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On November 06 2018 20:04 ReditusSum wrote: The breakdown of the "Church and Town" communal ties that typified the young people of older generations is a game changer and not in a good way.
What's "church and town"? Google has given me nothing.
On November 06 2018 20:04 ReditusSum wrote: Well no one has an obligation to try to convince them, or to reach out, so I can't blame people who don't have the patience for it and want to write them off. As long as everyone is aware of the consequences of their decisions, there really is no right answer. My personal prediction is that it's too late to deplatform effectively and that eventually this is going to lead to some kind of physical conflict that spills out into the wider society. But I could be wrong and it could be just a passing fad.
The breakdown of the "Church and Town" communal ties that typified the young people of older generations is a game changer and not in a good way.
Its a case of trying to contain something that has already broken out into the mainstream. There's very little you can do about it, and I think some people are forgetting that once these extreme political attitudes are forged, there really isn't any changing them - not on the scale that needs to happen to 'fix' the current issue with political debate. You're looking at waiting a generation and hoping the next lot of politically aware teenagers see things more clearly. I don't think we can write society off as being broken due to things the breakdown of 'church and town', but its certainly worth noting that the current generation, for whatever reason, hasn't adapted particularly well to it. I'm very hopeful for the future though. In the UK, for example, there's been a massive decrease in teenagers drinking and doing drugs. I can't help thinking that there's some forces at play that we don't understand that are behind a huge change in the way people think, and that we're somewhere in the middle of that and that's why everyone's confused.
It's social media.
Nobody was ready for the social media generation, and what we're in now is the scenario created when only one half of the political spectrum has really figured it out. Regular media for the left has been plenty satisfying, so there's been little need to really focus on social media. The right's been digging deep into social media for ages and ages because there's a large enough section of the right wing that isn't represented properly (due to them being fucking insane). So you've got your Alex Jones's and Milo's looking for ways to get their message out, and teaching the same playbook to the rest of the right in the process.
The left's only just getting involved, really.
So the new media paradigm is more or less dominated by one hald of the political spectrum, and things get screwed up.
On November 06 2018 20:04 ReditusSum wrote: The breakdown of the "Church and Town" communal ties that typified the young people of older generations is a game changer and not in a good way.
What's "church and town"? Google has given me nothing.
It's apparently conservative speak for "when I was young, everything was better".
On November 06 2018 20:48 Dangermousecatdog wrote:
On November 06 2018 20:04 ReditusSum wrote: The breakdown of the "Church and Town" communal ties that typified the young people of older generations is a game changer and not in a good way.
What's "church and town"? Google has given me nothing.
It's apparently conservative speak for "when I was young, everything was better".
It's not. Communities built around "church and town" have a much stronger influence on young people than what has replaced them. Kids are less likely to break their neighbour's window if they know that neighbour from the "church" (or other center of the community) or they know that that neighbour knows their parents (because everyone knows each other in the "town"). It's like flaming in videogames, ragers are less likely to act like dicks to people who are in the same guild or are friends or their friends because they don't want to be seen as immature by someone they have some form of social connection with.
You can't just say it means "when I was young, everything was better" because "church and town" already had an alternative back then, that is densely populated urban areas where people barely interacted with their neighours because they had absolutely no need to. Lack of interaction leads to weak social bonds and weak social bonds lead to weak ability of the community to pressure the young to act like the community wants them to.
That story has no basis in reality (rather in apologist nostalgia) and is loaded with qualitative judgments that assume a great deal about how people act without actually being able to establish any of it. Many, many people who grew up in dense urban centers wax just as poetic about the old neighborhood and how the kids from the block would all get together and play baseball in the street. Those same backwards glances also conveniently ignore all of the "neighborhood justice" and bullying that took place, as well as the harassment that weird adults would suffer as the object of the youth's ridicule (let's not forget the fact that minorities were de facto excluded from all of this in the first place, they were forced to live on the other side of the town, after all). The Sandlot didn't turn on a plot device through which the scary neighbor and his dog loomed large in the minds of the kids for nothing.
