"Vox pops" have formed part of filling air-time or column inches for a long while, but this is largely replaced now by journalists looking at Twitter and either a) using that as a stand-in for 'this is what the public think' or b) making it the story itself. Social media is no longer just "second screen" below-the-line commenting on events, it's helping to shape what becomes a story.
I think a lot of it is probably a symptom of trimmed budgets and the 24hr news cycle — social media is in easy reach and available at whatever point you're writing your article.
Unfortunately, I don't think we can roll back on the constant need for more 'breaking news', but would be interesting if a newspaper were to take an editorial stance that it won't quote/embed any tweets or social posts in their articles.
I understand your argument but I also in no way want to distract from the culpability owned by social media companies, their product designers and managers, and the people who wrote the code to implement their desires.
They are ultimately guilty for the damage they have wrought on our societies. Traditional media companies may have exacerbated the issue with their participation, but they didn't create it.
>Unfortunately, I don't think we can roll back on the constant need for more 'breaking news'
We can't, but just like smoking cigarettes or shooting up opioids we can recognize it as a source of damage and addiction and start changing things to combat it.
Contrary to popular thought, the "liberal" media utterly failed minorities. The abuse of minorities in the US spans generations and has consistently been relegated to the margins of mainstream news. It has been typical in the US -- for decades -- for the NY Times to grant a single death in Israel front page coverage while a death of an African American at the hands of police in NYC would barely get coverage. My point is not that either is acceptable -- but rather that both are bad. Perhaps non-coverage of an incident in NY is worse because a NY paper might want to consider the atrocities happening right down the street.
The BLM movement finally came to the forefront not because of the "liberal" media but in spite of it. The BLM movement was enabled by Social Media. If Twitter did not exist, there is no reason to assume we would have made any progress.
The media overall and the liberal media have lost part of their control over the narrative (and the power that selective coverage conveys) and trying to blame things on social media. But believe this -- what we have seen in 2020 is progress. As messy and as ugly as it is, we've actually moved forward with minority rights.
Consider also how hypocritical the coverage has been. Liberal media tells us that "Silicon Valley lacks diversity". TBH it does, but you know the real problem is not SV, it is a national media controlled by four families with zero minorities on their boards and executive staff -- telling an industry with huge numbers of minorities (including many brown people in senior/CxO ranks) they lack diversity.
SV does need to get better, but saying SV is the start and end of all problems is absolutely false.
Cue the 1960s and 70s long before any social media and the amazing amount of not just protests but bombings, assassinations and so on that make the current culture war seem like a mere shouting match.
What damage? The stuff people wrote on it? That's the people.
That's what I love about people who think everyone should vote. But just look at Twitter. Most people are poorly informed idiots who are hyper-emotional and inclined to mob-think.
I'm all for more direct democracy but that doesn't mean I want anyone and everyone to vote. We need informed voters.
Which is why I despise the drives to get random people out to vote for whoever they heard spoken the loudest about in relation to their issues.
Certainly they aren't part of the legacy media, but they all seem to carry water for the same narratives and ideologies.
The non-mainstream media is publications that people in polite urban mostly-coastal American culture sneer at: Breitbart, The Post Millenial, Reason, Parler, Gab, specific independent journalists on some of the mainstream platforms, etc.
But certainly Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit are media and they are mainstream. And they have demonstrated their willingness to censor stories with more or less the same bias (in the same ideological direction) as the mainstream legacy media. They're just the mainstream new media.
I'm not generally one to speak out against capitalism, but having come from a country that has 'strong, communitarian and cultural ideals' - I believe that hyper-individualism and capitalism have created an ugly, 'perfect storm of self flagellation' here with MSM, Social Media, Politics, Entertainment.
'Communitarian ideals' mean that there are unspoken rules of legitimacy, fraternity, civility, professionalism etc. that exist in many fields like the media, even in politics where all the 'grey areas' of civility count for so much, a lot of US Senate functions like this historically.
These soft ideals however leave the door way open for radicals and money-seekers to 'disrupt' and take over, justifying their cause through either 'moral legitimacy of social justice' or 'responsibility towards shareholders' - or, like in the case of Nike for example - both.
Any institution that can be instrumentalist and submitted will be.
Though I don't blame FB PM's specifically - it's right there in the ethos: 'disrupt' and 'move fast / break things / do it ask for permission later'. Without any regard at all for social and cultural ideals, they just get completely uprooted in the search for whatever it is the objective is, in the case of FB, money.
- block Twitter content in news articles
- block links to articles with Twitter content from ever being shown to me in the first place
Most news articles provide little value to my life anyway, but I don't think I've ever read an article referencing Twitter quotes that was worthwhile.
While I'm dreaming, if I had any way to filter all the news about what public figures say, and keep only the news about what they actually do...
It takes work to filter out the noise, (& there's plenty of noise to avoid!), but one can select the actual scientists diong the research, who will link to their key findings & papers, answer questions, etc., or direct to current & former officials, key industry/govt players, the journalists themselves and get their comments directly, without the scaled editorial slant. (private lists, to avoid the algorithmic feed is the key; I don't think it is possible on FB)
So I guess I somehow do block twitter?
It's not like we weren't warned.
“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism."
"Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with [indulgences]."
"As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists, who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny, “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.”
"In 1984, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us.”
-- Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
"I must say I believe, or fear, that taking the world as a whole these things are on the increase. Hitler, no doubt, will soon disappear, but only at the expense of strengthening (a) Stalin, (b) the Anglo-American millionaires and (c) all sorts of petty fuhrers of the type of de Gaulle. All the national movements everywhere, even those that originate in resistance to German domination, seem to take non-democratic forms, to group themselves round some superhuman fuhrer (Hitler, Stalin, Salazar, Franco, Gandhi, De Valera are all varying examples) and to adopt the theory that the end justifies the means. Everywhere the world movement seems to be in the direction of centralised economies which can be made to ‘work’ in an economic sense but which are not democratically organised and which tend to establish a caste system. With this go the horrors of emotional nationalism and a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the words and prophecies of some infallible fuhrer. Already history has in a sense ceased to exist, ie. there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted, and the exact sciences are endangered as soon as military necessity ceases to keep people up to the mark. Hitler can say that the Jews started the war, and if he survives that will become official history. He can’t say that two and two are five, because for the purposes of, say, ballistics they have to make four. But if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could become five if the fuhrer wished it. That, so far as I can see, is the direction in which we are actually moving, though, of course, the process is reversible. ... Secondly there is the fact that the intellectuals are more totalitarian in outlook than the common people. On the whole the English intelligentsia have opposed Hitler, but only at the price of accepting Stalin. Most of them are perfectly ready for dictatorial methods, secret police, systematic falsification of history etc. so long as they feel that it is on ‘our’ side."
One factor in that is America is a pretty unequal society, and problems the relatively wealthy [1] face receive disproportionate attention than those primarily confined to the less wealthy. Not saying that's the only factor, but it's definitely a major one.
Ditto with de-industrialization, which a sibling comment mentioned. The relatively wealthy gain disproportionately from it in the short term, and those who are disproportionately hurt by it are less wealthy and typically live in unfashionable areas. Predictably, their problems get relatively less attention than they probably should (esp. since the relatively wealthy have the option of hand-waving those problems away with stuff like "Pareto efficiency," etc.).
[1] I'd count software engineers and similar professionals as "relatively wealthy."
As for the issue itself, the wikipedia article has a pretty good overview of the whole thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathroom_bill
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-03-12/shares...
For one thing, guesstimating the number of affected people is pretty subjective. A policy can be important to me even though it does not nominally affect me directly. Secondly, this method doesn't even attempt to weigh policies by anything else, like the magnitude of benefits/downsides, budgetary concerns, civil rights implications, etc. For instance, in my view, it's fine for a political issue involving state-sanctioned persecution or bigotry of a very small minority to share political attention with a large public health crisis.
I'm surprised that you say that the main culprit is the main stream media. I see this kind of reporting in all news outlets, especially non-MSM. It's cheap and trivial to write an article that highlights some comments from four people with 15 twitter followers a piece, and claim that "People are saying".
You even hear the POTUS frequently use "people are saying" and then quoting whackadoos from Twitter. Can we really hold MSM to a higher standard than the president of the free world?
And that journalists have knowledge that is a mile wide and an inch deep. Their job is to file copy to strict deadlines.
Let’s challenge that assumption with historical precedent.
A technological and social revolution of sorts in the 1800s. In the first world of the time, the masses became literate and had more leisure time. Combined with advances in the technology of printing and paper production, and in distribution of the physical book, it led to an explosion of interest in something called “the novel”. It was almost a madness at the time, cf. the popularity of Charles Dickens works.
But eventually the violent boiling cooled to a simmer. A continuous simmer, but just a simmer culturally. I don’t know how or why the dynamic changed, but it did settle down.
I’d guess a similar analogy could be made with “the theater”, which is even below a simmer at this point in modern culture.
What will change the dynamic? Your guess is as good as mine...
The entire internet should take this advice, firstly for the reason you stated, and also because the Twitter website UX is appalling.
Agree with your statement of this being a symptom of trimmed budgets and the 24hr news cycle. The push for free news on the internet may have also contributed.
Alice wants to read the news, Bob wants to write it. Mallet wants to foster discussion of an idea of dubious worthiness to further nefarious but unstated aims.
Alice is attracted to lurid, weird and scary, even though she mostly knows better, because we all are.
Bob is attracted to easy stories, because it is hard to run a paper today.
Mallet doesn't care too much about how his poison gets out there, only that it does.
Among other things, this suggests that any one thing, like not embedding Twitter quotes, is unlikely to make much difference - Mallet will shift to something else.
That's the problem here. Kill the advertising dependency, and Mallet will find it much harder to spread their poison.
Much as this is reassuring, its not the whole story.
Yes, the "MSM", well parts of them report chaff because its cheap.
But why bother? because it sells.
In some cases there are editors that push a certain stance or opinion. even more rare are the cases where they manage to actually shift a section of society's world view permanently.
The problem is perfectly illustraited by the german newspaper "DER SPIEGEL" it literally means "the mirror"
Both social, print and to a lesser extent tv news(the uk is highly regulated) are a mirror on society.
They push what sells, and if its comfortable lies, then it so be it.
So no, the main problem is not "the media" its us for consuming shit.
If we stop reading gossip, junk and "punditry" then they'll stop making it. Its as simple as that.
I think you're 100% correct, social media stories are the equivalent of the cute fluffy stories 20 years ago, but there's a huge moral hazard associated with that.
Thoses enquetes were done on somewhate crowded yet non busy places for convenience, and tended to sample a specific part of the population: e.g. people going to shopping districts at off hours, or people coming out of church for the most biased samplings.
Telephone checks were similar in that you had a very high percentage of at home caregivers responding to them.
Do you the past journalistic methods as that much more sophisticated than nowadays ?
Some news about tweets is justified - for example the president of the US has at times announced policies on Twitter first. It's a modern equivalent of making an brief announcement to the press or sending out a very sparse press release.
