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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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Chuck Todd wrote a fantastic op-ed about the current state of our political polarization: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/chuck-todd-unite-nation-trump-harris-election-rcna171303

It comes down to (1) Our acceptance embrace of inflammatory rhetoric to "own the [other side]", (2) our ever-present, chronically online culture, and (3) the spread of inflammatory rhetoric and disinformation propagate by big tech.

Some notable quotes:

"The problem with political discourse in America right now is that we are all stuck in a social media funhouse mirror booth. What we see isn’t what is, and how we’re seen isn’t who we are. And yet, here we are."

"But just because Trump started it doesn’t mean his opponents have the high moral ground when they single out him and some of his supporters for personal derision. I still want to live in a society where “two wrongs don’t make a right.”

"Come Jan. 21, we all are going to be living in the same country and sharing the same group of people as our elected representatives. We need leaders who accept that there are major political differences between us and that governing needs to be incremental and not radical.

"Right now, our political information ecosystem doesn’t reward incrementalism or nuance, instead punishing both and, more to the point, rewarding those who make up the best stories.

"Most Americans have an instinct of de-escalation when things get heated, and yet most elected officials in the modern era are incentivized to behave the opposite way."

What we see isn’t what is, and how we’re seen isn’t who we are.

"we" "we" "we"....

We?

I think there's a very, very strong case to be made that the birth of the entire New Deal state and its subsequent massive growth (along with all its cousin forms of government in the mid 20th century, be it social democracy or communism or fascism or what have you) relied intensely on real time, overwhelming broadcast media. No radio+national periodicals+Hollywood movies+(later)broadcast tv -> no New Deal state. And more particularly, no polity that could even make sense to the New Deal state in the first place. And then throw in ever more centralized public schooling and the role of ever more dominant national university systems in finishing off the process of population... "massaging", let's say. Add in the draft and military service, too.

There's your "we". It has always been a technologically created Frankenstein monster... which, to be honest, is kind of the Western Enlightenment thing anyway. Can't have the Protestant reformation and the 30 years war without the printing press.

One deep problem "we" face right now, I think, is that current year American liberals in positions of social authority often very much have, I think, a "born on third, thought they hit a triple" sense of recent history, the 20th century, and the actual contours of sense making institutions in America in the 20th century. The stories of, say, the Red Scare in the 50s are still a memory they keep alive, but the similar role of the New Deal state in snuffing out conservative / traditionalist / reactionary broadcast media in the United States from the 30s until the 80's is largely unknown to them, and thus it seems like just a natural state of affairs, of them "being on the right side of history". So things like J Edgar Hoover's and FDRs actions against American "isolationists" - like here - or JFK's relationship to right wing radio - like here - are stories that are unfamiliar. Thus you end up with oblivious claims like, "Fox News and Rush Limbaugh were the aberration after normalcy, brought into being by the dastardly end of the Fairness Doctrine".

I think there's a similar undercurrent to the frustration with social media from people who desperately want to go back to the broadcast news environment I remember from the early 1980s as a kid. I recognize where it's coming from. And I know exactly why my conservative family abandoned its catechizing, scolding, and noxious (to them) values the moment they had the opportunity to have any other options for news, too.

I don't even disagree, at some object level, with all sorts of critiques about social media, their business models, and pervasive phones more broadly.

But we are living through a broad collapse of shared authority. Because they have been the unquestioned and unquestioning inheritors of a lot of that shared authority, this experience is apparently especially shocking to a lot of American liberals. Social media and new communication technologies certainly play a role in that process. But, at least to me, it seems like that collapse is a much bigger story, with a lot more moving parts, than just social media, and it's not so clear which direction casual arrows point.

I think this is a strong perspective, especially in light of previous perspectives going into earlier communication technology revolutions. One of the early motives / aspirations of the printing press, for example, was framed not in terms of 'think of what it could do for newspapers' but 'think of how many more Bibles the world could had.' An early advocacy group for radio were, again, religious interests thinking in terms of spreading the message / sermons / hymns to wider audiences.

