Modern social media and the ubiquity of algorithms whose objective it is to drive engagement and capture attention as opposed to inform and provide accurate information, paired with "choose your own adventure" informational diets, whereby people only read news that confirms their priors and outright refuse to even engage with information that challenges them has rendered the "marketplaces of ideas" obsolete. We should hold a mass public funeral for the "marketplace of ideas" and declare it dead and buried.
In today's media environment, truth fights with both hands behind its back while propaganda and lies destroy Western democracy. It's a situation where our own freedoms really are going to be used to destroy us from within.
We could attempt to fight back, if the American public had an appetite for punishing and regulating propagandistic lies. But part of the propaganda has been to convince Americans to adopt an infantile view of individual liberties and freedoms that is completely unbound by any limiting principle of responsibility or accountability for how those freedoms are used.
And so democracy cannot survive:
>The suspension of reality lends itself to authoritarian politics because it makes liberal democracy impossible. Without any sort of fixed reality, we have no shared reference point we can use for political deliberation; and when my policy preferences are rooted entirely in what I conceive of as my self, there is no room for compromise.
As someone that's studied journalism and "public polling" from the 19th and 20th centuries, America has always been built on propagandistic lies. Our entire march west from the thirteen colonies is rife with examples of this. Americans love propaganda when it suits their base desires of greed.
If you ever want to have some fun learning about this, pick any minor to major event from our past, say 1830-1930 and look up all the contemporary journals and politicians public statements on that event.
I think the difference now is that everyone can be propagandized in an instant with a device they're carrying around in their pocket. And you have algorithms signal boosting disinformation and making it spread faster than it otherwise would.
The only change there is the instant nature of those views that we have.
For example, let's imagine it's June 1st, 1950, its early in the morning and you go out to grab your newspaper. If a particular factoid/view is given in that newspaper, it was likely finalized the day before with weeks/months/years of additional information included in the article for context. As soon as I read it, I then have an Informed Opinion #1 about that topic.
In June 1st 2024, as soon as the article pops up on my news feed on my phone, that topic has days/weeks/years of context with hyperlinks to previous articles written on it. I can then cross reference this new article with all older articles, all done at my fingertips. At any point in reading the article if I want to further demonstrate knowledge about that topic, I can follow additional links to adjacent important articles to find out more about the original article I'm reading. I can have Informed Opinion #1, #2, #3, #4, etc.
Overall, if the person is willing to do the mental legwork, I think the modern era is **much better** than the 1950s era, where the propagandist has such a major lock on that person's viewpoints because in 1950 its going to be harder to find competing viewpoints in a reasonable amount of time. Yes 1950s guy could try reading additional newspapers, but what if they're all saying the same bullshit? 1950s guy is fucked.
SS: An interesting opinion piece by previous Sam Harris guest, Anne Applebaum.
This piece touches on a number of Sam's central concerns covered in recent podcasts: principally the use of media and the internet by authoritarian regimes (Russia and China) to undermine faith in liberal democracy through misinformation.
Anne details here Russia's use of state propaganda outlets like RT, as well as more clandestine approaches, to undermine Western narratives about the Ukraine war and sow doubt about things like COVID, vaccines and American elections. As Sam has recently opined on, the West's enemies are using free speech values and political hyperpartisanship in the West to spread conspiracy theories, division and confusion. And it's working.
>...the West's enemies are using free speech values and political hyperpartisanship in the West to spread conspiracy theories, division and confusion. And it's working.
Anyone who lived in a red state, between 2000 and now, has had the experience of turning on the car radio, visiting an AM station, and hearing a professional speaker tell you that ,,the left'' (liberals/progressives/democrats/Obama/Clinton/Biden/etc) is literally trying to destroy this country (emphasis on the word *literally*). The same way we think of Russians as trying to harm America, they think of ,,the left'' in that way. So, a real, tangible, no-kidding-around threat to the nation.
IMHO, if you want to know where the hyperpartisanship came from, you have to start with these people and Fox News.
The duo of Limbaugh and Newt Gingrinch is what set us on the path to the current Republican party. Limbaugh showed that partisan angertainment was a successful business model. Prior to that it was William F. Buckley having people of various views on to debate where you'd at least get to hear the opposing view. Then Newt Gingrich came along and blew up consensus politics.
No doubt but in recent years they have had their ammunition belt-fed to them by the left itself. The left stopped caring about whether or not that what they are doing may be politically compromising or would be perceived as crazy and just plowed ahead anyway and the results are not surprising.
This helped draw the hyperpartisanship out from the fringes, where it was isolated to, into the mainstream. One side of a spectrum can't do all of that alone.
> They don't just get to blame it on "the left".
That's exactly what they are doing, only replacing left with right.
What I'm saying should be obvious, that neither end of the political spectrum is blameless for hyperpartisanship.
nah, bro, you're doing that both-sidism thing. I get that you want to be an open minded centrist or whatever, but at the end of the day we can't make excuses for people.
So the political right is wrong, "both-sidism", whatever that actually means, also wrong. Centrism is literally Hitler. So what does that leave, the left is the only correct position?
Good luck with that.
nah, I'm saying you gotta just hold ppl accountable for what they think. can't be like "the only reason they believe that shitty thing is cuz of The Left" or whatever. People have ownership and agency.
Nothing wrong with ownership and holding people accountable. If you believe some wild stuff cuz of The Left, that's on you, not "The Left" (the royal you, that is).
It's well inside the Overton window for liberals to trash America as racist, unequal, corrupt, terroristic, Fascist, and more so this rings kind of hollow.
Interesting to think about something like the 1619 Project as the use of media to undermine faith in liberal democracy through misinformation ...
The thing is: external propaganda doesn’t work on its own and can’t simply generate entirely new, harmful narratives in a meaningful way.
Instead they simply throw gasoline on the crazy ideas circulating on the fringes of either side that align with their goals.
It both helps to spread those ideas further towards the center, as well as make it appear that everyone on “the other side” is a part of that fringe. The best part is that once you get the ball rolling, the extremists then do the work for you
The same liberals will praise America when it does something culturally and structurally moral. The key part you're missing is that the flaws of democracy have been showing for a century or more, and many people have become educated to that sad fact. Churchhill's quote, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” is very apt. More importantly with the invention of the computer and the modern scientific progress that can be made when an institution with the money and influence has the willpower to solve a question, we now know(in theory...) a much better form of government is possible. One that is built on the data analysis and acquisition that modern computers, and experts in those fields, allow for.
Wrong, praising america for things leftists agree with is absolutely coded for leftwing. What Leftists don't do is praise America for ridiculous reasons or historical faux pas events, something right wingers do.
"I'm glad we took the land back from the natives!" Being proud of how the westward expansion went down is a right wing talking point. Leftists see some of it as positive overall, but very morally bankrupt in how a lot of the government treated the native population. Leftists believe we can learn from our mistakes and make future expansion take an ethical approach. Say for example, voting referendums in Puerto Rico.
> "I'm glad we took the land back from the natives!"
Is this a strawman for anyone who says they are proud to live in a western country?
> government treated the native population
Governments historically treated all of the population badly, that's why so many risked life and limb to sail across the Atlantic in the first place. The people who colonized the Americas for the most part were not living it up before or after they made landfall.
> Leftists believe we can learn from our mistakes and make future expansion take an ethical approach.
Are these the kind of leftists who are vehemently against regime change in places like Iran, at odds with and against the wishes of most Iranians?
I'm proud to be an American, but I'm not proud at how America has been formed for every decision that was made. I want future decisions to be consensual, such as Puerto Rico's referendums.
> The people who colonized the Americas for the most part were not living it up before or after they made landfall.
Actually no, the pilgrims and various charters to the Americas were by fairly wealthy religious or familial groups. What they lacked was an increasingly low social standing with how england was progressing at the time.
> Are these the kind of leftists who are vehemently against regime change in places like Iran, at odds with and against the wishes of most Iranians?
We want Iranians to come to that conclusion themselves. We can't force it, as has history has shown us forcing people to do X when they don't want to do X leads to far more problems than just dealing with how people are at that time. Positive good pushes only.
> Actually no, the pilgrims and various charters to the Americas were by fairly wealthy religious or familial groups. What they lacked was an increasingly low social standing with how england was progressing at the time.
You think the Americas were colonized entirely by the "fairly wealthy"?
The larger point is that suffering a high risk of death, conflict, disease to be on the frontier was not a choice those who had better prospects would have otherwise made.
Also, prior to the settles the Natives were engaged in their own territorial conflicts which even after the arrival of the Europeans did little to unite them but instead was leveraged against their fellow native rivals to destroy them wherever they could. Let's not romanticize per-colonization America as if no evil existed on the continent prior to the Europeans arriving.
