93 Matching Annotations
  1. Jul 2024
    1. Improving the living standards of all working-class Americans while closing racial disparities in employment and wages will depend on how well we seize opportunities to build multiracial, multigendered, and multigenerational coalitions to advance policies that achieve both of these goals

      for - political polarization - challenge to building multi-racial coalition - to - Wired story - No one actually knows how AI will affect jobs

      political polarization - building multi-racial coalitions - This is challenging to do when there is so much political polarization with far-right pouring gasoline on the polarization fire and obscuring the issue - There is a complex combination of factors leading to the erosion of working class power

      automation - erosion of the working class - Ai is only the latest form of the automation trend, further eroding the working class - But Ai is also beginning to erode white collar jobs

      to - Wired story - No one actually knows how AI will affect jobs - https://hyp.is/KsIWPDzoEe-3rR-gufTfiQ/www.wired.com/story/ai-impact-on-work-mary-daly-interview/

  2. Mar 2024
    1. for - liberal blind spot - Chris Yates - book - liberalism and the challenge of climate change - adjacency - liberalism - individual liberty - progress - bond spot - political polarization - fuel for the right -hyperobjects

      Summary - This short article contains some key insights that point to the right climate communication strategy to target and win over the working class - Currently, climate communications speak to elitist values and is having the opposite effect - The working class farmer protests spreading across the EU is a symptom of this miscommunication strategy - as is the increasing support and ascendency of right wing political parties - Researcher and author Chris Yates is in a unique position with one foot in each world - He articulates his insightful ideas and points is in the right direction to communicate in a way that reaches the working class

      comment - the figure 4 graph is an example of carbon inequality

      Example - carbon inequality - see figure 4

  3. Dec 2023
    1. She is hopeful when she approaches a house with solar panels on the roof and an electric car in the driveway.
      • for: example - political polarization, example - trumpism, example - anti- vaxxers, example - conspiracy theories, nonduality - political polarization

      • example: political polarization

        • classic dualistic categories will always fail to capture the complexity
        • indyweb mindplex's could reveal the nuances
    1. what i would call a kind of epistemic fragmentation where where we're losing the ability as societies to have agreement on very basic facts and to the extent that we don't agree on 00:36:41 basic facts about the nature of the world and the nature of the challenges we face it's very hard to to solve those problems effectively democracy for instance can't effective effectively function 00:36:52 if if the people who are talking to each other don't actually agree on what the problems are
      • for: definition epistemic fragmentation, no agreement on basic facts, political polarization, adjacency - epistemic fragmentation - polarization - democracy

      • definition: epistemic fragmentation

        • when major parts of society disagree on basic facts
      • adjacency between
        • epistemic fragmentation
        • polarization
        • democracy
      • adjacency statement
        • democracy is critical to solving our challenges but it won't function if there is so much epistemic fragmentation that we can't agree on basic facts
    1. in some ways it may well be that this Century will be 00:16:19 a century characterized by the emotion of fear for many people and fear doesn't stay fear it often becomes anger and anger and fear are often exploited by 00:16:31 folks who uh use those emotions as a ways of as a as a way of building their political Authority to deepen divisions within their society to draw together their followers into sort of a fevered 00:16:45 pitch and uh and use and use the exploitation as political opportunists use the exploitation of fear and anger to build their Authority and Power
      • for: adjacency - polycrisis - fear - anger - political exploitation

      • adjacency between

        • polycrisis
        • fear
        • anger
        • political exploitation
        • polarization
        • authoritarianism
      • adjacency statement
        • In this polycrisis space, we witness fear leading to anger which is then exploited by political opportunists who then create polarization through authoritarian impulses that superficially quench the desires of the unheard angry citizens
    1. they have been swallowed up into uh you know the left part of the 00:52:30 the block that fights against the the rightwing block that's a necessary role that they're playing but the next Force needs to sit outside of that
      • for: left / right polarization - transcending

