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There are people who believe that the political polarization now afflicting the United States might finally start to subside if Americans of both parties could somehow become more empathetic. If you're one of these people, the American Political Science Review has sobering news for you.
Last week APSR—one of the alpha journals in political science—published a study[$] which found that "empathic concern does not reduce partisan animosity in the electorate and in some respects even exacerbates it."
The study had two parts. In the first part, Americans who scored high on an empathy scale showed higher levels of "affective polarization"—defined as the difference between the favorability rating they gave their political party and the rating they gave the opposing party. In the second part, undergraduates were shown a news story about a controversial speaker from the opposing party visiting a college campus. Students who had scored higher on the empathy scale were more likely to applaud efforts to deny the speaker a platform.
It gets worse. These high-empathy students were also more likely to be amused by reports that students protesting the speech had injured a bystander sympathetic to the speaker. That's right: According to this study, people prone to empathy are prone to schadenfreude.
This study is urgently important—though not because it's a paradigm shifter, shedding radically new light on our predicament. As the authors note, their findings are in many ways consistent with conclusions reached by other scholars in recent years. But the view of empathy that's emerging from this growing body of work hasn't much trickled down to the public. And public understanding of it may be critical to shifting America's political polarization into reverse somewhere between here and the abyss.
(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Tuesday November 12 2019, @07:03PM (4 children)
Decentralizing power is perceived by the forces of centralizing power as 'terrororism' or 'subversion.'
Try resisting 5g, national emergency warnings on netflix, or the national ID card, you will not be seen as a simple believer in decentralization.
Then once you succeed at decentralizing one thing, the rest of the central system sees you as cancer, not just as a problem, but the entire idea you started has to be erased so it doesn't give anyone else ideas.
It is difficult to imagine a world where someone decides to make randomly selected politicians. In a certain way it is kindof romantic, like that president Dave movie, but that is just not how power works. The miltary could always take over and then institute something like that to give the appearance of civilian leadership for propaganda purposes, but the fact of the matter is that the randomly selected people would not be up to the task, they would be looked down on by the military, not lead by their commander in farce.
I am curious why you don't see changing the finance rules as a solution? Seems a candidate can be watched closely enough for what they spend and election laws are pretty easy to change into something sensible, compared to a constitutional convention. But we have two political parties who are integrated into the state and oligarchy, and they already control how the votes are counted/tallied, in secret, by consultants something that is generally ignored.
Reversing any of their dictates on how elections are run, is difficult. And you would have to argue with a foreign countries that are infiltrating the united states by abusing our attempt at multiculturalism, and they really enjoy the obvious flaws in our system, many of which they designed themselves with their own lobbyists.
Financing and eliminating foreign interference are the first steps, that might some day lead to a ideas like your improvements but there is no direct route.
At the moment we are a lot more like the civilians in the Aliens comic series Rogue, who have a colony in the vicinity of the marine base, but when the commander goes mad, he feeds the colonists to the xenomorphs as part of his sick experimentation and plans to take over the earth. When a few marines escape the base upon learning about said sick plans, thinking they can just run to the colony for safety, they discover the colony is overrun by xenomorphs...have a bad time.
Which is to say, this centralization makes it really easy for madmen to take over, and for aliens to take over. Or an AI to take over. Or for someone to make a huge mistake. Or for war to break out between opposing lunatics(see erdogan and trump), or alien factions, we can't even see because it is so easy to present an absolutely false yet believable facade over video.
Until one day when everyone is truly asleep, and the system can just honestly declare itself a totalitarian xenarchy, and we are back where we started but with fancier phones we can't seem to detach from our heads.
Resistance is futile....
Well, not quite yet. I'm still typing aren't I?
thesesystemsarefailing.net
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday November 12 2019, @08:27PM (3 children)
You seem to think I'm talking about "randomly selected politicians", but I'm talking about a random selection from a group consisting of over half the population. Calling everyone in that group a politician is only valid if you stretch the word beyond all useful meaning.
OTOH, your point that there's no plausible way to enact such a government is valid.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Wednesday November 13 2019, @12:09PM (2 children)
Fair, I didn't mean to say pre-select from random self-described politicians, I get what that the point is to get leaders who don't want to be leaders but who are called to greatness by chance from the pool of eligible.
Nowadays I would bet you that the pentagon has a list of every high school student in the country who has a propensity for leadership.
Your high school class could also be the one who decides who would be a good person to be a potential leader, they know by 12th grade who is who.
After high school everyone scatters and everything gets chaotic. This ability of high schools to represent a community and allow kids to grow up together and really know each other is what private and charter schools really attack. That way the private schools can simply be seen as the preselected group and the kids of rich kids, in my experience who are frequently cruel and arrogant, will continue to rule over faux-capitalism.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday November 13 2019, @05:36PM (1 child)
The high schoolers would select less than half their class as "potential leaders". I'm sure the military would do likewise.
I was thinking that it might be reasonable to eliminate people who couldn't learn to read and couldn't learn to add from the pool. Or who couldn't speak the currently dominant language. Also anyone younger than 21. (Sorry, teenagers, you haven't seen enough history yet to be properly cynical.) Something that in combination might eliminate perhaps 1/4 of the people as "not suitable".
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Thursday November 14 2019, @09:03AM
This leader selection algorithm, if you could screw up this algorithm for another country, you could just walk it in and take it over. The whole sheep led by wolves thing.
In my opinion, that is what israel has done to the united states through their bribery of the republican party, which you can see in the quality of our current 'leadership'.
That is what facebook allows cambridge analysitica to do on a person by person basis, the people who are the best leaders of the country should be given lives of absolute hell so that they can barely exist, and the internet makes that very possible.
I suspect the strongest potential leaders in the united states are homeless and dying in large numbers from fetanyl sold to them by whichever division of the fbi or cia is handling that sort of thing nowadays. But if you can believe the official story of 9/11 and that saddaam hussein/assad/qadafi/bagdadi/mrbean is a clear and present danger, you will get a scholarshiop to westpoint.
That clears the way for people who have no leadership qualities, trump and biden, to run amok and sell the country out further down the river, as we are seeing in the daily news.