The point here isn't about the susceptibility of religious types (though the parallels between ideologues who substitute ideology for religion is interesting), but rather that the 'current' dominant ideological consensus types often imagine new communication technologies as a way to spread their consensus, rather than challenge it. Twitter and Social Media would inspire pro-western/democratic/progressive/etc. movements. Telegraphs would allow power centers to better assert their control over distant parts of their countries, rather than help new power centers arise. International communism/socialism would allow the Soviets to lead the global revolution, rather than splintering and schisming as local communist leaders usurped the foreign advisor factions that often helped them rise to power. Etc. etc. etc.

Your 'born on third, believes they hit a triple' aligns to that historical parallel, as does the contemporary pushback on uncontrolled information parallels the historical examples. Once expanded, once-unquestionably dominant factions try to re-assert their authority by regulation / reconsolidation / attempts to reassert exclusive authority.

The mistake Todd makes here is that he seems to recognize the characteristically Trumpian mode of lying — repetition of crude falsities — but not the mode preferred by the progressive establishment — capturing sense-making institutions and turning them toward promoting ideologically-driven narratives. The latter predates Trump, is far more consequential, and is propagated primarily by the likes of the NYT and CNN.

So then, to you, what would not be an ideologically-driven narrative?

I love the saying "Trump lies like a used car salesman, Democrats lie like lawyers". Did someone here come up with that? If not, where did it come from?

It perfectly encapsulates the current meta.

I said two months ago

And Trump as a salesman is a lot like a car salesman, Obama is more like a startup founder pitching to angel investors.

I don't recall seeing it formulated close to that before saying that but I absolutely could have, I don't think of it as any kind of personal insight, I see it as trivially derived from other insights I took elsewhere (taking Trump seriously not literally, him talking like New Yorker, being directionally if not literally correct, etc...)

It interesting that although we all understand the intended meaning of this expression (and it is true when given the meaning that people expect), it is not an accurate description of how lawyers and used car salesmen lie.

Creating a false belief using a carefully-curated set of technically-true statements is no more effective in an adversarial environment like a courtroom or a negotiation than creating the same false belief using false statements. The normal technique of a lawyer representing a rich-but-obviously-guilty client is to flood the zone with shit. This works best in criminal trials, where if the jury can't understand the case they are supposed to acquit based on reasonable doubt, but it also works in civil trials if the other side can't keep up. Lying by omission is explicitly prohibited in litigation (this is why discovery exists) and in some but not all negotiations.

Used car salesmen working for commercial dealerships, on the other hand, are trying to outnegotiate unsophisticated parties, which is exactly where "lying like a lawyer" is helpful. Making a technically-false statement creates legal risk and isn't necessary if you are good at your job. The people who tell blatant lies when selling used cars are private sellers, who are effectively gone once the cheque clears. Real estate agents are in the same boat - they will tell blatant lies, but they would much rather mislead you in legally safer ways.

So who does lie like Donald Trump? In my experience, the main groups are cheating spouses, toddlers caught with their hands in the cookie jar, and actual conmen. Trump, of course, belongs to at least two of these groups.

Who does "lie like a lawyer?" Well the main group is politicians not called Donald Trump. Politically biased journalists do, as do tendentious academics. Basically, exactly the people who form the "establishment" Trumpism is against. In each case it is because it is a lot easier to work a sympathetic ref if you got caught making a true-but-misleading statement than if you told an outright lie. But working the refs in that way doesn't work on normies, and doesn't work on neutral or unsympathetic refs.

Unfortunately this means that the saying reduces to "Trump lies like Trump, the liberal elite lie like liberal elites." This is tautological, but to someone who has been paying attention it is even truthier than the original. It also avoids calumnising innocent lawyers and used car salesmen by associating them with politicians and journalists.

Do lawyers lie? They try to craft different narratives with the available facts at hand, sure, but I don’t see that as dishonest.

To me it’s somewhat more dishonest. A lawyer lies by recasting the facts so that they tell the story that best serves his purpose, even when the clearest telling of the facts points in the exact opposite direction. They often do so by leaving out crucial context and details that would lead a neutral observer in the opposite direction, thus making people believe something is true that isn’t.