      • comment

        • What James is saying is that we must be wise enough to:
          • understand the attractors of each party so that
          • whole system change agents can navigate away from being coopted into the existing polarization
        • This requires a very strong and clear understanding of the direction whole system change requires and staying on course
        • It's very insightful to study how coopting occurs in real-life
    1. what you're referring to is the idea that people come together and through language culture and story they have narratives that then create their own realities like the 00:12:04 sociologist abely the sociologist wi Thomas said if people think people believe things to be real then they are real in their consequences
      • for: Thomas Theorem, The definition of the situation, William Isaac Thomas, Dorothy Swain Thomas, definition - Thomas Theorem, definition - definition of the situation, conflicting belief systems - Thomas theorem, learned something new - Thomas theorem

      • definition: Thomas Theorem

      • definition: definition of the situation
        • "The Thomas theorem is a theory of sociology which was formulated in 1928 by William Isaac Thomas and Dorothy Swaine Thomas:

      If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.[1]

      In other words, the interpretation of a situation causes the action. This interpretation is not objective. Actions are affected by subjective perceptions of situations. Whether there even is an objectively correct interpretation is not important for the purposes of helping guide individuals' behavior.|

  4. Nov 2023
      • for: epoche, epoche - interfaith applications, bracketing, applied epoche, Deep Humanity, DH, polycrisis, political polarization, religious polarization, epoche - research application

      • comment

        • I performed Google search for "Epoche and application to interfaith religion"
        • The reason is that I am exploring a hunch of the salience of applying epoche for deep interfaith understanding
        • political polarization constitutes an existential threat and is one important crisis in our current polycrisis
        • Unless we find ways to effectively and rapidly reduce polarization, the other crisis's such as climate crisis, biodiversity crisis and inequality crisis will likely not be resolved
        • religious polarization form ingroups / outgroups and is a major contributing factor to political polarization and violent conflict
        • hence it becomes important to understand how interfaith understanding can be enhanced
        • epoche appears to be one possible way to accelerate interfaith understanding
      • for: epoche, epoche - interfaith applications, Deep Humanity, DH, polycrisis, poltical polarization, religious polarization, hermenneutic, hermeneutical phenomenological method

      • summary

        • a very insightful paper
      • comment

        • I performed Google search for "Epoche and application to interfaith religion"
        • The reason is that I am exploring a hunch of the salience of applying epoche for deep interfaith understanding
        • political polarization constitutes an existential threat and is one important crisis in our current polycrisis
        • Unless we find ways to effectively and rapidly reduce polarization, the other crisis's such as climate crisis, biodiversity crisis and inequality crisis will likely not be resolved
        • religious polarization form ingroups / outgroups and is a major contributing factor to political polarization and violent conflict
        • hence it becomes important to understand how interfaith understanding can be enhanced
        • epoche appears to be one possible way to accelerate interfaith understanding
    1. On the Function of the Epoche inPhenomenological Interpretations of Religion
      • for: epoche, epoche - interfaith applications, Deep Humanity, DH, polycrisis, political polarization, religious polarization

      • comment

        • I performed Google search for "Epoche and application to interfaith religion"
        • The reason is that I am exploring a hunch of the salience of applying epoche for deep interfaith understanding
        • political polarization constitutes an existential threat and is one important crisis in our current polycrisis
        • Unless we find ways to effectively and rapidly reduce polarization, the other crisis's such as climate crisis, biodiversity crisis and inequality crisis will likely not be resolved
        • religious polarization form ingroups / outgroups and is a major contributing factor to political polarization and violent conflict
        • hence it becomes important to understand how interfaith understanding can be enhanced
        • epoche appears to be one possible way to accelerate interfaith understanding
  5. Oct 2023
    1. we have Dharma friends in Russia we have Dharma friends in Ukraine they're 00:01:20 in touch with each other the Dharma uh links these people even though their countries are at War um we also have Dharma friends in Israel 00:01:36 and okay there's some crossover here s
      • for: non-polarization, transcending differences during war
    1. They were so set in their categories that they couldn’t make a distinction between the Palestinian people and a genocidal cult that claimed to speak in that people’s name

      this.

