[asg70]

The problem is people have lost the ability to discern what constitutes grounds for outrage and what doesn't. And the feedback loop is that someone gets outraged at something and then the other side gets outraged that they're outraged and so on and so on. This phenomenon I think rests at the feet of the left for overplaying the victimization card. Does that mean there aren't genuine problems with race or gender relations in this country? Absolutely not. But the quality of the discourse has been polarized to such an extent that everyone adopts an endless siege mentality.

Speaking as someone who has been on the Internet since the first ISPs sprouted up, I really do think this is a sort of rewiring of the brain that has occurred thanks to the Internet and the perception of anonymity and invulnerability of the Internet as a bully pulpit in conjunction with the lack of restraint put on content (profanity, sex, etc...)

Remember this story?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Neda_Agha-Soltan

Remember this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Harambe

Or this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Cecil_the_lion

There are these viral empathy stories but they are overshadowed by the amount of petty dehumanizing bickering.

I just don't think the human brain is designed to be able to process an endless wave of opinionating from the peanut-gallery. I mean, in the past we had letters to the editor but newspapers could never publish ALL of them. But these days if you want to just sit there and get triggered by comments you can scroll and scroll through the ones directly underneath a news article.

The closest thing I can think of is it's like going through life being telepathic. Think of how many passing negative thoughts people have each day. They come and they go. But the Internet provides a dumping ground for these and you really get a raw taste for how much anger, hate, and just plain rudeness we carry around with us.

[evilgenius]

One thing I decry is a lack of forgiveness, on both sides of the political spectrum. The Left is guilty of it on sites such as the HuffPost. I'm fairly liberal, but I have a hard time reading stories about how somebody did some petty thing and it ought to be kept before my eyes all the live long day. It's just a ploy to keep me coming back, but they should worry more about the quality of their journalism to begin with. Losing sight of that original goal is what's at stake, not my ad dollars. If they want to hash and rehash the juvenile and the profane over and over again they should do it in strictly editorial pieces. They shouldn't try to accomplish the same thing by sneaking it in under the guise of reportage.

But I disagree that it is the Left which began this current streak of uncivilized commotion in the public sphere. The cult of victimization is real, but it is not as ancient as some other things in society. And, besides, it's more the result of sticking with a failed approach to building widespread economic success in the wake of the successful repeal of Jim Crow than it is an organized political agenda or weapon. The black community's leadership fell down in that way after Martin Luther King Jr. was taken from them. They descended into bickering because they were becoming irrelevant and had to keep power. Power was not devolved to the people, but was, therefore, kept in the hands of those few who could somehow claim a heritage back to Dr. King. There is a vast gulf between Barack Obama and Jesse Jackson that Jesse Jackson cannot cross, but Barack Obama can.

It is the Right which began it by focusing upon single issue politics. One by one they've taken singular moral issues, such as abortion and gun rights, and coerced people to vote against their more wide ranging best interests. They've done this by perverting the role of the church in American life. They stacked the deck with the sort of emotional power that religion brings to such arguments. Then they took that emotion, along with the authority it conveyed, and poured it heaping into society at large. Granted, they learned that from labor unions and temperance movements, but you really can't say that those organizations functioned at the high level the Right operates upon today. Neither can you say that those previous entities corrupted the church in the manner that the Right has managed now. The church is not fundamentally a political entity in a national sense, but they have made it one.

[asg70]

It is the Right which began it by focusing upon single issue politics. One by one they've taken singular moral issues, such as abortion and gun rights, and coerced people to vote against their more wide ranging best interests.

The reason I'm emphasizing the left is not that the right isn't partly to blame. It goes without saying that it is, starting with Rush Limbaugh and Fox News turning news into propaganda. But somewhere along the line the right stopped trying to pretend it had the moral high ground. The 'fair and balanced' moniker became a joke that even right-wingers stopped pretending to believe in. From that point onward, the right sort of "owned up" to its reputation of being the ideology that stands for insensitive bullying, hypocritical "moral majority" culture-wars, and a full embrace of the illusion of trickle-down economics.

