How Trolls Overran the Public Square

Re:How Trolls Overran the Public Square by Avicebron on Tuesday December 10, 2019 @12:03AM (#21749746)

This is a a circular argument and somewhat disingenuous. You presuppose that liberal values emerge from a "denser network", which at surface level seems fine. Except definitionally I argue that pluralism itself doesn't work without defined in groups and out groups (denoting the plurality of the group). This is inherently "anti-liberal" in the sense that it requires continued in group and out group hostility to maintain the segmentation.

Looking into history at say, early Iberia, the plurality was maintained by intense violence between muslim and christian populations living in proximity to each other. In order to maintain this plurality the in group had to drastically enforce conformity while in combat with the out group to maintain topological cohesion.

To diagnose the social problems rising in the country as "network damage" is almost calling people who disagree with what I imagine is your stance as mentally ill. That is a dangerous road to move down and I would advise you to reconsider or at least allow for the nuance that potentially this isn't just about identifying characteristics of a population feeling threatened by another group.

But rather this could a manifestation of a very real feeling of insecurity that is not caused by lets just say it, racial tensions, and perhaps more of an economic anxiety bent. If Maslow isn't getting his due, then the real conversation is how can people move to middle ground feel more unified by shared prosperity.

Othering people based on a diagnosis of "not enough different people they talked to" adds to the problem instead of addresses it.

Be very skeptical due to my lack of citing sources, but I share the above in earnest with this comment left in haste <3

EDIT: Clarity

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Re:How Trolls Overran the Public Square by patcon on Tuesday December 10, 2019 @01:12AM (#21750098)

Sorry, didn't mean to imply one side as mentally ill. I'll walk it back a bit: If there's an illness, both poles have responsibility. And maybe only ill in the sense that they will break the whole together. Due to historic districting and balance of power in the USA at least, the illness on the right seems to be "winning" in the political arena there. But it'd be a comparable powderkeg if the far left got their people in without laying a foundation for consensus-building. The conservative right doesn't have as much culture of consensus-building in its DNA imho, so it's hard to look to them for any hope of resolution to the crisis of social distance.

Bah, sorry, this is like a "drinks in bar" level of uff-the-cuff conversation on my part. Your reply was wonderful though :)

> Othering people based on a diagnosis of "not enough different people they talked to" adds to the problem instead of addresses it.

Fwiw, there's a really rad Santa Fe Institute podcast that addresses that very thing, which I'm listening to right now. tl;dr - we're all terribly biased but mostly just about people we DON'T have connection to, while we're FANTASTICALLY great integrators and estimators of even small nuances in the social fabrics that we're directly in conversation with. https://complexity.simplecast.com/episodes/9-U7UI7GsP

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Re:How Trolls Overran the Public Square by Avicebron on Tuesday December 10, 2019 @01:56AM (#21750298)

Sometimes "drinks in a bar" level conversation can be the most rewarding. Let me know if you want to get a drink and talk about it.

I'll cede that both poles have responsibility and that the conservative right have unified themselves mostly on a shared set of identities with little room for consensus, this is a problem.

But I think we need to remove ourselves from totally binary thinking (he says as a he programs all the time) and separate some concepts like neo liberal financial models from liberal social principles as I bet we would agree on the social and disagree on the financial. I'm assuming a lot so please correct me where I'm wrong. Reactionary populism is very often correlated to what are perceived to be unfair economic policy (see "reparation" payments of post world war 1 germany to france...ended tragically in 1945).

Dismissing the "conservatives" as on unified entity despite their strong coalition of identity misrepresents the problem as I see it.

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Re:How Trolls Overran the Public Square by patcon on Thursday December 12, 2019 @08:59PM (#21778509)

Don't suppose you're in Toronto? :)

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