Comment by clarkmoody
8 years ago
Twitter is taking itself too seriously, believing that if it could tweak around the edges, it could improve the quality of the debate in the direction of civility and understanding. Perhaps some nudges and UX changes could encourage these things (I remember a long article about Facebook tweaking their "report picture" function to encourage messaging the person to talk about it before reporting).
BUT
I hate to break it to @jack, but Twitter conversation simply reflects the nature of humanity in an adversarial political system. Attempting to "elevate the debate" will never work, since the debate has never been "elevated." There were no good ol' days of citizen-statesmen calmly discussing their political differences and coming to reasoned conclusions on policy.
No. Politics is always adversarial. As a libertarian, both "sides" of the American political divide feel threatening to me, since all proposals out there are for one form of authoritarianism or another. All proposals involve me giving up a little more of my personal or economic liberty. Will @jack do anything to alleviate my fears that my liberty is being attacked every single day? Probably not.
He's devoted to "collective health and civility," which reads like a 1984 thought-police handbook. Of course, the debate always seems civil after the dissenting voices have been crushed.
(Pre-emptive retort to attack on libertarianism: Yes, I know Twitter is private property. Yes, Jack can do whatever he wants with his business, within the laws for a publicly-traded company.)
Huh, your comment actually caused me to re-evaluate my thinking a little bit.
Because you're right, in general this is true:
> There were no good ol' days of citizen-statesmen calmly discussing their political differences and coming to reasoned conclusions on policy.
It seems that way sometimes (calm debate and discussion), but US history of course is full of angry, threatening debates with even politicians themselves erupting into actual physical violence sometimes [1].
Still, it feels like there's been a notable shift. Compare one of the 1992 presidential debates [2] to a 2016 presidential debate [3]. The former feels like an actual debate, the latter feels like a segment on a political news show where basically the loudest voice "wins".
Of course, US politics has always been a thin veneer of civility masking some extremely aggressive adversarial acts (e.g. Watergate), but it seems like that mask has now disappeared almost entirely.
I don't know that Twitter is the cause of any of this (as opposed to just a reflection of where we're at), but it does feel like things have certainly shifted nonetheless.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legislative_violence#United_St...
2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jg9qB_BIjWY
3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=855Am6ovK7s
> Still, it feels like there's been a notable shift.
I don't know if I agree completely...I watched your videos and yes- the debates during the 2016 election were absolutely ridiculous, I think that's mostly due to wider and more public acceptance of conspiracy theory, Fox News, and your Rush Limbaughs, and on the flipside thought-policing, extreme sensitivity, etc
It's funny, back to why I somewhat disagree with you, if you watch any news from the last twenty or thirty years everyone seems to have the exact same concerns as they do now. Donald Trump (and even Hillary Clinton when she was running) are just really loud mouthpieces for those concerns.
Setting aside formal debates among politicians, if you want to talk about why discussion of contentious topics by average Joes and Janes has degenerated into its current state of pointless shouting matches, I feel like it has less to do with Fox News, conspiracy theories, fake news, Russian meddling or whatever else is regularly associated with the alt-right. In the run-up to the election and the months following it, a large faction on the left has abandoned any pretense of discussing ideas and policies or of having civilized debate, preferring instead to become very aggressive with insults, wild accusations of racism, white supremacy, misogyny, etc., in order to demonize their opposition. You see it all the time on this forum and others. It's lazy and harmful, and it's being used as a tool to avoid any self-reflection.
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> I think that's mostly due to wider and more public acceptance of conspiracy theory, Fox News, and your Rush Limbaughs, etc..
That's a pretty serious shift!
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Yes, every time someone tells me politics is getting more adversarial I think back to people like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxEjzSlbHvY
As a socialist... You're right about Twitter and the history of political debate. The era of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster was also the era of Senators beating each other with canes.