And the tweets that you (and I) hate to see reported, those of random people and especially headlines like "Twitter goes mad about (whatever)" somehow making an entire article out of quoting 6 random Twitter users... it's a digital form of voxpops on TV or reader's letters in newspapers. All of them can be a nice addition at times, but in my opinion the vast majority shouldn't be part of a "news" medium.
It's driven by any participant who is making money from the political process. This includes MSM, Social Media, Political Consultants, and on and on.
They also voted to abandon entrance exams at my magnet high school: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4979
It’s not comforting to know that only a tiny minority of people are standing up and declaring themselves “gatekeepers of white supremacy” when that person is the Dean of a school or a School Board Superintendent. Just because folks fighting the culture wars might be few in number doesn’t mean they don’t have their hands on a lot of levers.
So even if that Dean said he is a racist, he's probably not unless you warp the definition of racism.
So, basically inquisitor wannabees and pseudoscience cultists. Your colleague dodged a bullet.
The idea that claiming that you are racist makes you not racist is totally gaga, random, and based in magical thinking, not in science. It only helps to hide in plain sight the real racists making much easier to admit it for everybody.
It's almost like making generalisations about people's actions only by their skin colour or ethnic background is somehow wrong. Weird to think that basically anyone studying social science or humanities is being taught this stuff and that it is at this point basically accepted as fact.
The fact that this is what "fighting racism" looks like when forced hysterectomies are performed on undocumented immigrants in concentration camps show that it's not really about racism for the people that are doing this.
> Struggle sessions were a form of public humiliation and torture used by the Chinese Communist Party (CPC) at various times in the Mao era, particularly during the years immediately before and after the establishment of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and during the Cultural Revolution. The aim of struggle sessions was to shape public opinion, as well as to humiliate, persecute, or execute political rivals and those deemed class enemies.
> In general, the victim of a struggle session was forced to admit various crimes before a crowd of people who would verbally and physically abuse the victim until they confessed. Struggle sessions were often held at the workplace of the accused, but they were sometimes conducted in sports stadiums where large crowds would gather if the target was well-known.
0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session Sorry for the Wikipedia reference.
Racists in positions of power may tilt the playing field in your favor whether you've asked for it or not. And it may not even be you personally, but people in your neighborhood, your social groups in general.
Good old Struggle sessions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session
There's also push back at the federal level against this, and public awareness is growing.
Please elaborate on what you mean by "warp the definition of racism".
I will say, I think it's strange they are asking them to admit to being racist, and "be better". It's a systemic thing, so it requires systemic change. Asking them to say they are racist and that they need to be better seems unneededly divisive.
Edit: As others have pointed out, the last sentence is kind of wrong. The paraphrase should probably say, "I recognize I'm a part of a system or systems that uphold racism". Look at the ADL's definition for racism to see what I mean:
By their definition, you are racist if you help uphold any of the "systems, institutions, or factors that advantage white people and for people of color, cause widespread harm and disadvantages in access and opportunity."
Even if the balance is tilted the other way for this particular magnet school, it's quite inflammatory to claim this initiative is in any way similar the destruction of 1,500 year old religious icons by an extremely violent group of religious extremists.
The people who "rearranged their lives" to try to get their children into the school are also in no way entitled a spot. If this school is doing an excellent job teaching students, and that absolutely appears to be the case, then more energy should be spent on expanding those same opportunities to a greater number of people, not worrying about the speculative incremental decline in quality that might be incurred when switching from one set of entrance criteria to another.
The data I've seen says the reverse, that SAT is a better predictor than GPA, but both together contain more information.
https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/underreview...
> then more energy should be spent on expanding those same opportunities to a greater number of people, not worrying about the speculative incremental decline in quality that might be incurred when switching from one set of entrance criteria to another.
Making all schools better is a noble goal. But I thought the point of selective magnet schools was largely to gather selected students in one place. It's not so much that you give superior teachers to some, it's that a whole class of kids who are all into math (or whatever) can be taught more, faster, than an average class.
For instance, I attended a HS where GPA was graded on a 4.0 scale, even for advanced placement and college credit classes. The consequence is that you had a bunch of "Valedictorians" with perfect GPAs that attended spitwad classes.
Other schools I've seen grade on a 5.0 (or even a 6.0 I believe) system, to differentiate.
I would also suspect that GPA is more easily influenced by parental involvement than SAT (or just a plain IQ test).
The second is the destruction of an institution. A school for the gifted and talented with no mechanism to keep out those who are neither rapidly becomes just another school. Once the City University of New York was one of the major public research universities of the USA. Then it moved to open admissions. Now it’s nothing special. In contrast Berkeley instituted affirmative action which allows for different standards for different ethnic groups. It’s probably the top public university.
Super majorities of people believe race should play no factor at all in college admissions. And grades and standardized test scores are the two things people list first as criteria that should govern admissions decisions. I do not believe that folks who would advocate abandoning standardized testing entirely based on the premise that they're irredeemably flawed are not expressing a widely-held opinion.
I'm not even American but I've found the more pompous a thing is named, the more likely it is to be Republican backed. I guess it's their penchant for drama :-)
I don't think someone who really was a "gatekeeper of white supremacy" would describe themselves that way.
In racism training, you simply acknowledge that by being human, you are racist. You can’t cure it anymore than you can cure alcoholism. It’s always with you and if you care to not be racist, you have to be aware of that.
Why is that claim uncomfortable?
Give it a few years to see if the drop-out rate changes.
Statements of that sort are meant to be acknowledgement that systemic racism is universal and perpetuates through us at the individual level, and usually in ways far more subtle than police brutality or the use of racial slurs.
