Where are all the sane people?

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funeralxempire
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23 Sep 2024, 4:24 pm

naturalplastic wrote:

Everyone is either knee jerk pro Israel, or knee-jerk anti Israel. Either way they have ready made opinions and dont have to think. Only a few of us still dont know who to root for and actually have to THINK about the issue.

The problem with viewing the situation this way is that it ignores how many people with settled opinions have already invested significant effort into understanding the situation and since then have only seen more of the same behaviour that helped settle their minds in the first place.

Further, I'm not sure that most of the people with unsettled opinions actually think that deeply on the topic, rather than ho-humming and never really committing to thinking about it in more than a superficial way. It's easy to never think deeply, stay on the fence and voice a few platitudes and then pretend like you're actually being more thoughtful rather than just demonstrating an avoidant tendency.

s**t, even grillpillers have the guts to admit they don't care enough to form an informed opinion on anything significant. It's not more thoughtful, but at least they're honest about not having formed an informed opinion.

Personally, I was fairly pro-Israel growing up, largely because most of the opinions I read on the topic were from books that generally had a pro-NATO and pro-Israel bias. It was only as I got older and started getting more information from outside of that echo chamber that my views started to change.

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MatchboxVagabond
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23 Sep 2024, 11:39 pm

Mona Pereth wrote:

bee33 wrote:

I haven't heard the term tankies but this idea that the country is divided between the far right and the far left is just false. The division is between those on the far right and those on the moderate center. The left is nearly nonexistent in the US.

Agreed.

But why is the left, here in the U.S.A., perceived as being so much bigger than it really is?

One reason, it seems to me, is that some aspects of leftist movement culture, or more specifically leftist etiquette (a.k.a. "political correctness" or "wokeness"), have been co-opted by corporate America and elite academia via DEI programs, and a lot of white folks have felt disoriented by this rapid cultural change.

Of course, real leftist politics consists of much more than just the idea that one should ditch traditional Western insults against marginalized minorities.

Because the media stopped trying to be fair and balanced and started doing this stupid two sides of the story thing where both sides would get more or less the same amount of time, even when one side objectively did not have a leg to stand on. Sometimes that does make sense, on the whole, giving both candidates in a head to head race equal time does make sense. But, like magic that no longer applies when there's 3rd party candidates.

(I think I got that fixed)

cyberdad
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25 Sep 2024, 4:52 pm

ImBlue34 wrote:

I feel like everywhere I look I'm now surrounded by MAGA fascists and Tankies.

I can't help but feel that this was exactly what the world was like before World War 2 broke out. World War 3 is probably going to happen within our lifetimes.

I actually like Will Smith's thinking on matters like this. People haven't really changed. they have more opportunities now to open up their personal skewed thinking because of technology.

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25 Sep 2024, 4:57 pm

naturalplastic wrote:

YBut the fact that we have a polarizing demagogue like Trump is a symptom of a seismic shift thats needed in society and in politics. Hope we get through the crises with equitable results...without too much bloodshed.

Symptom of seismic shift in the power of social media to connect with "like minded" people who share common beliefs. Not just the MAGAs and their conspiracies. Social media tipped Brits to vote Brexit, it has also galvanised movements like the Arab Spring in the Middle east.

bsickler
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30 Sep 2024, 8:54 pm

cyberdad wrote:

ImBlue34 wrote:

I actually like Will Smith's thinking on matters like this. People haven't really changed. they have more opportunities now to open up their personal skewed thinking because of technology.

If that's true, then why didn't this stuff start happening in the 1990s, when usenet, forums, etc. started really taking off? Why didn't this become such a huge issue until the late 2000s / early 2010s?

There were lots of places for hateful people to express themselves and find like-minded people on the early internet, for instance Stormfront (wikipedia link. No way I'm linking to the real thing

). What took so long?

The fact of the matter is, until the popularization of centralized social media in the late 2000s, pretty much everyone operated on their own little internet "island" or "fiefdom" and most had very little influence outside of that. Corporate social media effectively monopolized communication (to the point where most people IRL now legitimately believe social media IS the internet!) and merged these islands in to one big continent (so to speak), which enabled the substantial harm to society that is occurring.

