Reminds me of this quote: "The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way." -They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45[0]
[0] https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.htm
Reminds me of the Ukraine war. The original intent was clearly a very short intense “operation” and then a quick annexation. Nobody planned to grind hundreds of thousands of bodies through a war machine, but “here we are” and now everyone is “forced” to go through the motions.
I find the right goes into rage machines and sees their way of life changing and double down on keeping things the way they have been.
I find the left goes into anger machines and ends up suggesting overzealous steps for necessary changes that take many people aback.
But that’s not new. What’s not new is that now we have social media and mainstream media that wants to fan the flames by giving voices to the most extreme.
They aren't obstructing Congress. That has been ongoing since 1994 when rational negotiation by civic minded leaders was replaced with hostage taking to suit an ideology without regard for public benefit.
One only needs to observe societies response to Covid to see how “left leaning folks get swept up into rage machines”. People were cheering on cars getting towed from popular hiking spots, skate parks getting filled with sand, crazy people “protesting” beachgoers, etc. if you dared to suggest schools should open you were a grandma killing MAGA hat wearing pariah. Don’t forget the level of censorship, vaccine passes, wishing death upon those who didn’t get vaccinated, etc.
No sir, people of all tribes are fully capable of getting swept into rage machines. At the end of the day we are animals operating on animal instinct. No tribe gets to claim otherwise.
And the internet hijacks our brains so effectively; since it became ubiquitous, it is almost impossible for regular users to see how they are being conditioned.
I mean, some people reacted how you describe, but the vast majority did not regardless of political leanings. Are you going to pretend that was the dominant reaction among left-leaning people just so you can be mad about it?
There were indeed surveys showing that a fascist stance (like throwing unvaccinated into camps or taking their children) was, indeed, dominant (60% and more support) among American "democrats". So much for your "vast majority".
I wasn't suggesting an equivalence, just that the phenomena of the rage machine exists on both sides.
As an exercise, try coming up with some metric to measure it. Could be inflammatory posts, or the comment count on inflammatory posts. Compare BB BBS with some rough equivalent right-leaning place. You'll find it's worse in the right-leaning forum, no doubt.
But the phenomena exists on both sides of the political spectrum.
Many trends among one side of the political spectrum are mirrored to a lesser extent on the other side as well, and that's interesting don't you think?
I don’t find it that interesting because it’s obviously a consequence of our information environment. We have constructed algorithmic outrage machines and deferred thought and curation to them.
It’s far more interesting to me how one side of the political spectrum was so totally swallowed by this system, to the extent that literally every single news story is received with outlandish conspiracy theorizing from rather mainstream right wing media.
The null hypothesis is that actually both sides should be equally distorted, but it is very obviously the case they are not. That is what deserves inquiry.
It not obvious and also doesn't seem true at all. Still one may continue to investigate with this assumption but then result will neither be truth or much useful.
Yeah, it really is obvious. Here's one excellent example: the dominant right wing media apparatus knowingly engaging in a conspiratorial lie that fetched them a $787 million punishment.
It seems to me there's plenty of conspiratorial thinking on the left. The rhetoric around Project 2025 comes to mind as a recent example. Same with rhetoric around for-profit prisons (e.g., I see lots of people saying our criminal justice system is primarily profit driven).
If I had to guess, I'd say such thinking is more widespread on the right, but I find it very difficult to see these sort of things clearly since I'm generally left-leaning in my politics.
Which rhetoric around Project 2025 specifically? Everything I saw claimed to be in it is actually in it, and Trump’s distance from it was complete bullshit.
I haven’t heard anyone say our justice system is primarily profit-driven, and certainly haven’t heard any notable mainstreamers taking that position. One could argue lefties overplay the significance/effects of commercial incentives, but I also think it’s defensible to say there should be (to the extent possible) no commercial incentives in incarceration whatsoever.
