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"Kid-Friendly" Version of the 13 Principles of Black Lives Matter by Lalena Garcia This is widely used in an early childhood education context to teach kids about racial equity. Two of these Black Lives Matters principles are "queer-affirming" and "transgender affirming", and the one about "Black villages" is circumspect way of talking about the (admirable given historical context, but ultimately maladaptive) large extended matriarchal kinship networks that Black families have used to survive White supremacy and capitalism. Want to Dismantle Capitalism? Abolish the Family This has some valuable ideas about respecting pregnancy as work, and then veers off into complete nonsense such as "black motherhood was always queer". Modern American politics is easiest to understand if you see the Democrats and Republicans as two wings of liberal (as in Enlightenment liberalism) ideology. Republicans appeal to the liberal subject as master - most specifically as owner of property and manager of a business but that same concept applies to hierarchical structures like fathers as heads of the household and a general sympathy for preserving caste-based rule. Democrats are the liberal subject as individual - most innocently the idea that someone can be anything they want regardless of their race or gender but also that history, culture, and even biology should not bind you. One of the best examples of how this liberal-as-individual-subject ideology is expressed is the shifting conversation about race. Historically, the civil rights movement was about winning jobs (primarily for men), political equality, and addressing specific injustices that were done to Black Americans who were descendants of slaves. Now, modern racial ideology sees its fullest expression in the arts, fashion, and tv. It is about being who you want to be, with no one defining you, and it applies to everyone who does not fit into an increasingly smaller cis-white-hetero-male box. Justice for Black people was once a way to win political and economic equality, and now it is selling a product mostly to non-Black people. This becomes a problem when the ideology of getting to be whatever you want with no limits conflicts with the deeply held moral beliefs of Black and Latine people (specifically men), who are increasingly dropping out of politics. A Black father likely does not want a 25-year-old they/them teacher telling his 12-year-old son to wear a dress, but that is what voting for the Democratic party will get you. It also might win you a new HBO series about Black Excellence. What it will not get you is jobs for your community, or economic support, or an affirmation of your religion or beliefs. To bring this back on topic, the Democratic Party's only option will be to lean further into this ideology, as Republicans take more and more of the dropouts from Progressive capture of the party. The Democrats will be the party of wealthier, college-educated whites; select upwardly-mobile fashionable minorities (almost entirely women and gay men); and queer people in general.
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Mar 10, 2022 15:25
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That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works.
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Mar 10, 2022 16:46
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I find it odd that part of my write up was quoted when the small paragraph right above it gave it context. What I was saying that the groups I was speaking of earlier don’t have to be diehard for gender identity. But at least be willing to form an alliance with the existing leftwing factions to work on things that are in agreement like healthcare, bigger government, wages, inequality, etc. Similar to how there may be a divide between the Republicans and core issues like immigration or holding big corps accountable (from the same Pew Research source) but at the end of the day they vote for the American right doctrine of lower taxes, “states rights”, and imperialism. The issues brought into question wouldn’t be abandoned or stalled, they’ll just be worked alongside other issues at the same time as some working class/poor will see accepting such issues they are hesitant toward as a trade off for issues more akin to their survival. EDIT - To further elaborate, many minorities, poor, working class, and similar groups don’t see the Democratic Party and even further Left organizations fighting “for them”. They don’t feel that these groups are going to do things like give hard no string investments into their communities, jobs with higher wages, root out corruption, address public safety, give them healthcare coverage, so they don’t bother with them. They either see them as another cog in the system or idealists who don’t understand how things work thus are destined to fail. It’s up to the America Left to find ways to convince them that isn’t the case for the entire left of center of the country’s politics. This is the only way forward and where the nation goes hinges on this. punk rebel ecks fucked around with this message at 17:55 on Mar 10, 2022 |
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Mar 10, 2022 17:40
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punk rebel ecks posted:This is the only way forward and where the nation goes hinges on this. And this has to be done in language those minority groups and the working class speak in. A large portion of the left is uncomfortable doing that especially when religious language and symbols will be necessary to do it.
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Mar 10, 2022 20:20
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People are stopping going to church Bar. There is no place for God inside of Capitalism and the transformation of every religious impulse into either a culture war or an irrelevance is already well advanced across nigh on every corner of the globe by now.
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Mar 10, 2022 20:38
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After the period of hyper partisanship we have already entered ends, things gradually return to something approaching normal---still hosed up because there's a ton of damage already done and we're obstinate bastards with a system that's designed to work as slowly as possible, but more in line with what a "sane" country may look like. This will be caused not by any kind of idealism change or proverbial straw breaking the camel's back, but is an inevitability of messaging failure as more and more people turn off their televisions, which will coincide with the true visionaries of propaganda continuing their die off---the current propagandists don't have the right stuff. Meanwhile, online spaces become less radicalized as ad-blocking or related software improves to begin to filter obvious spam social media posts. Furthermore, Russian interference in spaces like Facebook and Twitter mysteriously disappears almost overnight as the funding of these psy-op programs dries up during the inevitable collapse of their current regime. To everyone that isn't one of the millions whose lives have already been ruined, be it by social injustice, our healthcare "system", usurious levels of student loan debt--issues that see only the most gradual of changes, and quite possibly for the worse--this period of insanity we've lived through will be nothing more than an interesting foot note in history, and not the multiple-decade long cry of anguish for those unfortunate enough to live through it.
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Mar 10, 2022 22:09
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punk rebel ecks posted:I find it odd that part of my write up was quoted when the small paragraph right above it gave it context. You keep saying convince like the American "Left" (as if such a thing could meaningfully exist in the Imperial core) problem is one of marketing or image, or maybe at best one of priorities. That refuses to see that there is a conflict between the project of Mostly-White Progressives and the Mostly-Brown Working Class, and that conflict needs to be resolved. In fact, it is being resolved, in favor of the Mostly-White Progressives who ultimately benefit from low taxes, competitive charter schools, and what passes for meritocracy. Your proposed solution of priorities is to bribe the Mostly-Brown Working Class into not being the kind of bigot you dislike in exchange for money or social programs or better trade deals. Is it any wonder they reject that generous offer? The program you're selling to a Black father who works as a maintenance man is you will give him a higher wage, and in exchange his son will be convinced by a teacher to identify as a woman, his daughter will focus on becoming the first Black woman manager at Northrup-Grumman and have at most 1 child if that, and he'll get some television programs that celebrate Black people as uncomplicated paragons of virtue. That deal is clearly being offered by people who despise and hate him, his beliefs, and his life. Ultimately the Democrats will become the party of people who went to college and learned to say and think the right things, and the Republicans will be everyone else. That will probably be bad for the country but America is a bad place anyways, so eh.
