted:No? I specifically left the date in so posters wouldn’t be confused. Apologies if you were misled. The point was that a poll for 2003 is worthless for saying what will matter for 2024. Unsurprisingly, the Iraq War starting in 2003 suddenly made people care about foreign policy for a period of time. Kchama fucked around with this message at 01:51 on Nov 21, 2023 |
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2023 01:48
|
|
|
Kchama posted:The point was that a poll for 2003 is worthless for saying what will matter for 2024. Unsurprisingly, the Iraq War starting in 2003 suddenly made people care about foreign policy for a period of time. That's true, but they were responding to the "never is" part of "Israel-Palestine is not going to be a major issue in the 2024 election. Foreign policy never is."
|
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2023 01:52
|
|
|
Civilized Fishbot posted:That's true, but they were responding to the "never is" part of "Israel-Palestine is not going to be a major issue in the 2024 election. Foreign policy never is." That poll didn't even answer it for 2004 though. In the actual exit polls for the 2004 election, Terrorism + Iraq together only accounted for 34% of people's 'biggest issue', less than Terrorism alone accounts for in the poll he posted. Moral Values and Economy were the big ones in the actual 2004 election. Taking a single poll conducted over a year before the election turns out to not be very good at predicting what will be the major issue in the actual election. Kchama fucked around with this message at 02:11 on Nov 21, 2023 |
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2023 02:09
|
|
|
Eric Cantonese posted:You drove me to look this story up. Yeah even as somebody who went out of my way to absentee vote- the Louisiana dems are basically the same as the bigger and famouser fuckup dems like in Texas and Florida. They are out of touch, give no fucks, and aren't even trying. I mainly care about voting in that a blue city in a red state is better than full red, so downballot shitlibs feel worth it even though I'm not excited. The republican majority in all three is real, but the state dems need to realize how many people they are losing by being known loser writeoffs who lose half their potential votes by sucking so hard that people don't bother.
|
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2023 02:19
|
|
|
Foreign policy may not be a "major" issue in 2024 but 2020 was decided by 70k votes across three states, and 2016 was iirc 140k votes across three states. Marginal issues can matter a whole lot in close races!
|
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2023 02:47
|
|
|
zoux posted:Incidentally, the first story in that article is from a mom who is friends with her daughter's currently-in-college friends (?) and then called one of them on the phone to confront them about social media posts (???) which is the most absolutely insane poo poo I've ever heard of. Several incidents with my own family in a row (none of which were this mortifying, but a few came close) led me to decide that I was going to separate my social media presence entirely from family, and I informed them very respectfully of this fact. Things absolutely erupted after that, it became a huge deal beyond anything I could have ever predicted. It was my first look into social media as a generationally toxified environment, ahead of the curve.
|
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2023 03:20
|
|
|
me and my family and friends still just talk by phone or text. have no intention of joining any social media outside this here
|
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2023 03:37
|
|
|
So the Times today is running (as news) not as opinion (which is (edit to is) pretty notable) basically the same discussion that was here yesterday re fascism. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/20/us/politics/trump-rhetoric-fascism.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare This part really stuck out to me: “He has insinuated that the nation’s top military general should be executed and called for the “termination” of parts of the Constitution. If he wins back the White House, he has said, he would have “no choice” but to imprison political opponents.” They source each assertion in the link. Bar Ran Dun fucked around with this message at 04:02 on Nov 21, 2023 |
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2023 03:58
|
|
|
Face to face is always better. The internet is an amazing resource if you care about informing yourself, but it has also worked to funneling us into the same old bullshit. Two things about face to face- you can see somebody basically regurgitate what amounts to a meme, and rhetorically pull their pants down, and they know it. It's not the rule but I swear it happens, you know it when you see it. Shame, remorse, growth. Not that we don't all make mistakes, and I'm familiar with the quote (sarytr?). Such effect seems much rarer on the internet though. Which brings me to my second point. You can be punched in the face in real life. A reliable metric of judging whether something is internet brained. Discourse happens much differently following that reality, for good or ill. And a topical point regarding morality of our society or international issues at large. What's allowed is decided by who's got the force, while we act above such things.
