Schmo wrote:This is pretty much where I land. I feel mostly despair for the world we're leaving my daughter's generation. Until making money off the news becomes illegal, I think humanity is screwed.
wondering if honor has any data on demographics. It seems to me the worst of the problem will die off in the next 20 years. My perception is that most of the unhinged right-wingers are older guys.
Hmmm... well, just going off the small sample in that HBO documentary about Jan 6, this is a problem among folks of all adult ages. To your point, there were a lot of older folks at the Capitol that day; I was actually surprised at how many.
My hopeful thought is that maybe social media will work itself out. Right now, it's a new shock to humanity, and maybe the next generation won't go so overboard with it. Those who grow up with it might be able to sort themselves out better.
Maybe. People have been pointing out that America has gone through other very turbulent times (many argue there have been times much worse than what we're going through now) and America is still here, so hope is not completely crazy.
I suppose any optimism I have comes from my real-world experience being completely different from my online experience. Most people I meet face to face are still very friendly and sane. Of course, most people don't talk politics with strangers.
Religion is for people whose existential fear is greater than their common sense.
I should also point out that my pessimism isn't just about the political divide in America, but what that divide is helping, which is the destruction of the Earth's livable environment. We can't do anything significant about climate change until we can all agree it's happening in the first place. A lot of people won't leave a burning building if they don't believe it's on fire.
Religion is for people whose existential fear is greater than their common sense.
since honor is on a roll with answers for this stuff, one more.
How much of the divide is serious and how much is virtual? How much of the 'divide' is blowing off steam vs. serious issues people are committed to?
Jan. 6 was a great example of a mob that had no idea if it was a real mob or not.
We can't take farmers and take all their people and send them back because they don't have maybe what they're supposed to have. They get rid of some of the people who have been there for 25 years and they work great and then you throw them out and they're replaced by criminals.
Jan. 6 was a great example of a mob that had no idea if it was a real mob or not.
So true. And both fascinating and frightening.
"I have learned with what evils tyranny infects a state. For it frustrates all the virtues, robs freedom of its lofty mood, and opens a school of fawning and terror, inasmuch as it leaves matters not to the wisdom of the laws, but to the angry whim of those who are in authority.”
since honor is on a roll with answers for this stuff, one more.
How much of the divide is serious and how much is virtual? How much of the 'divide' is blowing off steam vs. serious issues people are committed to?
Jan. 6 was a great example of a mob that had no idea if it was a real mob or not.
If, behind Jan. 6, was a memic virus that we are using to try and get a handle on the question you ask, I don't know that the work was in pushing the thousands who showed up at the Capital on January 6 into participating in the assault on democracy that occurred there. The work was in getting them to show up, period. Does it really, REALLY matter if some people are blowing off steam or LARPing? Or there to hang Mike Pence if he didn't overturn the election?
The medium is the message, and once consumed and digested to participate in any capacity, virtually, physically, violently, or vocally, the victory was in convincing others that they needed to show up and support Trump after he lost an election as he was declaring that election flawed. It's about potential states after just a bit more energy gets pushed into the system. Being there made the amount of extra energy needed more important than their position when they decided to go there or what their motives might have been. Motives are easy to lie about to ourselves. So I don't know the answer to the question but I don't think it's a question that understands the problem well, either. If that makes sense.
So, I’m reading a book that sees what we commonly describe as race issues in terms of caste. It’s a comparison among the caste systems of India, Nazi Germany, and the USA. It’s not a new idea. Some anthropologists described the US as a caste system as far back as the 40s.
Contempt plays a significant role in keeping a caste structure in place — especially when directed at the lowest caste: The dahlit in India, the Jews in Nazi Germany, and Black Africans in the US. Part of the power of contempt is that the least well off in the penultimate class always has someone to look down on and despise.
But what happens when the lower end of the upper caste looks around and sees members of the bottom caste becoming better off economically or socially than they are? Maybe this spiral of contempt is the US struggling through the breakdown of its caste system. All the contempt that was formerly directed to the bottom caste is chaotically being flung everywhere as everyone tries to establish caste dominance and avoid becoming the new subordinate caste.
It’s an interesting perspective because the caste structure is embedded in the system that comes to be accepted as normal. At least until the subordinate caste decides it’s getting the raw end of the deal.
he/him we all just have to live through it,
holding each other’s hands.