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Mar 10, 2022 22:14
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What data is your PoV based on, just gut based "I reckon it's true that things are like this because [personal experience]"?
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Mar 10, 2022 22:34
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punk rebel ecks posted:I find it odd that part of my write up was quoted when the small paragraph right above it gave it context. Not to pile on but I think ANOTHER SCORCHER has a generally correct critique of this, but I want to add that the idea that this is a messaging issue and that the American Left can correct this problem through good arguments is a fundamentally liberal viewpoint that is doomed to fail. The liberal-left/progressive/post-Occupy left -- whatever you want to call it -- cannot engender working class consciousness because the approach is from a liberal position of and ambiguous and inarticulable conception of "human rights", not one of worker power: People should have healthcare because it's good. Black people shouldn't be shot by police because that's unethical. You should use someone's preferred pronouns because doing so is polite. All of this is true, but irrelevant. The socialist position is that the axes of oppression that the liberal viewpoint (mostly) correctly identifies, that establishes liberal interpretation intersectionality (and is the basis of liberal "identity politics") are secondary to the axis of exploitation that underlies class struggle. The socialist position does not view eg. police violence as primarily a human rights abuse, but instead as primarily a tool of class suppression and intra-class alienation. Allowing redlining, gender-identity-based employment discriminations, any sort of restriction of healthcare by any means -- these are structures of class oppression, not a result of bad laws or people's inherent bigotry or a messaging failure. You are correct in identifying that poor and working class minorities don't view liberal and left-liberal organizations as fighting for them because they fundamentally are not. The skeptical poor and working class minorities are the ones correct here! The "leftists" are fighting -- at best! -- for a nebulous and individually-defined idea of goodness and propriety (derived, as A.S. points out, from higher education). People aren't that dumb! Everyone understands, or should understand, that the Democrat politician or the left-ish NPO activist does not really have any skin in the game, and that any flowery talk about "rights" etc. immediately dissolves when it meet an actual, personal, cost. You can't get around that, especially when people see it happen over and over, constantly, in national and local politics. It's no wonder that most people tune out after the fiftieth betrayal! The American "left", which is to say the post-Bernie, post-Occupy generally highly educated, generally white political activist set, cannot and will not convince anyone other than people exactly like them of much of anything. Not for lack of trying, but because it is generated by specific material conditions that it cannot, itself, change. The American left -- the real American left -- if and when it arises to be of much use to anyone, will fundamentally be fighting a battle against capital, not for "rights". A future useful left will certainly fight for eg. healthcare or police defunding but because they are strategically important towards the ultimate victory of the working class over the capitalist class, not because "people deserve healthcare", true though that may be. When this left arises it's going to be a lot less "woke" than progressives today might hope or imagine it to be, but it will be actually capable of meaningfully addressing racism, sexism, queerphobia, etc. A.S. is further correct in stating that moving more and more towards liberal, exclusionary identity-intersectional politics is the only thing the Democrats can do. First because we're out of runway and we're not in a historical moment where there's any room, or motivation, for capital to concede to working class demands. The working class has no meaningful political power, nor the capacity (right now) to build any, and the capital class is busy pulling out the copper wiring on the social structures won in an earlier era. There's nothing left to do but endless, increasingly polarized culture war. Secondly, though, and I think more importantly is that liberal "woke idpol" or whatever you want to call it is strategically useful for the capital class, and therefore the people who can direct the Democratic party. It's the mirror image of the Republicans' naked white supremacy, but accomplishes the exact same task: the alienation of the working class from itself.
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Mar 10, 2022 23:05
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punk rebel ecks posted:The movie just finally made it's way to Netflix, it's the perfect time to watch it. Well that takes a hell of a loving turn
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Mar 11, 2022 01:51
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You guys do know what happened to the Strasserists right Feeding trans people to the mob won't fix anything
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Mar 11, 2022 02:56
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Looking at the data further there is something I need to address. Earlier I said the "Outsider Left" was the second whitest group of the Dem voting bloc. This is actually not true as they are a close third from "Establishment Liberals" (2% more White)] but requires a bit more context: These are the demographics for the Outsider Left: quote:Outsider Left are by far the youngest political typology group. Four-in-ten are under the age of 30 and 83% are under 50. They are racially and ethnically diverse: About half (49%) are White, 20% are Hispanic, 15% are Black and 10% are Asian. Women make up 57% of this group. Compare this to the demographics of "Democratic Mainstays" which has the most diverse demographics of any voting bloc: quote:Democratic Mainstays are among the most diverse groups in terms of race and ethnicity. Fewer than half (46%) are White, 26% are Black, 20% are Hispanic and 4% are Asian. It seems that the only demographic the Outsider Left lacks are from the black population. Our I would say if it wasn't accounting for the fact that they are the youngest demographic by far, meaning that naturally they should have a higher split anyway. Being that Hispanic is equal to other Democratic voting blocs it's safe to say they are underrepresented too, just not as much as black people. Fortunately, they are also the fastest growing demographic accepting socialism, so this will possibly start to turn. ANOTHER SCORCHER posted:You keep saying convince like the American "Left" (as if such a thing could meaningfully exist in the Imperial core) problem is one of marketing or image, or maybe at best one of priorities. That refuses to see that there is a conflict between the project of Mostly-White Progressives and the Mostly-Brown Working Class, and that conflict needs to be resolved. In fact, it is being resolved, in favor of the Mostly-White Progressives who ultimately benefit from low taxes, competitive charter schools, and what passes for meritocracy. I realize that many white liberals turning against forward thinking policies when it affects them isn't exactly a secret. However, when I