You know when Trump made that comment about how the Iraq war was a mistake because we didn't take the oil? That's kind of what I mean. G. W. Bush tried to obfuscate the conflict of interest between his big oil cabinet and the decision to go to war in Iraq. But Trump just moved the goalposts to validating the idea of sacrificing American lives for resource wars. This is horrifying as far as a moral slippery-slope goes, but at least it's being honest, not that Trump doesn't still hide behind his share of dog-whistles.

The left, on the other hand, can't accept that if they push things too far they lose the moral upper-hand they may have had back in the MLK days. All this bitching and moaning about manspreading and mansplaining, for instance, is just calling for tyranny under the guise of social-justice. Also, their rigidity in regards to immigration policy (in Europe mostly) is a big factor in making the recent spate of terrorism possible. I wonder how many pressure-cooker bombs would need to explode off before they started to lay off on anti-fat-shaming and mansplaining kick...

Point being that there's no mid-ground and there's no civil discourse to be had between both sides.

I think this is what the Internet is doing. It's creating not so much physical tribalism but ideological tribalism. We may walk past our ideological enemies as we're staring down the street while unknowingly duking it out online in drive-by Facebook comments.

To whatever extent demographics has been mapped out via red and blue states or red and blue regions (in the case of liberal enclaves huddling the cities within otherwise red states) the endpoint may very well be the breakup of the US into red and blue states, perhaps not that different from the splitting up of the USSR, the balkan wars, Brexit, etc...

Diverse populations really can't function as a unified society without ideological tolerance.

This has been stewing for a long time, at least as far back as 2000 with the hanging chads in Florida. Then add in the backlash against a black president which some in the US could not deal with, etc... leading up to the kneeling NFL players.

National unity is in serious danger in the US because of this factionalism. I'm not saying we should all salute Trump because I think the guy should be impeached, but at the same time, he's there because enough of the American public bought into his populist rhetoric. How many of them think he should be impeached? He's "their guy" even if it winds up ending with NK managing to vaporize Los Angeles in his cheap pissing contest.

There's really no other way to look at this rant above other than that I'm pretty damn misanthropic at this point. I used to look at the US as this self-regulating system, the best possible government, but I have such a low opinion of the level of intelligence and the moral fiber of the voting public that we'd probably be better off with a benign dictator, a philosopher king of some sort, someone with such charisma that he could get on TV and find a way to tell us all to get our shit together.

[onlooker]

Discourse or agreement between the left and right and Democrats and Republicans is a strawman issue. The dysfunctions of our country and in fact the entire world are economic and of the underlying problem of overpopulation and our overshooting and abusing our Environment and carrying capacity. But of course everything gets framed in our social/cultural vernacular. The economic problems cannot be solved because they are intrinsically unsolvable under the premise of the social situation our world society finds itself in. This situation being one of a top down ruling structure resembling a Plutocracy ie. rule of money and where the humanity is structured in a very unequal and unjust manner. And so we sit here and echo utterly trivial discourse of a political nature when Politics has just become a convenient tool for the Economic elite to continue their pathological path and where rich world citizens are reluctant to part with their modern lifestyles and the rest of humanity is a horde of uneducated masses who have little to no power to change even slightlly the course of events. Even as the capacity of our planet to support most life is being systematically degraded.

[Newfie]

Ibon said:

People know the world is over crowded and that life is becoming a grand game of musical chairs even if they do not understand human overshoot in cold hard ecological terms.

I suspect this is quite true, even if we don't know it in our frontal lobes, it exists in our snake brain.

[Newfie]

Ya'll need Jesus in the worst possible way. I will pray for your doomed, yet valuable souls tomorrow.

It sounds like you need purpose in life. Then I'm your savior, you can pray for me until forever, I will always be here, skeptical, disbelieving, questioning.

You? Will always have a job.

[Newfie]

My.......we are a cheery crowd.

[asg70]

This situation being one of a top down ruling structure

You always see things under the lens of a mildly conspiratorial eye on the top of the pyramid way.

I think we get the government we deserve, at least here in the US. If we weren't so damn gullible and stupid in the first place we would not have these plutocrats because we wouldn't have voted them into office.

