Where does the culture war come from?

[padraig (u.s.)]

Its populism basically, like politics played for fun rather than governance

replace "for fun" with "to win"

specifically meaning to win as an end unto itself, rather than because you're interested in governing well

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

first time I heard culture wars was when newt Gingrich was speaker of the house, late 90s.

Pat Buchanan infamously gave a speech on it at 92 RNC

basically all the greatest hits - abortion, gay people, etc - besides trans rights bc ofc trans visibility was nonexistent at the time

 

[shakahislop]

i've got no idea if other people have experienced this and i don't totally trust my own memory. and maybe its just how its always been and i'm just getting older. but for i don't know the last seven years or something i've found more and more points of tension in real life conversations. i feel like all the time people have these strong opinions on stuff and it feels like a minefield. last night i was talking to a girl in a dive bar and she was talking about drag shows, i could guess her perspective on it dead on from what she looked like, it felt like i was on trial, or at least, it felt like i had to be careful with exactly what i said and what the right words and vocabulary would be to avoid suddenly some kind of minor point of conversational tension.

then about five minutes later my a bit right-wing bosnian mate pops up on some anti-feminist talking point, something about how girls can be bad people too or something, a mundane observation but it slotted into an anti-feminist discourse for sure.

 

[wild greens]

It's interesting to compare the trajectories of the recent trans hate in UK and US,
It has been made an issue in UK for the last 3 or so years, radfems getting beaten at speakers corner, jkr Running off her mouth about it,
Seems in US that it's more connected to party politics?

A couple of people i know via work and a relative or two get a lot of their viewpoints directly from the mail and facebook and this is a fucking hot topic right now for whatever reason

Any old random story about negative trans activity gets amplified massively. Very odd

Think that's definitely the phrase tbh "it has been made an issue"

 

[sufi]

replace "for fun" with "to win"

specifically meaning to win as an end unto itself, rather than because you're interested in governing well

Yeah but there are other ways to win, CW populism uses media driven moral panics, instead of say, old school style crony tribal democracy

 

[shakahislop]

in 2015 i worked with an australian bellend, who had previously worked for the scottish conservative party, who out of nowhere in the car started talking about how trans people don't exist, men are men and women are women, and i thought: what the fuck are you on about. what does this mean to you. why are you talking about this.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

the GOP has this kind of bizarre post-WWII trajectory

McCarthyism (100% concocted to get back into WH after 20 years out of power) followed by decades of people like William F. Buckley trying to make GOP "respectable" i.e. kicking out segregationists and John Birch Society types, then the unholy alliance of Reagan with the Moral Majority et al as well as Grover Norquist-style small govt fanaticism (the political heirs to Barry Goldwater), and finally the long turn to populism beginning with Gingrich and the general descent thru GW/Cheney to Trump to wherever the fuck it is now

 

[Mr. Tea]

There is a lot of disinformation about that is effectively using the same avenues


Who invents this and how does it spread

I think it's mainly @luka, on both counts.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

Yeah but there are other ways to win, CW populism uses media driven moral panics, instead of say, old school style crony tribal democracy

tribal democracy only works if you have the numbers

I strongly believe that right-wing strategists recognized long ago that they were demographically fucked, and what that meant

it was probably obvious pretty far back to anyone paying attention

you have a country that is getting more racially diverse, less religious overall, and less Christian specifically

those are your tribal factors

and if you don't have tribalism, you have to sell your actual policies

which are what? more tax cuts for billionaires? very difficult to get working-class White people worked up about that.

traditionally what you get them worked up about is race. "your children will have to go to school with Black children" etc.

they tried gay people, but it turns out Americans by and large don't care enough about that to make it a primary dog whistle.

gender identity is newer, more challenging, etc so it's a better dog whistle.

and while you're at it you can still try all the old classics ("critical race theory") because why not.

 

[shakahislop]

I'll venture something actually, which to say that regardless of the exact mechanics of who's pulling the strings, one thing that is going on en masse is the generation of a thousand new subjectivities by the internet. it's one of the main purposes of the machine. which I don't think was obvious even ten years ago.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

I'll venture something actually, which to say that regardless of the exact mechanics of who's pulling the strings, one thing that is going on en masse is the generation of a thousand new subjectivities by the internet. it's one of the main purposes of the machine. which I don't think was obvious even ten years ago.

what I think surprised most people is that having access to more information has made people less well informed

there's a line in In the Loop where the Rumsfeld analogue says "in the land of truth, the man with one fact is king"

I might rephrase it as "in the land of post-truth, the person with one truth is king"

facts are irrelevant in the face of a belief

 

[wild greens]

I think with the proliferation of these AI language models it's probably quite likely that your manipulation tools are getting a lot more advanced very quickly as well

The bots used to be really obvious but it will be much more of a grey area moving forward

 

[shakahislop]

I think with the proliferation of these AI language models it's probably quite likely that your manipulation tools are getting a lot more advanced very quickly as well

The bots used to be really obvious but it will be much more of a grey area moving forward

Yeah right. The other thing that's going on very quickly I think is that people are becoming aware of how they're being manipulated online. It's a dynamic, and one side of it is that the targets figure out what's going on.

One thing that's for sure is that in ten years the internet is going to be totally different. The current situation is very contingent I think. An early stage in the development of the people-smartphone machine

 

[sufi]

what I think surprised most people is that having access to more information has made people less well informed

there's a line in In the Loop where the Rumsfeld analogue says "in the land of truth, the man with one fact is king"

I might rephrase it as "in the land of post-truth, the person with one truth is king"

facts are irrelevant in the face of a belief

The triumph of the factoid!

 

[shakahislop]

what I think surprised most people is that having access to more information has made people less well informed

there's a line in In the Loop where the Rumsfeld analogue says "in the land of truth, the man with one fact is king"

I might rephrase it as "in the land of post-truth, the person with one truth is king"

facts are irrelevant in the face of a belief

so many of the western / anglo assumptions of the 90s and 00s seem so incredibly naive

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

facts are irrelevant in the face of a belief

idk how often yall talk to people irl with seriously different beliefs than yours

I do it pretty often. mainly in the gym, actually. evangelicals, right-wing meatheads, COVID skeptics, what have you.

you're always better off focusing on the underlying belief system rather than individual facts

you're a lot more likely to find common ground somewhere and then you can build out from there

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

I think with the proliferation of these AI language models it's probably quite likely that your manipulation tools are getting a lot more advanced very quickly as well

The bots used to be really obvious but it will be much more of a grey area moving forward

I definitely don't know enough to speculate about what this actually means or how it will make the Internet and consequently human communication look, but I've seen a few things about how previous AI language models have now infested the Internet with their answers, so that any future model will be in part trained by previous AIs ("AI" as it's currently used meaning webscraper plus some powerful algorithms) amplifying the problem of AI misinformation. it's a Pandora's Box situation, we can never go back to a pre-AI internet.

 

[DLaurent]

It all comes from the top. Speak to a lot of people and they think it's down to snowflakes getting their way. It's ok to think about things as long as you follow the agenda.

 

[version]

I think the right are focused on trans people because they lost on gay marriage. They're the logical target after losing the previous battle.

 

[sufi]

I read something recently about storification, how everything these days needs its little narrative, strapline, elevator pitch, mission and vision staement, backstory, lore...

And stories sound nice but they are different from facts,
But obvs neat stories fit our current info-spaces better than dry facts,
Journalism and social media need to be able to present context free factoids, digestible but subjective