One of the most anti-racist things that one can do is acknowledge the racism in themselves, and keep that in mind and in check when making decisions that affect others. Never trust when someone says they are absolutely not racist - it's something we all struggle with because of our shared conditioning.
A Dean saying they are racist and a "gatekeeper of white supremacy" is just acknowledging that through the power of their position, thet exercise a system that furthers white privilege.
If anything, that Dean should be applauded for confronting and acknowledging their own role in racist systems.
All the same, I can acknowledge that part of me becomes somewhat racist when walking through a less white part of town at night (and I'm not white).
>In July, NPR.org recorded nearly 33 million unique users, and 491,000 comments. But those comments came from just 19,400 commenters, Montgomery said. That's 0.06 percent of users who are commenting, a number that has stayed steady through 2016.
https://www.npr.org/sections/publiceditor/2016/08/17/4895169...
On the flip side, I wonder if everyone on social media were to comment on most items they had interest in, if it wouldn't completely drown out all of the extreme viewpoints. It may actually make social media extremely boring, as compared to the current standard. One can dream...
I always assumed it meant 90% only read, 9% interact/comment and 1% create.
I'd expect the same for politics. Of course politics affects everyone personally in all kinds of ways, but most of the population just isn't that interested.
The issue of gay marriage in the US was fought mostly by progressive and social conservative activists, but the people they were trying to convince were those in the middle. The reason the progressives won is that the middle became increasingly convinced that banning gay marriage was immoral for the government to do.
In the case of a gay marriage, a small minority was directly affected by a tangible and quantifiable problem: not being able to have the same legal status as straight families. It wasn't about taking something from the majority, or guilt-tripping others. So adopting what they asked for had a net-positive effect: straight people were unaffected, while the gays got perks previously unavailable to them.
The current trends are different. Climate change and social justice issues don't personally affect most the people who are vocal about it. Interestingly, most of them do have one thing in common: lack of highly marketable skills or professional weight. Most of them are priced out of property ownership or retirement. Many are depressed to a point where they cannot find anyone to make family with (in my experience, strong marriages boil down to having common constructive interests, working on the same goal together and relying on each other). Except, they are not addressing the quantifiable problems. Instead, their fury got redirected to much broader problems that are almost impossible to quantify or address in a measurable way. So now it's a fight with no winning, it keeps people busy blowing their steam off at random strangers who dare to disagree with them, but all it does in the long term is increases the divisiveness of the society and makes fear and anger the new normal.
Okay, I'm stopping reading here to start replying, because there are already numerous problems with your reasoning:
* In the case of gay marriage, many of the people fighting for it were not, in fact, gay, and were not personally affected. Why does that matter? There were white people fighting in the civil rights movement for black rights, is that somehow lesser? Why is fighting for others a problem?
* Climate change already has, in fact, displayed some impact on most people by now.
* The fight over climate change is focused on the future, it's focused on prevention of larger harms, we're talking about a timeline that includes decades. Waiting until things are already a total, unmitigated disaster and then doing something about it would obviously be deeply stupid.
* Social justice issues actually do affect tons of people -- my wife, being a woman, is affected by various problems of sexism. Women and girls comprise half the population, add in basically any ethnicity or sexual minority and you're already at a majority of people.
* Again, even if you're personally the whitest, straightest, cis-est, male-st person possible, what's wrong with standing up for the rights of others? How is that disturbing in the least? I think you may be confusing "disturbing" with "encouraging" or "inspiring".
> Interestingly, most of them do have one thing in common: lack of highly marketable skills or professional weight.
Imagine someone making an identical argument for MLK's march on Washington DC, or for the broader civil rights movement at large. This is basically a character attack designed to deflect from the actual problems they're protesting. "These people only protest because they're losers!" is basically the message you're sending here.
If you look at social conservatism as a whole, this is basically always the argument, the way that history is rationalized. As soon as they lose one fight -- women being able to vote, civil rights movement, gay marriage, etc. -- the mantra suddenly goes from "okay okay, fine, [last change] was totally a good thing after all, but [new change] is completely crazy! For real this time!"
That's not a tiny minority: it's a pretty reasonable dispersal of social media use. 12% of the population accounting for 50% of anything is a more egalitarian distribution than we see with, say: wealth, healthcare use, or educational attainment.
Public discourse was dominated by a "tiny minority" when the only people with a wide-reaching mouthpiece were a few hundred journalists and a few hundred politicians.
I don't really disagree with the article's main claim - that the more extreme views are overrepresented on social media - but it's not a numbers thing.
People who didn't vote, People who are too young to vote, People who cannot vote. Etc
Voters as a group is meant to reflect that proportion of the population that is involved with the political process at the basic level.
So the inequality is twice what I made it out to be there. I don't think it changes my comparisons all that much: we don't usually consider infants when measuring inequality in wealth or educational attainments either, or we use their caregivers as a proxy.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_Kingdom_European...
There is overwhelming evidence that at the end of the day, people's political and issue views are overwhelmingly bell curve-shaped.
The issue is that the bell curve gets split into categories. American voters are given two options, so people get split into "right" and "left" even when the mode is in the center. Or academics define the "center" extremely narrowly and therefore claim a majority of citizens are polarized.
[1] https://www.google.com/books/edition/Culture_War/s5YZQQAACAA...
i.e. If you're an extremely conservative government, your moderate citizens views will seem extremely liberal.
Hook-theory, etc.
AFAIK that's simply a fantasy promoted in certain corners of the internet (like the ironically-named r/EnlightenedCentrism). It's not supported by any actual quantitative evidence at all, nor am I aware of any credence given to it in academia. It's essentially made-up. There is no political scientist I'm aware of who takes it seriously.