say "the American Left", I don't mean people with CoExIsT bumper stickers or people who tune into Stephen Colbert, I'm referring to people who are part of legitimately left wing organizations, political parties, unions, and those with generally left wing beliefs and views who want to become active. I understand I lumped in the "Progressive Left" as an example of Americans on the left, but a point I made is that they are such a tiny cohort that on their own they have little political impact, even in cities. ANOTHER SCORCHER posted:Your proposed solution of priorities is to bribe the Mostly-Brown Working Class into not being the kind of bigot you dislike in exchange for money or social programs or better trade deals. Is it any wonder they reject that generous offer? I disagree with the idea that many minorities and the working class are staying away from the Democrats and left leaning politics in general due to trans issues. Rather it's due to the fact of them being apathetic since their communities and situations have largely not been addressed. I'm also not sure where you got the idea that "White Progressives" are going to "bribe" the black and Latino working class into being less bigoted. It's about building coalition on things you mostly agree with. You unite with the hard issues you agree with and make concessions. This is literally how politics has worked throughout all of world history. Lib and let die posted:Well that takes a hell of a loving turn It's amazing isn't it.  Pentecoastal Elites posted:Stuff. At the end of the day this is how collations work. Blacks and Hispanics can't take and rule the country by their power alone. Even the entire working class by itself won't be able to do that. You need to make allies with segments of the community. That's how a democratic system works, even after direct action is applied. As I told Another Scorcher above, when I say "the American Left" I don't just mean upper middle class white people. A left among people of color and the working class does exist, and is expanding. It's up for them to further build and find allies for a coalition to fight against the powers that be. Ghost Leviathan posted:You guys do know what happened to the Strasserists right It's a very strange suggestion, especially since while blacks and latinos are more conservative on that front, it isn't shown to be a wedge issue. When I said that the Democrats and the Left are seen as mostly "pronoun politics" it wasn't due to the fact that the fight for these things, but due to the fact that it's the only thing on their claimed agenda that they fight for. And looking at recent history it's true. Gay marriage is legal from sea to shining sea, yet healthcare and job security are nowhere to be found. I didn't imply to ditch or even lower the fighting of "rainbow politics" but rather have a stronger focus on economic, racial, and social welfare battles, things that are already top priority for these groups, and keep dialing it up the intensity until tangible results are achieved.. punk rebel ecks fucked around with this message at 04:08 on Mar 11, 2022 |
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Mar 11, 2022 03:38
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punk rebel ecks posted:At the end of the day this is how collations work. Blacks and Hispanics can't take and rule the country by their power alone. Even the entire working class by itself won't be able to do that. You need to make allies with segments of the community. That's how a democratic system works, even after direct action is applied. Coalitions manifestly do not work on the basis of shared class consciousness. If they did they'd cease to be a coalition and just be one singular and indivisible group of a common class. You're still thinking and talking about this in atomized liberal racial politics, an approach that is one hundred per cent doomed to failure. The "entire working class" -- which is to say everyone who isn't a capitalist, everyone who sells their labor to survive -- can indeed take and rule the country by their power alone. In fact, you'll find this has happened multiple times in history! In living memory, no less! Hell, if you read the right German political theorists you might even come to understand that such a thing is inevitable. As to the "American Left", I've been careful in my post to make a distinction between the working class (a group which includes the vast, vast, vast majority of all people of color, globally), and the post-Occupy/Democrat-adjacent American left-liberal progressive. I'm not conflating the two. Also, as someone who lives in Chicago, linking me to a Lori Lightfoot video to show me how the working class is meaningfully fighting "the powers that be" is... I don't know what to say. It's, frankly, astounding. Ghost Leviathan posted:You guys do know what happened to the Strasserists right Is this directed at me? If you read my post and took it as "Leftists gotta get more bigoted to win" I don't really know what to tell you, aside from that you will have very poor luck in trying to get a group of people that aren't trans (or, maybe, have a trans loved one) to fight on the liberal basis of rights and propriety. When push comes to shove and people who don't have skin in the game are going to bail. If you want to actually make meaningful, material progress towards anything you might want to include in the liberal bucket of "trans rights" (which you absolutely should!) you will need people to understand -- actually understand, not just be roped in by clever messaging -- that an injury to one is an injury to all; that every trans worker imperiled is a direct threat to their own livelihood. That whatever mechanisms demean and destroy trans lives will be used, and expanded, and made more powerful and subtle and will be employed and continued to be employed against other out-groups. Just as it is has always been with black people. Just as it has always been with Latino people. Just as it has always been etc. etc. etc. You can not do this with liberal standpoint-epistemological political bloviating. You can't do Good Messaging to elect Smart Technocrats who can craft Wise Laws to save everyone from the bad stuff. You can never resolve the structures that propagate racism, or sexism, or queerphobia this way. The only way forward is through class consciousness.
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Mar 11, 2022 04:55
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Also I'd like to change my answer to the thread question to the one veryslightlymad posted a few posts above, that America will be saved by a vibe shift
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Mar 11, 2022 05:05
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Lib and let die posted:Well that takes a hell of a loving turn The horse-people reveal was David Lynch levels of wtf. Josef bugman posted:People are stopping going to church Bar. There is no place for God inside of Capitalism and the transformation of every religious impulse into either a culture war or an irrelevance is already well advanced across nigh on every corner of the globe by now. There are still some groups which are quite religious:  https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/07/20/black-millennials-are-more-religious-than-other-millennials/  https://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/racial-and-ethnic-composition/ And don't forget Liberation theology. If religion has no place in capitalism, then such contradiction should be exploited.
