I like the More in Common Project. But it overlooks the disproportionate representation of the extremists in our institutions. This happened at my alma matter earlier this year: https://freebeacon.com/campus/northwestern-law-administrator....
They also voted to abandon entrance exams at my magnet high school: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4979
Itâs not comforting to know that only a tiny minority of people are standing up and declaring themselves âgatekeepers of white supremacyâ when that person is the Dean of a school or a School Board Superintendent. Just because folks fighting the culture wars might be few in number doesnât mean they donât have their hands on a lot of levers.
Reminds me of the research NPR did before closing their comments section.
>In July, NPR.org recorded nearly 33 million unique users, and 491,000 comments. But those comments came from just 19,400 commenters, Montgomery said. That's 0.06 percent of users who are commenting, a number that has stayed steady through 2016.
https://www.npr.org/sections/publiceditor/2016/08/17/4895169...
Culture wars are fought by tiny minorities, but they're fought over the large majority.
The issue of gay marriage in the US was fought mostly by progressive and social conservative activists, but the people they were trying to convince were those in the middle. The reason the progressives won is that the middle became increasingly convinced that banning gay marriage was immoral for the government to do.
> It states that 12% of voters accounted for 50% of all social-media and Twitter users â and are six times as active on social media as are other sections of the population.
That's not a tiny minority: it's a pretty reasonable dispersal of social media use. 12% of the population accounting for 50% of anything is a more egalitarian distribution than we see with, say: wealth, healthcare use, or educational attainment.
Public discourse was dominated by a "tiny minority" when the only people with a wide-reaching mouthpiece were a few hundred journalists and a few hundred politicians.
I don't really disagree with the article's main claim - that the more extreme views are overrepresented on social media - but it's not a numbers thing.
It's good to get every bit of confirmation we can of this, but the "myth of polarization" has been known for a long time -- best described in Morris Fiorina's 2011 book Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America.
There is overwhelming evidence that at the end of the day, people's political and issue views are overwhelmingly bell curve-shaped.
The issue is that the bell curve gets split into categories. American voters are given two options, so people get split into "right" and "left" even when the mode is in the center. Or academics define the "center" extremely narrowly and therefore claim a majority of citizens are polarized.
[1] https://www.google.com/books/edition/Culture_War/s5YZQQAACAA...
The idea that it is a culture 'war' comes out of a right-wing framing.
A (small) group of Conservative Party MPs in the UK have presented it as such and indicated that it's useful to their cause that there is a perceived enemy to unite behind, whether or not they agree with any particular policies.
e.g. https://inews.co.uk/opinion/tories-culture-war-win-back-popu...
similarly referenced from an international perspective on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_war#Artificiality_or_a...
Iâm a person who has seen the culture war start and evolve to its current status. I knew it became about money when certain outspoken people in the movement against âleft wingâ ideas started going on speaking tours and selling books.
They would act as though they were intellectuals and people who had common sense. I listened to hours and hours of them talking, and an observant person saw through their act pretty quickly.
These people could rarely offer any depth in any other subjects other than âguess what I saw on Twitter yesterdayâ.
They get money by believing people online (especually Twitter) represent a majority opinion, and after building that strawman they go on speaking tours to scare people to be afraid of college kids with blue hair.
Outrage porn sells. Itâs easy to sell outrage and this symbiotic relationship is very lucrative. Unfortunately they flooded many of my favorite places online and Iâve had to learn to tune them out.
From my perspective, it doesn't really matter to me what percentage of the population holds what beliefs, or how many different political stances they're balancing. What matters is the beliefs they have and the outcomes of these beliefs.
For example, if you think about support gay marriage and LGBT nondiscrimination protections, these are things that would have been framed as fringe progressive ideas a few decades ago, and in the US it's still framed as a "culture war" issue. However, if you are in the LGBT community, these things DO have an impact and will affect your life. It doesn't really matter whether 30% of the population supports these things or 60%.
When I was younger, this was a quote that was always thrown around:
âNever doubt that a small, group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.â â Margaret Mead
Is this really true though or does change occur in ways that are a lot smaller, more incremental and undetectable than we realize?
