Political & Social Polarization

[Bri]

Originally Posted by synaesthetic

The internet's a huge advancement for the human race, a paradigm shift in terms of how we accomplish things. But it's a double-edged sword. Lots of people I know rely so heavily on the internet that they have no earthly idea how to do old-fashioned library research...

Ask a college freshman in 2013 if they know how to use the card catalog and Dewey Decimal systems, and watch them give you a blank stare.

Older scientific methods just simply fade out of the collective consciousness over time. That's a recurring process. For example before the internet, calculators had made certain basic math operations obsolete. I wouldn't know how to do calculate roots by hand or how to use a slide ruler.

Or on a larger scale: Lockheed had problems with Orion to duplicate metallurgic processes from the 60s and had visit plants in Eastern Europe to rediscover long obsolete manufacturing techniques.

[solidguy]

Originally Posted by synaesthetic

Also, if I were straight and married and my husband stayed at work when I was giving birth, I would fucking divorce his ass in a god-damned heartbeat.

And when he gets fired...... Factory work is shit, it sucks the life outta your soul. I worked in a factory for 3 months full-time for the summer holidays (fuck working there for 40 years +) and I had so much more insight into the minds of the working class (in particular male). Drinking, sports, adhering to social stereotypes, seemingly blind faith in religion, negative attitudes to intelligence...its all coping mechanisms to deal with the fact that life is pretty shit....living from paycheck to paycheck is not the business. You are basically treated as a robot who gets a christmas fucntion once a year.

But when wasn't life about this? When wasn't life shit... our modern expectations of life are simply distorted by America's greatest gift to the world, The American Dream. This is what I think Kaijo was trying to get at when talking about individualism in America. America embodies mobility and the opportunity to 'upgrade' 'YOUR' life. Arguably this leads to over-reaching what ought to be yours to whatever you can take you will take (I was thinking about the conversation between Agent Smith and Morpheus off The Matrix). This is more selfish than individualistic but I think he has a valid point somewhere in there. Especially when what you can and can't take isn't decided by some neutral power but by a power in the pockets of dat cash money.

And this doctrine has spread around the world along with Americanism. At uni far more exceptionally intelligent students are choosing to study in the faculty of commerce because exceptionally intelligent should = higher salary today. I have a friend who for 14 years dreamt of being an engineer. His father and him would build lego houses and little robots...but he grew up and dreamt bigger, he dreamt American dreams. His logic was exactly as I stated above, infact it was near a quote from his mouth. Now I'm not saying my experience is the god's honest truth for everyone out there...I can only speak from what I've experienced, read in books and what idea's I deduce from that.

[synaesthetic]

Factory work? What factories? America doesn't have these factories you speak of.

[solidguy]

Snap! Ok susbstitute working class for foreigners

[synaesthetic]

There's no such thing as a neutral power. All humans have biases and personal agendas. Even a computer wouldn't be unbiased since it requires a programmer.

Capitalism isn't broken, but it's pretty shabby and in need of a major overhaul and tune-up. Oversight needs to be increased and we need more "untouchables" in the sociopolitical machine.

[solidguy]

Tbh idk why i said that. It sounded abit too fancy to be in there. Fair would've been better, but not by much.

And I think that's capitalist cultures fatal flaw. It creates a bubble where we tend to forget what is outside of it. Or maybe it's just the revolutionist in me that is constantly dreaming of a better place...ironically not too dissimilar to the American dream I just bagged

[SaintessHeart]

I agree somewhat with solidguy, having worked from factory to factory, warehouse to warehouse since 16. Although they are short periods of 2 weeks to 1 month, it taught me so much about people - their lives are sucked dry out of them by their monotonous work.

However, I wouldn't agree that they are robots because robots can't think or solve problems : a few plant technicians and engineers have the uncanny ability to rework and replace somponents using nothing more than a cutting torch and a few spare parts.

Unfortunately they get berated by the management for their work; but I guess in today's world of superficiality, companies prefer morons to Macgyvers.

[DonQuigleone]

@Equality of women:

For much of history women were not so unequal as you might think. While they were treated largely as political tools among the upper class, among the lower classes they tended to be equal in status to their husbands. Furthermore, the work they did was as important as the husbands.