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Mar 11, 2022 05:11
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Pentecoastal Elites posted:Coalitions manifestly do not work on the basis of shared class consciousness. If they did they'd cease to be a coalition and just be one singular and indivisible group of a common class. You're still thinking and talking about this in atomized liberal racial politics, an approach that is one hundred per cent doomed to failure. The "entire working class" -- which is to say everyone who isn't a capitalist, everyone who sells their labor to survive -- can indeed take and rule the country by their power alone. In fact, you'll find this has happened multiple times in history! In living memory, no less! Hell, if you read the right German political theorists you might even come to understand that such a thing is inevitable If you are referring to the Soviet sphere of authoritarian dictatorships that ended up collapsing by popular revolt then I'd hardly use them as an example. Even MAS have coalitions outside of just straight up union workers and the poor (for example according to exit polls University students in the city vote majority MAS too). Obviously the back bone of these movements are working class which is why I gave American unions and left wing organizations as example. I also showed that while "left wing America" has traditionally been white, this is becoming less and less the case, likely as the groups from the previous sentence are doing leg work. It's not like the American Left is exclusively made up of metropolitan whites. Even going by the Pew Research study a third to half would qualify as working class/minority framework with them making up a majority of the next generation. Things are clearly shifting already, much due to the work of the previous groups I listed. These political revolutions just don't appear out of thin air, they take time. Using MAS as an example again, going from it's origin it was around a three decade struggle of gradual growth and escalation. America's previous swing to the Left (which was admittedly a bandaid in the long run) was decades in the making. However, my main concern is if things will continue progressing or if they will be overpowered by the right. And the threat of climate change makes the time table tighter. However, there is the advantage of communication and the access of knowledge never being so easy and plentiful to find, which is a new factor that wasn't included until the past decade or two. Pentecoastal Elites posted:Also, as someone who lives in Chicago, linking me to a Lori Lightfoot video to show me how the working class is meaningfully fighting "the powers that be" is... I don't know what to say. It's, frankly, astounding. The video isn't about Lori Lightfoot, it focuses mostly about the activist group trying to reach out to local youth and challenging the mayor candidates. Blame Vice for their usual stupid video titles. Pentecoastal Elites posted:If you want to actually make meaningful, material progress towards anything you might want to include in the liberal bucket of "trans rights" (which you absolutely should!) you will need people to understand -- actually understand, not just be roped in by clever messaging -- that an injury to one is an injury to all; that every trans worker imperiled is a direct threat to their own livelihood. I think the issue is that nobody actually said this, to the point where the main responses are "it isn't even a thing that is keeping blacks and latinos away from the left", yet it keeps being used as a pivotal, if not main argument despite it only being used as a brief example in my post. punk rebel ecks fucked around with this message at 07:23 on Mar 11, 2022 |
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Mar 11, 2022 05:36
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My prediction is that the global economy will collapse due to a combination of political and climate related reasons and we're not preparing for it, we're in a very vulnerable situation now with certain countries holding too much of our construction capabilities and we've worked for decades to remove redundancies and "inefficiencies", you know, backups and stuff that provides stability and security, all in the name of cheap gadgets and free trade. I think the world will align into something of a new cold war, with russia and china and the EU and US on separate sides as these two blocks keep gliding away form each other politically. Our leaders ought to see the writing on the wall and prepare for a future without cheap foreign labour and overseas factories. It's time for governments to more actively regulate the economy again. They won't though, so we'll just have to suffer when it eventually comes.
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Mar 11, 2022 06:59
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ANOTHER SCORCHER posted:Ultimately the Democrats will become the party of people who went to college and learned to say and think the right things, and the Republicans will be everyone else. That will probably be bad for the country but America is a bad place anyways, so eh. Since it looks like the Republicans are going to go full speed on their transition to the Party of Spectacle, they are going to get very skilled at picking up everyone else. People will happily climb into their bespoke media bubble where their local wacky celebrity politician will claim to fight for whatever issue they think you care about. Tech companies will happily sell this information, for profit and political favor. Republicans won't even have to pretend to have some grand vision for America. What ever your particular moral outrage, they will have someone on their roster who will cater to it. While the Democrats try to herd cats, the Republicans will just give everyone their own personalized cat condo. And even if these crazy politicians are true believers rather than cynical charlatans, it won't matter. Legislative bodies have already handed off all their law making abilities, and Capital will get what it wants because it gets to hand pick technocrats in the executive branch that actually set the rules. Veryslightlymad posted:After the period of hyper partisanship we have already entered ends, things gradually return to something approaching normal---still hosed up because there's a ton of damage already done and we're obstinate bastards with a system that's designed to work as slowly as possible, but more in line with what a "sane" country may look like. This will be caused not by any kind of idealism change or proverbial straw breaking the camel's back, but is an inevitability of messaging failure as more and more people turn off their televisions, which will coincide with the true visionaries of propaganda continuing their die off---the current propagandists don't have the right stuff. Meanwhile, online spaces become less radicalized as ad-blocking or related software improves to begin to filter obvious spam social media posts. Furthermore, Russian interference in spaces like Facebook and Twitter mysteriously disappears almost overnight as the funding of these psy-op programs dries up during the inevitable collapse of their current regime. I think we are just at the beginning of this hyper partisan dark age. Russian psy-ops, and efforts like Newsmax, OAN, and Qanon, are demonstrating that these sort of propaganda networks can now be set up on the cheap. It's the tip of the iceberg. Making echo chambers is getting easier, not harder. Facebook and Twitter's efforts to filter out anything outside the liberal consensus is just demonstrating for others that they succeed in doing the same but in the other direction.
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Mar 11, 2022 23:37
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Beowulfs_Ghost posted:It's the tip of the iceberg. Making echo chambers is getting easier, not harder. It always seems so crazy when people express this sort of idea. Like, all of human history right up till the internet people used to live in super tightly homogenous communities. Like even growing up pre-internet anything but a big city was this absolutely community that like, self policed against people thinking differently. Or at least was a small collection of like a few different churches or major work places or whatever. People got their culture exclusively through the people physically next to them or through the same general popular media stuff. I feel like what people say when they say there is more echo chambers is that there is less perfect echo chambers now and getting less and less all the time so they have to look at them more. Like in 1970 there was still a bunch of ultra racists running a defacto sunset town in louisiana, they all talked to each other and agreed all had the same identical worldview as each other, we just got to ignore them by just never going to louisiana much. Their echo chamber was so tight the sound didn't escape at all. Now no one can make a good echo chamber and every is having to deal with a brave new world of hearing everyone else's ideas all the time. including the bad ones (but also including the good ones.)