We’ve all been talking about the Lebanon pager explosions. Some people here have speculated on how it was done and how it might be detected or hidden. And on the political side, I would find it fair to say that the comments on this site have a lean towards conservative and neo-reaction. Now if someone who frequents this site is prosecuted, any good lawyer would have painted this site as a reactionary and even fascist site where terrorism was discussed pretty openly. Ripped from context, as lawyers tend to do, the discussion of how Israel blew up pagers juxtaposed with a bit of juicy reactionary or HBD talk paints a picture of this place as a Proud Boy type site. Left out is the crucial context. It’s against the rules to recruit for any cause, liberals post here fairly often, and the discussion of pager batteries was talking about a news story and discussed by people who work n tech.

Lying by recasting the facts is worse to me because it can cover itself with the veneer of truthfulness. You can cite a fact, and people who check will see that the actual facts cited are true. But stripped of context, the facts tell a very different story than the events they’re used to describe. A lie, on the other hand, is easy enough to sus out. You look it up, and it’s not true at all. And so it doesn’t get deep enough into the culture to affect how we see the world. But tell a sort-of-truth, and your fact-checking will help the narrative stick because it’s not obviously wrong. It’s just not an accurate and honest telling of the facts and designed to elicit a belief that isn’t accurate.

Say there are two people. They both meet a guy who is 6’9” (2.05m) tall.

Person A says: “He’s the tallest person I’ve ever seen! Huge guy! At least 7’0” (2.13m) tall!”

Person B says: “He was probably above average height. I’ve seen taller. People before.”

Person A’s answer is a lie. The guy they saw wasn’t quite as tall as they said and it’s probable that they’ve watched a basketball game or a film and have seen a person who is taller than that before.

Person B’s answer is technically correct. They’ve probably seen basketball on TV, they’ve seen extremely tall people before. And the guy they saw was certainly taller than average.

But Person B’s answer is basically dishonest. The guy they saw was indeed extremely tall! They failed to convey that, all while being technically correct.

And Person A’s answer, while a lie, managed to be more accurate and honest assessment of the subject at hand. It was a much better answer if you wanted to know something about the subject.

Given a choice between them, I’d much rather deal with a person A, a liar who is directionally correct, than person B, a person that maybe rarely lies but also rarely conveys any useful information.

Person B’s answer is worse than useless; if taken seriously you would probably come to a conclusion further from the truth than Person A’s answer.

This is a rather simple and direct example but there’s ample situations like this on the real world. There really are a lot of Person B’s in the world, and once you see them you start seeing them everywhere.

Yes, lawyers lie. If you knowingly deceive your audience, you are a liar. That counts even if your words can be artfully construed to not be false.

We even created a whole new religion to deal with this hypocrisy. In the time of Jesus, the Pharisees were obsessed with following the letter of the law while neglecting its spirit. We invented the social technology to solve this problem 2000 years ago, but some people still don't get it.

The democrats also just straight up lie a lot. When Harris kept saying “Trump’s Project 2025” that isn’t “technically true but misleading.” That was straight up lying.

I’m not sure it is really fair to say Trump is unique in lying. Where he is probably unique is that when he doesn’t need to lie he exaggerates.

My favorite was the “no US soldiers in an active war-zone” lie. Just a few weeks ago some US Soldier got shot by ISIS.

There was a viral video uploaded basically the same day of the debate that ended up getting millions of views of the debate on TV when she said that, and it pans out to like seven soldiers in a forward operating base being like “Wait… then where the fuck are we right now?”

Can't you just say that Trump lies, the democrats deceive, if that's what you mean?

Would fit well with general rightwing memeplex of casting the democrats as the great deceiver(s). It would also be an opportunity to own the fact that Trump lies. Truth or lies isn't the primary issue, it's deception that's the issue (in politics, in news, in science, etc).

The position that you can be a habitual liar without deceiving seems like a difficult needle to thread!

You don't have to do that. You can say that truth isn't a good safeguard against deception, with the biggest deceivers being the ones telling you the "truth".

Lying isn't good but at the end of the day deception is worse. Its kind of like how betrayal is worse than opposition. You don't even have to play defense at all.

