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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

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a society with a more cynical default conception of other people (Russia?)

I actually already seen the poll replicated in Russian social network(VK) and the results are similar to twitter one - 65% Blue.

Interesting. I thought it might correlate with being a lower-trust society and surveys like these, especially because of the stereotype of Russians being vocally cynical, but maybe not. Though I probably shouldn't conclude anything from non-randomized social media polls.

Even the real surveys are dubious (different countries probably radically differ in how they interpret the question, especially when it's being translated) and looking at the link above Russia isn't as low on them as I thought. For instance 23.3% of surveyed Russians agreed with "most people can be trusted", which is lower than the U.S. (39.7%) or Sweden (63.8%) but slightly higher than France (18.7%) or Spain (19%), let alone Brazil (6.5%) or Zimbabwe (2.1%). It's hard to tell how meaningful any of this is.

It could also be that voting on Twitter is just fundamentally different from “voting” where picking blue may actually kill you.

Perhaps wartime and the general us vs them narrative has made the Russian society pull together in a way that's unlike, say, two years ago?