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Mar 12, 2022 01:48
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:It always seems so crazy when people express this sort of idea. This is a good point and I agree with the general premise. But to be fair the argument gets brought up primarily due to two reasons. The first is that up until recently, people primarily got their news from the same few networks. "The nightly news" used to be an American staple. This this was gradually eroded as the news became more for profit and polarized thus leading to Fox, MSNBC, and the like. Not to mention people are increasingly getting their information from social media and Youtube. The second reason is that a lot due to people remember a time when the internet wasn't so ideologically segregated. Facebook wasn't a political meme powerhouse, and talking about politics online you typically had people from multiple ideologies. Now you have sub-reddit and discords tailored to specific, if not hyper specific, ideologies. Sure there was always political chat but it seemed to become more dominant overtime. Again, I agree with your general premise as there was never this utopia of the left of center and right of center having constant friendly interaction with one another, but it's understandable why some may think a bit differently.
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Mar 12, 2022 02:37
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Like, all of human history right up till the internet people used to live in super tightly homogenous communities. But that isn't really an echo chamber. An echo is hearing your voice reflected back to you. In some of those communities, that's just being indoctrinated in the local culture. If you grew up in some catholic farming village in 15th century France, you weren't having your Catholic or monarchist beliefs echoed back to you, you were just indoctrinated into the preexisting culture. punk rebel ecks posted:Now you have sub-reddit and discords tailored to specific, if not hyper specific, ideologies. The problem is mostly this. You can go read plenty of stories of Qanon followers who could spend all day taking in amateur produced Qanon content. Back in the day, a town might get spun up in a witch burning frenzy. It wasn't that long ago we had the Satanic Panic spread by mainstream media. But many times, people were limited to the monthly newsletter, or hope the late night AM radio host would cover their topic instead of ghosts or aliens. But now, geography, money, and even language, are barely impediments to building a community around any idea one can come up with. There isn't 1 anti-vax community. There are thousands. And it isn't a monthly newsletter, it is a community you can live in. Where ever you are, you can pull out your phone and go deep into discussion in what ever your niche is. You don't need to take a break. You don't need to realize how crazy you sound explaining it to your neighbor. You don't need to look up and see the harm it is causing to those around you. Maybe echo chamber is a bad term. Hyperpartisanship might be better. Or, Confirmation Bias Skinner Box. What ever it is, I don't think we are anywhere near the end of it. Internet based communities seem to provide enough social interaction to allow for people to get away with completely alienating neighbors, coworkers, and family.
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Mar 12, 2022 05:34
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Beowulfs_Ghost posted:I think we are just at the beginning of this hyper partisan dark age. Russian psy-ops, and efforts like Newsmax, OAN, and Qanon, are demonstrating that these sort of propaganda networks can now be set up on the cheap. It's the tip of the iceberg. Making echo chambers is getting easier, not harder. Facebook and Twitter's efforts to filter out anything outside the liberal consensus is just demonstrating for others that they succeed in doing the same but in the other direction. "Facebook and Twitter are making an effort to filter out anything outside the liberal consensus" has to be one of the most divorced from reality statements I've ever read on Something Awful. Facebook is almost gleeful in how openly authoritarian they are, and literally everyone that uses Twitter hard enough consistently becomes ultra-radicalized in some direction or another---but never, ever sticking to a "liberal consensus" or even anything that could be construed as "moderate". Twitter is the breeding ground for the psy-ops we're talking about--about a quarter of all the accounts on the site are trying to get people to lean into any extreme talking point they can. And the psy-ops will dry out. Newsmax, OAN, and Qanon are virulent, but they're not anywhere near as successful at bleeding into everyday discourse. What made true propagandists so powerful was their ability to control the narrative outside of their coded spaces. The extreme edges of partisanship might indeed become even worse--but they'll become more and more fringe as it becomes harder to sound anything other than batshit crazy. Let there be more sources of evil---none are as powerful as the old guard. All of them are mewling pretenders.
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Mar 12, 2022 07:25
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Josef bugman posted:People are stopping going to church Bar. There is no place for God inside of Capitalism and the transformation of every religious impulse into either a culture war or an irrelevance is already well advanced across nigh on every corner of the globe by now. This is a weird thing to say when prosperity gospel exists. Wealth is a blessing from god, and those who have wealth are righteous and blessed while those without it must believe and work harder. Political momentum can either be built up in churches or ground to a halt in churches, because if you have the ears of the local purveyors of faith you have the hearts of the self selected most gullible segment of society Also, good news for those worried about American state propaganda's ability to adapt to a changing information landscape The White House is briefing TikTok stars about the war in Ukraine Nix Panicus fucked around with this message at 09:32 on Mar 12, 2022 |
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Mar 12, 2022 09:23
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Veryslightlymad posted:"Facebook and Twitter are making an effort to filter out anything outside the liberal consensus" has to be one of the most divorced from reality statements I've ever read on Something Awful. Facebook is almost gleeful in how openly authoritarian they are, and literally everyone that uses Twitter hard enough consistently becomes ultra-radicalized in some direction or another---but never, ever sticking to a "liberal consensus" or even anything that could be construed as "moderate". Twitter is the breeding ground for the psy-ops we're talking about--about a quarter of all the accounts on the site are trying to get people to lean into any extreme talking point they can. I think there's a confusion in terminology here - do you think by "liberal" they meant "leftist"? Because if so, then yeah, it sounds crazy. What they probably meant by "liberal consensus" was the overall economic and ideological capitalist system (which is a liberal consensus, in the historical meaning of the term). Liberalism, in practice, has never had a problem with authoritarianism, or psy-ops, or whatever, so long as there's money to be made
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Mar 12, 2022 13:00
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Beowulfs_Ghost posted:But that isn't really an echo chamber. That is the point, up until recently people lived in an echo chamber so complete that they could live their whole life with their opinions from birth to death never challenged in any meaningful way. The internet didn't give people echo chambers, it took them away. People now are living in a world where they regularly encounter opinions and types of people other than whatever their local default is. That is a scary and frustrating thing, because there is some really awful opinions out there, and everyone's own opinion is the best one so seeing people so wrong and refusing to start to be right is stressful. But it's not the existence of those people that changed. There only is disagreement when people that disagree talk. That has become MORE common not less common. It only felt less common in the past because of how easy it was to never talk to anyone that had that had a meaningfully different opinion.