  6. Sep 2023
    1. that's that is the Dirty Little Secret 00:12:08 of where we're at right now with Americans at each other's throats politically it's being created caused on purpose by the Chinese and the Russians who are manipulating people 00:12:22 through um use of phony websites and other disinformation campaigns being run which is a type of warfare that's being run 00:12:34 against the American people and they're falling for it
      • for: example, example - internet flaws, polarization, disinformation,, example - polarization, political interference - Russia, political interference - China
      • example: polarization, internet flaws
  7. Aug 2023
    1. The January 6th insurrection on Capitol Hill over one year ago, and the United States’ ongoing struggle to respond effectively to threats such as the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change, warn us of the dangers posed by unchecked polarization.
      • for: polarization, political polarization, conflict, water, violence, trump
      • Paraphrase
        • current example of polarization
          • The January 6th US insurrection on Capitol Hill
          • COVID-19 pandemic
          • climate change,
        • warn us of the dangers posed by unchecked polarization.
    1. Most Americans know that before becoming a politician Reaganwas an actor, but fewer are aware that Reagan’s flagging screencareer was revived by a job with the General Electric Corporation(GE). Reagan hosted the popular television show General ElectricTheater, where each week his voice and face reached into tens ofmillions of homes, promoting didactic stories of individualism andfree enterprise. At the same time, he traveled across the country onbehalf of GE—visiting factories, making speeches at schools, anddoing the dinner circuit in communities where GE had a presence—promoting the corporation’s stridently individualist antiunion andantigovernment vision.

      From a philosophical viewpoint, Reagan grew up in Dixon, Illinois a small town (surrounded by farmland) in North West-ish Illinois roughly on the border of the political borders of what Colin Woodard calls The Midlands and Greater Appalachia. He seems to have been a Midlander for the first half of his life, but obviously had an easy time moving to a more Greater Appalachia viewpoint when working for GE.

  8. Jul 2023
    1. at third act where we organize old people like me over the age 00:05:36 of 60. we're concentrating on democracy and on climate they seem uh they seem the twin crises that we face
      • for: polycrisis, dual crisis, climate change and political polarization

      • key insight

        • we have to deal with climate crisis AND political polarization simultaneously
        • unless we solve the political polarization problem, we will be stuck in policy gridlock
    1. there's really shocking data that shows red zip codes are getting red or redder and blue ones Bluer and Bluer
      • US political polarization at local level
        • there's really shocking data that shows
          • red zip codes are getting red or redder and
          • blue states are getting Bluer
        • people are self-selecting into communities based on their political beliefs
          • and this is the highest rate we've ever seen it since polling began in that space
        • The phenomenon is really hyper localized
  9. Apr 2023
    1. In Vice, Maggie Puniewska points to the moral foundations theory, according to which liberals and conservatives prioritize different ethics: the former compassion, fairness and liberty, the latter purity, loyalty and obedience to authority.
  10. Feb 2023
    1. i can use myself as an example here i i consider myself a pretty smart person i'm in grad school i tried to be really analytical my whole 00:03:56 life and yet i showed up at college when i was 19 years old believing that all the supposedly scientific stuff that white nationalists used to support the idea of race being predictive and segregation being 00:04:09 good and all this stupid stuff i totally believed i thought they were right and i thought everybody was just denying it and it took a community of people in college over years to condemn my beliefs to 00:04:22 show me uh kindness to show me real vitriol to be these in these private conversations where we could go over the facts and it took a long time for me thinking i was really smart and analytical to 00:04:35 accept that it was morally wrong that it was ethically wrong
      • comment
      • Derek Black is an example
      • of what it takes to undo deeply culturally conditioned misinformation
      • these variables have to be present for that to work
        • open mind
        • patience
        • accurate information
        • a caring, patient, informed community
      • Derek Black offers a lesson of what is required to depolarize society using social tipping points
      • there needs to be scalable education program to reach still open-minded individuals holding opposing views
      • to openly and respectfully debate difficult, polarizing issues
      • in order to form the wide bridges necessary for social tipping points of complex issues
  11. Dec 2022
    1. nalyze the content of 69,907 headlines pro-duced by four major global media corporations duringa minimum of eight consecutive months in 2014. In or-der to discover strategies that could be used to attractclicks, we extracted features from the text of the newsheadlines related to the sentiment polarity of the head-line. We discovered that the sentiment of the headline isstrongly related to the popularity of the news and alsowith the dynamics of the posted comments on that par-ticular news
    1. This new paper finds that people are less interested in reducing economic inequality through redistribution when they think about wealth disparities as hierarchies of individuals rather than of groups. This seems to be because, as the researchers put it, “people are more likely to believe that the wealth of individuals, rather than groups, at the top is well earned”.
    1. The psychology of hate: Moral concerns differentiate hate from dislike

      The effect of hate versus dislike on morality judgments (a) and moral emotions (b) in Study 2. Hated objects were rated as significantly more tied to core moral beliefs and moral emotions than disliked attitude objects.

