@HoneyBadgerDC : What are “good manners”?
I don’t believe it is something you can legislate and I doubt we will ever see it. I would consider good manners just listening to what someone has to say. Be honest to the best of ones ability but most of all at least try and remain objective about things. I do think it is possible to run a web site where a strict etiquette and protocol is expected to be adhered to. The Hilary Clinton thing got by me, I am usually pretty good about picking up on phrases that are taken out of context, I heard that one repeated so many times that I just accepted it. But that is a good example regardless, I think who ever framed the statement the way they did should have had some consequences.
Also she said half of Trump supporters, so not 45% of Americans. And she was way too charitable for what is a violent, white supremacist movement.
I think that we have been overly polite for too long. I know that in the past, I held my tongue at events like Thanksgiving and let the racists uncles talk nonsense. No more.
And If Clinton’s comment bothered him, I can’t imagine how upset Trump actually wanting to shoot protestors must make him.
I could never take Trump serious enough to be angry at most things he said. But the statement you just mentioned did infuriate me that he was still able to maintain influence after making stupid comments like that.
Neither could a great many Americans.
And then he became the President.
And appointed three Supreme Court Justices.
And almost, but not quite, overthrew the succeeding government.
And fully intends to do something similar in about 2 years.
It is waaay past time that a lot of people start taking Trump seriously. Deadly seriously.
In that case, I’m against it. Objectivity is way overrated (and subjectivity way too demonized) in public discourse. If objectivity is a necessary part of your good manners, I have no use for it.
Not that I’m a free speech advocate, in the first place, of course.
Back in 2018, Musk threatened to create a site where the public could rate the “core truth” of any article and track the credibility score of journalists, media, and publications. I think this is a good idea.
How so? An article about how the 2020 election was stolen will be rated “mega true” by Trump supporters, despite being pure bull.
What would be helpful is some system where to rate something “true” you had to explain the cites that the article gave. I am not sure how to do this in any practical way though.
(Of course, fact-checking sites like Politifact check cites, and take account of things like how equivocal claims are. But the Venn diagram of people who are interested in fact checking, and Trump supporters, looks like a bicycle).
My initial reaction – the one I wish held up to any thought at all – was “Yeah. So true. At least the damage won’t last for a generation or more.”
But we’re all witnessing the long-term harm: half the country is convinced that the Democrats did rig the election, giving the Republicans license to double down on gerrymandering (nothing new), create targeted voter restriction laws (what’s old is new again), and ensure that “who counts the votes” are party loyalists and toady scumbags.
So there’s that.
And that … sucks, and may very well be extremely hard to beat back or reverse.
So … yeah.
And you know Charlottesville where a Trump supporter drove a car into and lots of other terrorist attacks by Trump supporters. It might be time to take what he says more seriously, what with the coup and all.
Applying both objectivity and subjectivity are clearly necessary to give an appearance of good manners. Neither by themselves are enough and each relied upon too much would make good manners impossible.
Of course “good manners” are themselves often subjective so that makes the whole question difficult to navigate.
If good manners are required, it will be extremely hard to know what others are thinking.
Here is a tweet, posted today, by the government of Afghanistan:
Suppose that Twitter enforced a rule against anti-Jewish posts. Then the Taliban might post the same, substituting Zionists for Jews, and you wouldn’t know what they really thought.
Vladimir Putin’s Twitter feed is extremely polite. I learn nothing from it, partly because the less polite posts may have been blocked.
Convincing the average person to change their views does usually require, beyond patience and luck, good manners. But maybe not always. If someone is extremely sure they are correct, I’m going to be skeptical, even if I don’t know much about the subject, and am not emotionally invested. But others maybe are influenced by certainty the other way.
The most effective way to influence people remains flattery. That would seem to be a form of good manners.
Recently I learned the word, coined a couple decades ago, that would likely be most applicable to such a project. “Agnotology” studies the art of fomenting ignorance, by means of sowing doubt and burying productive dialog in a morass of minutiae. One example would be when discussing the regulation of firearms, when the anti-regulationists drag the discussion into technical pedantry (" that is a ‘magazine’, not a ‘clip’ ") that makes it nearly impossible to discuss any useful measures.
The art of fomenting stupidity/ignorance is venerable and skillfully practiced, and the US in well-stocked with people who are natural or deliberate idiots. To expose a “truth-seeking” forum to broad public participation would just be begging for the proliferation of ignorance.
Those are all excellent points. One thing I have found about myself and other people is that we tend to derive a part of our identity through our political and social affiliations, we value that relationship simply because it has become a source to supply our identities. Creating social media platforms that made it easier for people to discover identities they are happy with might be conducive to more open minds.
We have created exactly those social media identity-discovering tools and instead most people have used them to close their minds as tightly as possible.
Most people do not want to be individuals. That is terrifying to them. They desperately want to be a herd animal embedded in the middle of a herd, not at the dangerous periphery. Despite the fact many of them are making loud noises about “rugged individualist”, did you ever notice that “rugged individualists” all have the same hair, same pickup truck, same hobbies, and same politics? They’re followers to the core. As are many from the other end of the spectrum too.
Humans are herd animals. Damn few want to lead a herd, and most who do are congenitally unqualified to do so by reason of mild or raging psychopathy.
I am so going to plagiarize this.
I think the issue is people need to feel a sense of accomplishment and value they get a little touch of that being herd animals. I believe in the future there will be a greater value placed on what I call advocates which is the equivalent to talent scouts I guess. I don’t think we have any real need to lead the herd but I do think that most of us have a need to be valued
Totally agree about the need to be valued. And about it’s social opposite: the corrosive effect of a person or a group of similarly situated people feeling abandoned, ignored, or worse yet despised by the larger society.
Extending that a bit, we each need to be valued in a way that feels valuable to us. As an obvious example, praise for your good workmanship is far more meaningful when given by an expert peer or a friend than by some random clueless passerby or a child.
The challenge is that seeing value in other’s validation of you is easier when those others are more similar to you. At least for many (most?) people. Iterated over time and large numbers, that leads to vast legions of folks clinging to their clique where the positive strokes are most plentiful and feel most valuable.
I love Jordan Klepper’s antics.
Very on point – starts at about 2:39 and runs about a minute:
I suppose that “owning the libs” looks something like punching up, which – I suppose – makes what Jordan Klepper (and so many admirable others) do … punching down.
Still. Frikkin’ funny 