Further, the idea that technology and progress has separated people from one another is literally a bunch of loaded bullshit. There are dozens upon dozens of platforms, be they apps, games, or forums, that connect people in ways that could never have been imagined, and many of them even center on neighborhood structures. The long and short of it is that this feigned focus on the supposed positive aspects of the past's assembly of communal interactions is a form of Luddism masquerading as political wisdom. It's also a cornerstone of the conservative ethos, which is partly why criticism aimed at uncovering what actually happened in the past (i.e. CULTURAL MARXISM, BUM BUM BUM) is so often targeted by conservative "intellectuals." It's hard to say, "man, the past was better, kids behaved, people cared for one another" when the stories that underpin the sentiment are built upon their own kinds of exclusion, rigid social order, and discrimination.
On November 06 2018 20:04 ReditusSum wrote: Well no one has an obligation to try to convince them, or to reach out, so I can't blame people who don't have the patience for it and want to write them off. As long as everyone is aware of the consequences of their decisions, there really is no right answer. My personal prediction is that it's too late to deplatform effectively and that eventually this is going to lead to some kind of physical conflict that spills out into the wider society. But I could be wrong and it could be just a passing fad.
The breakdown of the "Church and Town" communal ties that typified the young people of older generations is a game changer and not in a good way.
Its a case of trying to contain something that has already broken out into the mainstream. There's very little you can do about it, and I think some people are forgetting that once these extreme political attitudes are forged, there really isn't any changing them - not on the scale that needs to happen to 'fix' the current issue with political debate. You're looking at waiting a generation and hoping the next lot of politically aware teenagers see things more clearly. I don't think we can write society off as being broken due to things the breakdown of 'church and town', but its certainly worth noting that the current generation, for whatever reason, hasn't adapted particularly well to it. I'm very hopeful for the future though. In the UK, for example, there's been a massive decrease in teenagers drinking and doing drugs. I can't help thinking that there's some forces at play that we don't understand that are behind a huge change in the way people think, and that we're somewhere in the middle of that and that's why everyone's confused.
It's social media.
Nobody was ready for the social media generation, and what we're in now is the scenario created when only one half of the political spectrum has really figured it out. Regular media for the left has been plenty satisfying, so there's been little need to really focus on social media. The right's been digging deep into social media for ages and ages because there's a large enough section of the right wing that isn't represented properly (due to them being fucking insane). So you've got your Alex Jones's and Milo's looking for ways to get their message out, and teaching the same playbook to the rest of the right in the process.
The left's only just getting involved, really.
So the new media paradigm is more or less dominated by one hald of the political spectrum, and things get screwed up.
Without doubt social media is the biggest player here, but there are other phenomena that are also very influential. The breakdown of the socially progressive, free market consensus, for example, is due to certain political and economic failures and short sightedness on the part of the political establishment, and this has created much more space for the right wing to fill with fear.
Everything seems so apocalyptic at the moment that I think people are losing perspective. There's always a reaction against political extremism, it just might take a while for things to settle down again and a new consensus to emerge from all the chaos.
So you've got your Alex Jones's and Milo's looking for ways to get their message out, and teaching the same playbook to the rest of the right in the process.
Interesting that you picked two examples of people who are now pariahs of the online community. It doesn't take long for these kind of ideas to become completely discredited (Alex Jones' insane conspiracy nut faboys aside), so you have this cycling in and out of personalities. Peterson must surely be next, given that his ideas are already discredited. You always end up left with the same kind of conservative commentator, the Shapiro kind, who go for conservative values and anti-leftism instead of sensationalist bullshit.
On November 06 2018 20:48 Dangermousecatdog wrote:
On November 06 2018 20:04 ReditusSum wrote: The breakdown of the "Church and Town" communal ties that typified the young people of older generations is a game changer and not in a good way.
What's "church and town"? Google has given me nothing.
It's apparently conservative speak for "when I was young, everything was better".
