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Earlier today I was visiting Facebook and I noticed a war of words in the comments on a post by a liberal LDS academic. The post was a short opinion piece in the Salt Lake Tribune on the teaching of Critical Race Theory in Utah public schools. Evidently the Utah Legislature passed a resolution banning the teaching of critical race theory in public schools. The writer noted that we have been teaching race theory for years from the perspective of white supremacy, so it is high time to teach some from the perspective of those victimized by white supremacy.

This raises a number of interesting questions.

In any case, if you are interested in the opinion piece, which has a lot of interesting and useful things to say in a short read, see: https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/letters/ ... DhUfc53QBM

To get on to the point, a popular Post-Mormon podcaster started commenting on the thread in opposition to Critical Race Theory. Needless to say, things did not go well. The academic in question is very liberal, one of the leading lights of the up and coming cadre of liberal Mormon academics, in fact. He is Facebook friends with folks like Daniel McClellan, former LDS apologist, former contributor to MDB, and former candidate for public office in Utah. These folks made short work of this podcaster's talking points, which seem to have been borrowed from one of those popular but not overly educated thinkers on the Right.

I was struck, however, by the way one particularly strident participant kept calling this person a "fascist" over and over again. I found this both odd and off-putting because this person never struck me as a "fascist" and the idea that all challenges to fashionable political opinion on the extreme Left must be fascist seems dubious to me.

I struggled over where to post this. Does it belong in Paradise or Terrestrial? I picked Terrestrial because I continually marvel at how divided in so many ways we all are, and our loudest voices are shouting out extreme positions. Is it possible to have conversations anymore without being in accord on the political issues of the day? The fringes of the political spectrum seem to be tearing us apart, and taking every community apart at the same time. It seems to me that this is true not just of a single fringe but the fringes of both ends. On the one hand we have Q-kooks and white nationalists pulling us apart, on the other we have the Uber-woke folk, some of whom have decided that challenges are not to be met with intellectual rebuttal but the epithet "fascist."

*Thanks to DocCam for the correction on faultlines>fault lines. Both variants are possible, but fault lines is on Merriam Webster, so that is what I will go with.

There's a lot to digest there, Kish but what I think is most salient on first reading is that all sides use labels as bludgeons and those bludgeons almost immediately stifle the kind of deep conversation that actually changes things.

But the medium being used (online/social media) only exacerbates the problem. I have no doubt if you and I were to meet for lunch, Kish, that we would get along swimmingly. We would no doubt disagree on many things, but our conversation would be cordial and I think we would both walk away having learned something about the other.

Sitting behind a computer screen or typing into a smartphone gives people (and I'm including myself here) some sort of permission to be sharper in our criticisms and weaponize our rhetoric rather than using it to find common ground.

I admittedly struggle with this, with online interactions turning into who can score the most points. It's a function of the sociology of how our brains process online interactions vs. in-person interactions and I would say the proliferation of online communication is one of the leading factors in our accelerated polarization.

Platforms like Facebook have done much more to tear us apart than they have to bring us together. Once the algorithm figured out that contention was a much better driver of clicks than people liking puppy and kiddy photos, the game was over.

jpatterson wrote: ↑

Tue May 25, 2021 8:00 pm

Facebook hasn't brought us together, it's torn us apart.

Which is interesting, since Facebook and Twitter often use real names instead of anonymous handles. It was often claimed that the anonymity of the internet is what led to the erosion of civility, but it was actually just the lack of face-to-face discussion. And also probably the large audience that starts to grow around online train-wrecks and internet drama.

I think the only thing I’d kind of state as a fact with regard to ideological fault lines is that hierarchies are unavoidable. Liberals and Leftists, unless one is an anarchist (and even then anarchist syndicalists form hierarchies) form hierarchies. Conservatives form hierarchies. You have, then, competing hierarchies where people shout at each other across the void. For example one of the religious commentators from your linked article wrote this:

God gave us our inalienable rights. No one, not even the mighty, all powerful central government can take those away.

The Founding fathers gave us our constitutional rights. Activist judges grant and take away "rights' at will, but only temporarily.

Conservatives usually view their hierarchical pyramid as a natural order that asserts itself with God being at the top, His chosen being below them, and the rest of us earning our spot in the hierarchy through merit.

I think where it gets messy, and where either side will level charges of unfairness against the other is the concept of merit.