|
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2023 04:05
|
|
|
Just bought this sign because of what we’re discussing here: https://www.etsy.com/listing/599485034/thank-you-for-not-discussing-the-outside Gonna display it prominently at Christmas with the family and then hang it next to my front door after. What I think about just about any given topic means exactly gently caress-all. which is why I post in D&D BRJurgis posted:(sarytr?) Lmao someone please show me the philosopher as the mythical creature
|
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2023 04:28
|
|
|
I AM GRANDO posted:Online also sets a hard expectation for immediate response and engagement with whatever is going on, so you’re already primed to fire a hot take as fast as possible. Teenagers I work with (high school + college) tell me part of what makes the social media experience so miserable for people in high school is the expectation that you will post to make your position clear and that not posting within a certain window signals that you’re choosing not to care about whatever is going on, all of which affects friendships and relationships about as seriously as one’s actions when you’re socializing in person. It sounds absolutely wretched. the saddest part is that this kinda poo poo isn't even new. for me it was myspace in middle school, facebook in highschool. hell, i've seen promising relationships vaporize because of a private profile or lack of a status "confirming" that someone was dating. social media has always been ridiculously toxic because everything about it is engineered to create bubbles of information that seem all-encompassing, which then cause people to make hostile assumptions if others aren't engaged on the same level. in short, social media is this tweet writ large: https://twitter.com/MikeDrucker/status/1137068315229208578?s=20 Kith fucked around with this message at 15:08 on Nov 21, 2023 |
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2023 04:56
|
|
|
In other news it is now several years later. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/18/opinion/pandemic-school-learning-loss.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare “The evidence is now in, and it is startling. The school closures that took 50 million children out of classrooms at the start of the pandemic may prove to be the most damaging disruption in the history of American education.” Remote was extremely terrible for kids. Turns out not just for elementary kids, as was my hypothesis. The high school chronic absenteeism rates are crazy. Worse in poor areas but still stunningly bad in rich areas. “More than a quarter of students were chronically absent in the 2021-22 school year” “The problem is pronounced in poorer districts like Oakland, Calif., where the chronic absenteeism rate exceeded 61 percent. But as the policy analyst Tim Daly wrote recently, absenteeism is rampant in wealthy schools, too. Consider New Trier Township High School in Illinois, a revered and highly competitive school that serves some of the country’s most affluent communities. Last spring, The Chicago Tribune reported that New Trier’s rate of chronic absenteeism got worse by class, reaching nearly 38 percent among its seniors.”
|
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2023 05:24
|
|
|
I'm not at all surprised by those findings. I was in grad school from 2021-23 and sometimes we had to do virtual. I had a hard time paying attention on zoom for hours of classes. Can't imagine having to learn that way full time, for months or a year plus.
|
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2023 06:16
|
|
|
Bar Ran Dun posted:In other news it is now several years later. I'm skeptical that a piece couched in the language of an arms race is much more than an open call for more of the emergency funding that produced these startlingly negative outcomes in the first place. I'm made more skeptical by hiding threats like "children are at risk of becoming impossible to educate" in the text. A truancy explosion in all income cohorts is a broken educational system, not something in need of a troop surge of elite educational operators to save the students who can still be saved.
|
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2023 06:29
|
|
|
Name Change posted:the emergency funding that produced these startlingly negative outcomes in the first place. That’s a rather extraordinary claim. You uh got any evidence that increased funding was causal instead of the year to year and a half remote?
|
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2023 07:29
|
|
|
Bar Ran Dun posted:That’s a rather extraordinary claim. You uh got any evidence that increased funding was causal instead of the year to year and a half remote? I suspect it is based around the idea that the money was only targeted at certain areas as opposed to actual teachers.
|
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2023 09:13
|
|
|
An AP article recently followed one of those cases in LAUSD, and as you probably guessed it was a kid struggling with helping provide for his family who was on the edge of homelessness. I don't blame remote learning completely, I blame the economic circumstances that have so many families on the brink and the kids who don't have the resources or mental energy to keep it together. https://apnews.com/article/housing-homeless-students-california-4187c5ad288be91683550d085f8d5035
|
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2023 09:24
|
|
|
A couple of my best friends have two young kids (7 and 5) and they and their other parent friends seem pretty much united in the belief that some serious consequences are and will result from the Great Lockdown. To be clear they are a sane couple who think it had to be done and should have been done hard enough to extirpate the rona, and discuss it because they are interested in understanding the harm and how it might be repaired and overcome. But they are certain that there have been major effects, less in educational attainment per se and more in terms of general development, social understandings, things like that. Entertaining aside, the younger child literally did the "He thought school was only for one day! He mad!" meme, she declared after the first week that school had been kind of fun but she wouldn't be going back. There was great confusion and then despair when informed it didn't work like that.
|
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2023 10:49
|
|
|
Bar Ran Dun posted:That’s a rather extraordinary claim. You uh got any evidence that increased funding was causal instead of the year to year and a half remote? America spent billions to make sure kids had some flavor of Zoom school (which they often didn't or couldn't attend, or weren't ultimately offered), while basic problems like food insecurity skyrocketed. The answer was never to put kids through the meatgrinder at all costs and insist school never stop (as it inevitably did), it was to stop and meaningfully address economic insecurity among families. Americans ultimately got a small amount of individual financial aid. Weak non-ideas like halo dropping The Best Educators onto students don't hold up against sustained economic programs. People who went through prolonged unemployment or had their educations disrupted by COVID should have something akin to a G.I. bill in their hands. That was achievable. Having a satisfactory school year was not.
