Social media
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Ive mentioned a few times here and have read a few other that think this is a printing-press level shake up in our political lives.
We need a whole set of norms around it like we figured out with the relationship between the press and a democratic government.
Old laws and principles don’t apply here. This is a completely new thing.
It’s not a coincidence that we now have completely fiction based belief sets that have risen on the left and right (wokeness and election stealing).
None of these things are based in fact. They’re based on a mutually reinforced narrative by people on social media.
I guess my only point is that - our political lives will be fundamentally different going forward - and we haven’t really figured how to deal with it yet.
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I'm very comfortable calling out wokeness as both the broader force and the more dangerous force. It is capable of indoctrinating more normal people into the vices of its righteous validation of any given destructive act. I understand we just witnessed a group of batshit people participate in a hopeless and frankly suicidal storming of the capitol building. I believe that spectacle was an object lesson at best. I do not believe the spectacles of CHAZ, Portland, etc, convinced indoctrinated leftists of anything other than the very real power they can invoke through violence and other forms of destruction.
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@horace said in Social media:
I'm very comfortable calling out wokeness as both the broader force and the more dangerous force. It is capable of indoctrinating more normal people into the vices of its righteous validation of any given destructive act. I understand we just witnessed a group of batshit people participate in a hopeless and frankly suicidal storming of the capitol building. I believe that spectacle was an object lesson at best. I do not believe the spectacles of CHAZ, Portland, and all that convinced indoctrinated leftists of anything other than the very real power they can invoke through violence and other forms of destruction.
I think they’re both idiosyncratic symptoms of a new problem posed by social media. The fact that one is stronger than the other - you can make a reasonable argument for it - but that’s not my point.
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Ok. The encroachment of wokeness actually long predates the internet though and I don't think the internet adequately explains it. I think it's more to do with those in cultural power (MSM, not politicians) exerting their messaging will over the people. I'm not even sure the internet has exacerbated it. The internet, in my experience, is a good check and balance on it. I have noticed that the left tends to hate the internet and free speech more than the right, in that they feel a loss of control of messaging.
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100% they predate the internet. But something has allowed them to go just nutso at a super charged pace.
Imagine you had internet during the 60s cultural revolution stuff.
On a recent Sam Harris podcast he mentioned something like 50% of healthcare workers in some places are refusing vaccine.
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I think it will always be difficult to distinguish between how much we hear of "threats" (such as the threat of neo-naziism and white supremacy), through social media, and the degree to which those threats are increased, due to the internet. Keep in mind Russia's vaunted influence was all about faking threats on social media and causing people to think they're a bigger deal than they actually are. If I was of a mind to destroy/divide society, that's what I would do.
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A bunch of my completely non-political cousins went full on woke in the course of a weekend.
They had no sense of the historical perspectives here, but saw their friends and all other young people believing something and posting black boxes on instagram. That was enough.
A bunch of them are super low information people with very strong feelings about this now.