To my knowledge, it's nothing more than a talking point invented by progressives to try to convince other progressives not to be pulled to the center.
A (small) group of Conservative Party MPs in the UK have presented it as such and indicated that it's useful to their cause that there is a perceived enemy to unite behind, whether or not they agree with any particular policies.
e.g. https://inews.co.uk/opinion/tories-culture-war-win-back-popu...
similarly referenced from an international perspective on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_war#Artificiality_or_a...
They would act as though they were intellectuals and people who had common sense. I listened to hours and hours of them talking, and an observant person saw through their act pretty quickly.
These people could rarely offer any depth in any other subjects other than ”guess what I saw on Twitter yesterday”.
They get money by believing people online (especually Twitter) represent a majority opinion, and after building that strawman they go on speaking tours to scare people to be afraid of college kids with blue hair.
Outrage porn sells. It’s easy to sell outrage and this symbiotic relationship is very lucrative. Unfortunately they flooded many of my favorite places online and I’ve had to learn to tune them out.
For example, if you think about support gay marriage and LGBT nondiscrimination protections, these are things that would have been framed as fringe progressive ideas a few decades ago, and in the US it's still framed as a "culture war" issue. However, if you are in the LGBT community, these things DO have an impact and will affect your life. It doesn't really matter whether 30% of the population supports these things or 60%.
In two-party democracies, 30% and 60% are exactly the percentages that do matter.
At 30% support you can expect no change - even human rights violations will scarcely be considered a relevant political issue with such a level of support.
Once you hit 60% support, you can expect reform that won't be rolled back.
Exactly as we have seen with gay marriage in the USA. Support for gay marriage reached 40% around 2005 - I can't establish when it hit 30%, as it was rarely polled in the decade before this. Support reached 60% for the first time in 2015 - the year when the Supreme Court ruled it a constitutional right.
In your example, 60% of people didn’t support gay marriage in 2005. I would argue that gay marriage didn’t become a “better” idea between 2005 and 2015. It was always a good idea that provided tangible benefits to gay people, public opinion didn’t just reflect this.
This is sort of aimed at other comments in this discussion, which seemed to be lamenting that the “polarizing” ideas were being pushed in people. I don’t really care if something like, say, a “bathroom bill” is considered a polarizing culture war issue or how many people support it. It has an effect on me and the other trans people in my life, and I don’t feel any inclination to compromise on my position
It's more correct to think that when 60% of the elites support something change occurs.
“Never doubt that a small, group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” — Margaret Mead
Is this really true though or does change occur in ways that are a lot smaller, more incremental and undetectable than we realize?
The US 'Founding Fathers' were a relatively small group of merchants, land owners, an publishers that were, if you will, "thought leaders" of an American "englightenment" movement that saw significant opportunities if they could toss the foreign rule of Great Britain. But "Let's break loose from the monarchy" was hardly a common public opinion before a combination of a series of writings made by an absolute handful of individuals in the group and a series of publicized bad tactical / strategic calls made by the representatives of the British government in the Colonies.
(It may be difficult to tease apart cause and effect on this topic, however; consider the possibility that there are fringe thinkers pulling in all directions, but as circumstances change, an accident of incidents may bring some of the fringe thinkers to a position of being less fringe. People were saying police in the US were too brutal to minorities for decades before combination of ubiquitous smartphone cameras and multiple disconnected high-profile incidents that common folk considered brutality started to bring public perception around to that way of thinking. We're in the middle of a cultural fight right now, but if policing as it's done in the US does fundamentally change, history will probably record a story of Black Lives Matter leaders bringing about that change. And if it doesn't change, this era of US history will probably hold a place in history books similar to the one the LA riots hold).
I feel sure most Americans have the same experience, but perhaps I'm an outlier?
Basically, it is with us or against us mentality. Even not having an opinion on some abstract idea, means that you are therefore a perpetrator of this moral wrong.
Not caring about politics is often the worst sin that you can commit to those people, no matter what other actions you have taken in your personal life regarding them or the community.
This is less common in person, and more common with individuals who have arguments with their "friends" on Facebook and the like.
Anyone who makes a post like "If you don't agree with me on X, then unfriend me, as I don't want any people like you in my life!"
And I'm not sharing with HN the details of my family and workplace discussions, sorry. But maybe someone else here will be willing to. If you don't believe me, then that's OK, that's up to you.
Edit: I mean, the media even covers the near constant revolts of activist employees at Facebook, Twitter, Coinbase, and many other tech companies. Do you want me to find you some articles? Is this new to you?
1. (pre-covid) asking us to cancel a family trip to her home country because her youtube channel says the police are just randomly shooting americans for being american
2. Refusing to go outside at all for months post-covid. In the first few weeks she tried to convince us not to even open the windows!
3. Having family members send us HCQ as a "just in case" even though we literally are more cautious about covid than probably 99% of households
4. Trying to convince us that she should take the HCQ as a preventative even though she goes outside the house for maybe an hour a week and takes no significant risk of exposure
Anyways, I think the easy part is avoiding discussions about politics and world events. Ultimately it matters very little to me why she thinks democrats are evil and which boogeyman she thinks secretly controls the world's finances. It becomes problematic when it leads to irrational behavior. I'm concerned what her youtube channel is going to convince her to believe or to do should Joe Biden win the election.
The younger members have grown up taught by many university professors who have pushed postmodernist, power-structure analyses in any different subject areas, to the extent that they find it more important to think of science from the sort of postmodernist cultural theory point of view, than to actually think about the science itself.
While there has been incursion of talk radio (LBC/Farage), there is no counterpart to the hyper-polarised TV of Fox News yet. Sky News is comparatively normal. The right-wing disinformation comes in via the press and various "client journalists" who repeat things they've heard from "Downing street sources" who they refuse to hold accountable.