This isn't a case of "everyone was always like this". Only a relatively small subset of people were like this before. Social media enabled that small subset of hateful, awful people to have significant outsized influence far, far outside of the historical norm, even when including the internet, and now those ideas are not only relatively commonplace, but even somewhat popular for the first time in many decades.

cyberdad
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01 Oct 2024, 3:09 am

^^^ there are two factors for social media, one is relative anonymity (this of course doesn't protect particularly vile individuals who will eventually be IDed). But the perception of anonymity emboldens people to remove their filter and share their deeper thoughts without inhibition (like drunk people). Second is lack of consequences. If internet trolls are permitted to roam free without consequence then their behaviour is enabled.

Cornflake
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01 Oct 2024, 9:18 am

But Usenet is anonymous, and isn't immune to nutters/trolls either.

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cyberdad
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01 Oct 2024, 5:51 pm

I have never used Usenet, reddit or facebook for talking to people. I must really be a dinosaur :lol:

funeralxempire
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01 Oct 2024, 5:54 pm

cyberdad wrote:

I have never used Usenet, reddit or facebook for talking to people. I must really be a dinosaur :lol:

I'd say having used Usenet would be more of a sign of being a dinosaur than having not used Usenet.

That's like the Golden Age of the Internet era. Before AOL spammed everyone's mailboxes with trial disks.

cyberdad
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01 Oct 2024, 6:04 pm

I used to play on something called BBL? back in the late 80s, it was slow but it was set up as a chat forum (very similar to WP) and certain American colleges set these up for anyone to join.

funeralxempire
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01 Oct 2024, 6:07 pm

I remember BBSes, where you had to call a specific number to connect rather than it using DNS and IP addresses.

cyberdad
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01 Oct 2024, 6:12 pm

funeralxempire wrote:

I remember BBSes, where you had to call a specific number to connect rather than it using DNS and IP addresses.

Yes! I would also wait 5-10 min for a user in the US to receive my post.

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03 Oct 2024, 10:23 am

Cornflake wrote:

But Usenet is anonymous, and isn't immune to nutters/trolls either.

That’s true, and definitely true of all Internet forums.

The difference is containment. It used to be that drama was contained to the specific forum (stuck on an “island” and not able to escape if you will).

Now that’s no longer the case because big social media companies have created a few enormous oligopolies. Because there are so few enormous websites, drama has a tendency to spread between them much more easily.

People straight up no longer know there are alternatives (like this website!). Go on to Reddit and ask and they’ll adamantly tell you that forums like this one essentially no longer exist.

This results in a concentration of drama that basically wasn’t possible before the late 2000s because the internet back then was more diffuse.

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03 Oct 2024, 4:02 pm

bsickler wrote:

The difference is containment. It used to be that drama was contained to the specific forum (stuck on an “island” and not able to escape if you will).

Now that’s no longer the case because big social media companies have created a few enormous oligopolies. Because there are so few enormous websites, drama has a tendency to spread between them much more easily.

Excellent points.
Thanks to poisonous abominations like Facebook and Twitter the previously self-isolating islands have become the whole world.

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cyberdad
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03 Oct 2024, 5:11 pm

bsickler wrote:

People straight up no longer know there are alternatives (like this website!). Go on to Reddit and ask and they’ll adamantly tell you that forums like this one essentially no longer exist.

For younger people they seem to be addicted to the traffic on larger forums, plus many are seeking online "clout" rather than meaningful interaction.

Believe it or not, the architecture of WP is identical to College BBS forums from 1989 and this persisted into the early 2000s, topix forums also had the same architecture and there were country specific, history and other forums using this form aimed at particular interest groups.

Fun fact: I managed to get an account on the University of tehran BBS forum in 1995. Many of the students I communicated with had never spoken to a foreigner before. But! they managed to know about US news and tv (american media manages to infliltrate everywhere). the big thing Iranian college students were excited about? the OJ Simpson trial! they couldn't stop asking me about it :lol:

I had to explain I wasn't American.

funeralxempire
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03 Oct 2024, 5:27 pm

Cornflake wrote:

bsickler wrote:

Excellent points.
Thanks to poisonous abominations like Facebook and Twitter the previously self-isolating islands have become the whole world.

It's almost like the internet (but RL) version of Pandemic

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