Your average democrat might lie less often than Donald Trump but they are much, much more dishonest in my opinion. It’s not even close.

I suppose you can claim that technically it's not a lie (knowingly putting forward a false statement), but the whole rub is that a lot of people (myself included) see "crafting narratives" as dishonest.

The best part about it is that everybody here seems to agree with it, and we're just fighting over which type of lying is better/worse.

Yes, and it also gets at a preference that is more primal than political. Would you prefer to hang out with a lawyer who selects their words carefully or a sales guy who's always bullshitting?

Seems closely related to the old finding from the okcupid blog (here's gwern quoting it, can't find archives of the original right now) that the question "Do you prefer the people in your life to be simple or complex?" is a good predictor of liberal vs. conservative US politics, with "simple" being the conservative answer.

I disagree entirely with the premise that political polarization has anything to do with social media or big tech. It is an absurd claim on its face, because human history is littered with countless examples of extreme political polarization long before smartphones or the Internet. It's a waste to even name them, because basically every historical event learned in school would qualify. Relatively speaking, the current period isn't even particularly highly polarized.

The only semi-charitable way to interpret these articles is to interpret them as apologia for why the current regime's systems of control have failed. Before the latest technology wave, the regime had everyone's opinion under control because they could make sure that all three news channels were broadcasting the correct messages. They cannot control social media as a whole, therefore, it must be social media's fault because people are able to exchange information and ideas without their consent.

The article itself is self-contradictory. In one paragraph, it's attacking Fox News for "cherry-picking" quotes from Democrats, and in the next says the only solution is to "stop big tech" from using their current algorithms. I guess it's left as an exercise for the reader how "big tech algorithms" caused Fox News's programming. Yet Fox News's current state could not possibly have been "caused" by social media, because as I recall, Democrats hated and mocked Fox News more in the 2000's than they do now.

The fundamental mistake the article is making is to mistake correlation for causation. While a relative increase in polarization has coincided with the rise of social media, this does not mean that one caused the other. In fact, there is not even a common cause. They are completely unrelated. All civilizations oscillate between periods of division and periods of cohesion. America was in a period of relative cohesion, but it could not last forever.

the regime had everyone's opinion under control because they could make sure that all three news channels were broadcasting the correct messages

How did the US government forcefully insert bias in news broadcasting before?

By not inviting the channels’ major shareholders to the cool cocktail parties if they took a heterodox editorial position.

I think this kind of article is just braining, the author has something he thinks or wants to talk about so he has to make up reasons to justify himself. This is really easy in politics. A million things are happening all the time and it's easy to remember a few and string them together. But Chuck Todd is not that smart and articles like this are really not worth much of anyone's time.

We’ve collectively underreacted — and perhaps there are perfectly reasonable explanations for that.

Yeah, no one got shot, and no one but law enforcement even got shot at. There's nothing strange about a muted reaction to the Secret Service chasing off an assassin.

Instead, the Trump campaign appears to be approaching this apparent assassination attempt as an opportunity rather than as a moment to reflect.

Ah, yes, the Trump campaign. That is, the organization whose raison d'etre is to elect Trump as President. It's hardly surprising they're trying to do so.

Fox News has been especially aggressive in its programming the last few days, going out of its way to find cherry-picked examples of rhetoric from the left that, on its face, can sound like incitement. It's something Fox could have easily done with Trump’s rhetoric but chose not to.

How many attempts have been made on Harris's life, again?

As a native of Miami, I saw firsthand similar attempts to dehumanize and otherize Haitians amid an influx of refugees from the country in the early ’80s.

I don't know what "otherize" is supposed to mean here; I mean, Haitians ARE different in various ways from both Miami natives and other refugrees. But I don't think accusing people of eating wildlife and/or pets is dehumanizing them. It's exactly this sort of overblown meta-rhetoric (and the speech policing which follows from it) that prevents any discussion of this topic across the left-right divide.

And no one has done a more effective job of exploiting this new medium of discourse than Trump.

Looks like someone never heard of the Arab Spring.

I still want to live in a society where “two wrongs don’t make a right.”

