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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
> but it is very obviously the case they are not.
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.
17 replies →
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 glorification of Luigi Mangione in some left-leaning circles seems to be a counterpoint to your assertion.
3 replies →
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.
See these are interesting questions. I don't have great answers.
IQ gap between the sides?
Me either. I think that's possibly a self-serving guess, to be honest. But how would we test it?
On the comedians question: some people think it's because it's easier to be funny when kicking up than kicking down.
Comedy requires deep thinking, powers of observation, and self-reflection.
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.
5 replies →
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.
No, not really.
Harris vs Trump voters who...
Approve: 5-11% vs 2-8%
Neither approve nor disapprove: 6-12% vs 7-13%
Disapprove: 65-71% vs 72-78%
Not sure: 6-12% vs 4-10%
Not a super substantial difference. The outrage machine wins again!
Source: https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/Reactions_to...
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.
7 replies →
That data is super helpful.
From browsing Reddit, my impression was that the left strongly approved.
1 reply →
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.
> The murder of the united healthcare CEO, or more specifically, the positive reaction towards it, seems rather associated with the left, doesn't it?
Not even close. Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh have been blasted by their own fans and viewers for criticising Luigi Mangioni.
>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)
3 replies →
And is also an incel...hard for me to imagine someone that Trump would despise more than a guy who can't get laid.
2 replies →