My mother was prone to drop idiot racist statements, but this all stopped without comment when her children and grand children started getting involved with partners of other races. This is a point that Bob Altemeyer (look up his name on Google---his work is really important to understanding this issue) makes about the difference between…
My mother was prone to drop idiot racist statements, but this all stopped without comment when her children and grand children started getting involved with partners of other races. This is a point that Bob Altemeyer (look up his name on Google---his work is really important to understanding this issue) makes about the difference between authoritarian and non-authoritarian personalities. The former simply don't change their minds based on theory or evidence. Instead, they do so on the basis of human-to-human bonds. The best example of this is the way homophobia was dramatically reduced in North American society once so many gays came out of the closet. This let people who 'hated gays' realize that many folks they really liked turned out to be gay after all.
My experience with the 'bug-eyed and shameless' types is that they fit into the two categories that Altemeyer identifies: the authoritarian leaders who exhibit psychopathic behaviour in order to find minions to follow them (I'm looking at you Pierre Poilievre), and, authoritarian followers who are looking for somebody to tell them what to think and do. These people have always existed as a small but significant fraction of the body politic who 'punch above their weight' because they most definitely will 'take direction' and don't act like 'a herd of cats' (like 'progressives' do).
What's new is that social media companies have learned to monetize their willingness to gobble up nonsense and then run like bison off whatever cliff their leaders tell them to. (The World Wide Web is like a giant version of Buffalo Jump cliffs.) These people are the prized livestock of the 'attention economy'.
The thing about livestock is that they are herd animals. There's no sense trying to talk them out of whatever stampede they are chasing. The point is to identify the cowboys or First Nations people (doesn't ring as well as the no longer polite term that comes to mind) chasing the stock---and then shut their operation down. That's 'deplatforming' and 'regulation of social media'. It was possible to create stupid stampedes of mass marching morons with both newspapers ("remember the Maine and invade Cuba") and radio (does anyone know about Father Coughlin and the Silver Legion of America? check out Rachel Maddow's excellent podcast on the subject: "Ultra"), but after a lot of stupid abuses, both the government and the culture created the idea of editorial responsibility and made the old media responsible for the frenzy they whipped people into.
That's why needs to happen. If a social media company promotes vile nonsense, it needs to be sued or regulated out of that behaviour---or pushed into bankruptcy. That's sorta what happened (and is still happening) with Fox News over the Dominion Voting Machines law suit. That's what needs to happen with FaceBook, Twitter, and all the other players in the WWW that have been given a 'get out of jail free' card by the neo-liberal consensus and the idiotic 'free speech absolutists'.
I'm (somewhat unfortunately) very familiar with Coughlin. We did a little section on him for The Flamethrowers, my podcast on the history of right-wing radio. Maddow did a much more thorough job on it, though.
Radio,, though, wound up being a pretty fascinating medium for this problem. I won't say it advanced terribly pro-science or 'enlightened' views, but it certainly challenged people to listen to people they disagreed with, and seemed to really like iconoclasts. (That trend sort of petered out into the 2000s.)
Many thanks for the Altemeyer reference, everybody should read. And the historical mentions: today's televangelist grifters have a long history (of evil success...)
Suggest just saying "wolves" as the herd-antagonist metaphor, leave humans out of it!
My mother was prone to drop idiot racist statements, but this all stopped without comment when her children and grand children started getting involved with partners of other races. This is a point that Bob Altemeyer (look up his name on Google---his work is really important to understanding this issue) makes about the difference between authoritarian and non-authoritarian personalities. The former simply don't change their minds based on theory or evidence. Instead, they do so on the basis of human-to-human bonds. The best example of this is the way homophobia was dramatically reduced in North American society once so many gays came out of the closet. This let people who 'hated gays' realize that many folks they really liked turned out to be gay after all.
My experience with the 'bug-eyed and shameless' types is that they fit into the two categories that Altemeyer identifies: the authoritarian leaders who exhibit psychopathic behaviour in order to find minions to follow them (I'm looking at you Pierre Poilievre), and, authoritarian followers who are looking for somebody to tell them what to think and do. These people have always existed as a small but significant fraction of the body politic who 'punch above their weight' because they most definitely will 'take direction' and don't act like 'a herd of cats' (like 'progressives' do).
What's new is that social media companies have learned to monetize their willingness to gobble up nonsense and then run like bison off whatever cliff their leaders tell them to. (The World Wide Web is like a giant version of Buffalo Jump cliffs.) These people are the prized livestock of the 'attention economy'.
The thing about livestock is that they are herd animals. There's no sense trying to talk them out of whatever stampede they are chasing. The point is to identify the cowboys or First Nations people (doesn't ring as well as the no longer polite term that comes to mind) chasing the stock---and then shut their operation down. That's 'deplatforming' and 'regulation of social media'. It was possible to create stupid stampedes of mass marching morons with both newspapers ("remember the Maine and invade Cuba") and radio (does anyone know about Father Coughlin and the Silver Legion of America? check out Rachel Maddow's excellent podcast on the subject: "Ultra"), but after a lot of stupid abuses, both the government and the culture created the idea of editorial responsibility and made the old media responsible for the frenzy they whipped people into.
That's why needs to happen. If a social media company promotes vile nonsense, it needs to be sued or regulated out of that behaviour---or pushed into bankruptcy. That's sorta what happened (and is still happening) with Fox News over the Dominion Voting Machines law suit. That's what needs to happen with FaceBook, Twitter, and all the other players in the WWW that have been given a 'get out of jail free' card by the neo-liberal consensus and the idiotic 'free speech absolutists'.
I'm unfamiliar with Altemeyer, I'll look him up!
I'm (somewhat unfortunately) very familiar with Coughlin. We did a little section on him for The Flamethrowers, my podcast on the history of right-wing radio. Maddow did a much more thorough job on it, though.
Radio,, though, wound up being a pretty fascinating medium for this problem. I won't say it advanced terribly pro-science or 'enlightened' views, but it certainly challenged people to listen to people they disagreed with, and seemed to really like iconoclasts. (That trend sort of petered out into the 2000s.)
Many thanks for the Altemeyer reference, everybody should read. And the historical mentions: today's televangelist grifters have a long history (of evil success...)
Suggest just saying "wolves" as the herd-antagonist metaphor, leave humans out of it!