> It found that most voters balanced competing political concerns and ideas. Its polling found that 73% believe hate speech is a problem, while 72% believe political correctness is an issue. Some 60% believe many are too sensitive about race, but 60% also recognise issues around “white privilege”.
This is just the combination of leading questions and people responding to words without actually thinking about the underlying concepts.
See, always, Yes Minister: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0ZZJXw4MTA
I think this is because minority populations are so much smaller in the UK. Minorities have less of a collective voice and influence on culture, and hence most brits "collision cross-section" with racism is smaller. Hence they think of it as less of a problem, but it isn't. I've had Indonesian colleagues yelled at on a bus, Chinese friend shrieked at for using their phone, and my black friend who just feels like he wont ever "be british". My Indian colleague can talk my head off about the racist hiring techniques he's had to deal with. It's not "not a problem" it's just that most brits don't even know someone who is a minority, let alone one that's experienced racism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windrush_scandal
I'm in the middle of a reading a book about it at the moment and to say I am appalled by how these people were treated is an understatement.
That's been one of the issues I encountered on my case on the time I've spent in the UK, you can spend as much time as you want there, you will never be considered like a local, you will be designated as a part of the community you supposed to belong, that's great if you like recreating the place you are coming from, not so great if you actually want to integrate.
Apart from film, pop music, reality television, the Yankees baseball cap, jeans, and a constant stream of news articles about Trump, what have the Americans ever done for us?
Compare how many cultural products are American in origin or mention America or American news to how many you get about, say, France or Germany. The influence is _huge_. This is why France has laws requiring a fraction of culture (especially TV and film) to be in French.
The UK is certainly polarised, and racist, but in different ways to America. It may be the case that a police murder in Portland starts a riot in Bristol, but it would never be the other way round.
When was the last time there was a protest by Americans outside a British embassy over British politics? The US embassy in London practically has a rota for all the different groups that have protested there.
The Daily Mail?
There is an effort to start a Fox News equivalent in the pipeline: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GB_News
Subject to the caveat that I haven't lived in the UK for over 15 years, overall the popular press in the UK is a bit shocking. I don't know of any liberal western country where you see the kind of racism routinely displayed on the front page of mainstream/popular UK newspapers. Perhaps xenophobia rather than direct racism would be a better description but it's not easy to tell the difference in many cases. It's all a bit weird as the UK is generally a tolerant society but somebody must be buying all those newspapers.
About the only UK newspaper I can read these days without getting upset is the Financial Times - there's pockets of good journalism in the Guardian also but it's almost too much of a struggle to find them in the swamp of opinion pieces. I guess the Times isn't too bad or at least tries to represent some sort of centrist view but it feels fairly shallow.
For me the Brexit issue is the UK's version of the culture war in the US. I've talked to people who say they can barely talk to members of their family any more because of Brexit stance differences. And I don't see this division healing very soon - I fear it's going to fester for years.
Yet. The planned GB News fronted by Andrew Neil looks a lot like a Fox News clone with 24/7 opinion: https://www.ft.com/content/470cf7f4-59e6-47c1-9efa-ce634b798...
This is because we have strong broadcast regulation. Broadcasters must have regard for due impartiality and due accuracy.[0]
LBC are managing to push that line to its very limit, by having shows that are presented by opposing polemics so that overall they maintain balance.
[0] https://www.ofcom.org.uk/tv-radio-and-on-demand/broadcast-co...
What's also a US import is the division of people into 'right-wing' or 'left-wing' based on the most frivolous of attributes.
'Downing Street Sources' has been a phrase used by journalists for decades; everyone knows what it means. It's not a 'dog whistle' (another stupid imported phrase).
That has not been moving recently.
The race-based division in the U.S. also heavily reinforces differences in culture that would be seen as purely class-based elsewhere, and thus mitigated in many ways - we see this when broadly pro-social cultural values end up associated with so-called "Whiteness" in the U.S., it's hard not to see that as a problem.
To be clear, this isn't a difference of culture we're talking about. We're talking about people who routinely get murdered and harassed by police, disenfranchised, paid less ins salary, and excluded from many professional roles by default.
The UK makes teaching religion mandatory in public schools: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_education_in_primary...
> Additionally, all schools are required by law to provide a daily act of collective worship, of which at least 51% must be Christian in basis over the course of the academic year.
This would be unconstitutional in the United States. We are far more religious than the U.K. But our Supreme Court has imposed a public secularism similar to that of France. (Based on an extremely strained reading of the Establishment Clause.) To this day, 2/3 of Americans oppose this 70-year old precedent.
In the UK, you legalized same-sex marriage by law. In the U.S. the Supreme Court found it to be a constitutional right (in a decision that is in my opinion correct as a legal matter, but many disagree). A year later, the European Court of Human Rights reached the opposite result (finding that denying same-sex couples the right to marry does not violate the European Convention on Human Rights) in a case arising out of France. It’s still not legal in Switzerland.
The UK legalized abortion by law. It’s 24-week limit on abortion for economic reasons is the longest in the EU. In the US, abortion was legalized by the Supreme Court. 24 weeks is a fairly typical limit in the US—a country that’s more religious than Poland (where abortion is illegal). The 12-week limit in Denmark or Germany or France, or the waiting periods that were place in France until 2015, would be unconstitutional. Germany’s abortion laws (where the constitutional court found it unconstitutional to legalize abortion so it’s still just decriminalized under 12 weeks, and where there is a counseling requirement) would be unimaginable. Indeed, at the same time as the Supreme Court found a constitutional right to abortion, the courts of Canada, Austria, and France found that it was a matter for the legislature to decide.