Conservatives view the top echelons of the pyramid as accessible for anyone willing to put in the work while ignoring systemic and social realities - they actually hate how rich people lock things down and will point to Republicans breaking up monopolies to make the marketplace more competitive - while, admittedly, they ignore the thousands of examples of wealthy people using the system to entrench their interests.

Conversely, Conservatives view Liberals as plucking wholly unqualified or under-qualified people from the bottom and emplacing them into the upper echelons as weakening the overall pyramid, and they view Liberals as idiotic for doing so because it makes the whole weaker and unable to respond to market forces, or existential threats. I kind of liken it to having a tribe, and if the tribe allows the weaker members to consume resources without contributing more than they consume the tribe suffers, or possibly dies - this thinking is scaled up by orders of magnitude, but is basically constant.

At the end of the day, I think we've found from the debates on the Paradise forum that rank and file Conservatives don’t really read, they ensconce themselves into echo chambers, and they just pivot to some other grievance when you try to nail them down on a consistent position. The only way to win Conservative hearts and minds is through imagery that appeals to their sense of individualism. The biggest fail Liberals repeat when engaging Conservatives is to be wordy - you literally lose their attention after a sentence or two.

So. Going back to your OP, Kish, is that these ideological fault lines are basically founded in one group believing order is derived from God and through His grace is passed down through His chosen while Leftists believe their hierarchy can somehow be founded on fairness and equality, which in turn must use unfairness and discrimination to achieve a sense of enfranchisement amongst the masses. How we cross that divide, that gulf that separates the two hierarchies is the question. I think the gulf is getting wider and it's making the Union pretty fragile these days.

edited to remove my ministroke grammar

- Doc

Doctor CamNC4Me wrote: ↑

Tue May 25, 2021 8:35 pm

The only way to win Conservative hearts and minds is through imagery that appeals to their sense of individualism. The biggest fail Liberals repeat when engaging Conservatives is to be wordy - you literally lose their attention after a sentence or two.

This rings so true, and it's a truth that I think many liberals, particularly the "incredibly online" variety, fail to grasp. I love a good Rachel Maddow style excoriation of all the ethical violations and hypocrisy of Trumpism as much as the next Democrat, but it will not and cannot move the needle one inch with conservatives.

One thing that has been on my mind over these past few years is that, in decades past (and I am talking even as recently as Obama's first term), the technology did not exist to finds ways to appeal to your party's core voters--and only your voters--with precision, pinpoint accuracy. Politicians had to moderate their opinions, even just slightly, to appeal to the moderate middle who were most likely to be persuaded one way or another in an election. With moderates as tipping point voters, moderated policy becomes the norm on a national stage. But now, there is so much data mining and algorithmic learning that helps party brokers bolster the voting behavior of ONLY their own voters, while also using targeted messaging to strategically depress and disenfranchise the other sides voters, there's no longer a need to be anything close to moderate to win an election. I'm no both sides-ist about this; republicans do this on a much more coordinated scale than Democrats. With the aid of technology, political parties have been able to cut out the middle men (literally, the moderate voters), and have found a strategy that lets them indulge the most extreme impulses of their base without suffering political consequence. Throw in the Supreme Court's recent sanctioning of gerrymandering, and what you have is a powder keg that will soon blow up our democracy, mark my words.

Turning back to how this relates to Mormonism, and how to win hearts and minds that inhabit that conservative and/or Mormon schema, I am reminded of this TED Talk from Megan Phelps-Roper, who was formerly a member of the Westboro Baptist Church. She shares why she left, and how strangers on the internet were effectively able to change her mind. I've returned to this video several times, and I honestly think it's one of the most important talks given over the past ten years. From her talk:

One side effect of having strong beliefs is that we sometimes assume that the value of our position is, or should be, obvious and self-evident. That we shouldn't have to defend our positions because they are so clearly right and good. That if someone doesn't get it, then it's their problem. That it's not my job to educate them. But if it were that simple, we would all see things the same way.... We are all a product of our upbringing, and our beliefs reflect our experiences. We can't expect others to spontaneously change their own minds. If we want change, we have to make the case for it... Each one of us contributes to the communities and the cultures and the societies we make up. The end of this spiral of rage and blame begins with one person who refuses to indulge these destructive and seductive impulses.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVV2Zk88beY

Kishkumen wrote: ↑

Tue May 25, 2021 7:43 pm

I was struck, however, by the way one particularly strident participant kept calling this person a "fascist" over and over again. I found this both odd and off-putting because this person never struck me as a "fascist" and the idea that all challenges to fashionable political opinion on the extreme Left must be fascist seems dubious to me.