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Mar 12, 2022 13:28
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Barry Foster posted:I think there's a confusion in terminology here - do you think by "liberal" they meant "leftist"? Because if so, then yeah, it sounds crazy. I think they mean moderate centrist, or at least what would be in the United States, as we are a liberal nation. And I am still loving right----Twitter absolutely radicalizes people to extreme stances, including left ones. Twitter is poisonous for discourse, and, again, as many as a quarter of users are either bots or paid bad actors, throwing out whatever incendiary opinion they can get to stick. "Liberal", being the status quo, is the main thing these bad actors avoid, though I will grant you, you may be onto something with liberalism somewhat ironically being a cause for their existence.
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Mar 12, 2022 19:53
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Social media is a new medium and as such it's relationship with the public is going through the same "yellow journalism" phase that newspapers and magazines first did, as culturally people haven't grown accustomed to spotting bullshit like they currently do with tabloids. Social media is a fantastic way to connect people, educate them, in order to progress society. I highly doubt that statistics I posted for "socialism" radically gaining popularity, especially among groups that previous indifferent or unaware of it would occur to such a degree without social media. Actually social spaces like Facebook, YouTube, Discord, Slack, and the like are paramount for organization. Unfortunately, like almost all potential mediums, it's also a double edge sword that the right wing can use too. And keep in mind it's a very big and very sharp sword.
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Mar 12, 2022 20:53
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Barry Foster posted:I think there's a confusion in terminology here - do you think by "liberal" they meant "leftist"? Because if so, then yeah, it sounds crazy. Yah, pretty much this. Like, of course Zuckerberg is an authoritarian. All Chief Executive Officers of modern corporations are authoritarians. It's the nature of the beast. I'm sure if you asked him, he would be fine with some regulation of capitalism, but not so much that he couldn't buy a helicopter for his yacht. But when it comes to a public outcry that some corner of Facebook or Twitter is getting too radical, it comes down to a room full of well paid, white collar, California Liberals, and the moral lens through which they view the world , as to who gets banned and who stays. So they end up banning ISIS recruiters, and overt neo-nazis. And when the George Floyd protests kicked off, they would ban Antifa and BLM activists who offended their liberal sensibilities. Veryslightlymad posted:And I am still loving right----Twitter absolutely radicalizes people to extreme stances, including left ones. Twitter is poisonous for discourse, and, again, as many as a quarter of users are either bots or paid bad actors, throwing out whatever incendiary opinion they can get to stick. My point is that pretty much all these forms of social media are poisonous to discourse precisely because it can shield one from discourse. If I got really into anti-vax, I can use following and blocking to craft an online experience that reinforces my world view. If I was a Nazi anti-vaxxer, I could go even farther and block other anti-vaxxers who don't blame the Jews. And I could do it the other way around. I can go on Facebook and talk to all my pro vaccine friends. We can talk about those crazy anti-vaxxers. We never have to talk _to_ any anti-vaxxer though, because we already kicked and blocked them. If you think that radical ideas only come about because some well funded actor is standing them up, then I could see how stopping those actors would solve the problem. I see it the other way around mostly. There are totally some government funded psy-ops. No doubt. But there are a huge amount of completely organically formed little cults. Remove all the bad actors from Twiter, and you will barely make a dent in this. Anit-vaxxers formed organically. I doubt there is a Putin behind the Flat Earth movement. Why would any of them need to be paid when plenty of true believers would just volunteer to produce content. Go sit in your car, set your phone to record, and rant about "The Globalists" for an hour. No one needs a paycheck from a foreign intelligence agency to do this. They will do it for free. They _want_ to do it for free. Back in the day, they tried doing it with friends and family, but would get argued with. But now they can craft an online world where everyone supports them. And any uncomfortable questions can be solved with a block button. Owlofcreamcheese posted:That is the point, up until recently people lived in an echo chamber so complete that they could live their whole life with their opinions from birth to death never challenged in any meaningful way. I think we are just going down a path of bad analogy here. Pretty much every empire in history had to contend with populations with different cultures and world views. The US had religious freedom and the no religious test clause, right from the start, just so they could formally agree to disagree and get on with running a government. The spread of so many religions is a pretty clear demonstration that the past was not some static affair of everyone perpetually living in an echo chamber. Some times and places were pretty static. Some times and places were full of movement and change. Owlofcreamcheese posted:There only is disagreement when people that disagree talk. That has become MORE common not less common. It only felt less common in the past because of how easy it was to never talk to anyone that had that had a meaningfully different opinion. I agree that this situation was on the rise. The printing press lowered the cost of spreading ideas. Having a handful of newspaper/radio/TV stations around meant you got a mix of information you agreed with, and some you didn't. Social interaction largely meant those around you, and they might now always agree with you. And the infrastructure of the early internet did mean that many different people would have to share a platform. And you could only do it while sitting at a computer. But the direction social media is going is away from that. It is putting tools into the hands of the users to make sure they never have to hear a dissenting opinion if they don't want to. And lets face it, no one likes hearing they are wrong. And for that reason, I do not think anyone needs to be tricked into some sort of Twitter radicalization. They will happily close themselves off in some weird social media rabbit hole, and they will feel the real, measurable, discomfort of cognitive dissonance if you force them out of there. And that is the sort of issue that I don't think we have reached the bottom of yet, or found any sort of real solution. How do you keep people from retreating to alternative fact bubbles on the internet?
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Mar 13, 2022 00:21
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End anonymity?
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Mar 13, 2022 01:37
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Beowulfs_Ghost posted:
Eh, but they can't. The sunset town in Louisiana did very well making a community they never saw anyone that disagreed with them and did a good job making sure to be far enough from you you didn't have to think about them or argue with them. The twitter nazi isn't sealed away like that, he has to see you and your opinions and you have to see his opinions all day every day. It sucks because he's bad and you have to see him. But it's not like it only goes one way. How many somethingawful posters can you click back 20 years in their posts and see them saying horrible bigoted things nonstop that totally grew up to be actually good people largely BECAUSE they kept engaging in the different sort of people on the internet until their worldview broadened? The internet isn't closing people off, it's pulling them together. You used to be very able to close yourself off and only talk to "your own kind" all day, god, the US even enforced that by law in some circumstances not THAT long ago. The new thing is everyone being able to go look what everyone else is talking about, not that people are talking about it.