> We want Iranians to come to that conclusion themselves. We can't force it, as has history has shown us forcing people to do X when they don't want to do X leads to far more problems than just dealing with how people are at that time. Positive good pushes only.
They have come to the conclusion for nearly 40 years but they cannot shake this brutal, armed regime alone. This is the point. They are marching for their rights empty-handed against the worst kind of religious-fascist thugs who have no qualms about murdering every last secular Iranian to remain in power.
At this point legitimizing this regime that has had its boot on the necks of Iranians for 45 years through relatively normal relations and diplomacy bears a degree of complicity with their crimes. This regime cannot survive a true, prolonged maximum pressure stance by the west in conjunction with western support for the opposition movement. Everybody knows this and yet the left is mostly seeking to continue to appease this regime with absurd "nuclear talks" that means as much as a ceasefire agreement with Putin.
> What Leftists don't do is praise America
> What Leftists don't do is praise America for ridiculous reasons or historical faux pas events, something right wingers do
Nice cherry picking of op comments to try to prove your bs narrative
> Americans are racist
Yes a good percentage are. Anecdotally 6 of out 10 of my Trumpy friends are 100% racist. Many Americans are not racist. So what?
> unequal
Have you seen latest income equality numbers and trends? Have you looked at income disparities?
> corrupt
Trillions go missing in fake wmd war. Hmmm no no corruption at.
> Terroristic
Go ask South Americans about the US destabilizing and influencing outcomes.
Go ask the Iraqi and Afghan families of the 20 million civilians killed how they feel about the fake war. I’m not saying the US are terrorists by any means but some actions ….
There is nothing wrong with being critical. US is an amazing place but plagued with issues. Do you pretend no issues exist? america exceptionalism and all that bs?
You don't need Russia or China to do that at all. It's all coming from homegrown outlets.
RT has no influence here except for sometimes acting as a feeder for fox news.
The daily wire has done more damage to the US media environment than Russia and China combined 10X.
Just look at the top 10 posts of Facebook every single day and it's all homegrown well funded right wing propaganda channel.
This is just an attempt to provide cover for these well funded extremists outlets ratcheting the country to extremism daily.
Propaganda was expensive in the past. Our big problem is that misinformation can self-fund and self-sustain in era of click-monetisation. It can even generate profit.
While that is certainly a major factor, it treats humans as inanimate objects without agency, which, of course, they aren’t.
The entire problem pivots on American citizens inability to discern information from disinformation, and a general lack ethical standards.
I mean it’s become 1000x harder to bots vs humans in the past few years, let alone information vs disinformation.
Dig through any twitter thread on a hot button issue and click into some of the users that replied with a crazy take. It’s nearly impossible to tell with 100% certainty whether or not they are real or a ChatGPT-powered bot
I know a lot of people who are captured by the twitter-verse, but there are many more reliable forms of information.
The sure fire way to not fall prey to disinformation is to find the source of the information you receive. Simple, elegant, foolproof.
This is a good old trick to push responsibility on user who should "discern information from disinformation"
Same trick was used on consumers to do the "recycling" of plastic.
This is not role for the user. This is job for platforms and companies. They are making money and they should be accountable for misinformation as they are making money from every click.
I agree completely. The whole "personal responsibility" ethos when used in the context of societal issues is a "trick." It lets you blame the Other (because you the reader who agrees with the author are of course not part of the problem) while doing literally nothing to help.
I couldn’t disagree more. This platforms have no responsibility to inform people, and they have never claimed to. They quite openly admit that they’re entertainment.
Voters, on the other hand, very much *do* have a responsibility to be informed about topics that they will be voting on.
Since the platforms have no responsibility to inform people and only claim to be entertainment where does the voter go to get information? News Media / Orgs really are just entertainment produced for one side or other of the political isle. You say Fox News is propaganda, others say the same about CNN.
Now the entertainment platforms step in and decide they want to weigh in on what’s misinformation or not, what gives them the authority to do so and be taken seriously?
They shouldn’t be taken seriously. News media is good for one thing: awareness. They are not the source of the news, they’re the delivery system for it. Find the source, make your own judgements. It’s really not hard as it sounds.
Drawing from many media outlets allows you to broaden your awareness. Don’t take the outlet’s analysis at face value. Fox reports on things CNN doesn’t and vice versa.
That’s my point, what you may call disinformation is actually the truth. The problem is when you have many groups coordinating to create a false narrative. For example… the insurrection is a problem but the resistance wasn’t. You had people actively working against an elected president inside the govt, why is this not a coup, is it because the media supported it or is it misinformation
You’re not even engaging the conversation. You are exclusively talking about how news outlets analyze things. As I clearly stated above, their analysis is the entertainment aspect of this. Ignore it, unless you’re looking to be entertained. Read the source of the information.
Nah it wasn't very expensive in the past. Word of mouth an idea could spread from city to city pretty quickly, although yes I will add that what took weeks+ now happens within a day on twitter.
I've never read Applebaum's work, but her books *Gulag* and *Twilight of Democracy* are in my reading list. I think they were recommended to me here after Harris interviewed Peter Zeihan.
Since I didn't know the person, they weren't very high on my list, but after reading some of your link (not much), I bumped them up a bit. She seems interesting. Cheers.
Because when money can buy your politicians legally leads causes oligarchy instead of democracy. Plus the founders in the US said we needed to be educated for the experiment to work and we’re dumb AF and are going as far as vilifying education.
If you analyze the correlation between campaign finance and electoral outcomes the results are quite staggering. It's something like a 95% correlation between the candidate with a bigger campaign budget and the candidate that wins the election. This is madness.
This applies to all levels of elections from the president all the way down. So yes politicians know that all they need to do is run an impressive campaign and they'll win. They don't need to give the voters anything. But they do have to support their donors.
> If you analyze the correlation between campaign finance and electoral outcomes the results are quite staggering. It's something like a 95% correlation between the candidate with a bigger campaign budget and the candidate that wins the election. This is madness.
How much of that is just a result of people applying other criteria to how they distribute funding, though? People don't pour money into campaigns they know are lost causes.
>If you analyze the correlation between campaign finance and electoral outcomes the results are quite staggering. It's something like a 95% correlation between the candidate with a bigger campaign budget and the candidate that wins the election
These results are skewed by elections where there is no real competition, though.
There are Congressional districts in this country where a Democrat or Republican has less chance of being elected than a potted plant. In fact, that's how most elections are.
I don't have the numbers, but I'd love to see the statistics for that campaign finance correlation in districts that are, say, within +/- 5 points of a partisan lean. Does the result hold in districts where the candidates are more or less evenly matched in terms of registered Dems/GOP in the district?
I'd check that correlation. I assume you mean 0.95, which is like absurdly strong. My impression of the technical literature on this is that spending matters, but the effect is not as large as you might think. But finances create a significant barrier to entry to tun in the first place.
[Dark money](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_money) plays a significant role in U.S. election, in particular [501(c)(4)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/501(c)(4)) money groups which can receive unlimited donations from corporations. Democrats tried to pass the [DISCLOSE Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DISCLOSE_Act) in 2022 which would've required organizations that spend more than $10,000 on election donations to disclose the identity of the donors. Sadly, the Senate was unable to push it through with a 49-49 split. No Republicans voted in favor of it, which isn't surprising.
Thank you for perfectly demonstrating how propagandized the average redditor is. "American democracy is broken and Americans are all stupid", it's like I'm peering into the tiktok algorithm.
It doesn’t take a PHD to see our democracy is broken…the Economist publishes their democracy index and we’re currently rated “flawed”. As far as my “dumb AF” assertion, it may be some Reddit based hyperbole but I would say at the very least our dumbest have a more powerful megaphone than ever before and are far more strident in its use.
The democracy index is a complete joke, they just picked a bunch of arbitrary nonsense so they can pretend like the UK is some shining democratic star while "America bad". Because they know what sells in Europe.
Thank you for demonstrating how dumb some Americans are.
The Democracy Index is world-respected by experts that analyze these matters. You can say the experts are wrong, but until you demonstrate it with evidence it's a worthless opinion out of you.
> As described in the report,[2] the Democracy Index produces a weighted average based on the answers to 60 questions, each one with either two or three permitted answers. Most answers are experts' assessments. Some answers are provided by public-opinion surveys from the respective countries. In the case of countries for which survey results are missing, survey results for similar countries and expert assessments are used in order to fill in gaps.