You passed a law banning discrimination based on sexual orientation. Since it was legislation, you were able to consider and impose a large set of exemptions for specific occupations. (You can’t sue a Catholic Church for not hiring gay clergy.) The Supreme Court just recently held (in a decision I think was correct) that our existing 1960s-era law already banned sexual orientation discrimination.
Our Supreme Court is dominated by our country’s cultural elites. Even the conservatives tend to be steeped in the cultural norms of the coastal urban areas. (The one Justice who is not, and has social views typical of Black men like himself of his age, is demonized mercilessly.) No other developed country puts a highly-educated elite in charge of dictating to the rest of the country how to handle these social issues. This is a huge source of resentment and polarization.
Just to add some nuance to this...
RE is the lesson in which pupils are taught about religion. It does not instruct that any particular religious claim is true or false.
And the “daily act of collective worship” is one of those laws that is widely disregarded, to the point where OFSTED inspections will note that schools are not compliant but not mark them down for it. It’s rapidly becoming one of those archaic laws like “the queen owns all the swans” which has very little practical effect on everyday life.
The US's leaning on the Supreme Court to make social progress is really a result of its inability to make social progress in sane ways through legislatures. The fact that it took a Supreme Court decision to legalize interracial marriage only two years before the Moon landings should be a source of profound shame on its legislatures.
The UK does no such thing - education is handled completely separately by the different parts of the UK.
There certainly weren't "daily acts of collective worship" when I was at school in Scotland 40+ years ago and there aren't now when my kids went to school.
Indeed. To provide background for others, by the early 1970s various US states had legalized abortion. In Roe v. Wade, however, the Supreme Court ruled that abortion was a constitutional right, abruptly legalizing it nationwide with more or less no restrictions whatsoever; even many abortion-rights supporters believe that the legal theory behind the decision was faulty (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roe_v._Wade#Legal). The result was so across-the-board that, among other things, the US still allows abortions to occur later than anywhere else.
Preventing the full political debate process from occurring is why abortion remains so controversial in the country almost 50 years and counting. Because such issues are polarizing and partisan, they need full discussion in a legislature, as opposed to unelected judges unilaterally short-circuiting the debate.
America at this point has little shared ethnic background. It’s largest states are minority-majority for example and that will be the case everywhere soon as minority babies are already the majority.
California and Texas are utterly dominated by Non-Hispanic and Hispanic white people, the two ethnic groups with by far the highest rates of intermarriage in the United States of America.
England 1798 -> Europe 1898 -> Western 1998
If Biden wins, then by spring, the leading story in the "left-leaning" media will be that we need to cut social spending to combat the deficit. The deficit miraculously stops being a story whenever a Republican is in the White House, and becomes a major priority whenever a Democrat is in the White House. Just because people in the media think that racism is bad doesn't make the media left-leaning.
It was a very sour taste in my mouth after reading this paragraph near the end and then seeing the exaggerated threats to garner donations.
> America faces an epic choice ... > ... in the coming weeks, and the results will define the country for a generation. These are perilous times. Over the last four years, much of what the Guardian holds dear has been threatened – democracy, civility, truth. > > The country is at a crossroads. The Supreme Court hangs in the balance – and with it, the future of abortion and voting rights, healthcare, climate policy and much more. Science is in a battle with conjecture and instinct to determine policy in the middle of a pandemic. At the same time, the US is reckoning with centuries of racial injustice – as the White House stokes division along racial lines. At a time like this, an independent news organization that fights for truth and holds power to account is not just optional. It is essential. > > Like many news organizations, the Guardian has been significantly impacted by the pandemic. We rely to an ever greater extent on our readers, both for the moral force to continue doing journalism at a time like this and for the financial strength to facilitate that reporting. > > We believe every one of us deserves equal access to fact-based news and analysis. We’ve decided to keep Guardian journalism free for all readers, regardless of where they live or what they can afford to pay. This is made possible thanks to the support we receive from readers across America in all 50 states. > > As our business model comes under even greater pressure, we’d love your help so that we can carry on our essential work. If you can, support the Guardian from as little as $1 – and it only takes a minute. Thank you.
I know it is de rigueur to bash the minority of liberals at the forefront of these "wars" (as opposed to the conservatives pushing back to "conserve" the cultural status quo, hence the names), but this article kinda shoots itself in the foot when it shows the increase of of awareness around issues that used to be fringe, like Climate Change, that are now regarded as a main-stream threat and not a "culture war", which is what conservatives have tried to paint it as for 30+ years.
Or consider gay marriage. In the 80's this was heretical on both sides of the pond, now it is close to being the law of the land in the US and no longer a "culture war". But thankfully the minority fought for what is now majority.
Second, culture wars are always fought by minorities. It doesn't take a large number of people to change the status quo. This applies as much to revolutionaries (communists, Nazis, etc) as demographics (Taleb once gave the relatively innocuous example of kashrut classifications on food in the grocery store as an example of how a tiny minority can impose its sectarian norms on an agricultural industry that serves a majority that probably doesn't even know what kashrut is; he used this, I believe, to illustrate that the argument that you don't need a majority of devout, Sharia law-following Muslims for Sharia to become a realistic possibility).
Third, the current culture war is real. Even if it is led and actively propelled by a small minority, it nonetheless embroils everyone. It's difficult to give a single date of birth for the current culture war, and in some sense, the world has always been in a state of cultural war. But what people typically have in mind is the deep-cutting revolution that has been escalating since the 1960s. Like newborn fish that don't know what water is and have no memory of things past, many fail to grasp the revolution taking place. Perhaps people expect revolutions to look theatrically dramatic. But there is a culture war taking place. In the last 20 years along, we have seen changes that were unthinkable across human history.
