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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Political polarization among Americans has grown rapidly in the last 40 years—more than in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia or Germany—a phenomenon possibly due to increased racial division, the rise of partisan cable news and changes in the composition of the Democratic and Republican parties.
That's according to new research co-authored by Jesse Shapiro, a professor of political economy at Brown University. The study, conducted alongside Stanford University economists Levi Boxell and Matthew Gentzkow, was released on Monday, Jan. 20, as a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper.
In the study, Shapiro and colleagues present the first ever multi-nation evidence on long-term trends in "affective polarization"—a phenomenon in which citizens feel more negatively toward other political parties than toward their own. They found that in the U.S., affective polarization has increased more dramatically since the late 1970s than in the eight other countries they examined—the U.K., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Switzerland, Norway and Sweden.
"A lot of analysis on polarization is focused on the U.S., so we thought it could be interesting to put the U.S. in context and see whether it is part of a global trend or whether it looks more exceptional," Shapiro said. "We found that the trend in the U.S. is indeed exceptional."
Using data from four decades of public opinion surveys conducted in the nine countries, the researchers used a so-called "feeling thermometer" to rate attitudes on a scale from 0 to 100, where 0 reflected no negative feelings toward other parties. They found that in 1978, the average American rated the members of their own political party 27 points higher than members of the other major party. By 2016, Americans were rating their own party 45.9 points higher than the other party, on average. In other words, negative feelings toward members of the other party compared to one's own party increased by an average of 4.8 points per decade.
The researchers found that polarization had also risen in Canada, New Zealand and Switzerland in the last 40 years, but to a lesser extent. In the U.K., Australia, Germany, Norway and Sweden, polarization decreased.
More information: Levi Boxell et al, Cross-Country Trends in Affective Polarization, (2020). DOI: 10.3386/w26669
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday January 30 2020, @03:47AM
I think everyone who's willing to associate me with Nazis is an idiot. That's all. Moving on, let's explore the onion technique a little. For example consider this little bit of racism [ricochet.com]:
Spoiler: it's the blacks. Notice how he doesn't come out and say it? He has to creep up on it like a lion stalking a zebra.
Now for our former resident flat Earther. He starts out with the assertions [soylentnews.org] that there are photographic artifacts in Apollo mission videos from the Moon that indicate they were taken in atmosphere, along with the assertions that the Apollo program is faked and the Earth is flat. He spent much of that thread claiming he had conducted all sorts of experiments that showed the world is flat and non-rotating. Now you might ask, isn't claiming that there's a flat Earth pretty damn far out there? Well, it turns out that there's more layers to that onion than merely that the world is flat.
The next bombshell came a few weeks later when someone, perhaps me, asked why the several hundred thousand people working on the Apollo program never blabbed. It was fear of the Freemasons which kept them in line. Googling around, I saw that the Freemason narrative is that Satan is using the Freemasons to hide that the world is flat. Ok, so why is that important?
The final piece fell into place when the concept of "energian planes" was introduced. From a single biblical verse [franknelte.net] (2 Thessalonians 2:11):
That emphasized part was in the original Greek "energian planes" (literally translated would be "working of delusion"). What this means in practical terms is that the entirety of science, not just the shape of the Earth or the structure of the Moon, is a deception sprung upon the wicked by God himself. Satan and the Freemasons are just incidental actors going along with it. That means every bit of science is subject to the same level of deception as our knowledge of the Earth and Moon. And of course, the righteous are the only ones who can see through this.
Once again, the same stalking upon the truth that dares not tell everything at once because otherwise, it'd just get laughed out of town on the first go.
So anyway, perhaps you will be insulted by this comparison to racist dog-whistling and flat Earth conspiracies. Good. I hope it will eventually spur you to change your ways.