      The effect of hate versus dislike on ratings of (a) negativity, (b) morality and (c) attitude strength in Study 3. Hated objects were rated as significantly more negative and were more associated with attitude strength than disliked objects but received similar ratings in negativity and attitude strength as extremely disliked objects. Hated objects were rated as more related to morality than extremely disliked attitude objects and disliked attitude objects.

      Results

      Consistent with our three laboratory studies, this analysis of real-world hate groups lent further support to the morality hypothesis. The language of hate groups was different, in the moral domain, from that of complain forums. These results reflect real, uncensored language used by groups and individuals known to espouse hate or dislike, and often known to take significant actions in support of these attitudes. Importantly, the expressions of these groups and individuals are less likely to involve their own lay theories about hate or dislike—but rather their public positions on these issues. There are, admittedly, several differences between hate websites and complaint forums and these data should be treated as preliminary. But taken together with the carefully controlled lab experiments, this overall pattern of findings suggests that morality helps differentiate expressions of hate from expressions of dislike.

    1. I don't know how this will look like. What I do think is it will come to cultural identity. What is the cultural identity? And that's what we will all gravitate to, and we'll gravitate.

      !- future global fragmentation : by culture - Michaux believes people will fragment in the future along cultural boundaries as we move through tumultuous transition. This makes sense as ingroups will naturally form - this should be further explored to explore implications: - will we get political polarization? At what level? National, regional, city / community scale? - what implications will this have on cooperation and sharing? will it create policy gridlock? Will it become even more urgent to educate everyone on a Deep Humanity type of open praxis that finds common human denominators (CHD)?

  12. Aug 2022
  13. Jul 2022
    1. as members of society, we tend to identify with one or another “immortality system” (as Becker calls it). That is, we identify with a religious group, or a political group, or engage in some kind of cultural activity, or adopt a certain culturally sanctioned viewpoint, that we invest with ultimate meaning, and to which we ascribe absolute and permanent truth. This inflates us with a sense of invulnerable righteousness. And then, we have to protect ourselves against the exposure of our absolute truth being just one more mortality-denying system among others, which we can only do by insisting that all other absolute truths are false. So we attack and degrade–preferably kill–the adherents of different mortality- denying-absolute-truth systems. So the Protestants kill the Catholics; the Muslims vilify the Christians and vice versa; upholders of the American way of life denounce Communists; the Communist Khmer Rouge slaughters all the intellectuals in Cambodia; the Spanish Inquisition tortures heretics; and all good students of the Enlightenment demonize religion as the source of all evil. The list could go on and on.

      Once we give ourselves over absolutely to a cultural immortality belief system, that is when our complete identification can emerge a self-righteousness so powerful that any other mortality-denying system that claims to be the truth and therefore threatens ours, must be eliminated.

  14. Jun 2022
    1. in the book i 00:14:51 tried to stay away from politics mainly because what i found was if you don't understand the concept of collective illusion if your first introduction to it is something very polarizing that issue tends to just be the all the thing you 00:15:04 can think about right so it's like you want your head around the actual concept but what's interesting from the political standpoint is not surprisingly our national politics are driving a lot of these illusions and it's happening on 00:15:17 both sides um but it's it's really leading to both both seeing the other side as very extreme when it's not really true but most importantly and even more damaging 00:15:30 we're seeing within any one political party the misunderstanding of our own party

      Introducing the concept of collective illusion within highly polarized context tends to reduce its conceptual understanding. The political impact of collective illusions is that it is a self-reinforcing feedback loop that drives further entrenchment, misunderstanding of one's own ingroup as well as the outgroup.