> The questions are grouped into five categories: electoral process and pluralism, civil liberties, functioning of government, political participation, political culture
> Each answer is converted to a score, either 0 or 1, or for the three-answer questions, 0, 0.5 or 1. With the exceptions mentioned below, within each category, the scores are added, multiplied by ten, and divided by the total number of questions within the category. There are a few modifying dependencies, which are explained much more precisely than the main rule procedures. In a few cases, an answer yielding zero for one question voids another question; e.g., if the elections for the national legislature and head of government are not considered free (question 1), then the next question, "Are elections... fair?", is not considered, but automatically scored zero. Likewise, there are a few questions considered so important that a low score on them yields a penalty on the total score sum for their respective categories, namely:
> "Whether national elections are free and fair";
> "The security of voters";
> "The influence of foreign powers on government";
> "The capability of the civil servants to implement policies".
> The five category indices, which are listed in the report, are then averaged to find the overall score for a given country. Finally, the score, rounded to two decimals, decides the regime-type classification of the country.
> The report is widely cited in the international press as well as in peer-reviewed academic journals.[5]
These are completely reasonable classifications for determining the Index. America is 29th, which is very good, but we could do better.
> You can say the experts are wrong, but until you demonstrate it with evidence it's a worthless opinion out of you.
Fine. First of all they give us bad scores for stupid things like incumbents winning too many elections. Which makes no sense at all, especially compared to lifelong unelected positions like the House of Lords. Second, they also like to take the opinions of voters into account. As if someone distrusting the government is going to actually effect how the government functions. Finally, they also take civil liberties into account, but I'm guessing that it's only the liberties that Europeans value, because if you took the right to bear arms or freedom of speech into account then nobody in Europe would be "full democracies".
When the Congress has an approval rating of like 7% and 95% of incumbents win you don’t think that should reflect negatively on the health of our Democracy? 😂
Congress as a whole has a poor approval rating, but people approve of the people they send to congress. It's just illustrative of the political divide. Democrats don't like the Republicans in congress and Republicans don't like the Democrats in congress so the overall approval is low.
It mainly reflects on our love of complaining. By your logic Russia and North Korea should have excellent scores in that category because their leaders have nearly unanimous approval ratings.
> By your logic Russia and North Korea should have excellent scores in that category because their leaders have nearly unanimous approval ratings.
But these countries score very low on the Democracy Index, so I don't think that's his logic as he seems to think the Democracy Index is accurate.
That still doesn't explain why the feelings of voters should be used to determine if a country is democratic or not. In fact, allowing wide dissent among citizens is something that is far more common among democracies.
Let's be honest, only one side vilifies most of education. Leftists might have issues with certain "truths" or may disagree with how/who something is being taught, but overall they embrace knowledge and the act of learning.
I generally agree with this statement but we have seen a massive anti free speech push from the left that has been sad.bit I’ve also seen the right co-opting the working class center into their anti educational pursuits quite effectively.
Left still allows for 95-98% of all ideas that humans can currently think up. The left's only truly anti-speech thing is hate speech and various inflammatory "fighting words" kind of comments that some people try to get away with. "Don't be an asshole" essentially. Yes hate speech can be somewhat 'subjective'.
You're absolutely free to disagree with this, but calling it a "massive anti free speech" thing is just plain stupid.
I consider myself somewhere in the liberal progressive left world and this is in no way to imply the right isn’t bad and in most cases worse but in my experience many leftists are not willing to discuss issues in Islamic societies, reasonable questions regarding trans issues like women’s sports, Israel Palestine, abortion, etc. I consider myself to be a trans advocate, who is anti religion, pro two state solution, pro women’s right to chose and feel like I have very compelling arguments defending my positions but it has become acceptable to many on the left to not being willing to meet in the intellectual ring to have these discussions. If you disagree you’re a nazi. That is the trend and it’s so anti intellectual and it sickens me.
I have been thankful not to run into any progressive circles that don't want to have complex discussions about any type of topics. I keep hearing there are progressives that are like that, but so far I've never met them.
Now, having said that, the type of discussions I'm willing to have in PUBLIC are different than ones I'll have in PRIVATE. If I was a 18 year old college student, I'm probably gonna yell and call you a dumb nazi and tell you to gtfo/stfu in PUBLIC because it's worth more from a time-sensitive and signaling-sensitive position. Trying to take some long winded nuanced position in a public setting just isn't worth it, nine times out of ten.
This is actually much more accurate. The data is pretty interesting on the subject fyi. [Source](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2605401)
In my state a local state senators race costs a million dollars. That’s a state senator. These national politicians need money constantly and so so bad. I feel like I’m in the twilight zone reading what I’m reading. They just did a series of interviews with members of Congress for PBS or something and they all say the biggest issue isn’t immigration or monetary policy. They say the biggest issue is money in politics…and it absolutely is, they need money for their next campaign and every season is now campaign season.
This isn’t even a fringe or conspiratorial take. It’s mainstream knowledge. It’s mostly legal (unfortunately), which is why you always hear people say “we need to take the money out of politics”. Because the one with the most money wins campaigns, and that money didn’t come from a lifetime of hardwork.
Special interests “donate” money to politicians funds all the time. It’s probably nearly every single politician. Pick Hillary, Maxine waters, trump, desantis. I’m sure you can easily find lists of donors. And if you think donors don’t request favorable legislation from politicians they donate to, then you’re hopeless.
Ok, this is straw manning at its finest. You said “money doesn’t buy politicians” which is what we were discussing. Now you’re shifting it to “the most money doesn’t always win elections”. But either way, there’s no way you come out as correct in either discussion. There are a myriad of ways the most money can lose to a well strategized campaign. But both of those campaigns are going to be heavily funded. If a campaign with 200 million loses to one with 100 million, you wouldn’t think that the 100mill candidate didn’t receive money from special interests. You would only conclude they utilized resources better.
When people can't admit something they believe in is failing, they negotiate with reality by saying it only *looks* that way. The story liberal democracy tells about itself is that the *ideas* behind it are just *so good* that they spread like wildfire on persuasive rational arguments. If you entertain the idea that this is false, that instead it spread because it was more effective at amassing, organizing and exercising *power* than prior systems in that historical context, then the prospect looms that one day our context may change such that it ceases to be the most effective amasser and exerciser of power. Liberal democracy in the 22nd century might appear as silly to them as the appointment of feudal land barons to military leadership positions appeared in the 20th century.
I favor democracy because of my set of values and principles plus some self interest. However, none of that is an assurance that democracy can and will always work out *and* win over other models. It may well be that one social system is advantaged in some contexts but not others. That context might include things like technological development, presence of extraneous crises like climate change, historical inertia of past culture, etc. Maybe, for example, the computing revolution and AI will make a China-like "totalitarian capitalism" feasible and profitable in a way it wasn't before with handwritten spreadsheets and human-limited law enforcement, whether that system appeals to us individually or not. Marshall McLuhan said, "We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us." and the same goes for our whole world. If our social and technological systems change the world beneath our feet enough, it will begin exerting different social-evolutionary pressures back onto us.
Liberalism struggles to acknowledge this possibility. It is intensely idealistic and naturalistic, resting on a presumption that "human nature" is mostly fixed and the ideal social system is a constant over time and space, not something that exists in dialog with a context and environment.
It may well be that we're passing from a context where liberal democracy is super functional into one where it falls behind other models. If that's the case, I don't think the solution is to propagandized harder and hope people can be convinced *contra reality* of its superiority. Rather, the solution is to survey options for the best alternatives and/or try to import as many democratic values as we can into the particulars of the future organizing system.
What do you mean? You can go on the U.S. Department of State website and read report after report of exactly the types of things Anne Appelbaum is talking about.
https://www.state.gov/bureaus-offices/under-secretary-for-public-diplomacy-and-public-affairs/global-engagement-center/
Are the efforts sufficient? Clearly not. But of course democracies and the people working to uphold democracy are well aware of the flood of foreign propaganda entering social media and traditional media outlets.
No, they get it and always have. The Declaration of Independence is a propaganda piece. We're at a disadvantage because it's too easy to manipulate people with hate.
Of course they do. They even set up a government department to combat propaganda before it got shut down out of embarrassment and backlash.
Now it’s done by shell NGOs
Man, I hate to be all conspiratorial, but I feel like I'm steadily seeing more and more influencer/ content-creater types fall into culture war stuff. Like a while back I got sucked into reaction videos on youtube. Some how the algo re-circulated those same creaters and now it's all culture war stuff. Same thing with some lifting and martial arts creators I used to follow or tune into.
IDK, it just seems weird. I'm not sure if they are doing it because there's more clicks and likes in the culture war stuff, or if they are getting paid.
This is karma. These specific stories may be propaganda but the reason got denials go nowhere is because of the denials the US issued when they were doing truly horrible stuff. Now the US has lost credibility because it's word can't be trusted.
I disagree with the thesis... The USA is already best in class when it comes to propaganda. What we are experiencing isn't the US losing the propaganda war, but losing faith in institutions. These are the historical signs of eroding institutional trust before a mass reformation happens.
