OT: Storm in a Teacup

We used to have a few news sources, newspapers and then three TV networks. Now we have thousands to choose from. The classic news sources have joined the free-for-all and degraded to the mean.

What's bizarre is that important people (Trump, Musk, movie stars, whatever) post to twitter and engage in battles with anyone. There is an infinite supply of jerks to argue with.

Another weird thing: why do news sites, when quoting twitter posts, show everything twice?

Quite :(

Often three times. Once in the text, and twice in different formats from the twits.

One has to wonder why John Larkin blames academia.

It's not as if he shows any sign of reading anything academic, and he swall ows a lot of guff from denialist propaganda outputs that tries to look acad emic and - for me at least - utterly fails.

John Larkin seems to have read - and taken seriously - "The Bell Curve" by Charles Murray and the late Richard Herrnstein. That was right-wing politic al propaganda dressed up as if was an academic publication.

was the academic counter-blast, which revealed the way that Murray and Herr nstein had misrepresented their data to get the result they wanted.

And where on earth would you find a "hard left" extremist in the USA?

Bernie Sanders is a about as left wing as public figures get in the US, and his brand of democratic socialism is the uncontested middle ground in Nort hern Europe - Scandinavia, Germany and the Netherlands. Not exactly any kin d of "hard left" position.

Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein are sympathetic to anarcho-syndicalist ideas - basically cooperatively owned businesses - and they would like to see the political influence of big business cut back, but they are happy to put the ir faith in peaceful democratic change (while dubious about big business si tting still while this happened).

Quite what the "hard left" would be going for has to be imagined. People li ke krw seem to think that Soviet-era international communism still exists, and still plans to foment revolution in every country in the world, but tha t's a trifle unrealistic.

You wouldn't - but that doesn't matter.

The polarisation of politics towards the extremes and away from middle ground is entirely relative to the local circumstances.

What is antifa? How about the open-borders people?

I don't follow regional politics that closely to be able to comment.

In general the centre ground in the USA is significantly to the right /in/ /some/ /respects/ of much of the rest of the world.

However left/right descriptions are far too coarse to be useful; the world is more than 2 dimensional.

I too find that people are a bit more complicated than that - perhaps

John

Multiplied by the time/datestamp :)

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."

The dynamic is that people inherently form teams or tribes to compete for resources. They pick some affinity to rally around: race, language, religion, city, soccer team, political party. The affinity is really arbitrary, it's mostly a way of picking teams.

So it becomes 2-dimensional as the dynamics pushes a population into a small number of competing tribes. Peer pressure encourages uniformity within each tribe.

It used to work like that. Now that life has got more complicated, everybod y is looking for access to a wide variety of different resources, and the g roup now have to work out way of cooperating to share and swap the various resources that they all need to access.

soccer team, political party.

They used to, and some people who want to keep on doing things the way that worked earlier keep on trying to work that way.

These days you end up with teams that don't include the diplomats you need to negotiate mutually acceptable exchanges of resources - team picking does rather exclude diplomats, whose work isn't helped by a perceived close ass ociation with any particular team.

In reality there are a lot more than two dimensions, and the tribes get per suaded that it is in their best interests to cooperate and share (unless th ey are being lead by a twit with a short attention span who can't be bother ed to get his head around the complexity of what is actually going on).

As H.L.Mencken said "For every complex problem there is an answer that is c lear, simple, and wrong." He didn't mention that these answers make great s ound bites and tweets, since neither had been invented at the time.

I think Americans tend to blame their financial failures on themselves, and their interpersonal/social/relationship failures on other people, when they should probably be doing the exact opposite...

Utter bullshit. You're in charge of you, financial well being as well as that of relationships.

er into deficit take their toll.

cuts, and it didn't deliver back them.

That doesn't mean that other people don't influence both outcomes.

America is currently set up to make sure that the rich get richer, which do es make it more likely that the less rich will fail finacially if they find themselves up against richer competitors (and richer competitors have a ha bit of moving into new markets initially discovered by other people).

Yup, although nowadays "resource" is more likely to be a "virtual" than physical concept, e.g. baseball team.

Yup.

But I, like most people, pick multiple independent "teams", e.g. one for food, another for software, another for hardware, another for recreation.

And in the political sphere, people tend to regard some of my beliefs as fascist and others as socialist, with most being somewhere in between.

The problem with political parties is that they force all nominally "teams" (e.g. food, hardware, recreation) to coalesce into a single team.

/That/ is unrealistic and destructive.

A?

They aren't so much left-wing as anti-fascist. If right-wing groups organis e potentially violent demonstrations, the local anti-fascists provide a vio lent reaction - it's more about suggesting that the right-wing demonstratio n doesn't enjoy a lot of popular support than it is about pushing any parti cular political agenda.

Proportional representation does make multi-party democracy practical, and you can have separate "teams" to represent separate interests. You can only vote for one at time, but at least you can pick the one that's got your at tention at the moment.

I think the team thing is wired into us, as is the tendency to rally around charismatic leaders and form hierarchial structures. In today's world, that wiring doesn't work like it did 50,000 years ago.

The team thing supresses thinking. Most people prefer emotion over thinking.

And the team puts winning and power above principles.

What really shocks me is how well things actually work, at least in

I wonder if anyone simulates social structures based on inherent bahaviors. Like weather and climate, it is chaotic so the models would be suggestive rather than predictive.

Some of the population has out-grown it, but trump's followers clearly have n't.

Members of a team are entirely free to think that their leaders are nuts, b ut it's unwise to admit it. John Larkin clearly prefers a nice warm cliche to anything that might involve thought, but people who have managed to grow up properly are aware that their emotions can be used to manipulate them i nto doing stuff that they wouldn't if they took the time to think about wha t they were being asked to do.

My first thought when anybody says anything nice about me is "What are they trying to get me to do?". It isn't usually a useful thought, but every now and then it pays off.

Not necessarily. Religions claim to take principles very seriously, and som etimes they do.

First world countries are first world countries because they worked out a s lightly better way of organising their societies than their competitors.

Universal education seems to help. First world countries aren't actually pe rfect, and if you compare the US health care system with the health care sy stem in any other advanced industrial country you've got a prime example of system that clearly could work better (and more cheaply).

John Larkin doesn't know what the word "chaotic" actually means.

Social structures are hard to simulate because the people who are involved in the structure get to hear what the simulation is predicting, and try to take advantage of it. This is most obvious in economics, which concentrates on one particular aspect of the human social structure.

Weather and climate don't have that particular problem. And humans are more complex than the average chunk of atmosphere.

Yeah but krw seems like such a happy, well put-together person and not like a stark-raving Internet kook at all so on what grounds do we have to disagree with his "life philosophy" lol