  15. May 2022
    1. What did Franklin himself think about abortions? In 1728 during his early years as a printer, he generated controversy over something he would end up doing himself. According to “Benjamin Franklin: An American Life” by Walter Isaacson, he “manufactured” an abortion debate, largely because he wanted to crush a rival, but his own opinions may not have been too strong about it. Franklin wrote a series of anonymous letters for another paper to draw attention away from Samuel Keimer’s paper: The first two pieces were attacks on poor Keimer, who was serializing entries from an encyclopedia. His initial installment included, innocently enough, an entry on abortion. Franklin pounced. Using the pen names “Martha Careful” and “Celia Shortface,” he wrote letters to Bradford’s paper feigning shock and indignation at Keimer’s offense. As Miss Careful threatened, “If he proceeds farther to expose the secrets of our sex in that audacious manner [women would] run the hazard of taking him by the beard in the next place we meet him.” Thus Franklin manufactured the first recorded abortion debate in America, not because he had any strong feelings on the issue, but because he knew it would help sell newspapers.

      Benjamin Franklin manufactured the first recorded abortion debate in America to help sell his newspapers and to crush a rival.

  16. Mar 2022
    1. Posting a new algorithm, poem, or video on the web makes it a vailable, but unless appropriate recipients notice it, the originator has little chance to influence them.

      An early statement of the problem of distribution which has been widely solved by many social media algorithmic feeds. Sadly pushing ideas to people interested in them (or not) doesn't seem to have improved humanity. Perhaps too much of the problem space with respect to the idea of "influence" has been devoted to marketing and commerce or to fringe misinformation spaces? How might we create more value to the "middle" of the populace while minimizing misinformation and polarization?

    1. This is a moment that we should seize, in all seriousness, in order to take on the two huge existential plagues that face us this morning: the climate crisis, outlined in this new IPCC report, and the fact that we have a madman with nuclear weapons who’s used the revenues from oil and gas to intimidate and terrify the entire world.

      This is the critical observation - everything is interconnected. It is a nexus of problems that requires that we deal with all dimensions of the problem simultaneously.

      Putin is the nexus of so much that is wrong with the world. He is like an octopus that has its arms in multiple crisis of the planet.

      The political polarization of the US, the ascendancy of the puppet government of Trump and the blatant cognitive dissonance of the extreme right who are impervious to facts is reminiscent of the propaganda imposed upon the Russian people themselves for one reason - it was part of Putin's master plan: https://youtu.be/FxgBuhMBXSA The US population has been split by Putin's information warfare system, the same one he uses on the Russian population.

      The fake news programmed by Russian propaganda about the Ukraine war has worked effectively to mislead the Russian populus: https://youtu.be/kELta9MLOzg The same pattern of psychological manipulation has also had the same impact in the belief system of the typical hardcore Trumpist.

  17. Feb 2022
    1. Polarization, in Physics, is defined as a phenomenon caused due to the wave nature of electromagnetic radiation. Sunlight travels through the vacuum to reach the Earth, which is an example of an electromagnetic wave. These waves are called electromagnetic waves because they form when an electric field that interacts with a magnetic field.

      Polarization

  18. Jan 2022
    1. ReconfigBehSci. (2022, January 9). Just a thought on this and the general vaccine mandate debate. As a behavioural scientist currently stuck in Germany where this is a live debate, it strikes me that the thoughts below address only part of the population: Those not currently vaccinated. But what about ... 1/2 [Tweet]. @SciBeh. https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1480213148032450565

  19. Dec 2021
    1. Timothy Caulfield. (2021, December 30). #RobertMalone suspended by #twitter today. Reaction: 1) Great news. He has been spreading harmful #misinformation. (He has NOT contributed to meaningful/constructive scientific debate. His views demonstrably wrong & polarizing.) 2) What took so long? #ScienceUpFirst [Tweet]. @CaulfieldTim. https://twitter.com/CaulfieldTim/status/1476346919890796545

  20. Nov 2021
    1. But what gives anyone the conviction that such a measure is necessary? Or that “keeping students safe” means you must violate due process? It is not the law. Nor, strictly speaking, is it politics. Although some have tried to link this social transformation to President Joe Biden or House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, anyone who tries to shoehorn these stories into a right-left political framework has to explain why so few of the victims of this shift can be described as “right wing” or conservative. According to one recent poll, 62 percent of Americans, including a majority of self-described moderates and liberals, are afraid to speak their mind about politics. All of those I spoke with are centrist or center-left liberals. Some have unconventional political views, but some have no strong views at all.

      Is cancel culture a right/left political issue? Some have indicated that it is though Anne Applebaum shows that the victims don't show such bias.