Here's the study
This is not my experience in the US. Culture wars have invaded both work and family life. It's not a tiny minority, it's many, if not most, Americans.
I feel sure most Americans have the same experience, but perhaps I'm an outlier?
Isn't this (more or less) what we'd expect to find? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
Yes. The culture war is to a great extent a US import. The US is extremely polarised, possibly uniquely so for a country with a single national language and mostly-shared ethnic background (compare Belgium, which is highly polarised but along language lines). The UK has its own natural fragmentation lines (north/south, class system, four nations, catholic/protestant) but those are not the lines on which the culture war is run.
While there has been incursion of talk radio (LBC/Farage), there is no counterpart to the hyper-polarised TV of Fox News yet. Sky News is comparatively normal. The right-wing disinformation comes in via the press and various "client journalists" who repeat things they've heard from "Downing street sources" who they refuse to hold accountable.
> It found that most voters balanced competing political concerns and ideas. Its polling found that 73% believe hate speech is a problem, while 72% believe political correctness is an issue. Some 60% believe many are too sensitive about race, but 60% also recognise issues around âwhite privilegeâ.
This is just the combination of leading questions and people responding to words without actually thinking about the underlying concepts.
See, always, Yes Minister: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0ZZJXw4MTA
From The Guardian, a not-insignificant player in those culture wars.
It is a minority until people start to see a direct impact an issue has on their lives.
I know it is de rigueur to bash the minority of liberals at the forefront of these "wars" (as opposed to the conservatives pushing back to "conserve" the cultural status quo, hence the names), but this article kinda shoots itself in the foot when it shows the increase of of awareness around issues that used to be fringe, like Climate Change, that are now regarded as a main-stream threat and not a "culture war", which is what conservatives have tried to paint it as for 30+ years.
Or consider gay marriage. In the 80's this was heretical on both sides of the pond, now it is close to being the law of the land in the US and no longer a "culture war". But thankfully the minority fought for what is now majority.
First, the Guardian is one to talk given they've fueled and capitalized on the culture war themselves. They're not the only ones, of course. Mainstream media outlets are propaganda outlets. They all have a POV that the owner and editorial staff enforce through hiring, company culture, what they accept for print, etc.
Second, culture wars are always fought by minorities. It doesn't take a large number of people to change the status quo. This applies as much to revolutionaries (communists, Nazis, etc) as demographics (Taleb once gave the relatively innocuous example of kashrut classifications on food in the grocery store as an example of how a tiny minority can impose its sectarian norms on an agricultural industry that serves a majority that probably doesn't even know what kashrut is; he used this, I believe, to illustrate that the argument that you don't need a majority of devout, Sharia law-following Muslims for Sharia to become a realistic possibility).
Third, the current culture war is real. Even if it is led and actively propelled by a small minority, it nonetheless embroils everyone. It's difficult to give a single date of birth for the current culture war, and in some sense, the world has always been in a state of cultural war. But what people typically have in mind is the deep-cutting revolution that has been escalating since the 1960s. Like newborn fish that don't know what water is and have no memory of things past, many fail to grasp the revolution taking place. Perhaps people expect revolutions to look theatrically dramatic. But there is a culture war taking place. In the last 20 years along, we have seen changes that were unthinkable across human history.
The stakes are high and the multitudes will be led by whoever is the victor. The media are instruments of different factions in the war. Some are looking for a seat at the table when the dust has settled Other look to wage total cultural war against their opponents. Some are fighting to preserve what's left. Others seek to counteract the entire rebellion.
It may be better to call this a culture battle. I claim to know the victor of the war. I just don't know who will win the battle, or how much blood will be spilled.
That's not particularly surprising. The core of the US Revolutionary movement was very small relative to the total population
The cultures wars are stoked by the 0.01% because they want working people divided against each other.
