If you ask me, this is mostly mumbo jumbo: Talk about the hollowing out of democracy while looking just at the US is going to miss symptoms and reasons: We have more data than one country! The call against cancel culture is just mood affiliation. There is no problem in the general public pressuring others because they don’t like what they say: It’s arguably one of the few ways people can try to create any change, given how arthritic our electoral system is: Reform and movement is so painful the system has stopped being able ot make them. To not understand that the current problem is about abuse of government power, vs “cancel culture” is IMO quite lazy.
And then there’s the AI talk. It’s just humanities emptyness to a bad interview between two people that aren’t very deep. A mountain out of a molehill.
To be educated in our democracy never, ever, meant having actual fascists and socialists arguing. If we look at history, the moments where the overton window wides greatly, what also widens is risk of violence. Look at the wonders of Spain, 1936. We can’t educate people into not believing in fascism, or into thinking that France levels of retirement support just doesn’t work. What we actually had in years of peace was also an environment where the voices that most people could hear were very narrow. We had even more narrowing after 9/11 for a while. Talking about the marketplace of ideas in a world with the internet and where recommendation engines do a very good job at making sure we don’t hear things we really dislike is like claiming that walks outside are healthy without checking if there’a forest fire, or our house is in Mars.
We have no idea of what a reasonable society looks like in the age of the internet. I don’t pretend to have answers, but claiming that we know a wide overton window is the answer is being blind to risks we are also seeing around us at all times.
SenranHaruka on
A few years ago, I wish I saved it, I made the prediction that the worst case scenario for America was basically to turn into Turkey. A politicial system slanted in favor heavily of a large even if not majority conservative heartland folk dominating progressive and geographically concentrated opposition politically as a means to revenge for and strip their cultural power. Institutions that in theory should check them being paralyzed to not fight because of this large base that equates any level of accountability or criticism of the man to treason against the nation. He gets away with everything because he’s convinced a critical mass of 35% of the country that not letting him get away with anything is unpatriotic.
Lo and behold, that more or less seems to be the track we are taking.
Also fun fact the Abraham Lincoln quote was directed at the Know Nothings as well as the Democrats. I don’t remember exactly but he was calling out the hypocrisy of “all men are created equal except Catholics” being just as bad as “all men are created equal except Negroes”. Bro was goated.
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If you ask me, this is mostly mumbo jumbo: Talk about the hollowing out of democracy while looking just at the US is going to miss symptoms and reasons: We have more data than one country! The call against cancel culture is just mood affiliation. There is no problem in the general public pressuring others because they don’t like what they say: It’s arguably one of the few ways people can try to create any change, given how arthritic our electoral system is: Reform and movement is so painful the system has stopped being able ot make them. To not understand that the current problem is about abuse of government power, vs “cancel culture” is IMO quite lazy.
And then there’s the AI talk. It’s just humanities emptyness to a bad interview between two people that aren’t very deep. A mountain out of a molehill.
To be educated in our democracy never, ever, meant having actual fascists and socialists arguing. If we look at history, the moments where the overton window wides greatly, what also widens is risk of violence. Look at the wonders of Spain, 1936. We can’t educate people into not believing in fascism, or into thinking that France levels of retirement support just doesn’t work. What we actually had in years of peace was also an environment where the voices that most people could hear were very narrow. We had even more narrowing after 9/11 for a while. Talking about the marketplace of ideas in a world with the internet and where recommendation engines do a very good job at making sure we don’t hear things we really dislike is like claiming that walks outside are healthy without checking if there’a forest fire, or our house is in Mars.
We have no idea of what a reasonable society looks like in the age of the internet. I don’t pretend to have answers, but claiming that we know a wide overton window is the answer is being blind to risks we are also seeing around us at all times.
A few years ago, I wish I saved it, I made the prediction that the worst case scenario for America was basically to turn into Turkey. A politicial system slanted in favor heavily of a large even if not majority conservative heartland folk dominating progressive and geographically concentrated opposition politically as a means to revenge for and strip their cultural power. Institutions that in theory should check them being paralyzed to not fight because of this large base that equates any level of accountability or criticism of the man to treason against the nation. He gets away with everything because he’s convinced a critical mass of 35% of the country that not letting him get away with anything is unpatriotic.
Lo and behold, that more or less seems to be the track we are taking.
Also fun fact the Abraham Lincoln quote was directed at the Know Nothings as well as the Democrats. I don’t remember exactly but he was calling out the hypocrisy of “all men are created equal except Catholics” being just as bad as “all men are created equal except Negroes”. Bro was goated.