It's not. Communities built around "church and town" have a much stronger influence on young people than what has replaced them. Kids are less likely to break their neighbour's window if they know that neighbour from the "church" (or other center of the community) or they know that that neighbour knows their parents (because everyone knows each other in the "town"). It's like flaming in videogames, ragers are less likely to act like dicks to people who are in the same guild or are friends or their friends because they don't want to be seen as immature by someone they have some form of social connection with.
You can't just say it just means "when I was young, everything was better" because "church and town" already had an alternative back then, that is densely populated urban areas where people barely interacted with their neighours because they had absolutely no need to. Lack of interaction leads to weak social bonds and weak social bonds lead to weak ability of the community to pressure the young to act like the community wants them to.
But in your valiant defense of 1950s communities you instantly mentioned some of the social structures that are replacing "towns". Whatsapp groups and gaming guilds. We don't need "church and town". We need "social structures".
surpressing a political vieuw wont make the vieuw go away. It will only make the people with that vieuw fight harder I think. Nazism in games I have seen as well,mostly with the names people use. There is a lot of hate in the gaming community in general. Most people these days they cant handle losing lol. It is often more like a meme or a 14 year old who doesn't know what he is talking about then seriously trying to promote extreme right wing policys though no doubt that happens as well.
I think in the end a lot of the extremism these days can be contributed to internet in general. The communication between people has exploded with the internet. You used to talk to friends in school,in bar or sportsclub. Now people are communicating with the whole world. Amount of communication really has exploded with internet,its not even double or triple that what it was before the internet,it is probably around 100 times bigger.
This explosion in communication I have not read much about it,but I think it is kinda interesting subject with far reaching implications.
So turnout was pretty good at my place, 6:00am and I was already the 20th one there. Anyway my ballot was pretty straightforward, save the County Judge (a 10 year term) and I had to think back to stuff I looked up during the primary to jog my memory a bit.
Also, is there any reason to vote if there's only one candidate listed for a position (such as Justice of the Supreme Court or Family Court Judge)? I left those blank since I figured if they were able to get all the endorsements (Dem, Rep, Conservative etc.) all the way down the page then there's no way they'd lose, right?
On November 06 2018 20:48 Dangermousecatdog wrote:
On November 06 2018 20:04 ReditusSum wrote: The breakdown of the "Church and Town" communal ties that typified the young people of older generations is a game changer and not in a good way.
What's "church and town"? Google has given me nothing.
It's apparently conservative speak for "when I was young, everything was better".
It's not. Communities built around "church and town" have a much stronger influence on young people than what has replaced them. Kids are less likely to break their neighbour's window if they know that neighbour from the "church" (or other center of the community) or they know that that neighbour knows their parents (because everyone knows each other in the "town"). It's like flaming in videogames, ragers are less likely to act like dicks to people who are in the same guild or are friends or their friends because they don't want to be seen as immature by someone they have some form of social connection with.
You can't just say it just means "when I was young, everything was better" because "church and town" already had an alternative back then, that is densely populated urban areas where people barely interacted with their neighours because they had absolutely no need to. Lack of interaction leads to weak social bonds and weak social bonds lead to weak ability of the community to pressure the young to act like the community wants them to.
But in your valiant defense of 1950s communities you instantly mentioned some of the social structures that are replacing "towns". Whatsapp groups and gaming guilds. We don't need "church and town". We need "social structures".
Are you trying to beat me in some sort of a gotcha game? I did not imply the "church and town" community from 1950 is some sort of an ideal we should go back to. I only tried to explain what I thought the phrase meant, and said that the social structures of modern local communities have a weaker influence on the young.
On November 06 2018 21:47 pmh wrote: surpressing a political vieuw wont make the vieuw go away. It will only make the people with that vieuw fight harder I think. Nazism in games I have seen as well,mostly with the names people use. There is a lot of hate in the gaming community in general. Most people these days they cant handle losing lol. It is often more like a meme or a 14 year old who doesn't know what he is talking about then seriously trying to promote extreme right wing policys though no doubt that happens as well.
I think in the end a lot of the extremism these days can be contributed to internet in general. The communication between people has exploded with the internet. You used to talk to friends in school,in bar or sportsclub. Now people are communicating with the whole world. Amount of communication really has exploded with internet,its not even double or triple that what it was before the internet,it is probably around 100 times bigger.