[onlooker]

To a certain extent Asg. But you think discount the pathological manner in which the already wealthy and powerful pursue ever more wealth and power. It is a well documented habit spanning the centuries. It is also documented in the discipline of psychology. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/ev ... -addiction
https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volu ... ects-brain

[evilgenius]

The real context of what it means, especially economically, to be Republican or Democrat is getting lost in this argument. We need to back up in time a little more, back to around the Great Depression. What led up to that was a huge stock bubble. It was very much like some of the other stock bubbles that had taken place before, but different as well. It was bigger. It had managed to envelop so many people that when it went down it produced a severe loss of economic power amongst many, at all levels of society. The powers that be, the rich guys who largely foisted the bubble upon the nation in their form of business as usual game they had been playing with stock bubbles, counldn't fix this bubble with confidence tricks. They had been able to do that before, by stepping in with their own money or consortiums of money and backing the size of the investment pile so that average people felt they could keep pouring money into it. This time it went down, and the deflation was so severe that even the rich were taking a huge hit. The size of this bubble, being beyond even the capacity of the rich, was enough to threaten large scale destruction of the money supply. Largely what happened, you see, was that people borrowed more than they could get paid back from their investments because they looked at this bubble and thought they were going to get rich. They took risks they shouldn't have because that's what people do when there is a bubble and it looks like it is going to pay off. The bubble didn't just burst the investment pool, revaluing it to a much more modest level, but it took out the capacity to borrow and raise the bubble up again.

Enter Keynes. He wasn't just about realizing that you need demand in order to form markets. His thesis wasn't just about the power of demand. He said that the government could participate as an actor in this situation and foster demand. He posited that by creating demand it would give business reason to operate, and people to be employed. It was a Democratic president, Roosevelt, who took that thesis and ran with it. Keynes' way of thinking was the central element of the New Deal. Despite the backlash from the Republicans, who used the Supreme Court to thwart many of the efforts of the New Deal, the country limped along until the war. Then the spending on the war, and the common purpose that came with it, took care of the Depression. There wasn't any petty Supreme Court recalcitrance stopping spending any more. Besides, the Republican businessmen had no reason to complain. They were all getting rich.

Over the next many decades politics in America was framed in the history of the New Deal. Democrats had transformed themselves into the party that reckoned that government spending could solve economic problems. They began to imagine what kind of society they could form if they kept going. There were all kinds of social problems inherent to American society and the Democrats wanted to address those. Meanwhile the Republicans were busy making money in business. The money supply was growing all of that time. There was something called the business cycle, where the country experienced recessions from time to time, though. Those recessions were periodic enough that people imagined they could get a handle on them, and eliminate them.

Somewhere along the line the Republicans began to attack the Democrats over the size of government. All of the deficit spending they were doing was probably cutting into their ability to borrow money at scale, most likely. Borrowing money at scale is different from going to the bank. For one thing, it's usually cheaper, but it requires a unity of purpose as well. Going to the bank is more about exercising one's individual will to power whereas borrowing at scale is about leveraging large scale opportunities that take conglomerations of people to take advantage of them.

The antagonism over government spending came to a boil politically in the south first. That was where the Republicans realized they could use the single issue of race in order to pick up white working class support. The big government of imagining what we can do with this ability to create demand activity of the Democrats had focused upon the inequality of blacks in the south and started to do something about it. Racially motivated whites hated that it was happening. The sixties were full of racial tension as a result. They were also characterized by the rise of the Republican Party in the south. Granted, it took a long time for the ramifications of what Lyndon Johnson had done to hit home, but the political make up of the south was never going to be the same. Whites pushed back. They became Republicans. I believe this was where the Republicans realized the power in using single issue politics to gain support.