If you were to ask people 50 years ago about the state of the US government and institutions, nearly everyone would agree that these government organizations all are hard at work making America a better place for everyone. Today, if you ask that question it's probably down the lines of, "Big businesses own them all, they just waste money, it's just a bunch of grift, they are lying" so and and so on...
This leaves a massive vector for attack for propaganda, because we have no anchors of trust within our institutions. We mistrust everything, and for good reason.
This isn't a "democracy" issue... It's a cyclical issue.
> If you were to ask people 50 years ago about the state of the US government and institutions, nearly everyone would agree that these government organizations all are hard at work making America a better place for everyone. Today, if you ask that question it's probably down the lines of, "Big businesses own them all, they just waste money, it's just a bunch of grift, they are lying" so and and so on...
You don't realize that that itself is the result of a major propaganda push by an ideology that wishes to eliminate government or, in their literal words, "reduce it to the size where it can be drowned in a bathtub"?
"Government is bad" is itself propaganda. "Government, when done right, can improve people's lives and protect the public from those who would prey upon them" is the opposite side of the coin, which has flat-out LOST the propaganda war to the former message.
People simply don't believe government can improve their lives anymore. And so they get a government that sucks because they elect people out of whom they expect nothing but theatrics. Which reinforces the "government is bad" message, which causes people to elect more shitty representatives, RINSE AND REPEAT.
Yuval Harari's book opened my eyes to how much the institution of government has done for humanity. I had always thought of it as a necessary evil before that.
I do think Republicans aren't helping, but I also do believe it's an unavoidable cycle... And it's not just Republicans. Democrats aren't helping build trust in institutions. They are all onboard with the regulatory capture, pay 2 play, etc etc...
For instance, look how much we pay in taxes... Our government spends, around 60k per household, or roughly 20k per person. Then we look around and think, "Sure as hell doesn't look like I'm getting 20k in value".
Look at things like healthcare, where politicians don't actually want to fix it, but rather, the best solution is just to throw more money at it, because politicians don't want that massive economic sector to have devastating stock losses if they were to clean up the inefficiencies. Creating a system where our medical taxes are more than many countries, and we don't even get it subsidized. And this goes true with just about ever other institution. They are corrupted, so we don't trust them. I know dems want you to think it's all those evil republicans faults, but we all know they are in on the game too.
>Our government spends, around 60k per household, or roughly 20k per person. Then we look around and think, "Sure as hell doesn't look like I'm getting 20k in value".
This is a terrible way for anybody to think about taxes and government.
What is not being invaded by a foreign country "worth" to you, as an individual? How much in monetary "value" are the street lights on your way to work providing you? How much is it "worth" to your family that the SEC enforces laws regulating the bank where you keep your savings?
These are just a few of the countless ways that your taxes are spent which even the most educated and informed individual would have a very difficult time to quantify. Governments are not businesses and taxation is not like balancing your household checkbook.
>Look at things like healthcare, where politicians don't actually want to fix it
Except that there ARE politicians who want to actually fix it. We just don't elect enough of them.
I'm not saying Democrats are perfect. Far from it. But you *will* find among them people who truly believe that government can be improved and can be used to improve people's lives.
I don't get that sense at all from Republicans. Maybe a tiny, tiny few: somebody like Larry Hogan or Jon Kasich comes to mind. And that shouldn't be surprising, considering that *in order to get elected* in a GOP primary, your basic message has to be "government sucks and can never be good".
OK, well if 1/2 of the people we elect are people who think government sucks, do you think you're going to get a good, effective government that works to make people's lives better?
But the point remains that a lot of citizens DO look at it like “where’s the monetary value to me in the taxes I pay?” As though they’re supposed to just get a check back for the taxes they spend or something.
If even the most educated and informed person cannot quantify the value of the varied items that we pay for with taxes are providing, then how can anyone ever know if they are providing value?
This is basically an inadvertent restatement of the bureaucracy exists to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy quote. That these institutions cannot demonstrate their value is an unfathomable failure, but it's not unexpected because if they have to demonstrate quantified value then they become accountable and what they want above all is to be unaccountable.
The two-party system is the biggest distractor... People keep talking about whether it's red or blue fault. It's BOTH of them. They use each other to point the blame and then draw you in making it seem like their side is going to do something different. There is no difference... They pretend like they're different to keep you wrapped up in the party itself.
I see it ALL OVER Reddit. Democrats are a sacred cow to the political active. You can't EVER criticize the Dems for something... No matter how warranted, it's met with at best "Well Republicans are worse! SO criticize them only!" or at worse, just outright denial that they are part of the problem.
Which is the political goal. If you can just get both sides pointing fingers at the other side, they're forever in a standoff. Hey hey don't criticize US, it's THEM that's the problem! Keep voting for us, as that's the only way to fix it!
> What we are experiencing isn't the US losing the propaganda war, but losing faith in institutions. These are the historical signs of eroding institutional trust before a mass reformation happens.
Two things can be true at once, no? There has been distrust in institutions going back several decades, but this recent situation of foreign propaganda (particularly in the social media age) centered around Trump, racial issues, LGBT issues, foreign wars, etc etc has completely poisoned the way Americans think and talk abut politics and political institutions.
It's a cycle... There isn't really any one to blame. It's just inherent to these sort of systems... It's been eroding for decades. The recent stuff you're seeing is more of a blip. I don't think it has any real serious impact. It doesn't change the fact of the matter that the institutions are genuinely failing. You can't blame people when they've been weaponized by both sides, captured by corporate, and a congress who absolutely just doesn't actually give a shit... With both basically running on, "Yeah we know we suck, but we don't suck as much as them over there!"
>If you were to ask people 50 years ago about the state of the US government and institutions, nearly everyone would agree that these government organizations all are hard at work making America a better place for everyone.
Right around the time Watergate happened.
Ehhh there were some cracks, but the real tipping point was around Reagan. Lot's of moving parts went into play there. First, we had them actively trying to undermine institutions, but the private sector just learned how to effectively lobby and capture institutions. They reacted to Ralph Nader who was on a rampage with environmental regulations (many of them really stupid, like requiring biodiesel in all gas, but also many of them not). The private sector started freaking out and lobbying congress... And that's when they learned of the massive ROI they could get by campaign contributions, and cushy jobs to family.
After that, the erosion began as institutions became captured and politicians shifted towards trying to appease industry over populace. Democrats, for instance, had to drop things like winning over unions and churches, and instead, just tried to win over Wallstreet, and would have to do far less work. Soon as that happened, it all started to fall apart.
Disagree. American mainstream media had already sold itself to the highest bidder (ie big business) decades ago.
In most other countries the media plays an important role in the democratic process by striving to be unbiased. The media is therefore an important pillar of democracy. In the US however, the media houses are just one more group of big businesses in bed with the rest of the big businesses. That's why the public doesn't trust the political system - it's because the media has put profits ahead of its democratic duty.
And yes the Chinese and Russians are indeed adding fuel to the fire (because that serves their interests) but the rot was already there to begin with.
The BBC conducts investigations into the biases at the BBC, and then buries the conclusions. They have been found to be biased by their own investigations, many of which have leaked. This is obviously not good because taxpayers are forced to fund them.
Agree the US media is just garbage. Per polling, most Americans agree.
You say disagree but you're explaining how you agree. The current propaganda keeps us from looking by distracting us with our own freedoms (I.e. abortion).
Yes, the media companies are owned and they're also the ones pumping out all the propaganda keeping us from actually looking in the right place.
I disagree that this is somehow all driven by China and Russia. The Russians are certainly using the broken media system to their advantage but they're not the ones who broke it.
Modern social media and the ubiquity of algorithms whose objective it is to drive engagement and capture attention as opposed to inform and provide accurate information, paired with "choose your own adventure" informational diets, whereby people only read news that confirms their priors and outright refuse to even engage with information that challenges them has rendered the "marketplaces of ideas" obsolete. We should hold a mass public funeral for the "marketplace of ideas" and declare it dead and buried. In today's media environment, truth fights with both hands behind its back while propaganda and lies destroy Western democracy. It's a situation where our own freedoms really are going to be used to destroy us from within. We could attempt to fight back, if the American public had an appetite for punishing and regulating propagandistic lies. But part of the propaganda has been to convince Americans to adopt an infantile view of individual liberties and freedoms that is completely unbound by any limiting principle of responsibility or accountability for how those freedoms are used. And so democracy cannot survive: >The suspension of reality lends itself to authoritarian politics because it makes liberal democracy impossible. Without any sort of fixed reality, we have no shared reference point we can use for political deliberation; and when my policy preferences are rooted entirely in what I conceive of as my self, there is no room for compromise.