This explosion in communication I have not read much about it,but I think it is kinda interesting subject with far reaching implications.
Its easy to talk about nazism online, in real life you run the risk of getting a fist to your face.
On November 06 2018 20:04 ReditusSum wrote: Well no one has an obligation to try to convince them, or to reach out, so I can't blame people who don't have the patience for it and want to write them off. As long as everyone is aware of the consequences of their decisions, there really is no right answer. My personal prediction is that it's too late to deplatform effectively and that eventually this is going to lead to some kind of physical conflict that spills out into the wider society. But I could be wrong and it could be just a passing fad.
The breakdown of the "Church and Town" communal ties that typified the young people of older generations is a game changer and not in a good way.
Its a case of trying to contain something that has already broken out into the mainstream. There's very little you can do about it, and I think some people are forgetting that once these extreme political attitudes are forged, there really isn't any changing them - not on the scale that needs to happen to 'fix' the current issue with political debate. You're looking at waiting a generation and hoping the next lot of politically aware teenagers see things more clearly. I don't think we can write society off as being broken due to things the breakdown of 'church and town', but its certainly worth noting that the current generation, for whatever reason, hasn't adapted particularly well to it. I'm very hopeful for the future though. In the UK, for example, there's been a massive decrease in teenagers drinking and doing drugs. I can't help thinking that there's some forces at play that we don't understand that are behind a huge change in the way people think, and that we're somewhere in the middle of that and that's why everyone's confused.
It's social media.
Nobody was ready for the social media generation, and what we're in now is the scenario created when only one half of the political spectrum has really figured it out. Regular media for the left has been plenty satisfying, so there's been little need to really focus on social media. The right's been digging deep into social media for ages and ages because there's a large enough section of the right wing that isn't represented properly (due to them being fucking insane). So you've got your Alex Jones's and Milo's looking for ways to get their message out, and teaching the same playbook to the rest of the right in the process.
The left's only just getting involved, really.
So the new media paradigm is more or less dominated by one hald of the political spectrum, and things get screwed up.
Without doubt social media is the biggest player here, but there are other phenomena that are also very influential. The breakdown of the socially progressive, free market consensus, for example, is due to certain political and economic failures and short sightedness on the part of the political establishment, and this has created much more space for the right wing to fill with fear.
Everything seems so apocalyptic at the moment that I think people are losing perspective. There's always a reaction against political extremism, it just might take a while for things to settle down again and a new consensus to emerge from all the chaos.
So you've got your Alex Jones's and Milo's looking for ways to get their message out, and teaching the same playbook to the rest of the right in the process.
Interesting that you picked two examples of people who are now pariahs of the online community. It doesn't take long for these kind of ideas to become completely discredited (Alex Jones' insane conspiracy nut faboys aside), so you have this cycling in and out of personalities. Peterson must surely be next, given that his ideas are already discredited. You always end up left with the same kind of conservative commentator, the Shapiro kind, who go for conservative values and anti-leftism instead of sensationalist bullshit.
Is Alex Jones a pariah now? What happened to make him so? I know what happened with Milo.
The voices don't matter though, the point is they developed the playbook that the rest of the right wing is now using. Much of Alex Jones' career is proto Trump campaign.
Nobody wants a new consensus though, not in the US at least. The political discourse has become two alternate realities fighting to establish dominance. Look at XDaunt over in the mega blog, who challenged me to prove that Trump is a liar. And he's a well educated Conservative. My involvement in these two threads has convinced me of one thing: There is no reconciliation possible in the US at this time. Left and right in the US can't agree on basic truth and have discarded morality for their side when it comes to political activity. They'll condemn in the other what they celebrate in their own, and it no longer matters that the right is worse than the left, because they'll slowly drag the left down to their level, as we can see happening bit by bit in Congress.
I think in the UK we'll settle once the Brexit turmoil has finally ended. There's signs of that already (people are mostly angry at the government now instead of it being pro/anti Brexiteers as it was for quite a while). When the people actually responsible for the chaos are being held to it, there's room to grow.