Something else happened as well. This was post sixties, but also very important. There were two supply based crashes that occurred during the seventies, both of them linked to oil. Political extremism on the part of the oil producing countries caused huge inflation. This was not the kind of inflation that is produced by the banking system making too many poor loans and thus expanding the money supply. This was due to a supply crunch. The Fed stepped in and raised rates to combat this inflation, just like it would with a banking system related inflation. They contracted the money supply as a result, and revalued the dollar such that it held enough power to combat the political will of the oil producers. They basically enticed them out of their former political position, at the cost of a lot of economic pain at home. Right around then the lesson was learned, also, that whatever the people were making in wages was not nearly as important as was once thought. There was a new idea in the economy from that point on that a more profligate form of borrowing could expand the money supply, something less tied to individual responsibility. As long as the resulting bankruptcies didn't all happen at once the system could probably go on from there and keep expanding based upon this new paradigm. There might not even be that many bankruptcies, if the rate of expansion could be maintained without the disruption of severe business cycle recessions. Instead of just using the banking system to fulfill the will to power of the people, by loaning them money to go into business, why not use it to get them into houses? Housing had always been important, but it could, obviously, be expanded upon. Mortgage rates actually got cheaper. They had to because people weren't being paid as much relatively as they were before. Later, this same principle was applied to get people into debt to buy all sorts of crap, the very things the third world was now producing for them.

The lack of wage earning power continued. The dollar became something that had much more international power. Now it also had the US military to help back it, as well as the knowledge that the Fed would do what it had to, crash things, in order to get what it wanted. The oil producers weren't the only ones who could be induced by the whoring. The third world was ripe for the picking. Since they had discovered that trapping people in profligate borrowing at home was enough to pump up the system, why not ship jobs to the third world and reap the benefit of paying workers the very low wages those countries allowed? All they had to do was keep fine tuning the system with rate tweaks that seemed disassociated from the economy, but were really very scientifically based, and aimed at the value of engaging in the new paradigm. Both political parties benefited from this, but they still had to think about power. That's where the cult of victimization and the politics of morality grew strong. Neither of them were really tethered to reality, or they would have suffered some sort of push back enough to rein them in, however.

[Tanada]

Serious question. Would you define the desire to avoid responsibility a dark emotion?

In my accumulated experience I have come to realize that something like 95% of human beings would rather follow a bad decision maker giving directions than take responsibility for making their own decisions. This makes it easy for those who crave power and control because the bulk of the population will fall in line with their orders whether those orders make any sense or not. It is also the reason a 'free open culture' like the one created in 1789 in the USA doesn't often last past about 200 years because those in power maneuver to accumulate more power and the 'free voters' keep giving it to them generation after generation. It doesn't matter what cause they claim or rhetoric they use, the people in charge consider themselves elite and are under no desire to follow the wishes of the masses other than whatever lip service they must pay to keep from losing the power they have today.

[SeaGypsy]

Tanada, firstly, no, avoiding responsibility is an auto response monkey brain- taking responsibility generally only happens when there's no choice & the jig is up. (Referring to responsibility for negative behaviour/ against the hierarchy or the collective. "Getting away with it" is a win, "I stole the banana, nobody saw, so obviously I was meant to have the banana"- humans tell ourselves God let us have the banana, or they line up to get their banana from the hierarchy, then thank God for the hierarchy & the banana is the prize for subservience. )

Your second point, turn it on it's head- you are born into or have otherwise acquired- power, authority, control- over a large number of ignorant & largely compliant humans. Now what? Abdicate? Or rule? Bring them up to be your equals? (Kidding right?)

Given the systems in place for millennia to keep hierarchy in place, ruling almost happens on auto pilot. Abdication is social suicide.

[evilgenius]

It's a well known fact that if you put two or more people in a room to test them, letting them believe they are there to take part in a later test, by pouring smoke into the room while they are waiting for that test through a vent, they will sit there and look at each other rather than act. It takes a special kind of person to act. It takes the kind of person who, when we are talking about society, is an entrepreneur. The will to power evident in the role of fiat money is a tool to put power into the hands of these people. It also serves to empower the more mediocre. I don't really think of those who borrow, but pay off their debt as mediocre. I'm just using that word to make a point. Profligate borrowing as a basis for an economy only serves to bury those who wish to exercise the will to power, as well as those mediocre folks who follow in their train. Their influence is negated by the success of those whose only legitimate end should be bankruptcy. Oddly, the entrepreneur finds the path harder because their customers don't have the spending money necessary to purchase from them. Remember, keeping a cap on real wages is a big part of this. Their customers can't make buying decisions on any basis much other than lowest cost. In order to compete a smaller business that doesn't have some inherent lowest cost to produce available to it as a basis from which to compete against large corporations must spend a great deal more on marketing, or have special access to information. Big companies become the standard on the economic landscape. The politicians on both sides kowtow to the wishes of those who hold power at those companies. Really, it's a feudal arrangement. Some of those big bosses even have the temerity to tell their employees how to vote. Most of them don't have to, though, because it's understood. The political parties cease to exist in order to protect ordinary people and instead pander toward corporate rights. Sound familiar?

