The Current State of the World - 2016 - The Something Awful Forums

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Helsing: Aug 23, 2003; DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU JOE BIDEN

I think one of the real places to watch at this point is Turkey. The situation with the Kurds was bad enough but with the recent coup and backlash the stability of the entire country is questionable at best.

# ¿ Aug 5, 2016 00:30

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# ¿ May 19, 2024 16:30

Helsing: Aug 23, 2003; DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU JOE BIDEN

TomViolence posted:

I'm as big a doomsayer as the next man, but I wonder how much of this supposedly apocalyptic chaos is real and how much of it is just a result of the media, politicians and the establishment in general losing control of the popular narrative. Nobody trusts them anymore and with an increasingly multipolar and interconnected world, nobody has to anymore either. So we have no more unified songsheet to read off and there is no meticulously constructed monomyth to control the conversation and everything becomes confusing and frightening because while we have vast amounts of information at our disposal we only ever see one small piece of the bigger beast. The volume of information is growing exponentially with each passing day too without human intervention and so even if a concerted effort was made to interpret and analyse even just relevant and pertinent information there literally aren't enough minds to collaboratively process it.

So while terror attacks are down and mass shootings are happening at the same rate they have done for years and the cops aren't extrajudicially killing any more or less young black males than they have historically and capitalism continues its zombielike lurching from crisis to crisis, we collectively poo poo ourselves in incomprehension.

I think it's more complicated than that. Yes, it's true that the nature of contemporary media and politics is that it encourages fear, division and mistrust. However, it would be wrong to suggest that there are no objective changes in material conditions contributing to this rising sense of alarm. In particular, the declining economic fortunes of large parts of the first world can't be ignored or dismissed as an illusion any longer.

In advanced economies "between 2005 and 2014, real incomes in those same advanced economies were flat or fell for 65 to 70 percent of households, or more than 540 million people". The same data reveals a correlation between declining economic fortunes and opposition to immigration and trade deals. And in America the white working class is experiencing a demographic collapse of unprecedented magnitude: "The mortality rate for whites 45 to 54 years old with no more than a high school education increased by 134 deaths per 100,000 people from 1999 to 2014." So I think it's fair to say that these heightened anxieties that the media and political system is exagerating or redirecting aren't just being created in a vacuum by the media or by politicians.

It's fair to say that often people get anxious about the wrong things, or they fixate on very bad solutions to their problems. But that doesn't mean the problems don't exist.

# ¿ Aug 7, 2016 18:11

Helsing: Aug 23, 2003; DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU JOE BIDEN

rudatron posted:

Part of the reason is that these attacks are part of a recruitment strategy, it wants to get as many disaffected young muslims into their territory as possible. The % of people who actually get their kicks from these attacks is low, but it's become so cheap to travel internationally now, thanks to globalization, that you can use these attacks to pull bodies back into Syria. It's using the mass media to get their propaganda out to so many people, that it doesn't matter if your target audience, as a % of the people who see the propaganda, is so low. Hell, the people going to join ISIS are paying for it on their own dime, and so are the people doing the actual attacks. So from ISIS' perspective, all it does it take credit, keep pushing out internet material. Then these attacks just 'happen', and then people turn up at their doorstep to help fight for them. None of that would be possible without international trade and passenger networks, the internet, and the 24 hour news cycle.

Here's the real catch: Imagine it's not just fringe islamists. Imagine a civil war breaks out, somewhere else in the world, and they employ that same 'perspective', ie- use those same tools to get as many foreign fighters into their ranks as possible (not necessarily terrorism). Imagine you have one side in this civil war, with manpower & technical expertise arriving from all over the world, fighting the other side in the civil war, who doesn't. Who's has the advantage, the highest chance of winning?

I think the role of foreign fighters - especially from the West - in ISIS strategy is massively exaggerated. I think the bigger focus here is home front propaganda. Insofar as they want to influence western Muslims I think the idea is to whip up antiMuslim sentiment so that Muslim refugees are forced to remain in the caliphate where ISIS thinks they belong.

# ¿ Aug 7, 2016 19:02

Helsing: Aug 23, 2003; DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU JOE BIDEN

Ytlaya posted:

As a point related to this, the vastly increased pervasiveness of media you mention is also responsible for having a much greater influence on peoples' political views. While there's not some shadowy backroom conspiracy where the Illuminati say "we should say X, Y, and Z in the media", you still end up with a situation where the interests of the owners of media (which are generally wealthy individuals/organizations, just like the owners of any large business) are promoted through said media.

The practical impact of this probably isn't that the media directly seeks to promote the owners' interests, but rather that the media is unlikely to report in a way that can significantly harm the interests of owners. For example, media corporations probably don't decide things like "We should report on X because it makes the wealthy look good!" Instead, they simply generally avoid reporting in such a way that could cause very significant harm to wealthy interests.

Just to clarify further, this obviously doesn't mean the media never reports on stuff that harms the interests of wealthy individuals/organization. The owners of different media organizations are different people with different political views. But while they may differ in many respects, they also share the same perspective as wealthy people (just like, say, black people have their own individual political views but, as a demographic, are unlikely to support policy that is racist). They may have different feelings about what is necessary to make the world better or improve their own situation, but they're extremely unlikely to ever do anything that is a significant threat to their position/wealth.

One good way to explain this idea is that the media is effectively a buffer against public opinion ever shifting too far in a direction that could harm the interests of the wealthy. It (usually) doesn't explicitly seek a "pro-wealthy" result, but it would never promote a strongly "anti-wealthy" viewpoint.

(One thing that bugs me regarding this whole point is that many people have this dumb idea that the media is some giant conspiracy to promote the wealthy/liberals/the illuminati/whatever, and it distracts from the fact that the media does generally act in a way that promotes or condemns certain views, but not because of some shady backroom conspiracy - it's just because people of a particular demographic tend to support ideas that don't harm that demographic, and simply by virtue of the way our economic system works the owners of media corporations are mostly wealthy people/organizations. There's no need for media owners to have a conspiracy, because they inherently share some of the same interests.)

It's funny how your attempt to sound learned and thoughtful here actually made you sound extremely credulous and naive. Do you seriously doubt that media corporations don't directly seek to promote the interests of their owners, or the friends and allies of their owners? There's no grand Illuminati council running a giant world conspiracy, but what does exist is thousands of local interlocking local conspiracies. Because the fact is that it's easier to get things done when you mostly keep everyone who might disagree with you in the dark.

Whether it's the branch manager at your office maneuvering behind the scenes to secure a promotion by making his rival look bad, or Dick Cheney selling the media on a false narrative about Iraq, the fact of the matter is conspiratorial behavior is the default mode of politics and business, for very obvious and practical reasons. Society is rife with competition, knowledge is power, and conspiracies are all about controlling who has what information at what time.

# ¿ Aug 9, 2016 23:13

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > The Current State of the World - 2016