The stakes are high and the multitudes will be led by whoever is the victor. The media are instruments of different factions in the war. Some are looking for a seat at the table when the dust has settled Other look to wage total cultural war against their opponents. Some are fighting to preserve what's left. Others seek to counteract the entire rebellion.
It may be better to call this a culture battle. I claim to know the victor of the war. I just don't know who will win the battle, or how much blood will be spilled.
If "blue state" workers think their red-state brethren are incorrigible racist assholes, and "red state" working people think the blue states are full of virtue-signaling effete hypocrites... then capital wins because, even though 75% of the American public likes socialist economic ideas (when stated plainly and without a "socialist" label) they are all fighting each other over unrelated stuff, like whether J.K. Rowling's latest misinformed comment means we should stop reading her.
What if we levied an information fee -- any entity which dispenses information for profit must then pay into public education tax funds to enhance the discerning capabilities of the populace.
https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
Really telling. These fringe groups are taking over our political discourse and online discussion. They are driving a societal wedge.
The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly paradoxical idea that "In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance."
The Guardian is as bad as The Daily Mail from the other side, but seems to genuinely believe it's somehow above it all.
The vast majority of people who heavily use social media, are much more likely to have much stronger beliefs one way or another than people who don't.
I even have a theory much of this is driven by social isolation, mostly young men with nothing better to do. So these young men go on tirades about how the Last of Us Two is a feminist plot to destroy masculinity or something stupid like that.
Normally if you have stuff going on you won't waste your time being angry about a piece of media. Society is going to need to find a path for these left over men, self worth shouldn't be tied into your income after all.
I'd wager that boredom and, more importantly, lack of purpose fuels most of the hate and insanity we see today on the internet. This impacts all genders equally and our society is going need to think real hard how we go about tackling a growing number of young people struggling with existential angst.
Last week the internet had a compelling video showing a young white person yelling at a black man trying to cross a BLM barricade. The black man wanted to go on his way, the protester was insulting him and telling him what a terrible person he was.
It's completely nuts. But not a new phenomenon.
If your theory is correct much of this kerfuffle will dry up right after the election, along with the funding.
You'll also find that radical centrists (as defined by actual political positions) are an infinitesimal group, and that the vast majority of people will report their beliefs as middle of the road no matter what the actual content. They will also report that they are middle-class, no matter what their income.
And what content-free questions:
> It concludes that unlike in the US, climate change is not a culture-war issue in the UK. In Britain, it found that 85% of voters believe climate change concerns us all. The most sceptical group were voters described as “disengaged traditionalists”, where the figure was still 76%. Meanwhile, 79% of all voters say gender equality is a sign of progress.
Does climate change "concern us all"? Yes, climate change is being used as a weapon to destroy progress and people's livelihoods.
Is gender equality a sign of progress? Yes, when the courts stop favoring women, and give me the right to choose who I want to hire regardless of whether they're a man or woman, society will have progressed.
> The research also suggested that the Covid-19 crisis had prompted an outburst of social solidarity. In February, 70% of voters agreed that “it’s everyone for themselves”, with 30% agreeing that “we look after each other”. By September, the proportion who opted for “we look after each other” had increased to 54%.
I don't even know what this question means, or how it's relevant to the thesis. I think they were searching for people who both had no loved ones, and are not just covid denialists, but not even aware that anything is even going on. Covid denialists have support networks, that's how they keep their businesses open and schedule protests. It's very difficult to phrase a question when the position that you think is the most reasonable is also a very extreme one (that covid is very dangerous and justifies extreme measures.)
> More than half (57%) reported an increased awareness of the living conditions of others, 77% feel that the pandemic has reminded us of our common humanity, and 62% feel they have the ability to change things around them – an increase of 15 points since February.
Unintelligible. And these are the entirety of the examples cited in the article.
edit: also Jo Cox supported BDS, so I guess she was an extremist, too.
edit2: missed this
> Its polling found that 73% believe hate speech is a problem, while 72% believe political correctness is an issue. Some 60% believe many are too sensitive about race, but 60% also recognise issues around “white privilege”.
- looks pretty extreme to me.
Um, no. You already can hire whomever you want and for whatever reason you want. You just can't be blatantly sexist. Perhaps you need to step back and reassess your viewpoint because it reeks of scare mongering.
tl;dr: If you go around with a survey that asks "Are you an unreasonable extremist?" and mark everyone down who says "No" as a Brownite centrist Democrat, you're going to find a silent majority of Brownite centrist Democrats.
While technically true, in a real war the “tiny minority” (the military) don’t choose when or where or why to fight, that is done by the “large majority”, the voters electing a government.
The UK has been in a number of wars since I've been able to vote - I don't recall being asked to vote on any one of them? Or indeed the wars in question being part of the manifesto for any party at any election?
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-news-media-is-destroying-i...
It’s just text. Copy-paste is the first computer user habit anyone learns.
The idea machines are learning is nuts. Sorting the same old human copy-pasta isn’t learning. What is there to learn about vanilla ice cream? It’s all in eating it.
What a shock we’re just more efficiently eating shit
I really don't think The Guardian understands what they're talking about here. The so called "culture war" is about Marxist ideology. The people denying climate change are fringe wackos of this tiny minority who fight culture wars.
EDIT: It's fascinating to see the votes on this change without anyone even trying to make an argument to justify the claim it has to do with Marxism. I'd love to see one of those downvoters explain exactly how it has anything to do with Marxism. I'm not holding my breath.