Prior to the Industrial era all work was done in the home, so that women were "restricted" to it was not particularly a negative, as men were also restricted to it as well. However with the industrial revolution you had men leaving their farms to work in physically demanding factory and mining jobs, which of course were not performed in the home. This created a situation where men were working outside the home, while women were still restricted to the home. Not only that, but work that had formerly been performed by women, was increasingly being performed by men in factories (like Weaving, textiles), so women were pushed out of working life into a rather dull domestic existence of exclusive child rearing. Ultimately this was temporary, however. Factory work became less physically demanding, and this combined with the introduction of schooling, meant women finally were able to work outside the home. Once women were "working" once more, political rights proceeded apace.

[synaesthetic]

That's basically what I said already.

Historically speaking, some of the "oppression of women" wasn't actually oppression. I mean, really, would YOU want to work in the coal mines 16 hours a day? Would YOU want to be forcibly conscripted into the military service of a guy who wanted to fatten his treasury by invading the neighboring country?

Now, when it came to subsistence farmers, yeah, the ladies had more work to do because anyone with functional arms and legs can swing a sickle and harvest. Everyone pitched in, because if you didn't, you didn't eat and then you died.

[DonQuigleone]

I just take issue with the idea that gender equality is purely a modern thing, because I think if you look at the past it varied substantially. And for "most" of the population it was comparatively minor, or varied substantially from household to household (in some households the men had the power, in others the women, in most it was mixed with women having power in different spheres compared to men).

[LeoXiao]

Yeah, I don't really think that the average woman was any worse off than the average man, considering that the latter had to go do the dangerous work. Women worked their butts off too but at least not in places like the battlefield. If you say women were tied down by and sometimes lost their lives in the course of child-bearing, you need to remember that men died in war and accidents quite often as well. Before the rulers, both genders were equally oppressed.

The real difference was in who could have political power, and who could be educated. Women sometimes had political power but they were the exception. The ladies of the upper classes also had education, though I suspect it was certainly in a very limited fashion compared to that allowed to men. The point, however, is that it was probably not some clear-cut "women cannot learn" sort of thing but more "women are needed as wives to continue the family and so don't have time to waste on knowledge they will never use". I recall OTOH a painting of some European princess discussing math with a philosopher, so at least some of them received education.

[DonQuigleone]

Eh, the average medieval or renaissance noble would strike a modern person as being an uncultured lout. I doubt that most of the aristocracy were particularly well educated, man or woman.

In fact, I'd say the average noble woman was as likely to be as educated as any man. Nobles did not pursue education for utilitarian purposes, but for status. After all, there's no reason that a person needs to know Greek or Latin literature, other then the hypothetical cultivation of morals, and even then...

The people who educated themselves for utilitarian purposes would have been merchants, and them being savvy with money they would have prioritised educating sons into their trade over daughters. Women did occasionally do well in the sphere of business, but they usually learned it from their husbands, not necessarily their fathers.

[AnimeFan188]

"Add this to another recent poll in which only 22% of likely voters feel America's
government has the "consent of the governed," and you've got a pretty
depressing picture -- and a recipe for potential trouble. Governments operate, to
a degree, by force, but ultimately they depend on legitimacy. A government that a
majority views as a threat, and that only a small minority sees as enjoying the
consent of the governed, is a government with legitimacy problems.

I suspect that these issues also have something to do with the increasing
bitterness and polarization of today's politics, but not the way you might think. As
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^


science fiction writer Jerry Pournelle wrote in 2008, "We have always known that
eternal vigilance is the price of freedom. It's worse now, because capture of
government is so much more important than it once was. There was a time when
there was enough freedom that it hardly mattered which brand of crooks ran
government. That has not been true for a long time -- not during most of your
lifetimes, and for much of mine -- and it will probably never be true again."

That captures an important point. The more powerful the government becomes,
the more people are willing to do in order to seize the prize, and the more afraid
they become when someone else has control. So it was after the 2004 election
when liberals talked revolution, and so again after 2012, when secession
petitions flooded the White House."

