SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the By-the-inch,-it's-a-cinch-but-a-mile-takes-a-while dept.
We've previously discussed ( https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=21/12/11/1847236 ) how it becomes impossible to reverse the polarization of a community once their differences become too great, and how that plays out both here at SN and in the wider world. Science Blog has a piece ( https://scienceblog.com/527745/computer-model-seeks-to-explain-the-spread-of-misinformation-and-suggest-counter-measures/ ) about a PLOS paper titled "Cognitive cascades: How to model (and potentially counter) the spread of fake news" ( https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0261811 ) which uses an interesting computer model to explore how this actually happens.
The model demonstrated that if the new information is too much at odds with a person's existing belief, it will be ignored. Furthermore, if that belief is connected with the person's identity, their current belief will be strengthened as a defense against cognitive dissonance. Interestingly, though, a succession of new information that gradually nudge the person to adjust their beliefs can, over time, cause the person to adopt a belief that is very different from the one they started with. This sounds like how psy-ops manipulate targets to accept extreme views.
What was the gradual change of ideas that have led national political parties to be ever more different from one another, and who fed them those messages?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DrkShadow on Sunday January 16 2022, @11:09AM (11 children)
Different? Every time I look they're more and more the same. Wasn't it Trump who offered to buy the pfizer vaccine, if it were limited to US use? Had the Democrats not won the next election, the Republicans would have been forcing the vaccine on people so hard people would likely have sued to stop it. Oh, wait...
The republicrats are entirely the same party. It's just that they opt to be difficult toward whatever the other wants to do. Note how the democrats recently passed some bill with absolutely zero Republican support, but the democrats were earlier saying that for something to be successful it needs the buy-in of both parties.
"Both". Two parties. That are the same, but just try to be difficult to make the other look bad. Two parties. For 300 million people, two. Ugh.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by gznork26 on Sunday January 16 2022, @01:17PM (8 children)
Submitter here. Thanks for pointing this out. On an absolute scale, when compared to the rest of the world, the two US parties are both right wing, but one is more extreme than the other. To keep entraining their adherents, both parties focus the people's attention on the few differences that exist, while hiding their vast similarities. This hypnosis allows them to gradually move the shared bulk of their objectives further rightwards. But the method remains consistent with the proposed model.
Khipu were Turing complete.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by DrkShadow on Sunday January 16 2022, @01:48PM (7 children)
Interesting take/feedback.
---
One of the things that gets me: over time, the Democratic party became more republican (big-gov) than the republicans. (Decent reference: https://www.livescience.com/34241-democratic-republican-parties-switch-platforms.html [livescience.com] -- though I read more about the shift / stay-the-same / 1990's in school than I am at this link.)
In the past, as we know, the Democrats were more for small government, and the republicans were for centralization and control. That hasn't necessarily changed for the republicans - the attempt to acquire (own) the vaccine, the banking breaks, the business-oriented goals.. all republicans in the past and present. However, the democratic party shifted around them to become more-republican-than-the-republicans, in their attempt to win the west -- at the time, republican viewpoints of personal freedoms, equal rights, safety-net, etc that were adopted by the Democrats.
Ok.
What that means to me is that Republicans have been basically the same for the life of the United States (pandering to the same core group?) while the Democrats have changed with the "popular thing". I would argue that both have their good-merit (We have our core principles! Times change and people change, so change with them!) so I can't necessarily fault either party, but ... maybe they've both settled in basically the same spot. And so, they've become the Republicrats. (Maybe this will change some more, and the democrats will change with them and there will again be a natural difference between the parties.)
Just a recently-old dude rambling on. Feel free to ignore this comment. :-)
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 16 2022, @04:04PM (5 children)
That part, at least is laughably wrong. The Dems have always been for more big government.
Another knee-slapper. The Republicans were always much more supportive of the 10th Amendment than the Democrats ever were.
One of the main differences was the Democrats long history as the party of slavery and segregation. Remember just the other day when Biden asked if the people wanted to be George Wallace, Bull Connor and Jefferson Davis? Note that all of them were Democrats. Joe Biden used to heap praise on George Wallace (ref [newsweek.com]).
It's worth remembering, with the Martin Luther King holiday tomorrow, that MLK was a Republican.
(Score: 0, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 16 2022, @07:16PM (4 children)
> It's worth remembering, with the Martin Luther King holiday tomorrow, that MLK was a Republican.
It's also worth remembering that the parties "switched" at some point in past, causing no end of confusion to right-wing blowhards from that date on. So confusing for them.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 16 2022, @07:47PM
"I don't think the Republican party is a party full of the almighty God nor is the Democratic party. They both have weaknesses ... And I'm not inextricably bound to either party."[380] King did praise Democratic Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois as being the "greatest of all senators" because of his fierce advocacy for civil rights causes over the years."
wikipedia
So he wasn't much affiliated with R or D, just more FUD from Republicans that don't want to be the party of racist fascists. Well, they don't want to admit to it anyway, though surely some truly don't like the racist fascism.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 17 2022, @04:22PM (2 children)
Why is that nonsense moderated as 'informative'? It's a crock of shit, it always has been a crock of shit. "We'll have those niggers voting for us for the next 200 years." There was no switcheroo, the Dems were using blacks then, and they are using blacks now. It's far past time people woke up and understood that Dems don't care for anyone, they care about POWER!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 17 2022, @11:06PM (1 child)
Viciously allowing gay marriage, equality, voting rights. Those bastards!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 19 2022, @05:57AM
"We'll have those
niggersqueers voting for us for the next 200 years."(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 17 2022, @06:27AM
Um, are we Jaywalking tonight? The Republican party did not exist before 1854, its first national candidate was Abraham Lincoln. Perhaps you refer to the Whigs? (Oh, the United States have "lived" since 1789, with the ratification of the Constitution.)
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Monday January 17 2022, @04:38AM (1 child)
>The republicrats are entirely the same party.
I will give you a difference.
Our nuclear bombs were built and are maintained by the Department of Energy. Under Obama, the DOE was headed by a nuclear physicist. Under Trump, the head was a Texas politician who did not know what the agency did.
Want another one? Max Boot is a columnist who emigrated from the USSR, hates dictatorships, and was a Reagan Republican. Today he is a straight ticket Democratic voter. He doesn't consider himself a Democrat but he sees what is going on with the organization that used to be called the Republican Party and he will do anything to oppose it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 18 2022, @11:21PM
.... and? Stupid person made stupid decision. Based on the rest of the comment, I think I've identified another.
Want to know a really big, really stupid party decision? the Democrats shanked their slam-dunk candidate (Bernie) and put in his place a candidate so vile that the candidate lost to TRUMP. Go ahead. Try and defend that.