Well that's interesting, as I (a conservative libertarian) have called my Church pro-Trump supporters neo-fascist. My evidence?

1. The Trump party invokes federal power to uphold union claims for nativist mercantile economics. "Buy American" and impose tariffs. Penalize multinationals for using lower labor costs abroad.

2. Abolish the Republic Platform entirely and replace it with a statement that the GOP follows Trump's policies. Now, we're looking at the cult of personality.

3. Ignore the historic Republican approach to immigration, which is a reasoned approach to granting lawful status. Reagan granted amnesty to a million immigrants. Instead -- do what Trump has done.

4. Give only lip service to religious principles that the Republicans have long cherished.

I'd be interested in exploring where these fault lines lie and what natural groupings there are in the Mormon-space ideology.

As an experiment of curiosity, has anyone thought to create questionnaire that explores ideologies? We create a list of questions that we answer on a wide variety of doctrinal, social, philosophical, etc... issues and beliefs. This high dimensional dataset is assumed to be a function of some latent variable of ideology or something else, which could then be explored. It would be within Mormon space - so we'd have TBMs, NOM, PostMos, Apologists, PostMoMasogenists... Natural groupings could be explored and clusters visualised. It would be interesting to see where everyone is on this board.

Anyone up for creating a questionnaire?

Bought Yahoo wrote: ↑

Tue May 25, 2021 9:50 pm

Well that's interesting, as I (a conservative libertarian) have called my Church pro-Trump supporters neo-fascist. My evidence?

1. The Trump party invokes federal power to uphold union claims for nativist mercantile economics. "Buy American" and impose tariffs. Penalize multinationals for using lower labor costs abroad.

2. Abolish the Republic Platform entirely and replace it with a statement that the GOP follows Trump's policies. Now, we're looking at the cult of personality.

3. Ignore the historic Republican approach to immigration, which is a reasoned approach to granting lawful status. Reagan granted amnesty to a million immigrants. Instead -- do what Trump has done.

4. Give only lip service to religious principles that the Republicans have long cherished.

Well, you have listed some criteria here, Bought Yahoo. This means you are judging according to some rational standard. The fellow I was talking about was just calling the fellow posting talking points against critical race theory a "fascist" based on nothing more than his request for feedback on those talking points. That's pretty thin gruel if you ask me. You above points are a lot more substantive.

jpatterson wrote: ↑

Tue May 25, 2021 8:00 pm

There's a lot to digest there, Kish but what I think is most salient on first reading is that all sides use labels as bludgeons and those bludgeons almost immediately stifle the kind of deep conversation that actually changes things.

Excellent point. I was more than a little disappointed in the fellow who was just calling this person a fascist as though shaming were the best way to get him to change his mind.

But the medium being used (online/social media) only exacerbates the problem. I have no doubt if you and I were to meet for lunch, Kish, that we would get along swimmingly. We would no doubt disagree on many things, but our conversation would be cordial and I think we would both walk away having learned something about the other.

I have a hunch that you are correct.

Sitting behind a computer screen or typing into a smartphone gives people (and I'm including myself here) some sort of permission to be sharper in our criticisms and weaponize our rhetoric rather than using it to find common ground.

Agreed. I regret how sharp I can be online. Some of it is the Kishkumen persona, which has its own history. It is like an actor putting on an old role.

I admittedly struggle with this, with online interactions turning into who can score the most points. It's a function of the sociology of how our brains process online interactions vs. in-person interactions and I would say the proliferation of online communication is one of the leading factors in our accelerated polarization.

I think we all struggle with it, and the factors you mention play a very big role in creating the conditions we are struggling in.

Platforms like Facebook have done much more to tear us apart than they have to bring us together. Once the algorithm figured out that contention was a much better driver of clicks than people liking puppy and kiddy photos, the game was over.

Facebook interactions are especially bad. You are induced to mix it up, but then other things distract you away from completing interactions in any satisfactory way. Here we are able, although it is difficult, to argue something at greater length. Without the argument, nothing is happening. That is probably better than, "Oh, I am in this heated argument, and look at my friend's new photos!"

drumdude wrote: ↑

Tue May 25, 2021 8:06 pm

Which is interesting, since Facebook and Twitter often use real names instead of anonymous handles. It was often claimed that the anonymity of the internet is what led to the erosion of civility, but it was actually just the lack of face-to-face discussion. And also probably the large audience that starts to grow around online train-wrecks and internet drama.

I would agree that lack of face-to-face is the bigger problem.