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Mar 13, 2022 02:28
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It's more that social media sites are actively enabling and spreading white supremacy, their communities and propaganda, while socialism is still spreading despite being actively suppressed by literally all authorities. Liberal centrists feel like they're oppressed despite being in charge of nearly everything because they're not literally the only game in town anymore.
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Mar 13, 2022 04:04
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:The twitter nazi isn't sealed away like that, he has to see you and your opinions and you have to see his opinions all day every day. There is nothing requiring anyone to go to a public forum and have their ideas challenged. A guy like Richard Spencer, who wants to be some sort of public face of Nazism, will go to public forums. But all his sympathizers don't. It's always heart warming to hear about the kids who got themselves out of the alt-right rabbit hole by watching some Contrapoints videos. But how many never leave? No one is forced to watch a Contrapoints video. Owlofcreamcheese posted:How many somethingawful posters can you click back 20 years in their posts and see them saying horrible bigoted things nonstop that totally grew up to be actually good people largely BECAUSE they kept engaging in the different sort of people on the internet until their worldview broadened? And how many just ate a ban and went off to 4chan or kiwifarms and continue to be nasty people. I mean really, that is probably the best rebuttal. 4chan. SomethingAwful tried to moderate some terrible ideas, and some went and created a nastier place. If what you are saying is true, 4chan shouldn't have happened. They would have moderated their behavior for the sake of social cohesion. And in the real world, that is often what happens, because changing your mind is easier than building a new village. But on the internet, making a new village is pretty easy. The cost of making your own Virtual Louisiana Sundown Town is pretty low. Just google "conservative alternative to..." It is getting easier to make alternative online spaces, not harder. And it isn't like we are some paragons of virtue. When a bunch of conservatives ran off to some alternative facebook, we didn't win them over with reasoned debate. We invaded the place and spammed gay porn. And the current "don't touch the poop" culture here means we often just stay in our bubble and laugh at their bubble. I admire the optimism, but I can't pretend that things like 4chan, 8chan, Gab and Parler never happened. That Cloudflare hasn't been called out several times for helping keep Neo-Nazi havens online. Or all the reports on how quickly YouTube will "suggest" people right into a million hours of alt-right content. Or that a few thousand people could binge so much Qanon and rightwing conspiracy that they actually went to Washington DC and trashed the Capitol building based on bullshit and fantasy. The online groups that pointed people to fish tank cleaner and horse dewormer as a Covid treatment. The anecdote about the Louisiana sundown town is a good one. Richard Spencer had far more success helping build virtual racists communities (enough to produce a sizable mob in Charlottesville) than he did with his real one up in Montana. And as more and more people spend more and more time online, there will be more of these. Virtual racist and sexist communities. Virtual alternative medicine communities. Virtual alternative fact communities. And as late stage capitalism makes real life in the US a shittier place to be, people will happily retreat to online utopias. And I don't think this is just a right wing problem. I'm sure plenty of leftist communities will go back to the old routine of splitting and purging in their own online spaces, if just to feel like they are doing something useful.
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Mar 13, 2022 04:52
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Ghost Leviathan posted:It's more that social media sites are actively enabling and spreading white supremacy, their communities and propaganda, while socialism is still spreading despite being actively suppressed by literally all authorities. Hmm, strange, it seems like in polls various expressions of white supremacy were much more common in even the recent past. Even something as basic as support of "whites marrying non-whites" went from being a minority opinion only about a third of people held when I was born to being held by only a single digit amount of americans in the present.  It actually seems like instead of the idea racism is SPREADING, it's actually become so small that it is deviant and noticeable when someone has such a strange and out of step with society opinion. Same with gay rights, when I grew up homophobia was so common there was kid's movies that called people "faggots", now even the majority of fox news viewers support some amount of basic gay rights, making expressions of it ever more surprising and shocking.
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Mar 13, 2022 06:05
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I feel like the change with the internet is you can use it to find almost anyone who will agree with you and give positive feedback no matter what. This can be good, people who would have been the town freak can find and support each other. This is also bad for a lot of the same reasons.
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Mar 13, 2022 06:19
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The assertion that any significant number of people using closed groups and block functions to curate echo chambers is kind of nuts. Social media algorithms go out of their way to show you directly opposing viewpoints because outrage drives engagement.
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Mar 13, 2022 06:22
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How are u posted:Well, we seem to be living in a pivotal moment in history, here in the States. I know the future I'm working for: a USA that spends the next decades enacting a Just Transition to a more equitable society, focusing on emissions mitigation and climate adaptation at home while also leading the democracies of the world in climate cooperation and coordination abroad. If it was to happen by 2042, the rising age of members of the House would have to flipped on its head, and senators flipper and doubled. A 7 year drop relative to the trend has happened before, so it's not entirely impossible, but it should be noted that following this drop the average age just started growing much faster. Presumably because the "young" back then are still sitting there today. Arguably, it'd be a case of revolutionary energies getting funneled into electoral politics to defuse them, further cementing a system driving the world towards mass death.
