SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
When we consider how much time young people spend on social media, negative news content may have a bad impact. And those already psychologically vulnerable may be particularly susceptible to the ill effects of a constant stream of negative news. This is because stress responses are often accentuated in those already suffering from symptoms of anxiety, depression and other mental illnesses.
So, it is encouraging to see some technology companies proactively showing concern about their users' mental health. For example, Twitter is teaming up with the youth mental health organisation ReachOut to provide resources to help young people learn about the possible negative impacts of social media, so they won't be overly consumed by it and know how to cope if they are.
This is a good start – Twitter is making more information available. But it can do more, and Twitter shouldn't be the only one doing it.
Yes, I'm certain this is exactly what is needed. Much better idea than shutting your Twitter app.
Source: The Conversation
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday June 02 2017, @08:15PM (6 children)
First, while people vary in temperament, and some of that is either genetic or determined at a VERY early age, I sincerely doubt that most people have some sort of "innate" political view or even the psychological factors that tend to push them toward a standard political "side." Witness that it's a common trope for people to start out liberal and become more conservative as they age. That's not universally true, but it does happen a lot. And, no, I don't think it's because they move to the suburbs.
As to why there's a geographic correlation, I think it depends on how you define words like "liberal" and "conservative." There are some factors that seem to make a bit of sense regarding the urban/rural divide. Xenophobia and general fear of people "different from you" makes some sense when you live in a clustered isolated community and aren't familiar with outsiders. Urban dwellers generally are forced to deal with all sorts of people who are very different from them on a regular basis. Religion can seem more powerful in a small community with one or two churches that almost everyone attends. In an urban setting, you see the local rabbi walk by followed by some Muslims and some Hindus, and it somehow starts to seem a little less likely that your one preacher must have all "the answers."
And a lot of the other stereotypical urban/rural issues are tied up with religion. I don't think there's any grand reason why rural people should be more anti-abortion other than that's what they're taught from the churches.
And yet there are other divisions that don't seem to have any clear explanation, or even a clear reason why one issue should be tied to the other platforms of "conservatives" or "liberals." For example, the death penalty. Doesn't correlate well with religion: many churches are officially anti-death penalty, and pro-forgiveness. And why should urban dwellers be more strongly against the death penalty when they're more likely to see a higher concentration of murders, etc. around them? Another thing is government aid to help those less well-off. Rural communities frequently have strong social clubs, church communities, etc. that provide local support to those in need, so I suppose it may seem unnecessary, but why such strong opposition to government assistance? Why not view it as an extension of the giving mission of the local church, rather than in opposition to it? On the other side of things, urban dwellers frequently live more "isolated" lives these days, without the tight-knit communities where "everyone knows each other's business" that can still exist in small towns. Why should urban folks necessarily be more disposed to be in favor of government assistance? Rural poverty is a real thing too.
Bottom line: stereotypical "liberal" and "conservative" philosophies often have a bunch of different components that aren't all necessarily interdependent, but we're taught that there is a single unidimensional political "spectrum," so most people just take a side that seems to correlate with issues they feel most strongly about. There may be a few views driven by different geographic circumstances, and a lot of the rest is just crap people (from politicians to preachers) pile up on top to create a set of political binaries that build group identity through stereotypical divisions.
(P.S. I know there may be people reading this who think there's an "obvious" explanation why all their conservative/liberal platform MUST make sense together. I'm not denying that the parties have gone to great trouble to try to justify and create consistency. But there are a lot of alternative alignments among issues that could be possible and logically consistent with a different rationale.)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday June 02 2017, @09:25PM (4 children)
Obligatory, if you haven't tried this, you should:
http://chartsme.com/ [chartsme.com]
Still debatable whether nature or nurture is predominant in determining these things, but I think it tracks with the urban/rural divide: lots more disgusting stuff to encounter in a city.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday June 03 2017, @06:05AM (3 children)
Really? Cities are more disgusting? I think they're just different. I know lots of city folk who can't stand the smell of livestock, for example, and walk around a dairy farm looking like they're about to vomit. I've come upon lots of dead animals walking in the woods... Not so many in cities. True, in run-down or poorly maintained city locations, you get rats, roaches, etc. But plenty of "disgusting" bugs out in the country too. More rotting trash smells around the city, though.