“Project 2025 is more than an idea, it's a dystopian plot that’s already in motion to dismantle our democratic institutions, abolish checks and balances, chip away at church-state separation, and impose a far-right agenda that infringes on basic liberties and violates public will. This is an unprecedented embrace of extremism, fascism, and religious nationalism, orchestrated by the radical right and its dark money backers. We need a coordinated strategy to save America and stop this coup before it’s too late."
Here's one example on prisons from a quick Kagi search:
"Currently, many think that the goals of [American Prison System] APS are to rehabilitate inmates and help them function properly in the real world. However, the APS’s high recidivism rate and methods of revenue creation support the conclusion that increasing the prison population may be the real goal of the APS."
"Daniel Hatcher used to work as an attorney for Maryland Legal Aid. He says he's seen American courts turn into a system that's more interested in profits than justice.
'California is pursuing billions in fines and fees, and Alabama, multiple prosecutors' offices in Alabama generate 70% of their total funding solely by the pursuit of these court ordered fines and fees against the poor,' Daniel Hatcher says.
Hatcher says that when profit becomes the point, families become targets of the very justice system that is meant to protect."
The suggestion that profit is "the point" of California's criminal fines and fees seems absolutely wild to me.
Ah, the notable figurehead Daniel Hatcher, who used to work as an attorney in Maryland, I suppose.
> I haven’t heard anyone say our justice system is primarily profit-driven, and certainly haven’t heard any notable mainstreamers taking that position.
I suppose you can find someone to say any ol' opinion on the vast Internet. I'll consider clause 1 to be disproven and clause 2 to stand.
I'd consider someone saying profit is the "point" to mean it is primarily profit driven. You asked for an example and I provided one. It's pretty clear your mind is made up, so best of luck to you.
Did you read the comment? I said yes, you've demonstrated that a person has expressed that sentiment. I said "no notable mainstreamer" has, and your example doesn't refute that. No one knows who this guy is!
You seem to have dodged the larger point that right wing rage is a mainstream phenomenon and a dominant force across television, radio, podcasts and social media, whereas comparably hateful and violent language on the left is mostly only in the margins.
The only divide is pushed from the corporate media who desperately wants 1. this to be a left/right issue and 2. for everyone to stfu because United spends billions of dollars advertising on said media's platforms.
Luigi's selfless act of heroism on the behalf of the American middle and lower classes should be treated as such.
You'll find that United Fraudcare doesn't discriminate on left/right when it comes to denying care to those who need it most. The same can be said for the victims of United denying them services that they paid handsomely for over the course of several years.
But it is a left/right issue : this obviously wouldn't have happened in a socialist country. (You would still have had issues with higher status people sometimes getting much better healthcare of course.)
The problem here is that people confuse left/right with Democrat/Republican and seem to think that Trump is on the right just because he used the Republican party : he is no more on the right than the Nazis, who deployed both left leaning and right leaning policies when those suited them.
BoingBoing is still very much made in Doctorow's image. Michael Moore is an earlier example.
Not suggesting equivalence, in fact I would be really interested to hear theories as to why right-wing polemicists are so much more popular (and numerous) than left-wing polemicists. On the face of it, there are a lot of left-wing things to be justifiably outraged about (especially right now). So why isn't left-wing outrage reliably bankable?
I don't think it's a pattern tied to the zeitgeist, because you see it in talk radio too, which predates social media's Skinner box algorithms by decades.
Side-question: why are there more left-wing political comedians than right-wing ones?
I think most Americans don't want to be morally lectured. Today's far-left is most similar to the religious right of decades ago. Outside their fervent base, everyone else is annoyed by them.
This is a just-so rationalization, which feels good, but people have looked into many of these, and they don't really hold up.
The most common one is that poor white people are overwhelmingly voting for Trump. The average household income of a Trump voter is something like 75k - hardly poor (depending where you're at).