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Mar 13, 2022 08:35
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:It actually seems like instead of the idea racism is SPREADING, it's actually become so small that it is deviant and noticeable when someone has such a strange and out of step with society opinion. Same with gay rights, when I grew up homophobia was so common there was kid's movies that called people "faggots", now even the majority of fox news viewers support some amount of basic gay rights, making expressions of it ever more surprising and shocking. https://www.newsweek.com/82-fox-news-97-oann-newsmax-viewers-believe-trumps-stolen-election-claim-poll-1644756 Those Fox News viewers also on the right side of history when they think the election was stolen from Trump? Or when they think American culture have gotten worse? Lets see how polite the average Fox News viewer is in an online community of like minded folks. Google "site:ar15.com human being" About 32,000 results (0.36 seconds) Pentecoastal Elites posted:The assertion that any significant number of people using closed groups and block functions to curate echo chambers is kind of nuts. Social media algorithms go out of their way to show you directly opposing viewpoints because outrage drives engagement. How would that even work? If the algorithm sees me binge cute cat videos, do they send me an link to a site for people who hate cats? Suppose I was a serious BLM activist, and the algorithm sees all my activist activities, does it start sending me clips of Ben Shapiro calling me a "race hustler"? Do pastors that had to post there sermons on Facebook during the lock down get links to The Atheist Experience? If I'm a Trump supporter, and they know Biden outrages me, do I only get news about Biden making things worse? Does the news about Biden have to be true, or does the algorithm send me fake news to elicit maximum outrage. Some of this has already been answered; https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/03/facebook-misinformation-nyu-study/ The social media algorithms are not obligated to give you factual information in an effort to meet some outrage metric. Computers are kind of stupid like that. They have already been shown to keep people in an alternative reality bubble. But keeping you in a bubble can also register as keeping you engaged. And suppose Facebook really is doing their upmost to eliminate fake news. If they are still filtering the true news to just what outrages me, am I then getting a complete and balanced view of the world, or am I back in some sort of alternate reality where everything is terrible? The bare facts of this stuff going on shouldn't be controversial. Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and the like, have all been open about how their driving goal is keeping your eyes on there site for as long as possible, because they can sell that real estate to advertisers and drive up stock value. They are also open that they will put their finger on the scale to balance content in favor of stuff that doesn't offend Silcon Valley Liberals. Other than that, they are happy to let the algorithm "promote" conspiracy theory, quack medicine, dangerous pranks, and other endless bullshit. And every time they get called out when the algorithm drives people into a ditch, all they can do is admit they were asleep at the wheel. How about this golden oldie... https://www.newsweek.com/pro-anorexia-groups-spread-facebook-85129 quote:Kate, a 20-year-old Utah college student, says being able to see people's faces, friends and interests on their Facebook sites makes for a more intimate community. "It's a lot more of a support group for pro-ana," she says. "MySpace was more focused on tips and tricks and when to exercise. [On Facebook], there's a lot of really close networking, so you add those people as friends and exchange phone numbers, and when you're having a hard day, you talk on the phone." You still find it hard to believe that people can make closed groups to focus on a well known "bad idea" , like anorexia, when Facebook had already been called out for this, as far back as 2008. My original premise was that given all these (I assumed) well known facts; (1) Social media corporations driving goal is to keep you on their site for as long as possible (2) They will allow bullshit to propagate provided it keeps people engaged (3) Confirmation bias means people will engage most with what already fits their worldview (even if it is bullshit) My conclusion is that, if this runs long enough, people will end up happily spending as much time as possible engaged in some small bullshit bubble. Every iteration of this algorithm is to try and get even more people to stare at the site for even longer, and every time the algorithm will employ out right lies if it accomplishes that goal. The more bullshit it employs, the less likely people are to function in the real world, and thus driving them back into comforting lies of their online world. In over a decade, these supposed fact checking abilities have never materialized, and it has now progressed from small time stuff like pro-ana groups and crypto fascists, to Qanon, anti-vax and fake cure conspiracy, and all sort of alt-right nonsense. It has moved from small groups doing cult like things to causing legitimate national security and public health problems. And since these companies have the stated goal of broadcasting as much bullshit per day as possible in an effort to keep people engaged, I don't see it getting better any time soon.
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Mar 13, 2022 10:18
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Pentecoastal Elites posted:The assertion that any significant number of people using closed groups and block functions to curate echo chambers is kind of nuts. Social media algorithms go out of their way to show you directly opposing viewpoints because outrage drives engagement. And posting that on a forum that is most definitely an echo chamber is even weirder.
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Mar 13, 2022 10:31
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Beowulfs_Ghost posted:https://www.newsweek.com/82-fox-news-97-oann-newsmax-viewers-believe-trumps-stolen-election-claim-poll-1644756 I have literally no idea what point you are making?
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Mar 13, 2022 14:23
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The algorithms these companies use are designed to keep you on the site as much as possible. They like the things you click like on (you're willing to spend more time on the feed if it's full of stuff that interests you), but they love the stuff you comment on. Inevitably, because people like arguing on the internet (just like us, right now), controversial posts that start arguments (where multiple parties are making many comments) are goldmines. That stuff keeps you engaged, reading back through comments, incessantly refreshing the page to see who has responded to you, etc, which all provides ample time and space to serve you ads. The algorithm doesn't understand any of this in a human way, it just has a fuzzy link between the cohort of people who have data profiles like you and posts that generate interaction from that cohort. It wants to show you stuff you'll engage with often, so it often, but not always, shows you things you will get mad about because that's what drives your interaction with the site. It doesn't "know" that you're a BLM guy and therefore "wants" to show you a Ben Shapiro video. It knows that you have a data profile that looks like this and that there's a high degree of probability you'll interact with posts that look like that. It'll show you a Ben Shapiro video if the people who have similar data profiles to yours comment on videos that look like Ben Shapiro's -- and they do, so it will. Anyway, underlining your arguments is this chiefly liberal delusion that the things you believe are so self-evidently true that there's no way someone with a functioning brain could be presented with "the facts" and come to any conclusion other than the one you made. The panic about fake news and alternative facts and conspiracy theories are a fundamental misunderstanding about what belief is and how it works. I guarantee you that everyone in those pro-ana groups have heard all the arguments about how anorexia is bad -- they just don't believe it, and no amount of hard data on a webpage is going to convince them otherwise. That's not how people change their minds. I don't know how often D&D needs to hear this but: posting is not praxis. You don't change hearts and minds by showing people Good Posts. You're not going to convince any Q-Anon wackos that Trump isn't a white hat pedophile hunter by showing them a news article where government officials say it isn't true. The reason people are falling into these weird alternative views of reality and cultlike groups is because we are all miserable, and we are all alienated from any sort of political power we might have had. You're seeing the shared culture cracking as people increasingly become unable to ignore the contradiction of what they've been told their whole lives in terms of their freedoms, their rights, the democratic nature of the society we live in, a person's ability to lift themselves up by their bootstraps, etc., etc., and the material reality of the world that they see around them, which they are powerless to change.
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Mar 13, 2022 18:02
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