On November 06 2018 05:55 Simberto wrote: I am not a fan online voting due to the trust problems inherent in that. You already have people not trusting voting machines. Even ignoring all of the possible security concerns with online voting ( And i am sure that there are a lot of those), even if it were completely safe, there would still not be any way of knowing that a) Your vote is actually being counted, b) Only real votes are being counted, and c) no one knows who you voted for.
I think that the physical act of voting is an important part of instilling the feeling of democracy into a population.
what assurances do you have that those problems don’t already exist in the current voting mechanism?
Most of this has been covered, but here is the video that convinced me that pen+paper voting is all we reasonably have. It pretty much boils down to "attacks on physical voting don't scale well". It convinced me to the point that if electronic voting were ever implemented on the large scale I would instantly assume it was a move against democracy or that, if it wasn't, it would be used as such very soon.
On November 06 2018 20:48 Dangermousecatdog wrote:
On November 06 2018 20:04 ReditusSum wrote: The breakdown of the "Church and Town" communal ties that typified the young people of older generations is a game changer and not in a good way.
What's "church and town"? Google has given me nothing.
It's apparently conservative speak for "when I was young, everything was better".
It's not. Communities built around "church and town" have a much stronger influence on young people than what has replaced them. Kids are less likely to break their neighbour's window if they know that neighbour from the "church" (or other center of the community) or they know that that neighbour knows their parents (because everyone knows each other in the "town"). It's like flaming in videogames, ragers are less likely to act like dicks to people who are in the same guild or are friends or their friends because they don't want to be seen as immature by someone they have some form of social connection with.
You can't just say it means "when I was young, everything was better" because "church and town" already had an alternative back then, that is densely populated urban areas where people barely interacted with their neighours because they had absolutely no need to. Lack of interaction leads to weak social bonds and weak social bonds lead to weak ability of the community to pressure the young to act like the community wants them to.
I wouldn't know, I've only ever lived in a large city. Nobody lives in fear of someone breaking their windows, and it's normal to know your neighbours. If someone wants to go break a window in a town, it'll be pretty easy to just walk to the next street to find someone you don't know anyways to break the windows of. What you just written seems to be a bunch of imaginary fears. There's like 10 churches within 5 mins drive of where I live anyways.
On November 06 2018 20:04 ReditusSum wrote: Well no one has an obligation to try to convince them, or to reach out, so I can't blame people who don't have the patience for it and want to write them off. As long as everyone is aware of the consequences of their decisions, there really is no right answer. My personal prediction is that it's too late to deplatform effectively and that eventually this is going to lead to some kind of physical conflict that spills out into the wider society. But I could be wrong and it could be just a passing fad.
The breakdown of the "Church and Town" communal ties that typified the young people of older generations is a game changer and not in a good way.
Its a case of trying to contain something that has already broken out into the mainstream. There's very little you can do about it, and I think some people are forgetting that once these extreme political attitudes are forged, there really isn't any changing them - not on the scale that needs to happen to 'fix' the current issue with political debate. You're looking at waiting a generation and hoping the next lot of politically aware teenagers see things more clearly. I don't think we can write society off as being broken due to things the breakdown of 'church and town', but its certainly worth noting that the current generation, for whatever reason, hasn't adapted particularly well to it. I'm very hopeful for the future though. In the UK, for example, there's been a massive decrease in teenagers drinking and doing drugs. I can't help thinking that there's some forces at play that we don't understand that are behind a huge change in the way people think, and that we're somewhere in the middle of that and that's why everyone's confused.
It's social media.
Nobody was ready for the social media generation, and what we're in now is the scenario created when only one half of the political spectrum has really figured it out. Regular media for the left has been plenty satisfying, so there's been little need to really focus on social media. The right's been digging deep into social media for ages and ages because there's a large enough section of the right wing that isn't represented properly (due to them being fucking insane). So you've got your Alex Jones's and Milo's looking for ways to get their message out, and teaching the same playbook to the rest of the right in the process.
The left's only just getting involved, really.