Anecdata: I know plenty of Trump voters who are very smart. A friend's dad has multiple PhD's and accomplished career as a theoretical physicist. He's also pretty racist. My father is a retired engineer, and doesn't like Trump, but keeps voting for him, because the Democrats are on the wrong side of issues he cares about. (Gun control, namely)
The reality is likely to be - they have used the mountains of publicly available data, and fine tuned their messages with the help of a highly partisan rage-baiting media ecosystem to capture more voters. It seems to me, the right wing is more organized, and manages to keep their voters and party members more aligned and on-message. They also have a much more voracious appetite for fighting dirty (rough talk, conspiracy theories, whisper campaigns, untraceable mailers giving wrong polling place info to black communities, etc.) - something the Democrats do not have the stomach for.
This explains election results (agreed) but I'm more curious why outrage-generators and conspiracists seem to have culturally taken a stronger hold on the right over the course of decades.
I would tentatively suggest that it because the right lost the broader cultural "wars".
Our story-telling media is, if not actually "leftish", generally progressive in the broadest sense of that term. Struggles over gay marriage, contraception, divorce, interracial marriage, civil rights were all, as of 2010 or so, pretty much wrapped up in ways that broadly speaking reflected a progressive win.
So for quite a few decades, the conservative right have been "forced" into their own little culture bubble where you can still ask if a white person and black person should be able to marry, whether contraception violates the will of god, where evil is punished and not "understood", poverty reflects personal failure and moral flaws rather than systemic issues and so on and so forth.
That creates a strange distortion (ask any group that has been an outlier to the mainstream culture they live within), and in this particular case this has manifested as both endless outrage and conspiracy-mongering.
Of course, meanwhile, the same conservative right have won on most economic issues. Union membership and power are down, taxes on the wealthy are down, all attempts at socializing health care have been rebuffed, industries were successfully deregulated, capital gains taxes are low, the share of GDP flowing to labor is down, estate taxes barely exist, defense spending is way up, and more recently Roe has been overturned.
So there's this strange contradiction in which progressive ideas have come to dominate the cultural sphere (though this may be changing) while conservative ideas have been the most successful in the economic and political sphere. Progressives often don't recognize the success they've had, and the failure side just looks like more of the same. Conservatives, on the other hand, need to downplay their successes (because these things are actually not broadly popular) and are left facing their "losses" in the cultural sphere, which can no doubt (Dobbs not withstanding) seem pretty overwhelming.
I'll nitpick terminology here, taking a larger view : has the Chicago school brand of economics been around long enough now to be considered "conservative" now ?
And its rightward momentum seems to be much more liberal to me, considering how often it's about removing regulations...
The Chicago school was always "conservative" inasmuch its ideas, whether intending to or not, in practice produce results that maintain existing power relationships and economic distributions.
I suspect part of it may be due to resources. The far right commentator has a pretty solid career path ahead of them, and support from large backers who find that far right beliefs don't threaten their profits. As a result, someone on the right who gets into this sort of content can get funding from both a certain percentage of billionaires/large companies, plus the right wing media machine and potentially foreign adversaries like Russia.
On the other hand a lot of far left beliefs are very unfriendly to capitalism/large companies/billionaires/foreign adversaries, to the 'abolish capitalism' or 'eat the rich' degree. So the far right folks can more easily afford to make it their full time job, since they have other sources of funding rather than just their fans.
I suspect that left wing audiences are also more skeptical of these types of figures, and more prone to infighting. So it's harder to bring together a large audience of fanatics for left wing content, since they're divided over 50 ways to 'solve' a problem.
Good thoughts. But I don't buy it; Capitalism eats everything. Che Guevara t-shirts are the ur-example, but it took capitalism about 15 minutes to turn grunge from a bunch of kids hanging out in Seattle basements to worldwide catwalk fodder.
If there was money to be made, someone would be bankrolling it.
The murder of the united healthcare CEO, or more specifically, the positive reaction towards it, seems rather associated with the left, doesn't it?