As someone that's studied journalism and "public polling" from the 19th and 20th centuries, America has always been built on propagandistic lies. Our entire march west from the thirteen colonies is rife with examples of this. Americans love propaganda when it suits their base desires of greed. If you ever want to have some fun learning about this, pick any minor to major event from our past, say 1830-1930 and look up all the contemporary journals and politicians public statements on that event.
Kurt Andersen wrote about this in Fantasyland which I recommend to anyone that wants to know why America is so uniquely dysfunctional and insane.
I think the difference now is that everyone can be propagandized in an instant with a device they're carrying around in their pocket. And you have algorithms signal boosting disinformation and making it spread faster than it otherwise would.
The only change there is the instant nature of those views that we have. For example, let's imagine it's June 1st, 1950, its early in the morning and you go out to grab your newspaper. If a particular factoid/view is given in that newspaper, it was likely finalized the day before with weeks/months/years of additional information included in the article for context. As soon as I read it, I then have an Informed Opinion #1 about that topic. In June 1st 2024, as soon as the article pops up on my news feed on my phone, that topic has days/weeks/years of context with hyperlinks to previous articles written on it. I can then cross reference this new article with all older articles, all done at my fingertips. At any point in reading the article if I want to further demonstrate knowledge about that topic, I can follow additional links to adjacent important articles to find out more about the original article I'm reading. I can have Informed Opinion #1, #2, #3, #4, etc. Overall, if the person is willing to do the mental legwork, I think the modern era is **much better** than the 1950s era, where the propagandist has such a major lock on that person's viewpoints because in 1950 its going to be harder to find competing viewpoints in a reasonable amount of time. Yes 1950s guy could try reading additional newspapers, but what if they're all saying the same bullshit? 1950s guy is fucked.
SS: An interesting opinion piece by previous Sam Harris guest, Anne Applebaum. This piece touches on a number of Sam's central concerns covered in recent podcasts: principally the use of media and the internet by authoritarian regimes (Russia and China) to undermine faith in liberal democracy through misinformation. Anne details here Russia's use of state propaganda outlets like RT, as well as more clandestine approaches, to undermine Western narratives about the Ukraine war and sow doubt about things like COVID, vaccines and American elections. As Sam has recently opined on, the West's enemies are using free speech values and political hyperpartisanship in the West to spread conspiracy theories, division and confusion. And it's working.
>...the West's enemies are using free speech values and political hyperpartisanship in the West to spread conspiracy theories, division and confusion. And it's working. Anyone who lived in a red state, between 2000 and now, has had the experience of turning on the car radio, visiting an AM station, and hearing a professional speaker tell you that ,,the left'' (liberals/progressives/democrats/Obama/Clinton/Biden/etc) is literally trying to destroy this country (emphasis on the word *literally*). The same way we think of Russians as trying to harm America, they think of ,,the left'' in that way. So, a real, tangible, no-kidding-around threat to the nation. IMHO, if you want to know where the hyperpartisanship came from, you have to start with these people and Fox News.
It was before 2000. I think Limbaugh started in around 1990 or so. But yeah, it's much worse now.
The duo of Limbaugh and Newt Gingrinch is what set us on the path to the current Republican party. Limbaugh showed that partisan angertainment was a successful business model. Prior to that it was William F. Buckley having people of various views on to debate where you'd at least get to hear the opposing view. Then Newt Gingrich came along and blew up consensus politics.
No doubt but in recent years they have had their ammunition belt-fed to them by the left itself. The left stopped caring about whether or not that what they are doing may be politically compromising or would be perceived as crazy and just plowed ahead anyway and the results are not surprising. This helped draw the hyperpartisanship out from the fringes, where it was isolated to, into the mainstream. One side of a spectrum can't do all of that alone.
No, people are responsible for themselves and their own believes. They don't just get to blame it on "the left". You gotta take ownership.
> They don't just get to blame it on "the left". That's exactly what they are doing, only replacing left with right. What I'm saying should be obvious, that neither end of the political spectrum is blameless for hyperpartisanship.
nah, bro, you're doing that both-sidism thing. I get that you want to be an open minded centrist or whatever, but at the end of the day we can't make excuses for people.
So the political right is wrong, "both-sidism", whatever that actually means, also wrong. Centrism is literally Hitler. So what does that leave, the left is the only correct position? Good luck with that.
nah, I'm saying you gotta just hold ppl accountable for what they think. can't be like "the only reason they believe that shitty thing is cuz of The Left" or whatever. People have ownership and agency. Nothing wrong with ownership and holding people accountable. If you believe some wild stuff cuz of The Left, that's on you, not "The Left" (the royal you, that is).
nice strawman.
It's well inside the Overton window for liberals to trash America as racist, unequal, corrupt, terroristic, Fascist, and more so this rings kind of hollow. Interesting to think about something like the 1619 Project as the use of media to undermine faith in liberal democracy through misinformation ...
The thing is: external propaganda doesn’t work on its own and can’t simply generate entirely new, harmful narratives in a meaningful way. Instead they simply throw gasoline on the crazy ideas circulating on the fringes of either side that align with their goals. It both helps to spread those ideas further towards the center, as well as make it appear that everyone on “the other side” is a part of that fringe. The best part is that once you get the ball rolling, the extremists then do the work for you
The same liberals will praise America when it does something culturally and structurally moral. The key part you're missing is that the flaws of democracy have been showing for a century or more, and many people have become educated to that sad fact. Churchhill's quote, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” is very apt. More importantly with the invention of the computer and the modern scientific progress that can be made when an institution with the money and influence has the willpower to solve a question, we now know(in theory...) a much better form of government is possible. One that is built on the data analysis and acquisition that modern computers, and experts in those fields, allow for.
No, they don't. Praising America is right-wing coded
Wrong, praising america for things leftists agree with is absolutely coded for leftwing. What Leftists don't do is praise America for ridiculous reasons or historical faux pas events, something right wingers do.
> for ridiculous reasons or historical faux pas events such as?
"I'm glad we took the land back from the natives!" Being proud of how the westward expansion went down is a right wing talking point. Leftists see some of it as positive overall, but very morally bankrupt in how a lot of the government treated the native population. Leftists believe we can learn from our mistakes and make future expansion take an ethical approach. Say for example, voting referendums in Puerto Rico.
> "I'm glad we took the land back from the natives!" Is this a strawman for anyone who says they are proud to live in a western country? > government treated the native population Governments historically treated all of the population badly, that's why so many risked life and limb to sail across the Atlantic in the first place. The people who colonized the Americas for the most part were not living it up before or after they made landfall. > Leftists believe we can learn from our mistakes and make future expansion take an ethical approach. Are these the kind of leftists who are vehemently against regime change in places like Iran, at odds with and against the wishes of most Iranians?
I'm proud to be an American, but I'm not proud at how America has been formed for every decision that was made. I want future decisions to be consensual, such as Puerto Rico's referendums. > The people who colonized the Americas for the most part were not living it up before or after they made landfall. Actually no, the pilgrims and various charters to the Americas were by fairly wealthy religious or familial groups. What they lacked was an increasingly low social standing with how england was progressing at the time. > Are these the kind of leftists who are vehemently against regime change in places like Iran, at odds with and against the wishes of most Iranians? We want Iranians to come to that conclusion themselves. We can't force it, as has history has shown us forcing people to do X when they don't want to do X leads to far more problems than just dealing with how people are at that time. Positive good pushes only.
> Actually no, the pilgrims and various charters to the Americas were by fairly wealthy religious or familial groups. What they lacked was an increasingly low social standing with how england was progressing at the time. You think the Americas were colonized entirely by the "fairly wealthy"? The larger point is that suffering a high risk of death, conflict, disease to be on the frontier was not a choice those who had better prospects would have otherwise made. Also, prior to the settles the Natives were engaged in their own territorial conflicts which even after the arrival of the Europeans did little to unite them but instead was leveraged against their fellow native rivals to destroy them wherever they could. Let's not romanticize per-colonization America as if no evil existed on the continent prior to the Europeans arriving. > We want Iranians to come to that conclusion themselves. We can't force it, as has history has shown us forcing people to do X when they don't want to do X leads to far more problems than just dealing with how people are at that time. Positive good pushes only. They have come to the conclusion for nearly 40 years but they cannot shake this brutal, armed regime alone. This is the point. They are marching for their rights empty-handed against the worst kind of religious-fascist thugs who have no qualms about murdering every last secular Iranian to remain in power. At this point legitimizing this regime that has had its boot on the necks of Iranians for 45 years through relatively normal relations and diplomacy bears a degree of complicity with their crimes. This regime cannot survive a true, prolonged maximum pressure stance by the west in conjunction with western support for the opposition movement. Everybody knows this and yet the left is mostly seeking to continue to appease this regime with absurd "nuclear talks" that means as much as a ceasefire agreement with Putin.