So the new media paradigm is more or less dominated by one hald of the political spectrum, and things get screwed up.
Without doubt social media is the biggest player here, but there are other phenomena that are also very influential. The breakdown of the socially progressive, free market consensus, for example, is due to certain political and economic failures and short sightedness on the part of the political establishment, and this has created much more space for the right wing to fill with fear.
Everything seems so apocalyptic at the moment that I think people are losing perspective. There's always a reaction against political extremism, it just might take a while for things to settle down again and a new consensus to emerge from all the chaos.
So you've got your Alex Jones's and Milo's looking for ways to get their message out, and teaching the same playbook to the rest of the right in the process.
Interesting that you picked two examples of people who are now pariahs of the online community. It doesn't take long for these kind of ideas to become completely discredited (Alex Jones' insane conspiracy nut faboys aside), so you have this cycling in and out of personalities. Peterson must surely be next, given that his ideas are already discredited. You always end up left with the same kind of conservative commentator, the Shapiro kind, who go for conservative values and anti-leftism instead of sensationalist bullshit.
Is Alex Jones a pariah now? What happened to make him so? I know what happened with Milo.
The voices don't matter though, the point is they developed the playbook that the rest of the right wing is now using. Much of Alex Jones' career is proto Trump campaign.
Nobody wants a new consensus though, not in the US at least. The political discourse has become two alternate realities fighting to establish dominance. Look at XDaunt over in the mega blog, who challenged me to prove that Trump is a liar. And he's a well educated Conservative. My involvement in these two threads has convinced me of one thing: There is no reconciliation possible in the US at this time. Left and right in the US can't agree on basic truth and have discarded morality for their side when it comes to political activity. They'll condemn in the other what they celebrate in their own, and it no longer matters that the right is worse than the left, because they'll slowly drag the left down to their level, as we can see happening bit by bit in Congress.
I think in the UK we'll settle once the Brexit turmoil has finally ended. There's signs of that already (people are mostly angry at the government now instead of it being pro/anti Brexiteers as it was for quite a while). When the people actually responsible for the chaos are being held to it, there's room to grow.
Plenty of people want a new consensus, the issue is that the people most likely to talk about it publicly are also the ones most likely to take radical or reactionary stances with regards to emerging cultural norms. I'd wager most of the relatively quiet majority sees some things they like, some they dislike, and wants some kind of moderation in the face of what seems like an increasingly vituperative political climate. The fact that universal healthcare and climate change tend to poll quite well when removed from the context of a political debate is good evidence that that is the case.
On November 06 2018 20:48 Dangermousecatdog wrote:
On November 06 2018 20:04 ReditusSum wrote: The breakdown of the "Church and Town" communal ties that typified the young people of older generations is a game changer and not in a good way.
What's "church and town"? Google has given me nothing.
It's apparently conservative speak for "when I was young, everything was better".
It's not. Communities built around "church and town" have a much stronger influence on young people than what has replaced them. Kids are less likely to break their neighbour's window if they know that neighbour from the "church" (or other center of the community) or they know that that neighbour knows their parents (because everyone knows each other in the "town"). It's like flaming in videogames, ragers are less likely to act like dicks to people who are in the same guild or are friends or their friends because they don't want to be seen as immature by someone they have some form of social connection with.
You can't just say it means "when I was young, everything was better" because "church and town" already had an alternative back then, that is densely populated urban areas where people barely interacted with their neighours because they had absolutely no need to. Lack of interaction leads to weak social bonds and weak social bonds lead to weak ability of the community to pressure the young to act like the community wants them to.
I wouldn't know, I've only ever lived in a large city. Nobody lives in fear of someone breaking their windows, and it's normal to know your neighbours. If someone wants to go break a window in a town, it'll be pretty easy to just walk to the next street to find someone you don't know anyways to break the windows of. What you just written seems to be a bunch of imaginary fears. There's like 10 churches within 5 mins drive of where I live anyways.
Heh. England has too few churches. There's like 10 churches within 5 minutes walk of where I live! No wonder your "church and town" society is going down the crapper. You need more churches!