On the Nature of Things | Forum

"(President Trump) is going to be all the more uncontrollable, like a furious bull, that he has the distinct feeling the opposition wants his scalp, and that's true! One should understand that the political class that is opposing him, in particular the Democrats, wants Trump's impeachment. They have still not accepted the idea that this man is their preisdent. Therefore that system is very dangerous, very unstable. We are looking at a country in a state of absolute division. Look up what happened a short time ago: several events have shown existence of a very worrying potential for violence, incidentally from both sides. Look up that blogger who said jokingly - but a really macabre joke it was - that one could cut the president's head. You have had a theater in New York figuring as Julius Caesar a Trump killed on the scene by women and minorities, very violent things, and eventually we've had that very serious incident when a man describing himself as far left and having been a fan of Bernie Sanders has shot (...) Republican MPs who were training for base-ball"

Alexis wrote:Here is translation of part of a debate on the present state of America (audio in French), few months after Trump became US president.

Laure Mandeville is a noted specialist of the USA, she has for long been extremely sympathetic to America.

She seems deeply worried. And I think she's right.

"(President Trump) is going to be all the more uncontrollable, like a furious bull, that he has the distinct feeling the opposition wants his scalp, and that's true! One should understand that the political class that is opposing him, in particular the Democrats, wants Trump's impeachment. They have still not accepted the idea that this man is their preisdent. Therefore that system is very dangerous, very unstable. We are looking at a country in a state of absolute division. Look up what happened a short time ago: several events have shown existence of a very worrying potential for violence, incidentally from both sides. Look up that blogger who said jokingly - but a really macabre joke it was - that one could cut the president's head. You have had a theater in New York figuring as Julius Caesar a Trump killed on the scene by women and minorities, very violent things, and eventually we've had that very serious incident when a man describing himself as far left and having been a fan of Bernie Sanders has shot (...) Republican MPs who were training for base-ball"

America is in a perilous state.

How could things be improved?

Mr. Perfect wrote:Are we not allowed to post videos now?

“These stages that Trump is going through in the United States and the stirring of racial hatred … a kind of burning of the books as he attacks, as he declares real news as fake news, the law becomes fake news, everything becomes fake news.

“I think of all things that were happening across Europe in the 1930s, in Spain, in Japan, obviously in Germany. To me, these are absolutely comparable signs of the rise of fascism and it’s contagious, it’s infectious. Fascism is up and running in Poland and Hungary. There’s an encouragement about.”

noddy wrote:

network graph of twitter re-tweeting, the echo chamber has very few leaks.

Abstract
Political debate concerning moralized issues is increasingly common in online social networks. However, moral psychology has yet to incorporate the study of social networks to investigate processes by which some moral ideas spread more rapidly or broadly than others. Here, we show that the expression of moral emotion is key for the spread of moral and political ideas in online social networks, a process we call “moral contagion.” Using a large sample of social media communications about three polarizing moral/political issues (n = 563,312), we observed that the presence of moral-emotional words in messages increased their diffusion by a factor of 20% for each additional word. Furthermore, we found that moral contagion was bounded by group membership; moral-emotional language increased diffusion more strongly within liberal and conservative networks, and less between them. Our results highlight the importance of emotion in the social transmission of moral ideas and also demonstrate the utility of social network methods for studying morality. These findings offer insights into how people are exposed to moral and political ideas through social networks, thus expanding models of social influence and group polarization as people become increasingly immersed in social media networks.

Heracleum Persicum wrote:.John le Carré on Trump :
‘ Something seriously bad is happening ’

“These stages that Trump is going through in the United States and the stirring of racial hatred … a kind of burning of the books as he attacks, as he declares real news as fake news, the law becomes fake news, everything becomes fake news.

“I think of all things that were happening across Europe in the 1930s, in Spain, in Japan, obviously in Germany. To me, these are absolutely comparable signs of the rise of fascism and it’s contagious, it’s infectious. Fascism is up and running in Poland and Hungary. There’s an encouragement about.”

Seconded 1000 times

Yes, folks, we back to old good days .. have not learned your lesson from history
.

COVID-19 is more than a pandemic. It’s a trigger that has released decades of pent-up pressures and unleashed “one of the most unstable times in history”.

Sick people can’t work. Dead people can’t pay taxes. Scared people want change. Combined, this presents a looming crisis of unprecedented scale.

It’s a crisis already challenging the United States. Soaring infection rates are disrupting economies, politics, social equilibriums – and the health system.

“We will have hospitals overwhelmed and not only in terms of ICU beds and hospitals – and that’s bad – but exhausted hospital staff and hospital staff that’s getting ill themselves,” a US epidemiologist warned at the weekend.

Dr Peter Hotez, of the Baylor College of Medicine, told CNN this would bring dire consequences across society and the economy.

“We won’t have enough manpower, human power, to manage all of this. (It will become) one of the most unstable times in the history of our country.”

noddy wrote: ↑Sun Jul 19, 2020 11:24 am https://www.news.com.au/world/coronavir ... 28e37bee44

Mr P is now moonlighting as a newscorp journalist.