The uncharitable take on this would be that the author and his allies have done wrong and now they want to avoid the blowback.

We need leaders who accept that there are major political differences between us and that governing needs to be incremental and not radical.

Trying to get the other side to pre-commit to not actually making major changes in the direction they prefer isn't going to work any more.

Most Americans have an instinct of de-escalation when things get heated

And that instinct has been exploited over and over again. If by getting hot you can get the other side to concede, getting hot makes sense. Trump's habit of getting just as hot if not more instead is why he has taken over the GOP. If Todd doesn't like it... that's tough. The alternative to polarization his side offers is "Do it our way", and that will no be agreed to.

But I don't think accusing people of eating wildlife and/or pets is dehumanizing them.

People will kill for their pets.

Somebody harming our pets is a sick and severe crime to most of our moral systems.

To accuse an ethnic group of eating our pets is explicitly setting them up to be the targets of violence.

Those people are going to be in harms way, there’s no two ways about it.

To accuse an ethnic group of eating our pets is explicitly setting them up to be the targets of violence.

By analogy you've just placed responsibility for the assassination attempts against Trump on those Democratic politicians who called him an existential threat, just like the Trump campaign itself has. However, even granting that arguendo, it's STILL not dehumanizing them.

How many attempts have been made on Harris's life, again?

Ideally we wouldn't know even if the answer was greater than zero, to avoid inspiring copy-cats. The press coverage of the Trump assassination attempts is good for transparency and public discourse, but does have costs.

Ideally we wouldn't know even if the answer was greater than zero, to avoid inspiring copy-cats.

We're not in that situation, though, so it's irrelevant to the question.

I actually don't know if we're in that situation. It would not surprise me if the Secret Service took incidents involving a Dem VP significantly more seriously than incidents involving Trump.

But I don't think accusing people of eating wildlife and/or pets is dehumanizing them

Ironically I think this defense of potential pet eating is a deflection. Migrants ARE different from locals and from each other, and not always for the better. By emphasizing that Noticing the pet eating is itself a 'dehumanizing' act, all Noticing is thus reflective of the Noticers dehumanizing intent and thus can be categorically dismissed.

This is why the pet thing is so damn stupid. Migrants ARE committing crimes at elevated rates relative to their demographic, violent crimes at that. All the statistics about migrants being good for the economy and good for safety are due to large numbers of women inflating the denominator of crime/migrant ratios. Thanks to this stupid pet thing, the haitian who drove illegally or migrants robbing in NYC or the other instances of actual crimes are dismissed by the polity. Harris absolutely fumbled the border during her time as border czar, and the only reason people don't care right now is because the ones suffering are deep blue sanctuary cities that normies don't particularly like anyways.

Migrants ARE committing crimes at elevated rates relative to their demographic, violent crimes at that

Source?

I’ve never seen this shown, despite all the times it’s claimed.

Would you accept a European source, or would you say it's irrelevant to the conversation you're having in America?

I think immigration dynamics tend to be pretty different in Europe vs the US, for whatever reason.

But yes you can post it.

The big difference between the US and Europe is that the US has a native high-crime subgroup which is large enough (unlike European gypsies) to materially skew the crime statistics. A group of immigrants can commit more crime that white Americans and still commit less crime than heritage-Americans as a whole, who are 15-20% black. And in fact this appears to be true of by far the largest group of immigrants (i.e. Mexicans) - if you don't trust the MSM or academia then the most recent analysis on this point from an unquestionably right-wing source is Ron Unz.

There may be specific high-crime subgroups of immigrants who are worse than ADOS blacks, and Haitians in Springfield may even be one of them (although nobody in Springfield is saying this). But the only cat to have been eaten was eaten by a mentally ill ADOS black woman.

In the America that actually exists, poor Mexican immigrants make cities like LA safer by displacing poor blacks, and their US citizen children elect Democrats to local office who don't feel white guilt about black crime.

It's actually quite similar. Pre-selected immigrants generally have unusually low crime rates, free and in particular illegal immigrants have unusually high crime rates. This is true for both europe and the US. It's just that a mexican in europe is more likely than not legally pre-selected, highly educated and highly conscientious, while the opposite in the US. It's vice versa for other groups, such as eastern europeans.