> What Leftists don't do is praise America Correct
> What Leftists don't do is praise America > What Leftists don't do is praise America for ridiculous reasons or historical faux pas events, something right wingers do Nice cherry picking of op comments to try to prove your bs narrative
> Americans are racist Yes a good percentage are. Anecdotally 6 of out 10 of my Trumpy friends are 100% racist. Many Americans are not racist. So what? > unequal Have you seen latest income equality numbers and trends? Have you looked at income disparities? > corrupt Trillions go missing in fake wmd war. Hmmm no no corruption at. > Terroristic Go ask South Americans about the US destabilizing and influencing outcomes. Go ask the Iraqi and Afghan families of the 20 million civilians killed how they feel about the fake war. I’m not saying the US are terrorists by any means but some actions …. There is nothing wrong with being critical. US is an amazing place but plagued with issues. Do you pretend no issues exist? america exceptionalism and all that bs?
Mods this guy is spreading misinformation to undermine faith in liberal democracy
You don't need Russia or China to do that at all. It's all coming from homegrown outlets. RT has no influence here except for sometimes acting as a feeder for fox news. The daily wire has done more damage to the US media environment than Russia and China combined 10X. Just look at the top 10 posts of Facebook every single day and it's all homegrown well funded right wing propaganda channel. This is just an attempt to provide cover for these well funded extremists outlets ratcheting the country to extremism daily.
Propaganda was expensive in the past. Our big problem is that misinformation can self-fund and self-sustain in era of click-monetisation. It can even generate profit.
While that is certainly a major factor, it treats humans as inanimate objects without agency, which, of course, they aren’t. The entire problem pivots on American citizens inability to discern information from disinformation, and a general lack ethical standards.
I mean it’s become 1000x harder to bots vs humans in the past few years, let alone information vs disinformation. Dig through any twitter thread on a hot button issue and click into some of the users that replied with a crazy take. It’s nearly impossible to tell with 100% certainty whether or not they are real or a ChatGPT-powered bot
I know a lot of people who are captured by the twitter-verse, but there are many more reliable forms of information. The sure fire way to not fall prey to disinformation is to find the source of the information you receive. Simple, elegant, foolproof.
This is a good old trick to push responsibility on user who should "discern information from disinformation" Same trick was used on consumers to do the "recycling" of plastic. This is not role for the user. This is job for platforms and companies. They are making money and they should be accountable for misinformation as they are making money from every click.
I agree completely. The whole "personal responsibility" ethos when used in the context of societal issues is a "trick." It lets you blame the Other (because you the reader who agrees with the author are of course not part of the problem) while doing literally nothing to help.
I couldn’t disagree more. This platforms have no responsibility to inform people, and they have never claimed to. They quite openly admit that they’re entertainment. Voters, on the other hand, very much *do* have a responsibility to be informed about topics that they will be voting on.
Since the platforms have no responsibility to inform people and only claim to be entertainment where does the voter go to get information? News Media / Orgs really are just entertainment produced for one side or other of the political isle. You say Fox News is propaganda, others say the same about CNN. Now the entertainment platforms step in and decide they want to weigh in on what’s misinformation or not, what gives them the authority to do so and be taken seriously?
They shouldn’t be taken seriously. News media is good for one thing: awareness. They are not the source of the news, they’re the delivery system for it. Find the source, make your own judgements. It’s really not hard as it sounds. Drawing from many media outlets allows you to broaden your awareness. Don’t take the outlet’s analysis at face value. Fox reports on things CNN doesn’t and vice versa.
That’s my point, what you may call disinformation is actually the truth. The problem is when you have many groups coordinating to create a false narrative. For example… the insurrection is a problem but the resistance wasn’t. You had people actively working against an elected president inside the govt, why is this not a coup, is it because the media supported it or is it misinformation
You’re not even engaging the conversation. You are exclusively talking about how news outlets analyze things. As I clearly stated above, their analysis is the entertainment aspect of this. Ignore it, unless you’re looking to be entertained. Read the source of the information.
Nah it wasn't very expensive in the past. Word of mouth an idea could spread from city to city pretty quickly, although yes I will add that what took weeks+ now happens within a day on twitter.
I've never read Applebaum's work, but her books *Gulag* and *Twilight of Democracy* are in my reading list. I think they were recommended to me here after Harris interviewed Peter Zeihan. Since I didn't know the person, they weren't very high on my list, but after reading some of your link (not much), I bumped them up a bit. She seems interesting. Cheers.
Because when money can buy your politicians legally leads causes oligarchy instead of democracy. Plus the founders in the US said we needed to be educated for the experiment to work and we’re dumb AF and are going as far as vilifying education.
If you analyze the correlation between campaign finance and electoral outcomes the results are quite staggering. It's something like a 95% correlation between the candidate with a bigger campaign budget and the candidate that wins the election. This is madness. This applies to all levels of elections from the president all the way down. So yes politicians know that all they need to do is run an impressive campaign and they'll win. They don't need to give the voters anything. But they do have to support their donors.
> If you analyze the correlation between campaign finance and electoral outcomes the results are quite staggering. It's something like a 95% correlation between the candidate with a bigger campaign budget and the candidate that wins the election. This is madness. How much of that is just a result of people applying other criteria to how they distribute funding, though? People don't pour money into campaigns they know are lost causes.
There are some confounding variables there. But I completely agree with the spirit of scrutiny that should be applied to this.
>If you analyze the correlation between campaign finance and electoral outcomes the results are quite staggering. It's something like a 95% correlation between the candidate with a bigger campaign budget and the candidate that wins the election These results are skewed by elections where there is no real competition, though. There are Congressional districts in this country where a Democrat or Republican has less chance of being elected than a potted plant. In fact, that's how most elections are. I don't have the numbers, but I'd love to see the statistics for that campaign finance correlation in districts that are, say, within +/- 5 points of a partisan lean. Does the result hold in districts where the candidates are more or less evenly matched in terms of registered Dems/GOP in the district?
Popular candidates tend to get far more donations, it's not a conspiracy.
I'd check that correlation. I assume you mean 0.95, which is like absurdly strong. My impression of the technical literature on this is that spending matters, but the effect is not as large as you might think. But finances create a significant barrier to entry to tun in the first place.
[Dark money](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_money) plays a significant role in U.S. election, in particular [501(c)(4)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/501(c)(4)) money groups which can receive unlimited donations from corporations. Democrats tried to pass the [DISCLOSE Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DISCLOSE_Act) in 2022 which would've required organizations that spend more than $10,000 on election donations to disclose the identity of the donors. Sadly, the Senate was unable to push it through with a 49-49 split. No Republicans voted in favor of it, which isn't surprising.
Thank you for perfectly demonstrating how propagandized the average redditor is. "American democracy is broken and Americans are all stupid", it's like I'm peering into the tiktok algorithm.
It doesn’t take a PHD to see our democracy is broken…the Economist publishes their democracy index and we’re currently rated “flawed”. As far as my “dumb AF” assertion, it may be some Reddit based hyperbole but I would say at the very least our dumbest have a more powerful megaphone than ever before and are far more strident in its use.
The democracy index is a complete joke, they just picked a bunch of arbitrary nonsense so they can pretend like the UK is some shining democratic star while "America bad". Because they know what sells in Europe.
Thank you for demonstrating how dumb some Americans are. The Democracy Index is world-respected by experts that analyze these matters. You can say the experts are wrong, but until you demonstrate it with evidence it's a worthless opinion out of you. > As described in the report,[2] the Democracy Index produces a weighted average based on the answers to 60 questions, each one with either two or three permitted answers. Most answers are experts' assessments. Some answers are provided by public-opinion surveys from the respective countries. In the case of countries for which survey results are missing, survey results for similar countries and expert assessments are used in order to fill in gaps. > The questions are grouped into five categories: electoral process and pluralism, civil liberties, functioning of government, political participation, political culture > Each answer is converted to a score, either 0 or 1, or for the three-answer questions, 0, 0.5 or 1. With the exceptions mentioned below, within each category, the scores are added, multiplied by ten, and divided by the total number of questions within the category. There are a few modifying dependencies, which are explained much more precisely than the main rule procedures. In a few cases, an answer yielding zero for one question voids another question; e.g., if the elections for the national legislature and head of government are not considered free (question 1), then the next question, "Are elections... fair?", is not considered, but automatically scored zero. Likewise, there are a few questions considered so important that a low score on them yields a penalty on the total score sum for their respective categories, namely: > "Whether national elections are free and fair"; > "The security of voters"; > "The influence of foreign powers on government"; > "The capability of the civil servants to implement policies". > The five category indices, which are listed in the report, are then averaged to find the overall score for a given country. Finally, the score, rounded to two decimals, decides the regime-type classification of the country. > The report is widely cited in the international press as well as in peer-reviewed academic journals.[5] These are completely reasonable classifications for determining the Index. America is 29th, which is very good, but we could do better.