Anyhow most of the scenarios in your link don't seem well-correlated with the urban/rural divide.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday June 03 2017, @11:51AM (2 children)
Short on time now, but the things that stuck with me from the survey involved dead human bodies...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday June 03 2017, @04:17PM (1 child)
Again, I'm not sure how dead bodies are more "urban." I've spent a lot of time living in cities and never randomly encountered a dead body.
Also, I'm not sure what patterns of disgust really tell us other than culture. Psychological studies have shown a lot of disgust is determined by culture, which is why children seem to have so little of it (they'll happily pick up all sorts of things adults might be revolted by). Accouns of feral children seem to show thet develop very little disgust reflexes. So it appears conservatives are likely taught more or stronger signals of disgust than liberals. The specific things that disgust conservatives (gay sex, etc.) are likely substantially learned behaviors.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday June 04 2017, @07:42PM
When I'm thinking of "rural" I'm not thinking of out in the deep countryside with the chicken factories and slaughter houses, I'm thinking more of Crockett, TX or Starke, FL - people may live "out in the country" and even have jobs in the small towns, but they're not really living an animal husbandry type lifestyle, because, really, not very many people do that anymore, anywhere.
Maybe I just had bad luck in Miami and Manhattan, but the cook at a Chinese restaurant I used to eat at was blown up by a copy-cat terror bomb just after the Atlanta Olympics bombing. I didn't see the body, but I drove by the bus bench with the police tape on it the morning it happened. Then their was my neighbor who murdered his uncle in the front yard, again - I didn't witness the body, but I saw evidence later when walking the neighborhood, same place I had walked days before the murder. The local news station there would occasionally show dead bodies from helicopter footage covering big traffic crash stories, always at places that would be familiar to anyone who lived in the city. The beach condos were filled with really old retirees, you'd see gurneys being loaded into ambulances in no particular hurry then drive away with lights off. Miami street people were generally pretty healthy, but lots of the ones you'd see in Manhattan in the 1980s were near death, and plenty of places in Manhattan were open air latrines at that time. I never saw anything like that when living in smaller towns / rural areas - not that it didn't happen at the same rate per-capita, just that it was kept out of sight better, more actively hidden even, and the lower population density meant that less of it was happening physically nearby.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 02 2017, @11:48PM
You might not be aware, but one american religious institution has a lot to do with what you see as unexplained.
The southern baptist convention was created as a white supremacist organization. They splintered from the Triennial Convention [sbcvoices.com] over one single issue: slavery.
It was only about 20 years ago that they finally officially acknowledged their racist heritage. [sbc.net] And that racism is still a strong undercurrent. [faithfullymagazine.com] You don't undo 150 years of white supremacy in just one generation. Especially when racism was still an official policy as recently as 2000 — The last time "religious liberty" was a popular phrase [thinkprogress.org] was in 1983 when Bob Jones University wanted to be exempt from Title IX requirements regarding first admitting blacks [drslewis.org] and then inter-racial dating. [christianitytoday.com]
That racism informs their views on welfare. Part of the protestant work ethic is not taking handouts and that can easily get perverted into prosperity gospel - where being poor is evidence of not being right with god. But that gets squishy when it comes to seeing people who are obviously in need. Racism affects the perception of who deserves welfare. So all those racist stereotypes about blacks being lazy feeds right into that prosperity gospel shit and while they are OK with people they know personally (because their friends are all good, god-fearing people, natch) or even themselves, getting welfare, they don't want all the undeserving (aka non-white) people to get free handouts (remember the "welfare queen" bogeyman?) Which is also why they are always freaked out that illegal immigrants are sucking on the teat of the state too, despite that not really being possible.
Related to that: many within the SBC saw the writing on the wall about racism during the 70s and decided they needed a new "enemy" to unify them. The settled on abortion. As recently as 1976 the SBC supported full abortion rights [sbc.net] based on scripture that said (among other things) that god doesn't put a soul into a person until they are "fully formed." [biblehub.com]
The SBC is by far the single largest protestant denomination in the US, with 200,000 churches and 15.5 million members (although membership has been declining for about a decade).
Trump got the highest share of the (white) evangelical vote ever measured [pewresearch.org] (although they only started measuring in 2004). That coincides with a truly massive reversal in how much evangelicals think character matters in a presidential candidate. [npr.org] They sold out their principles for racism.