[Newfie]

Tanada/Sea

Nice thoughtful interchange. Something to chew on.

[asg70]

avoiding responsibility is an auto response monkey brain

In other words, this:



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtVteemLin4

[roccman]

There's not much evidence "God" is anything more than a way of lining one's self up, getting your ducks in a row so to speak. Sorry but long blathering spiels about "God"- just lose me completely. Not one new thought in any of it, just repeat dogmatic programming.

well - most think god is good.

I have always wondered about, "In God We Trust".

What is the constitution of "god" - good/bad/ugly?
Who is the "we"? - the chosen+slaves or just the chosen or just the slaves?
And why is it that "we" need to trust in a god that is good?

I agree - the word "god" comes with baggage - and a lot of it. But like you say - just repeat dogmatic programming. I suggest we put god on the stand for a few questions.

[SeaGypsy]

Of course God is good, s/he lets us steal bananas/ put the banana hierarchy in place/ let us earn our bananas/ probably even created us & the banana bush.

[GHung]

There's not much evidence "God" is anything more than a way of lining one's self up, getting your ducks in a row so to speak. Sorry but long blathering spiels about "God"- just lose me completely. Not one new thought in any of it, just repeat dogmatic programming.

well - most think god is good.

I have always wondered about, "In God We Trust".

What is the constitution of "god" - good/bad/ugly?
Who is the "we"? - the chosen+slaves or just the chosen or just the slaves?
And why is it that "we" need to trust in a god that is good?

I agree - the word "god" comes with baggage - and a lot of it. But like you say - just repeat dogmatic programming. I suggest we put god on the stand for a few questions.

We did! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWjlkm5g-Tk

[Ibon]

Serious question. Would you define the desire to avoid responsibility a dark emotion?

In my accumulated experience I have come to realize that something like 95% of human beings would rather follow a bad decision maker giving directions than take responsibility for making their own decisions. This makes it easy for those who crave power and control because the bulk of the population will fall in line with their orders whether those orders make any sense or not. It is also the reason a 'free open culture' like the one created in 1789 in the USA doesn't often last past about 200 years because those in power maneuver to accumulate more power and the 'free voters' keep giving it to them generation after generation. It doesn't matter what cause they claim or rhetoric they use, the people in charge consider themselves elite and are under no desire to follow the wishes of the masses other than whatever lip service they must pay to keep from losing the power they have today.

You know, I think many of us agree with your assessment. Which opens another serious question. If we recognize that what you say is true then to what degree is it worth trying to participate in changing or even engaging with the status quo?

Let's consider those 5%. We have those who seek out power, money, status, control, all those uber wealthy who game the system with lobbyists insuring that politicians act as lackys.

But that is not all of the 5%. There are those who do not follow but who also do not seek out control and power. Actually, here at po.com we can find quite a few. Aware, intelligent, insightful to the macro dynamics, independent but who do not seek power and control. I have friends and colleagues who fit this. I read many posters here of different political persuasions and recognize self actualized folks who are not sheeples but who also are not part of those few gaming the system.

We fall into a category neither sheeple nor parasite. It's somewhat in the crack actually. Disengaged from the status quo, not part of the elite, seeing the big picture but not quite feeling any tribal alliance.

Withdrawing from this dysfunctional matrix of 95% sheeples and maybe 1% parasites might leave about 4% of us wondering where do we belong?

Is this part of the reason we are drawn together in these discussions. Seriously?