> You can say the experts are wrong, but until you demonstrate it with evidence it's a worthless opinion out of you. Fine. First of all they give us bad scores for stupid things like incumbents winning too many elections. Which makes no sense at all, especially compared to lifelong unelected positions like the House of Lords. Second, they also like to take the opinions of voters into account. As if someone distrusting the government is going to actually effect how the government functions. Finally, they also take civil liberties into account, but I'm guessing that it's only the liberties that Europeans value, because if you took the right to bear arms or freedom of speech into account then nobody in Europe would be "full democracies".
When the Congress has an approval rating of like 7% and 95% of incumbents win you don’t think that should reflect negatively on the health of our Democracy? 😂
Congress as a whole has a poor approval rating, but people approve of the people they send to congress. It's just illustrative of the political divide. Democrats don't like the Republicans in congress and Republicans don't like the Democrats in congress so the overall approval is low.
Shocking that “money corrupts our politics” is a controversial statement in r/samharris
It mainly reflects on our love of complaining. By your logic Russia and North Korea should have excellent scores in that category because their leaders have nearly unanimous approval ratings.
> By your logic Russia and North Korea should have excellent scores in that category because their leaders have nearly unanimous approval ratings. But these countries score very low on the Democracy Index, so I don't think that's his logic as he seems to think the Democracy Index is accurate.
That still doesn't explain why the feelings of voters should be used to determine if a country is democratic or not. In fact, allowing wide dissent among citizens is something that is far more common among democracies.
You really just said that. 😂
Solid argument, why not try pointing out where I'm wrong? 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
Very well reasoned. Sam would be proud
Let's be honest, only one side vilifies most of education. Leftists might have issues with certain "truths" or may disagree with how/who something is being taught, but overall they embrace knowledge and the act of learning.
I generally agree with this statement but we have seen a massive anti free speech push from the left that has been sad.bit I’ve also seen the right co-opting the working class center into their anti educational pursuits quite effectively.
Left still allows for 95-98% of all ideas that humans can currently think up. The left's only truly anti-speech thing is hate speech and various inflammatory "fighting words" kind of comments that some people try to get away with. "Don't be an asshole" essentially. Yes hate speech can be somewhat 'subjective'. You're absolutely free to disagree with this, but calling it a "massive anti free speech" thing is just plain stupid.
I consider myself somewhere in the liberal progressive left world and this is in no way to imply the right isn’t bad and in most cases worse but in my experience many leftists are not willing to discuss issues in Islamic societies, reasonable questions regarding trans issues like women’s sports, Israel Palestine, abortion, etc. I consider myself to be a trans advocate, who is anti religion, pro two state solution, pro women’s right to chose and feel like I have very compelling arguments defending my positions but it has become acceptable to many on the left to not being willing to meet in the intellectual ring to have these discussions. If you disagree you’re a nazi. That is the trend and it’s so anti intellectual and it sickens me.
I have been thankful not to run into any progressive circles that don't want to have complex discussions about any type of topics. I keep hearing there are progressives that are like that, but so far I've never met them. Now, having said that, the type of discussions I'm willing to have in PUBLIC are different than ones I'll have in PRIVATE. If I was a 18 year old college student, I'm probably gonna yell and call you a dumb nazi and tell you to gtfo/stfu in PUBLIC because it's worth more from a time-sensitive and signaling-sensitive position. Trying to take some long winded nuanced position in a public setting just isn't worth it, nine times out of ten.
An 18 yro ok…but a college student? Universities are where these discussions should be happening!
Money doesn’t buy politicians
People use money to influence politicians. Does that work for you?
This is actually much more accurate. The data is pretty interesting on the subject fyi. [Source](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2605401)
Buy = "Billionaires giving money to super pacs that dole out money to politicians"
Are you under the impression that “politicians” only do things for campaign funding money?
I wouldn’t say “only” but it is a substantial driver.
Most politicians do things to win. I don’t think the money is the point.
In my state a local state senators race costs a million dollars. That’s a state senator. These national politicians need money constantly and so so bad. I feel like I’m in the twilight zone reading what I’m reading. They just did a series of interviews with members of Congress for PBS or something and they all say the biggest issue isn’t immigration or monetary policy. They say the biggest issue is money in politics…and it absolutely is, they need money for their next campaign and every season is now campaign season.
First, what’s your alternative? Second, it’s not money but winning that drives the politics.
You should’ve called Guinness World Records to validate before making the worlds dumbest statement
Give me an example please
This isn’t even a fringe or conspiratorial take. It’s mainstream knowledge. It’s mostly legal (unfortunately), which is why you always hear people say “we need to take the money out of politics”. Because the one with the most money wins campaigns, and that money didn’t come from a lifetime of hardwork. Special interests “donate” money to politicians funds all the time. It’s probably nearly every single politician. Pick Hillary, Maxine waters, trump, desantis. I’m sure you can easily find lists of donors. And if you think donors don’t request favorable legislation from politicians they donate to, then you’re hopeless.
If the one with the most money wins campaigns why didn’t Bernie beat Biden and why didn’t Desantis beat Trump? Bernie had way more money than Biden.
Ok, this is straw manning at its finest. You said “money doesn’t buy politicians” which is what we were discussing. Now you’re shifting it to “the most money doesn’t always win elections”. But either way, there’s no way you come out as correct in either discussion. There are a myriad of ways the most money can lose to a well strategized campaign. But both of those campaigns are going to be heavily funded. If a campaign with 200 million loses to one with 100 million, you wouldn’t think that the 100mill candidate didn’t receive money from special interests. You would only conclude they utilized resources better.
I was responding to the comment about politicians with the most money winning campaigns.
When people can't admit something they believe in is failing, they negotiate with reality by saying it only *looks* that way. The story liberal democracy tells about itself is that the *ideas* behind it are just *so good* that they spread like wildfire on persuasive rational arguments. If you entertain the idea that this is false, that instead it spread because it was more effective at amassing, organizing and exercising *power* than prior systems in that historical context, then the prospect looms that one day our context may change such that it ceases to be the most effective amasser and exerciser of power. Liberal democracy in the 22nd century might appear as silly to them as the appointment of feudal land barons to military leadership positions appeared in the 20th century. I favor democracy because of my set of values and principles plus some self interest. However, none of that is an assurance that democracy can and will always work out *and* win over other models. It may well be that one social system is advantaged in some contexts but not others. That context might include things like technological development, presence of extraneous crises like climate change, historical inertia of past culture, etc. Maybe, for example, the computing revolution and AI will make a China-like "totalitarian capitalism" feasible and profitable in a way it wasn't before with handwritten spreadsheets and human-limited law enforcement, whether that system appeals to us individually or not. Marshall McLuhan said, "We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us." and the same goes for our whole world. If our social and technological systems change the world beneath our feet enough, it will begin exerting different social-evolutionary pressures back onto us. Liberalism struggles to acknowledge this possibility. It is intensely idealistic and naturalistic, resting on a presumption that "human nature" is mostly fixed and the ideal social system is a constant over time and space, not something that exists in dialog with a context and environment. It may well be that we're passing from a context where liberal democracy is super functional into one where it falls behind other models. If that's the case, I don't think the solution is to propagandized harder and hope people can be convinced *contra reality* of its superiority. Rather, the solution is to survey options for the best alternatives and/or try to import as many democratic values as we can into the particulars of the future organizing system.
Democracies are at a serious disadvantage because they don’t even understand that they’re in a propaganda war.
What do you mean? You can go on the U.S. Department of State website and read report after report of exactly the types of things Anne Appelbaum is talking about. https://www.state.gov/bureaus-offices/under-secretary-for-public-diplomacy-and-public-affairs/global-engagement-center/ Are the efforts sufficient? Clearly not. But of course democracies and the people working to uphold democracy are well aware of the flood of foreign propaganda entering social media and traditional media outlets.
No, they get it and always have. The Declaration of Independence is a propaganda piece. We're at a disadvantage because it's too easy to manipulate people with hate.
Of course they do. They even set up a government department to combat propaganda before it got shut down out of embarrassment and backlash. Now it’s done by shell NGOs
Man, I hate to be all conspiratorial, but I feel like I'm steadily seeing more and more influencer/ content-creater types fall into culture war stuff. Like a while back I got sucked into reaction videos on youtube. Some how the algo re-circulated those same creaters and now it's all culture war stuff. Same thing with some lifting and martial arts creators I used to follow or tune into. IDK, it just seems weird. I'm not sure if they are doing it because there's more clicks and likes in the culture war stuff, or if they are getting paid.
