Comment by Amezarak
6 hours ago
Your country is being 'destabilized' by your own government refusing to address popular concerns. No amount of bad speech can make people extremist on its own. Instead of addressing the underlying issues causing societal destabilization, just as countless failed governments have before, your government is focused on doubling down and making people shut up about it.
Yes, a lot of these people are bigots or cranks. But people living in well-run countries don't listen to bigots and cranks. They aren't a problem. People start listening to bigots and cranks when nobody else will listen to them. Instead of curing the disease you're treating the symptoms. Silencing people to maintain public order and harmony is the siren song of every failing authoritarian government there's ever been.
> Instead of curing the disease you're treating the symptoms.
Banning criminals and neonazis who act against our nation's interests is a simple matter of sovereignty and I hope we continue to do it despite your and JD Vance's opinions; it's a right the nation reserves.
> No amount of bad speech can make people extremist on its own.
This is pie-in-the-sky fantasy. It's just not true at all.
The tiniest, most meaningless, most temporary grievance can be exploited by demagogues and everyone knows it. Including the American president.
> Banning criminals and neonazis who act against our nation's interests is a simple matter of sovereignty and I hope we continue to do it despite your and JD Vance's opinions; it's a right the nation reserves.
The UK seems to mainly ban thought criminals, while letting actual criminals run rampant. This, of course, is why much of the world views the UK as teetering on the edge of being a failed state.
> This is pie-in-the-sky fantasy. It's just not true at all.
It's absolutely true. How many hours of Nazi propaganda would it take to turn you into a Nazi? I don't know about you, but the answer for me is "no amount of Nazi propaganda would ever turn me into a Nazi." People are becoming extremists in the UK because of the worsening cultural and economic situation. You were once one of the richest nations in the world. Now, the GDP per capita PPP of the UK is comparable to Mississippi.
> The tiniest, most meaningless, most temporary grievance can be exploited by demagogues and everyone knows it. Including the American president
This is the same old argument that tyrants and dictators have made for thousands of years. You can't have freedom or democracy because then demagogues will fool the people. Nevertheless, democracy is still a better system than the alternatives. The solution is to do a good job governing your people so mass dissatisfaction doesn't lead them to lend their ear to demagogues.
> No amount of bad speech can make people extremist on its own.
This is pretty much how extremism and cult recruitment work. Wording this as a disprovable statement was of utility.
People in well run companies listen to bigots and cranks. People listen to entertaining bigots and cranks all the time.
I mean, you are talking about the country which listened to the Brexit crowd.
Their current situation is also another massive self own, which happened because they listened to cranks!
Most of the west has been unprepared for how the information economy they grew up with from the 1940s onwards, has been taken over.
——-
I get the argument you are trying to make, that seeds only sprout when the conditions are right.
The supporting argument is adulterated since the advent of cable television and mass media. Rupert Murdoch has single handedly been able to decide what agendas survive for decades.
> This is pretty much how extremism and cult recruitment work. Wording this as a disprovable statement was of utility.
"On it's own" is the key hinge in that statement. They impact people the social system has already failed. The type of extremism is really irrelevant; the fact of extremism is a signal that something is going wrong. Suppressing the signal doesn't actually help anything. You or I could watch 200 hours of Nazi programming without feeling the slightest bit of inclination to start harming Jewish people. You have to be already screwed up to be seriously threatened by extremist content.
> I mean, you are talking about the country which listened to the Brexit crowd.
This is a great example. Remain had nearly unanimous elite support. Despite a massive state propaganda campaign, the Brexit campaign won the referendum. This should have been a huge flashing red light with air raid sirens to the UK elite class that something had gone horribly wrong with their management of the country. Instead, all that's happened is sneering contempt toward the stupid proles who voted at the behest of shadowy puppet masters against their own interests. Even the Brexiteer politicians themselves were obviously none too concerned about popular opinion, as Brexit was obviously in part driven by immigration fears, which they did less than nothing about - vote what you will, the UK politicians of either side know better than you. Indeed instead of addressing this at all, UK politicians have cracked down with increasing harshness on criminal opinions and speech, culminating in kafkaesque absurdities like Greta Thurberg being arrested for expressing support for the wrong side in a foreign conflict that should have nothing to do with the UK, or the laughable pretense that the UK government is utterly helpless to do anything about small boat landings other than put them up in hotels.
> Most of the west has been unprepared for how the information economy they grew up with from the 1940s onwards, has been taken over.
"Since the 1940s" is an important caveat. Broadcast media, in particular state control of broadcast media, really change the way the elite classes perceived the world. By installing their own people to control the media apparatus, they began to only see the world through their own lens and to believe that popular opinion could be largely controlled via the media, because that's all they saw. (In the US, for example, FDR used the FCC as a weapon to suppress dissent in radio.) Even print media was subject to enormous consolidation and unprecedented state control. What we're seeing now is something much more closely resembling the pre-war media environment, where the "wrong people" often got very large audiences, and false rumors and misinformation ran rampant. But all these sentiments and problems still existed postwar, they just stopped being visible to the political and intellectual elites.
> Even the Brexiteer politicians themselves were obviously none too concerned about popular opinion, as Brexit was obviously in part driven by immigration fears, which they did less than nothing about
Eh? People in the official Vote Leave campaign stoked those fears over literally THIRTY YEARS and were happy to leave the unofficial Leave.EU campaign to explicitly stoke them with racist campaigning.
I don't know where you get the idea that the Leave campaigns were complacent about racisms and bigotry and xenophobia; they excused it or amplified it at every turn (while lying about everything else)
The seriousness of immigration problems remains a black-hearted fucking fabrication drummed up by every single right wing newspaper in this country over the entirety of my life.
I don't think you really know what you are talking about because, for example:
> Remain had nearly unanimous elite support.
This just isn't true. I know some people who move in pretty elite circles, City circles, Oxbridge, and I can tell you that Brexit had at least lukewarm support and in some circles (those who don't know or don't care that Boris is a habitual liar) rabid support.
Remain absolutely knew what it was up against.
1 reply →