Damn, and here I've been thinking I defy being pigeonholed into a single ideology and issue.. Well I guess I will go back to posting about Chinese food on Hangout.
You have any friends who would tie themselves to a goal post at an nba game or mistaken black person for a white dude in blackface ? Avoid them
I like this graphic: Trying to flatten all political beliefs onto a single dimension is somewhat problematic, but nevertheless it would be interesting to see a graph with that scale as the X-axis and percentage from population on the Y-axis. I don't think the distribution would be symmetric.
Now make the same graph but during 1920s Germany. I make this point because if you polled German citizens during that time frame how many are going to agree with hard right sentiments like exterminating or removing Jews from Germany? For the right, a apathetic majority is all that is needed. For the left, the election of Trump and his convincing of a sizable chink of the nation that he won the election and that our voting system is fake really have put them on overdrive worried about history repeating themselves which can often make them go overboard.
Remember when white power groups were recuitung kids in chatrooms? This was back around the late 90s. Companies/ISPs banded together, shut that down, patted themselves on the back. Of course it was an easier decision then when the traffic wasn't monetized and actually cost companies money to host. Would this action be controversial today?
There are divisions among age and class that split party lines. Republicans started going nuts with Palin and they mostly still think Trump won the last one. That's a real shift from Republicans radicalizing their primary system after Citizens United to bring out Ted Cruz and other opportunistic tea baggers. Democrats are slowly doing the same thing except their leaders love the Wall Street and establishment money that comes with "being the responsible ones" who keep the lights on, don't shut down the government and reduces the chance of a social riot. It's not necessarily a bad thing but there are obvious disagreements among the generations that are spilling over.
We have system of elections and governance in the US that amplifies and rewards extremism. Until the rules of that game are changed, we will continue to see the middle hollowed out and people set against each other.
Our system of government has not changed. The same bad actors are still acting badly. The only thing that has fundamentally changed is the introduction of social media. If you let a child run free in a candy store, they will eventually suffer a sugar overdose. We all live in that candy store now.
Look, here is the thing, I believe that before Trump we had more discourse, it was on the way to broken, but once Trump hit it is pretty clear it is fight fire with fire or get run over. So, yeah, socially moderate people - who are the majority in this country- need to stand up and call out the bullshit of the religious right and the wack job right....or it will be setting policy. DD
Our system of government didn't need to change for us to end up where we are. We started drifting towards a duopoly long, long before social media hit the scene. Hell, on paper we've been under two-party rule since before the Great Depression, and one could even argue the Civil War. That was sustainable for a while because the parties were coalitions of disparate factions. That ended, or started to end, mid-last century. Again, the rules made this inevitable. Things like closed primaries and FPTP make alternative choices impossible, elevate the most extreme voices in the room, and make compromise anathema. This goes well beyond people/actors, it is systemic. This is a system that rewards partisanship and punishes reasonableness. It pushes good actors out or bends them to its will. The evolution of mass media didn't create this problem, it merely accelerated a process that was already set in motion. I highly recommend this book if you're interested in learning more about how we got here, and why.
To think independently is the key but the foundation is to live in "consideration of others". The one thing I like about the right is their push for "the right to repair". I like to have control of my vehicle's maintenance and repair as much as possible while safely protecting hazardous from the the environment. However the despair I have of the right is they don't have consideration of my existence as a marginalized person of color. It seems that right and left seem to try to bury the hatchet when comes to issues particular wrongs on people that don't fit their profile.
Thanks for sharing that book. I agree we were heading down a certain path and have been but I still say it was a long not so steep slope. Mass media isn't the difference maker as Rush Limbaugh had been around for decades. The rise of Fascism isn't an American problem, it's global. Why now? I agree it's systemic but this system is much much bigger than America. The Arab Spring started in 2010 which destabalized multiple governments. That was made possible by social media and their algorithms. All that said, two things can be true at the same time and I agree our two party system fundamentally sets up an us vs. them mindset.