The Germans used to have a "crime by nationality" chapter in their annual crime report, where all the stereotypically criminal minorities turn out to be actually criminal. Though the last in year for which the full report seems to be available is 2020.

I think immigration dynamics tend to be pretty different in Europe vs the US, for whatever reason.

I think this was true in the past moreso than it is now, though obviously you have different nationalities coming over, which might have it's own impact.

This feels super online. The battle isn't trying to score debate points with the moderator. It's trying to get people to NOTICE.

A 4000 word think piece in the Atlantic is just not going to move public opinion. The whole cats thing got regular people to notice how deeply fucked up things have gotten.

Imagine explaining all this to a gas station clerk. That's the level of discourse we're dealing with.

Illegal immigration is deeply unpopular and becoming more so. The pet thing didn't massively polarize people in favor of immigration. Maybe you're traveling in unrepresentative circles.

Yea this is a delusion the dems have been trying to sell themselves ever since Trump. They see themselves not as a specific group fighting for it's members interests, like the republicans do, but more like a religion like messianic figures that will bring about utopia if they can just get enough control and "eliminate" the external things dividing us. Reality is that Trump didn't start anything and the divisions had been brewing for a while. The things dividing us are us. Globalism has clear winners and losers, 20k Haitians get dumped on a rural town of 40k, but two bus loads would overwhelm Martha's Vineyard, etc.

Due to this they need a rationalization for why their universalist solutions aren't working or their self conception would break down. Similar to that Muslim meme people always post in regards to Europe where the bureaucrats are desperately asking what the Muslim wants, more healthcare, better housing and the Muslim says they just want Shariah. It's clear what the man in the meme wants, the increasingly desperate questions aren't for his sake. It's funny they made diversity one of the pillars of their ideology when they don't really believe it exists in the first place.

Globalism has clear winners and losers, 20k Haitians get dumped on a rural town of 40k, but two bus loads would overwhelm Martha's Vineyard, etc.

I think this hints at the root cause of our national malaise: pro-fargroup bias.

The Martha's Vineyard crowd cares more about poor undocumented workers than they do about their own countrymen. They see themselves as global citizens with no great connection to a particular place.

The Haitian immigrant is better than the lazy American, why shouldn't we replace one with the other?

The problem with this situation is that it's inherently unstable. It's tough for elites to rule when they despise the people they rule over. And it's tough for working class types to be pro-social when they feel the game is inherently rigged against them.

The MV incident to me, showed just how bubbled the elites are. I’m not sure whether or not it ever occurred to the elites of those enclaves that importing people with no resources has a negative effect on community. They interact with the world through news media whilst living in gated exurbs where the only interactions they have with the rest of the world are transactional. They don’t talk with the lower clases, they order their services and when no longer paying for that service, they kind of forget they exist. I’m not sure it’s even contempt, it’s summoning a workman or servant, hiring their services and banishing them back into the ether where they don’t think about them until they need the air conditioning fixed or order door dash.

Chuck Todd routinely degraded American politics. Why should I listen to a thing he says unless it starts with “I am a huge part of the problem—I’m sorry.”

I always wonder which people are really that historically ignorant. Noise, signal, so hard to tell. So little worth listening to at all?

This stuff kicked off at least as early as 2012, and it was more "nerd wars" and professor/student social media drama than politics to start with. (Tumblr isn't "big tech" either, though prior Twitter certainly made things even worse...) Trump is obviously a symptom of a problem that won't go away when he does.

Just as “watermelon” has come to refer to politics which wears a green skin to smuggle in red outcomes, I want a word for politics which wears a nonpartisan skin to smuggle in Dem hackery. What’s something that’s grey on the outside and blue on the inside? Something something haemocyanin.

Horseshoe crab

What’s something that’s grey on the outside and blue on the inside?

I think that's just called depression.

  • the spread of inflammatory rhetoric and disinformation propagate by big tech.

Just..big tech?

Are you really saying it's big tech's fault blacks and many liberals whites believe what's basically blood libel - that is, that police kills thousands of unarmed blacks every year ?