If "blue state" workers think their red-state brethren are incorrigible racist assholes, and "red state" working people think the blue states are full of virtue-signaling effete hypocrites... then capital wins because, even though 75% of the American public likes socialist economic ideas (when stated plainly and without a "socialist" label) they are all fighting each other over unrelated stuff, like whether J.K. Rowling's latest misinformed comment means we should stop reading her.
The Enlightenment was also a "culture war" fought by a tiny minority.
Any diverse media ecosystem is going to have a wide variety of quality and stance of writings and media, the issue is: is our populace well-educated enough to contextualize and understand it?
What if we levied an information fee -- any entity which dispenses information for profit must then pay into public education tax funds to enhance the discerning capabilities of the populace.
The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority
https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
> It states that 12% of voters accounted for 50% of all social-media and Twitter users â and are six times as active on social media as are other sections of the population. The two âtribesâ most oriented towards politics, labelled âprogressive activistsâ and âbackbone Conservativesâ, were least likely to agree with the need for compromise. However, two-thirds of respondents who identify with either the centre, centre-left or centre-right strongly prefer compromise over conflict, by a margin of three to one.
Really telling. These fringe groups are taking over our political discourse and online discussion. They are driving a societal wedge.
There is also a Paradox of Tolerance, as from Wiki:
The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly paradoxical idea that "In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance."
This should come as a surprise to nobody, unless you happen to be in the bubble that believes Twitter is the real world.
Somewhat ironic to have the leading liberal culture warrior publication in the UK dismiss the ugliness as some sort of sideline crank affair.
The Guardian is as bad as The Daily Mail from the other side, but seems to genuinely believe it's somehow above it all.
This is why it's impossible to have a nuance discussion online.
The vast majority of people who heavily use social media, are much more likely to have much stronger beliefs one way or another than people who don't.
I even have a theory much of this is driven by social isolation, mostly young men with nothing better to do. So these young men go on tirades about how the Last of Us Two is a feminist plot to destroy masculinity or something stupid like that.
Normally if you have stuff going on you won't waste your time being angry about a piece of media. Society is going to need to find a path for these left over men, self worth shouldn't be tied into your income after all.
One issue I have with this is that on many of the âbattlegroundsâ of the âculture warsâ, non-participation is effectively the same as fighting for one particular side.
I recall when movies were condemned by the Catholic Anti-defamation League, it was one rich old woman and her priest. And they didn't watch the movies.
Another interesting factor is the level of excitement found in young people with little experience in the sphere under discussion. (i.e. college campuses are full of zealots who've lived privileged lives and don't really have any contact with many of the subjects they are excitedly concerned about).
Last week the internet had a compelling video showing a young white person yelling at a black man trying to cross a BLM barricade. The black man wanted to go on his way, the protester was insulting him and telling him what a terrible person he was.
It's completely nuts. But not a new phenomenon.
I think that's why it catches "the rest of us" off guard when the media portrays this intensely divided community.
You can tell that much of it is paid and bots. Social media spreads a lot of negativity.
I don't see how the article's data supports the headline at all.
Intolerant Minority rule by Nassim Taleb.
Like journalists at the guardian...
yes. its called the cia
There's no "culture war". People who oppose science, human rights, etc. are irrational and violent terrorists. Humanity should defend itself both on the internet and IRL.
This is "centrist" propaganda. I'm also absolutely sure you'll find that 99% cross-stitch and scrapbooking content online is posted by a tiny percentage of cross-stitchers and scrapbookers.
You'll also find that radical centrists (as defined by actual political positions) are an infinitesimal group, and that the vast majority of people will report their beliefs as middle of the road no matter what the actual content. They will also report that they are middle-class, no matter what their income.
And what content-free questions:
> It concludes that unlike in the US, climate change is not a culture-war issue in the UK. In Britain, it found that 85% of voters believe climate change concerns us all. The most sceptical group were voters described as âdisengaged traditionalistsâ, where the figure was still 76%. Meanwhile, 79% of all voters say gender equality is a sign of progress.
Does climate change "concern us all"? Yes, climate change is being used as a weapon to destroy progress and people's livelihoods.