      This is worth exploring in more depth to untangle the justice needed from the political debate cesspool and political polarization which seems to be occurring in America.

  21. Oct 2021
    1. For a talk at one conservative Christian college, Dr. Hayhoe – an atmospheric scientist, professor of political science at Texas Tech University, and the chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy – decided to emphasize how caring about climate change is in line with Christian values and, ultimately, is “pro-life” in the fullest sense of that word. Afterward, she says, people “were able to listen, acknowledge it, and think about approaching [climate change] a little differently.”

      We often talk about the same things, share the same values, have the same common human denominators, but couched in different language. It is critical to get to the root of what we have in common in order to establish meaningful dialogue.

  22. Sep 2021
  23. Jul 2021
    1. One of the reasons for this situation is that the very media we have mentioned are so designed as to make thinking seem unnecessary (though this is only an appearance). The packag­ing of intellectual positions and views is one of the most active enterprises of some of the best minds of our day. The viewer of television, the listener to radio, the reader of magazines, is presented with a whole complex of elements-all the way from ingenious rhetoric to carefully selected data and statistics-to make it easy for him to "make up his own mind" with the mini­mum of difficulty and effort. But the packaging is often done so effectively that the viewer, listener, or reader does not make up his own mind at all. Instead, he inserts a packaged opinion into his mind, somewhat like inserting a cassette into a cassette player. He then pushes a button and "plays back" the opinion whenever it seems appropriate to do so. He has performed ac­ceptably without having had to think.

      This is an incredibly important fact. It's gone even further with additional advances in advertising and social media not to mention the slow drip mental programming provided by algorithmic feeds which tend to polarize their readers.

      People simply aren't actively reading their content, comparing, contrasting, or even fact checking it.

      I suspect that this book could use an additional overhaul to cover many of these aspects.

  24. May 2021
  25. Mar 2021
    1. In 2017, Chris Cox, Facebook’s longtime chief product officer, formed a new task force to understand whether maximizing user engagement on Facebook was contributing to political polarization. It found that there was indeed a correlation, and that reducing polarization would mean taking a hit on engagement. In a mid-2018 document reviewed by the Journal, the task force proposed several potential fixes, such as tweaking the recommendation algorithms to suggest a more diverse range of groups for people to join. But it acknowledged that some of the ideas were “antigrowth.” Most of the proposals didn’t move forward, and the task force disbanded. Since then, other employees have corroborated these findings. A former Facebook AI researcher who joined in 2018 says he and his team conducted “study after study” confirming the same basic idea: models that maximize engagement increase polarization. They could easily track how strongly users agreed or disagreed on different issues, what content they liked to engage with, and how their stances changed as a result. Regardless of the issue, the models learned to feed users increasingly extreme viewpoints. “Over time they measurably become more polarized,” he says.
    1. The lone Black delegate to the convention, Isaiah Montgomery, participated in openly suppressing the voting eligibility of most of those Black men, in the hope that this would reduce the terror, intimidation and hostility that white supremacists aimed at Black people.

      This is interesting because Montgomery essentially sacrificed a part of his community and his heritage in the name of peace and compromise without being certain of the results. This makes me consider the present day political climate, particular, the way that neither side is willing to make concessions (especially the people power).

  26. Feb 2021
    1. This is just one study, of course, and these are complicated social realities. I think it is fair to say that our pundits and social critics can no longer make the easy assumption that the web and the blogosphere are echo-chamber amplifiers. But whether or not this study proves to be accurate, one thing is certain. The force that enables these unlikely encounters between people of different persuasions, the force that makes the web a space of serendipity and discovery, is precisely the open, combinatorial, connective nature of the medium. So when we choose to take our text out of that medium, when we keep our words from being copied, linked, indexed, that’s a choice with real civic consequences that are not to be taken lightly.

      These words certainly didn't take into account the focusing factor that social media algorithms based on surveillance capitalism and attention seeking clicks and engagement would inflict in the coming decade.