COVID-19 is more than a pandemic. It’s a trigger that has released decades of pent-up pressures and unleashed “one of the most unstable times in history”.

Sick people can’t work. Dead people can’t pay taxes. Scared people want change. Combined, this presents a looming crisis of unprecedented scale.

It’s a crisis already challenging the United States. Soaring infection rates are disrupting economies, politics, social equilibriums – and the health system.

“We will have hospitals overwhelmed and not only in terms of ICU beds and hospitals – and that’s bad – but exhausted hospital staff and hospital staff that’s getting ill themselves,” a US epidemiologist warned at the weekend.

Dr Peter Hotez, of the Baylor College of Medicine, told CNN this would bring dire consequences across society and the economy.

“We won’t have enough manpower, human power, to manage all of this. (It will become) one of the most unstable times in the history of our country.”

Mr. Perfect wrote: ↑Tue Jul 04, 2017 6:51 pm Lol the GOP is a supermajority party.. We've rarely been less divided as we enter a new golden age. Some people just let the media create reality for them, others can figure out reality on their own.

kmich wrote: ↑Sun Jul 19, 2020 5:06 pm We Americans have several wars that remain unresolved and that we are still fighting in one way or another: our Civil War, the War in Vietnam, the Global War on Terror, the “war” on drugs, etc. There is an American attitude that we are an exception to the countless follies of history, so we avoid and perennially fail to come to terms with our political, strategic, and most of all, our moral errors in these efforts. Our conflicts therefore resist resolution.

In the now distant past, if we did not want to deal with the messes we made, we could always pick up roots and go to some frontier and try to move on. This has been no longer realistic for some time, but Trump is helping along our habitual historical amnesia by creating the myth of walls and a new exceptionalism to replace our frontier narratives, though the limits to his narrative are that his new American exceptionalism only applies to his supporters.

So now as we face an out of control pandemic without a plan or leadership, our failures are knocking louder on our doors with more insistence. Until it actually comes to us or to people we know, we don’t really have to take it all that seriously – after all, it remains only lists of numbers of cases and deaths on a screen that we adjust to and normalize. There seems always a way to breezily dismiss the “experts” who sound alarms. After all, there are always conspiracies to spin, data to sophomorically deploy, and ways to characterize any alarm within in our familiar, reassuring frames. It is always satisfying to be the ones who are really in the know.

However, if we are honest with ourselves, we are groping in the dark like everyone else, and the pending existential dangers remain as nagging discomforts in the back of our minds. If an undesirable consternation emerges from those depths though, we can adeptly convert fear into anger at others to blame and to ridicule to avert our attention. We can also obtain a familiar sense of belonging by being on the side that shares a common contempt toward other groups and interests.

But still there remains that annoying knocking and restlessness of the mind…

Mayor de Blasio cancels a graffiti-eradication program, accommodating vandals who make the city uglier.

Attitudes toward graffiti are one of the biggest divides between the conservative and progressive (or anarchist) mindset. To a conservative, graffiti is self-evidently abhorrent, a spirit-crushing blight on the public realm, and a theft of property by feckless individuals who avenge their mediocrity by destroying what others have built. It is a round-the-clock reminder that vandals (most often fatherless young men) recently broke the law with impunity and may still be in the neighborhood, ready to commit crime again.

To a progressive, by contrast, graffiti is a “political statement,” as the New York Times recently put it, a courageous strike against stultifying bourgeois values. It represents urban grit and resistance to corporate hegemony. The property owner whose building has been unwillingly appropriated is a nonentity; the “tagger” is the city’s vibrant, anti-capitalist soul.

Colonel Sun wrote: ↑Fri Jul 24, 2020 3:45 pm City J | Freedom to Deface

Mayor de Blasio cancels a graffiti-eradication program, accommodating vandals who make the city uglier.

Attitudes toward graffiti are one of the biggest divides between the conservative and progressive (or anarchist) mindset. To a conservative, graffiti is self-evidently abhorrent, a spirit-crushing blight on the public realm, and a theft of property by feckless individuals who avenge their mediocrity by destroying what others have built. It is a round-the-clock reminder that vandals (most often fatherless young men) recently broke the law with impunity and may still be in the neighborhood, ready to commit crime again.

To a progressive, by contrast, graffiti is a “political statement,” as the New York Times recently put it, a courageous strike against stultifying bourgeois values. It represents urban grit and resistance to corporate hegemony. The property owner whose building has been unwillingly appropriated is a nonentity; the “tagger” is the city’s vibrant, anti-capitalist soul.

Interesting. In Japan, zero-tolerance for graffiti.

"....Attitudes toward graffiti are one of the biggest divides between the conservative and progressive (or anarchist) mindset. To a conservative, graffiti is self-evidently abhorrent, a spirit-crushing blight on the public realm, and a theft of property by feckless individuals who avenge their mediocrity by destroying what others have built. It is a round-the-clock reminder that vandals (most often fatherless young men) recently broke the law with impunity and may still be in the neighborhood, ready to commit crime again....."