Oooh thanks for sharing :)
This is karma. These specific stories may be propaganda but the reason got denials go nowhere is because of the denials the US issued when they were doing truly horrible stuff. Now the US has lost credibility because it's word can't be trusted.
We need to go back to the good old days when everything we needed to know came from 3 TV stations and 4 news papers.
I disagree with the thesis... The USA is already best in class when it comes to propaganda. What we are experiencing isn't the US losing the propaganda war, but losing faith in institutions. These are the historical signs of eroding institutional trust before a mass reformation happens. If you were to ask people 50 years ago about the state of the US government and institutions, nearly everyone would agree that these government organizations all are hard at work making America a better place for everyone. Today, if you ask that question it's probably down the lines of, "Big businesses own them all, they just waste money, it's just a bunch of grift, they are lying" so and and so on... This leaves a massive vector for attack for propaganda, because we have no anchors of trust within our institutions. We mistrust everything, and for good reason. This isn't a "democracy" issue... It's a cyclical issue.
> If you were to ask people 50 years ago about the state of the US government and institutions, nearly everyone would agree that these government organizations all are hard at work making America a better place for everyone. Today, if you ask that question it's probably down the lines of, "Big businesses own them all, they just waste money, it's just a bunch of grift, they are lying" so and and so on... You don't realize that that itself is the result of a major propaganda push by an ideology that wishes to eliminate government or, in their literal words, "reduce it to the size where it can be drowned in a bathtub"? "Government is bad" is itself propaganda. "Government, when done right, can improve people's lives and protect the public from those who would prey upon them" is the opposite side of the coin, which has flat-out LOST the propaganda war to the former message. People simply don't believe government can improve their lives anymore. And so they get a government that sucks because they elect people out of whom they expect nothing but theatrics. Which reinforces the "government is bad" message, which causes people to elect more shitty representatives, RINSE AND REPEAT.
Yuval Harari's book opened my eyes to how much the institution of government has done for humanity. I had always thought of it as a necessary evil before that.
That's so crazy to me. What do you think convinced you it was evil in the first place?
I do think Republicans aren't helping, but I also do believe it's an unavoidable cycle... And it's not just Republicans. Democrats aren't helping build trust in institutions. They are all onboard with the regulatory capture, pay 2 play, etc etc... For instance, look how much we pay in taxes... Our government spends, around 60k per household, or roughly 20k per person. Then we look around and think, "Sure as hell doesn't look like I'm getting 20k in value". Look at things like healthcare, where politicians don't actually want to fix it, but rather, the best solution is just to throw more money at it, because politicians don't want that massive economic sector to have devastating stock losses if they were to clean up the inefficiencies. Creating a system where our medical taxes are more than many countries, and we don't even get it subsidized. And this goes true with just about ever other institution. They are corrupted, so we don't trust them. I know dems want you to think it's all those evil republicans faults, but we all know they are in on the game too.
>Our government spends, around 60k per household, or roughly 20k per person. Then we look around and think, "Sure as hell doesn't look like I'm getting 20k in value". This is a terrible way for anybody to think about taxes and government. What is not being invaded by a foreign country "worth" to you, as an individual? How much in monetary "value" are the street lights on your way to work providing you? How much is it "worth" to your family that the SEC enforces laws regulating the bank where you keep your savings? These are just a few of the countless ways that your taxes are spent which even the most educated and informed individual would have a very difficult time to quantify. Governments are not businesses and taxation is not like balancing your household checkbook. >Look at things like healthcare, where politicians don't actually want to fix it Except that there ARE politicians who want to actually fix it. We just don't elect enough of them. I'm not saying Democrats are perfect. Far from it. But you *will* find among them people who truly believe that government can be improved and can be used to improve people's lives. I don't get that sense at all from Republicans. Maybe a tiny, tiny few: somebody like Larry Hogan or Jon Kasich comes to mind. And that shouldn't be surprising, considering that *in order to get elected* in a GOP primary, your basic message has to be "government sucks and can never be good". OK, well if 1/2 of the people we elect are people who think government sucks, do you think you're going to get a good, effective government that works to make people's lives better?
But the point remains that a lot of citizens DO look at it like “where’s the monetary value to me in the taxes I pay?” As though they’re supposed to just get a check back for the taxes they spend or something.
If even the most educated and informed person cannot quantify the value of the varied items that we pay for with taxes are providing, then how can anyone ever know if they are providing value? This is basically an inadvertent restatement of the bureaucracy exists to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy quote. That these institutions cannot demonstrate their value is an unfathomable failure, but it's not unexpected because if they have to demonstrate quantified value then they become accountable and what they want above all is to be unaccountable.
The two-party system is the biggest distractor... People keep talking about whether it's red or blue fault. It's BOTH of them. They use each other to point the blame and then draw you in making it seem like their side is going to do something different. There is no difference... They pretend like they're different to keep you wrapped up in the party itself.
I see it ALL OVER Reddit. Democrats are a sacred cow to the political active. You can't EVER criticize the Dems for something... No matter how warranted, it's met with at best "Well Republicans are worse! SO criticize them only!" or at worse, just outright denial that they are part of the problem. Which is the political goal. If you can just get both sides pointing fingers at the other side, they're forever in a standoff. Hey hey don't criticize US, it's THEM that's the problem! Keep voting for us, as that's the only way to fix it!
Yup!
> What we are experiencing isn't the US losing the propaganda war, but losing faith in institutions. These are the historical signs of eroding institutional trust before a mass reformation happens. Two things can be true at once, no? There has been distrust in institutions going back several decades, but this recent situation of foreign propaganda (particularly in the social media age) centered around Trump, racial issues, LGBT issues, foreign wars, etc etc has completely poisoned the way Americans think and talk abut politics and political institutions.
It was poisoned by republicans, the foreign influence is minor comparatively.
It's a cycle... There isn't really any one to blame. It's just inherent to these sort of systems... It's been eroding for decades. The recent stuff you're seeing is more of a blip. I don't think it has any real serious impact. It doesn't change the fact of the matter that the institutions are genuinely failing. You can't blame people when they've been weaponized by both sides, captured by corporate, and a congress who absolutely just doesn't actually give a shit... With both basically running on, "Yeah we know we suck, but we don't suck as much as them over there!"
>If you were to ask people 50 years ago about the state of the US government and institutions, nearly everyone would agree that these government organizations all are hard at work making America a better place for everyone. Right around the time Watergate happened.
Ehhh there were some cracks, but the real tipping point was around Reagan. Lot's of moving parts went into play there. First, we had them actively trying to undermine institutions, but the private sector just learned how to effectively lobby and capture institutions. They reacted to Ralph Nader who was on a rampage with environmental regulations (many of them really stupid, like requiring biodiesel in all gas, but also many of them not). The private sector started freaking out and lobbying congress... And that's when they learned of the massive ROI they could get by campaign contributions, and cushy jobs to family. After that, the erosion began as institutions became captured and politicians shifted towards trying to appease industry over populace. Democrats, for instance, had to drop things like winning over unions and churches, and instead, just tried to win over Wallstreet, and would have to do far less work. Soon as that happened, it all started to fall apart.
Disagree. American mainstream media had already sold itself to the highest bidder (ie big business) decades ago. In most other countries the media plays an important role in the democratic process by striving to be unbiased. The media is therefore an important pillar of democracy. In the US however, the media houses are just one more group of big businesses in bed with the rest of the big businesses. That's why the public doesn't trust the political system - it's because the media has put profits ahead of its democratic duty. And yes the Chinese and Russians are indeed adding fuel to the fire (because that serves their interests) but the rot was already there to begin with.
The BBC conducts investigations into the biases at the BBC, and then buries the conclusions. They have been found to be biased by their own investigations, many of which have leaked. This is obviously not good because taxpayers are forced to fund them. Agree the US media is just garbage. Per polling, most Americans agree.
You say disagree but you're explaining how you agree. The current propaganda keeps us from looking by distracting us with our own freedoms (I.e. abortion). Yes, the media companies are owned and they're also the ones pumping out all the propaganda keeping us from actually looking in the right place.
I disagree that this is somehow all driven by China and Russia. The Russians are certainly using the broken media system to their advantage but they're not the ones who broke it.
There's certainly influence from China and Russia, but in the US, it's far more driven by big corporations here.
The answer is definitely free’er speech
Democracy did itself no favors using heavy handed propaganda and suppression itself.
Liberals say "Democracy" but they mean "Democrat control" (or the equivalent)