People who want a certain party to be in power should hold that party to a higher standard. Independent of the party. Being "better than the others" is not good enough.
so the data shows that the left's approval of the murder is 37% higher on the low end up to a max of 5x higher (depending on how the confidence intervals map to reality).
And that that the left is anywhere from 20% to 3x more likely to be undecided about the morality of an assassination.
Your data is not so much math, but more a tangled macramé of logical gymnastics, pretzel logic, twisted topology, knot theory, and Marlinespike Seamanship.
Nobody thinks the arithmetic is wrong, we're saying you're engaged in (really transparent and unconvincing) deception.
If the approval rate was 0.1% and 0.2%, does it give someone the correct impression to say "Democrats are twice as likely as Republicans to approve of the killing?"
After saying that sentence, would someone draw a diagram that's even remotely close to the actual probabilities and support levels?
No. Of course not. That's called deception.
If you say, "5-11% of Harris votes vs 2-8% of Trump voters approve," would someone be able to draw a diagram of probabilities that's pretty close to reality?
Yes. They would. That's called honesty.
So all you're doing here is adding to the outrage machine in, again, a really transparent, unconvincing, and deceptive manner. I know you probably think this is all clever and whatnot, but it really is wildly unimpressive.
>the positive reaction towards [the CEO's murder], seems rather associated with the left
So the question is, "of the population of folks who approve of the murder, how many are left leaning vs right?"
So your own data says that the population of murder-approvers is left leaning by a huge margin. you are the one using tricks to obfuscate that fact.
further, you are trying to malign the entire trump presidency based on his dining with a single person (and known troll) while dodging the fact that a significant contingent of Harris voters support that murder. you can't have it both ways
Terminally online not-rich people across the spectrum approved. Other not-rich people seem to land in the "vaguely disapprove" realm IMO. Obviously the plutocrats are all terrified and think it's the worst crime ever.
So among Harris voters, the assassination was about as popular as a Trump policy. And yet here we have people trying to say it's popular among lefties. We do not deserve nice things.
>There are actual [people that I label with bad labels] just one or two hops away from the President!
My latest understanding of the US political landscape is that 2008-2024 the left got very adept at defining things as bad and then attacking those things. In 2016 the right started to learn to counter that, and in 2024 that finally died. In other words, you'll need to try harder than just calling people nazis.
You're getting downvoted because people don't buy that 1) tens of millions of their fellow Americans are lunatics and 2) that the left doesn't have their own moral failings.
> My latest understanding of the US political landscape is that 2008-2024 the left got very adept at defining things as bad and then attacking those things. In 2016 the right started to learn to counter that, and in 2024 that finally died.
Every piece of this understanding is wrong. For one thing, the far Right in American has been better and more effective at that than any part of the Democratic coalition, since at least the 1980s.
Theocracy is bad and neo-Nazism is bad. Trump had dinner with Nick Fuentes, who 1) is an open anti-semite, 2) praises Adolf Hitler, and 3) calls for white ethnonationalism.
I don't need to write a treatise to explain why this is bad.
You don't need to write the treatise because the era of that kind of "logic" winning elections is over. (ie the left being able to label whole political movements as bad because certain bad people associate themselves with it)
I didn't label a whole movement as bad, ya goofball. Well except for neo-Nazism and theocracy, the latter of which is explicitly counter to the US Constitution and the former is... well... you can defend it if you'd like.
I said extreme ideologies (including the two I mentioned) are bad, and there's an asymmetry in their representation and proximity to power on the different ends of the political spectrum.
yeah so you're doing the same thing. the era when people fall for the rhetorical trick of labeling a group as [really bad thing] in order to make them not want to associate with that group is over.
you'll just have to compete on ideas instead of word games now.
Wait, in my media bubble the American left is the one consumed by rage.
The right is stupid or craven or greedy or just evil, but true righteous fury is reserved for those who saw a woman's rights not getting respected one time.