See:

http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinio...olumn/1887593/

[AnimeFan188]

The Spreading Cloud:

"Without anybody quite being aware of it identity politics has taken on a life of its own.
The campaign against Confederate statues has moved like a pullulating cloud of
nanoparticles to the national anthem protest in the NFL. One arm of the cloud has
spread to major league baseball. A tendril may soon make the jump to NASCAR racing.
There's no escape from the spreading politicization any more, not in the theater,
stadium, school or social media. We're trapped in hell."

See:

https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez...reading-cloud/

[AnimeFan188]

Nearly one in three Americans say it may soon be necessary to take up arms against the government

"A majority of Americans say the U.S. government is corrupt and almost a third say it may soon be necessary to take up arms against it, according to a new poll from the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics.

Two-thirds of Republicans and independents say the government is “corrupt and rigged against everyday people like me,” according to the poll, compared to 51 percent of liberal voters.

Twenty-eight percent of all voters, including 37 percent of gun owners, agreed “it may be necessary at some point soon for citizens to take up arms against the government,” a view held by around 35 percent of Republicans and around 35 percent of Independents. One in five Democrats concurred.

The findings come after a House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riots at the U.S. Capitol wrapped up its final hearing for the summer, seeking to place former President Trump at the heart of efforts to overturn the 2020 election."

See:

https://thehill.com/homenews/3572278...he-government/

[Anh_Minh]

And how many think it may soon be necessary to take up arms against that third of Americans?

[BWTraveller]

Originally Posted by Bri

Older scientific methods just simply fade out of the collective consciousness over time. That's a recurring process. For example before the internet, calculators had made certain basic math operations obsolete. I wouldn't know how to do calculate roots by hand or how to use a slide ruler.

Or on a larger scale: Lockheed had problems with Orion to duplicate metallurgic processes from the 60s and had visit plants in Eastern Europe to rediscover long obsolete manufacturing techniques.

Equating the internet to calculators isn't really accurate though. We surf the net through search engines, which are run by corporations that are desperate to make money through ads and get as many people to use their specific engine as possible. Search engines, forum-type systems, a broad range of media sources... far too many places people go for information online are desperate to encourage your interest by showing you things they think you want to see. The result is that over time things that you maybe don't want to see gets pushed further and further down, and you end up seeing only one side of the story. Add that to media companies pandering to what they think their audience wants with frequently biased presentation and chances are strong that you'll have tons of people getting data "from the internet" who aren't seeing anything the other side is seeing. Each side only sees one side of the story, from people who have no reason to make the other side look like anything better than evil incompetents. What's meant to help people more easily get the materials they really want has ended up massively encouraging groupthink on a global scale.

[Sugetsu]

I am pretty sure that most of you are aware of news media bias and how they pander to the elites. The following video is another clear demonstration of how terrible the current state of affairs is; Kim Iversen is no longer with Raising, she is one of the few independent journalists out there who still has a voice of her own.

YouTube

https://youtu.be/vlYdJLj3TLI

Sorry; dynamic content not loaded. Reload?

As far as I am concern this just leaves US viewers with Breaking Points, Jimmy Dore and Joe Rogan for independent news sources as far as I am concerned. (I might be missing a few more but you get the idea)

[Key Board]

I trust her as much as I trust Jimmy Dore and Joe Rogan

zero

especially after Covid, and that great reset rubbish


//

[Sugetsu]

^ Interesting, so you rather believe all the covid rhetoric corporate media throws at you while not really questioning if there is a profit incentive behind it all.. you know, the case being that vaccines dont stop the spread and all.. or the fact that wealthy people increase their asset positions disproportionally compared to the average Joe year to year? Or that many corporations are more economically powerful than most countries out there?

But I am going to leave it there, if you are a critical thinker you will be able to verify the validity of my claims.

---

Political and social polization is just an intentional game that our corporate overlords use against us. Corporate media has been playing this game over 40 years when Regan deregulated the news and they, in turn, boosted their profit margins substantially. So long as the majority of the population is focused on the culture wars, which the media happily feeds to the citizenry, and not on substantive policies that impact the common folk and their budget directly the elite class will continue to rob the treasury while the rest of us are oblivious to the fact.

In fact, I blame the polarization in this country squarely on the news media. We need more investigative journalists who can think for themselves and ask the tough questions. There will always be bias in journalism, but you can only trust the ones that disclose their biases upfront before they report on anything, such as Kim or Kyle Kulinski.