Is gender equality a sign of progress? Yes, when the courts stop favoring women, and give me the right to choose who I want to hire regardless of whether they're a man or woman, society will have progressed.
> The research also suggested that the Covid-19 crisis had prompted an outburst of social solidarity. In February, 70% of voters agreed that âitâs everyone for themselvesâ, with 30% agreeing that âwe look after each otherâ. By September, the proportion who opted for âwe look after each otherâ had increased to 54%.
I don't even know what this question means, or how it's relevant to the thesis. I think they were searching for people who both had no loved ones, and are not just covid denialists, but not even aware that anything is even going on. Covid denialists have support networks, that's how they keep their businesses open and schedule protests. It's very difficult to phrase a question when the position that you think is the most reasonable is also a very extreme one (that covid is very dangerous and justifies extreme measures.)
> More than half (57%) reported an increased awareness of the living conditions of others, 77% feel that the pandemic has reminded us of our common humanity, and 62% feel they have the ability to change things around them â an increase of 15 points since February.
Unintelligible. And these are the entirety of the examples cited in the article.
edit: also Jo Cox supported BDS, so I guess she was an extremist, too.
edit2: missed this
> Its polling found that 73% believe hate speech is a problem, while 72% believe political correctness is an issue. Some 60% believe many are too sensitive about race, but 60% also recognise issues around âwhite privilegeâ.
- looks pretty extreme to me.
This is a surprise only to that tiny minority.
Almost any war is fought by a tiny minority, which is backed by large majority.
What happens if culture warriors make everyone hate the position they are fighting for by using really annoying methods?
Most people are scared of losing their jobs for saying / thinking / doing / being accused of doing the wrong thing by the vocal minority of social justice warriors. This is totally obvious if youâre not part part of the minority, but a bitter pill for the woke crowd to swallow.
The claim that it is a tiny minority is not very relevant considering the recent dominance of intolerant identity-politics type views in the media. For example, read Matt Taibbi on the US media:
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-news-media-is-destroying-i...
Similar result on Twitter from a year ago: https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/23/just-6-of-u-s-adults-on-tw...
Itâs just text. Copy-paste is the first computer user habit anyone learns.
The idea machines are learning is nuts. Sorting the same old human copy-pasta isnât learning. What is there to learn about vanilla ice cream? Itâs all in eating it.
What a shock weâre just more efficiently eating shit
You know I don't recall hearing the term "culture war" when I was studying critical theory and culture and media and so on at university last decade.. I heard about hegemony, and how theories of cultural transmission have changed over time.. I heard of Edward Said and his The Myth of the âClash of Civilizationsâ, I heard of Virilio's "Pure War" of technology vs humanity... but I can't recall any discussion of a culture war.. which leads me to suspect that this phrase is actually just made up by a group of people who want to bring the ideas of violent struggle into their discourse about who the world ought to be.. and journalist have unwittingly picked up the phrase and reified it(another nifty media studies word). There aren't two side to a culture war, there isn't any war. from what I've heard of fascist ideology, and how it glorifies violence and war, it's not surprising that the phrase would arise.
> It found that there was actually widespread agreement in the UK over topics such as gender equality and climate change â often seen as culture war issues.
I really don't think The Guardian understands what they're talking about here. The so called "culture war" is about Marxist ideology. The people denying climate change are fringe wackos of this tiny minority who fight culture wars.
I think the main culprit exacerbating this is the main stream media.
"Vox pops" have formed part of filling air-time or column inches for a long while, but this is largely replaced now by journalists looking at Twitter and either a) using that as a stand-in for 'this is what the public think' or b) making it the story itself. Social media is no longer just "second screen" below-the-line commenting on events, it's helping to shape what becomes a story.
I think a lot of it is probably a symptom of trimmed budgets and the 24hr news cycle â social media is in easy reach and available at whatever point you're writing your article.
Unfortunately, I don't think we can roll back on the constant need for more 'breaking news', but would be interesting if a newspaper were to take an editorial stance that it won't quote/embed any tweets or social posts in their articles.