|
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2023 12:17
|
|
|
My personal belief is: A) “lockdowns”/remote learning were a major disruption to the education of most students B) they were the least-bad option available to us Although I confess this is merely based on a hunch. Bar Ran Dun posted:In other news it is now several years later. You’ve shared some of the struggles you’ve had w remote learning. Do you think there would have been an alternative approach that would have been viable in the USA?
|
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2023 12:46
|
|
|
The Top G posted:My personal belief is: Yup Name Change posted:I'm skeptical that a piece couched in the language of an arms race is much more than an open call for more of the emergency funding that produced these startlingly negative outcomes in the first place. I'm made more skeptical by hiding threats like "children are at risk of becoming impossible to educate" in the text. A truancy explosion in all income cohorts is a broken educational system, not something in need of a troop surge of elite educational operators to save the students who can still be saved. The thing to look for when reading about problems in the public the education system is generally "is this article pushing for fixes, or is it pushing for privatization?" Because there is an absolutely massive lobbying effort aimed at discrediting public schools so that they can be replaced with private for profit and religious-based systems. It's one of the few unachieved policy goals that the Christian right and the business right are in total agreement on, and most attacks on public education these days are in whole or in part an attempt to set up a one two punch of "but privatization would solve this problem we caused." Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 13:43 on Nov 21, 2023 |
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2023 13:05
|
|
|
I'm kind of on the boat that remote learning probably wasn't good for most kids but i don't know if there was a decent alternative as well. I think some people really do need the structure, especially young children, and they didn't get it.
|
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2023 13:33
|
|
|
It worked out ok for my oldest and actually was excellent for my youngest, but they had huge advantages. Both my ex wife and I worked from home in jobs that gave us the ability to monitor them, they were already great students and we lived in a huge house with lots of room for studying. I can see how it would be devastating for people without those advantages.
|
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2023 13:39
|
|
|
Panzeh posted:I'm kind of on the boat that remote learning probably wasn't good for most kids but i don't know if there was a decent alternative as well. I think some people really do need the structure, especially young children, and they didn't get it. The only alternatives I can think of would’ve required a massive amount of money. Like either paying one parent to quit their job so they could become a full-time home schooler with the help of a couple of zoom classes from their normal teacher. Or find tens of thousands of temporary educators and putting kids in like 6 person pods would’ve worked too, but how do you find all those people, and then where do you create all these temporary classrooms? Really the first option was probably realistic, but would mean funneling like $50k a year to every family, which could be done, but it definitely wasn’t going to happen.
|
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2023 14:00
|
|
|
Yeah, you really don't gotta think that the US public school system is excellent or disagree with remote learning during the height of the pandemic to notice that it hosed up a lot of kids' growth. Spend about two minutes around a loving kid who wasn't a dedicated dork to school and you'll notice. Goons gonna goon about Material Conditions Only Hail Marx but even with the ideal scenario of dedicated kid and dedicated homeschool parent, rich kids still suffered from the lack of school socialization and poor kids just ate it harder. It was bad.
|
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2023 14:11
|
|
|
Jesus III posted:It worked out ok for my oldest and actually was excellent for my youngest, but they had huge advantages. Both my ex wife and I worked from home in jobs that gave us the ability to monitor them, they were already great students and we lived in a huge house with lots of room for studying. I can see how it would be devastating for people without those advantages. Checkout this guy with the huge house and studious kids
|
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2023 14:21
|
|
|
Bird in a Blender posted:The only alternatives I can think of would’ve required a massive amount of money. Like either paying one parent to quit their job so they could become a full-time home schooler with the help of a couple of zoom classes from their normal teacher. Or find tens of thousands of temporary educators and putting kids in like 6 person pods would’ve worked too, but how do you find all those people, and then where do you create all these temporary classrooms?
|
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2023 14:21
|
|
|
Things that I wish would happen but won't: legislators using this accidental test case of mass homeschooling to realize there should be regulations on homeschooling. Like, it was the lesser evil as the kids were vastly less likely to die if they didn't attend in-person schooling. It was absoutely necessary. The "medicine" just has side effects.
|
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2023 14:24
|
|
|
Twincityhacker posted:Things that I wish would happen but won't: legislators using this accidental test case of mass homeschooling to realize there should be regulations on homeschooling. Yeah, this is the lesson legislators aren't wanting to learn, because all the lobbying is pushing in the other direction. "Lack of public school in person hurts kids! So let's push for more homeschooling!"
|
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2023 14:31
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 27, 2024 16:25 |
|
|
To be fair there's a pretty big difference between remote schooling and homeschooling. The ideal would've been a shorter lockdown that actually got full participation and stopped the spread, but y'know. "Essential workers" and all that.
|
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2023 14:52
|
|
