In taking a brief look at the younger people giving up on democracy post above I think there are a few things I took away. (1) It covers countries all over the world and not just the US. How many of those countries actually have histories of successful democracies? How many of them have democratic traditions worth following. (2) I get it that even in the US younger people, according to the study, are turning away from democracy, but …How much of that is caused by the parties refusing to compromise and by the media blasting out bad news about the government 24-7, regardless of who is in power?
Maybe some of this was answered but I didn’t see it.
More on that diplomat hearing loss story from Gizmodo.
Citing an anonymous government official, CNN reports that the US is still investigating the possibility this was an attack by a third country that might be trying to harm America’s relations with Cuba.
According to the Associated Press, five diplomats were affected and CNN’s sources claim that at least one will have to wear a hearing aid. In her cagey comments yesterday, Nauert would only refer to an “incident” in which diplomats experienced “physical symptoms.” She said the department does not have any definitive answers about “the source or the cause” of these incidents, and that “some of our people have had the option of leaving Cuba as a result, for medical reasons.”
As to why it has taken officials so long to do something about this, Nauert said that “it took time to figure out what it was, and this is still ongoing.” She added that they are “monitoring it,” and providing any necessary medical care.
On Thursday, the Canadian government confirmed to the Associated Press that at least one of its diplomats had also experienced hearing loss. A spokesperson for the Canadian government said that authorities, “are aware of unusual symptoms affecting Canadian and US diplomatic personnel and their families in Havana. The government is actively working—including with US and Cuban authorities—to ascertain the cause.”
You know maybe this is why i have this… slight grating annoyance with the average “progressive” millennial on social media even while despising their opposites (to the point of literally never interacting with conservatives) whom at this point go under some kind of alt-right adjacent categories. Underlying so many progressive arguments, the way those arguments are constructed, the way they see broader society, ect., is this kind of foot-stomping Veruca Salt impatience to have their voice heard - against, I take it, whoever is not letting their voices being heard but in this case not doing a particular fine job of it. I see Vox as the penultimate purveyor this style (if they they do good journalism at times). My recent Vox hot take alerted me “The news about North Korea can be scary and confusing. Here’s the questions about North Korea you were too embarrassed to ask.” There are so many loaded presumptions about their audience, their reaction to information, and how best to convey that information to them, that one very millennial-ish lede itself tells a book-length story about millennials progressive attitudes (in general) and relationship to information on an emotional rather than intellectual level.
Consider these sorts of young people, who are apparently turning away from democracy, into two oppositional camps for a moment. Neo-conservatives/alt-right want to sieize power away from democracy- but at least they imagine they know what power is. The problem with progressives seems to be more this weird misunderstanding of what power is. They seem to think “calling out” and “getting heard” and pointing at some person, throwing a fit and saying “somebody do something about this person!” and getting a mob on social media to agree with them is what power is - they don’t seem to be thinking who exactly are the people who have the power to actually do something, they just assume the adults are still somewhere in the building. So many of them spend their intellectual and political resources mobbing up and liking on social media and not really wanting to get involved in politics, and not apparently really understanding that politics is the answer to political problems.
It’s awesome to imagine the look on Trump’s face of he tried to read a sentence like this:
As used in this discussion, cultural Marxism relates to programs and activities that arise out of Gramsci Marxism, Fabian Socialism and most directly from the Frankfurt School. The Frankfurt strategy deconstructs societies through attacks on culture by imposing a dialectic that forces unresolvable contradictions under the rubric of critical theory
"On Wednesday, Gorka lashed out at “at [New York Times reporter] Maggie Haberman and her acolytes in the fake news media, who immediately have a conniption fit” and brought up McVeigh. He added that “white men” and “white supremacists” are not “the problem.”
It’s this constant, “Oh, it’s the white man. It’s the white supremacists. That’s the problem.” No, it isn’t, Maggie Haberman. Go to Sinjar. Go to the Middle East, and tell me what the real problem is today. Go to Manchester.
Let’s talk bluntly about what is happening in the American information space. /1 https://t.co/PCi8qktOJx
Because, Americans are being radicalized to reject core values of a democratic society /2
What have we heard from Fox-iverse this week?
At home, America is doing great. Economy going gangbusters, everything coming up roses /3
BUT there are many enemies we must confront
Via Gorka: left extremists are staging terror attacks/hate attacks in order to smear POTUS /4
Via Prince: our military & its leadership are weak & broken, and our wars should be outsourced to private forces w/no rules of engagement /5
Via POTUS, fox, Breitbart: establishment republicans are enemy far worse than democrats, will be challenged by trump’s election machine /6
Don’t underestimate importance of this. SCL/CA not a normal company. They have clear agenda. It’s linked to trump/7
What’s going to happen now is Republican Party will be gutted & repopulated w/ pro-Trump candidates. Think tea party elex, but far worse /8
These candidates, who reject fundamental democratic institutions/values, idea of tolerance and indisputable truth, American leadership …/9
… Will be backed by a powerful alliance of media, data-analytics, money operating totally opaquely. Not clear stated agenda … /10
… Beyond elevation of small group of billionaires into positions where they control politics as means of controlling economic resources/11
This is why our institutions are being gutted. Because control requires centralization. Ditto with Trump team needing congress to be weak/12
Sound familiar?
It’s because it’s what happened in Russia after 2000, only w/o the security state involved /13
But there are new tools that make the drive to accomplish this more possible.
We’re mostly ignoring how it is happening /14
The core apparatus of conservative media is sending 1 message: only president can be trusted. Dark forces prevent him from delivering… /15
… So the only way for him to be successful is to attack the enemy within.
That’s how you conduct state capture w/ 25% radicalized base/16
If I knew nothing about America and were analyzing its information environment the way I do that of other countries… /17
… , I would tell you a campaign of subversion is well underway, near complete.
This will move out of info space soon. Always does. /18
Now we have an external enemy and crisis, North Korea, and a reason to centralize more control to deal with crisis /19
You’ve all seen polling. The majority of Americans do not subscribe to these views. Regardless what the info environment is telling you /20
Our system requires two vibrant, engaged, representative political parties, a free media – and the separation of money and politics /21
But I’m really tired of people saying Americans are dumb and lazy and “choose” divided info spaces. Some is choice. Sure. However – /22
It’s time to acknowledge that a lot of this is being done to people. Created on purpose. Call it what you will, it’s about radicalization/23
The creation of self-reinforcing universes-- left, right, against-all, outside views not welcome–is a tool of psychological control/24
Google and Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and wtf else need to stop showing us what they think we want to see to drive consumption /25
Data-driven everything needs to be understood for what it is. Which is not a force for good when it comes to the selling of ideas. /26
I used to think that tweetstorms were terrible because there was no way to read them as blocks of efficient text. I was wrong, they are just terrible. The act of writing arguments as a series of individual tweets must inherently lead the mind to scattered thinking, terrible sentence construction, and hyperbole.
No offense to you @Clay, perhaps there are worthwhile insights in there, but i’ll never find out unless someone expresses them coherently.
I mostly agree. I think the salient point in there is that in the chaos of rapid widespread adoption of data analysis to create personalized profit-maximizing algorithms and services, tech companies inadvertently created channels that magnify everybody’s pre-existing beliefs and prejudices. Nefarious political actors have learned to exploit them with frightening efficiency, effectively controlling the tide of popular sentiment around issues, magnifying radical fringe voices and suppressing the mainstream and dialog between people who disagree. Until we, as a society, turn away from profit to restore discourse and reason, we’re effectively ceding control of our future. It’s a tragedy of the commons expressed through data-driven targeted content recommendation culture.