  27. Jan 2021
  28. Dec 2020
    1. KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation) @KFF (2020) RT @KFF @DrewAltman discusses two fundamental policy decisions made by the Trump administration that set the U.S. on the controversial an…

  29. Nov 2020
    1. Our advice to the press: Don’t seek professional safety through the even-handed, unfiltered presentation of opposing views. Which politician is telling the truth? Who is taking hostages, at what risks and to what ends?
    2. political scientists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal, who have long tracked historical trends in political polarization, said their studies of congressional votes found that Republicans are now more conservative than they have been in more than a century. Their data show a dramatic uptick in polarization, mostly caused by the sharp rightward move of the GOP.
    3. And Mike Lofgren, a veteran Republican congressional staffer, wrote an anguished diatribe last year about why he was ending his career on the Hill after nearly three decades. “The Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe,” he wrote on the Truthout Web site.

      An interesting example with some inflamatory rhetoric, but coupled with his resignation which is all he has left...

  30. Oct 2020
  31. Sep 2020
  32. Aug 2020
  33. Jul 2020
  34. Jun 2020
  35. May 2020
  36. Mar 2020
    1. Political Polarization

      And important: the role media plays in political polarization. On this topic, I've found works from the Pew useful, like "U.S. Media Polarization and the 2020 Election: A Nation Divided":

      "As the U.S. enters a heated 2020 presidential election year, a new Pew Research Center report finds that Republicans and Democrats place their trust in two nearly inverse news media environments."

      Also useful are works from Data & Society like "Media, Technology, Politics: six new pieces on the networked public sphere"

      "Although many people are anxious to understand how much influence old and new media had over the US presidential election, the reality is that we will never know comprehensively. We can, though, seek to understand how different cultural and technical factors are shaping the contemporary information landscape."

  37. Oct 2019
    1. Liberal and Conservative Representations of the Good Society: A (Social) Structural Topic Modeling Approach

      I chose this article, because it is timely, relevant, easy-to-follow (because it is intuitive), and innovative (using data sources, Twitter, and an innovative method, textual analysis). I hope you enjoy the reading. Please follow my annotations (comments + questions) and respond to the questions I pose. Try to answer them in your own words.

  38. Sep 2018
    1. “The ether is a public medium,” he insisted, “and its use must be for the public benefit.”

      The deregulation of the 90s, consolidating ownership, had consequences. unintended and unanticipated or not.

  39. Feb 2017
    1. Donald Trump’s obvious affection for authoritarians is prompting worried comparisons of our polarized country to the polarized Germany of the 1920s and ’30s. Since I’m known to see in polarization both crisis and opportunity, my friends are asking me these days about Hitler, the worst-case scenario.

      Polarization Can Be Good

  40. Dec 2016
    1. That evidence shows that partisans who score highest on a standard measure of AOT are in fact the most polarized on the reality of human-caused climate change.
  41. Nov 2016
    1. Best piece I’ve seen on last week’s announcements.

      Gruber had linked to Michael Tsai’s roundup of the backlash, calling it “must-read stuff”. In this case, though, Gruber is “throwing his hat in the ring”. And the ring now feels like the site of a burgeoning flamewar. Issue is, here, that the “war” is happening about people who actually enjoy Apple’s products. This isn’t the “religious wars” between Macs and PCs or between Fandroids and Apple fanbois. It’s a whole argument between people who have been purchasing Apple computers and wanted updated ones. A well-known lesson from social psychology is that group polarization deepens divides by encouraging extreme positions. Chuq Von Rospach’s piece contains several comments which could be qualified as “extreme”. And it puts the blame on those who disagree. There are similar pieces on the other side of the equation, surely. Tsai’s roundup should make it possible to identify them. But Gruber has yet to link to them (apart from arguing about specific points like Tim Cook’s quote on the irrelevance of “PCs” and trying to set the record straight on Apple and Intel sharing responsibility for the 16GB limits on new top-of-the-line MacBook Pro desktop replacements).

      As an example of the effect of group polarization: my own perspective is that disappointment is real. Wasn’t impressed by what transpired from last week’s announcement. Feeling a bit more excited about the Microsoft Surface Studio than about the Touch Bar, but will likely not buy either any time soon. Because polarization forces me to take sides, my vote would go for the “there’s a serious problem, here”. Not saying Apple is doomed or that each of the problems discussed is a tragedy. But, to me, what is being thrown around sounds quite reasonable, not “trivial and petty”. Can’t be on Von Rospach’s side if that’s where the line is drawn. “You’re either with us or against us.” If you force me to choose, well, bye bye!