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I hope this isn’t too controversial. (If so, moderators are welcome to delete). I’m certainly not here to promote a particular view. But I’ve seen a number of blogs and posts where Mormons for Biden are unable to understand why members of the Church voted from Trump and Mormons for Trump are appalled that a member of the Church would vote for Biden. What many of these posts have in common is a real inability to perspective take. In my opinion. I’ve tried hard (sometimes I’ve failed) to see both sides (I have both Trump lovers and Biden supporters in my family). I read an article (I think on CNN) about a reporter whose family had fallen apart because political differences. He lamented the divide but at the same time could only express utter perplexity at why someone he loved would support Trump. I failed to see how his approach would ever heal a divide. Until we’re willing to sit down and ask with sincerity why someone voted for whom they did and recognize there could be compelling reasons for voting for either candidate, those conflicts will continue to rage. Christ was the great uniter, wasn’t he? He was no respecter of persons and had a philosophy about loving enemies as well as friends. I just wanted to put that out there at this time of conflict. I’ve tried posting and saying something similar in other places but it just gets ignored. I hope I haven’t offended anyone. I think everyone here is great no matter who they voted for. :thumbup: I’m horrified by what’s happening just now with social media. I do not support Trump (who is a misogynist among other things), but now we have sinister “fact check” labels on everything. I’ve just been suspended on YouTube for saying there is a duty for every election to be properly monitored and some fraud always happens. Real 1984 stuff. Obviously my censors at Google/Youtube think free speech and freedom of expression is not a fundamental part of democracy. Or they think in such binary terms that if I say these things, I support Trump, which I don’t. In fact, looking back at Trump, his greatest failures were in not breaking up big tech like Google or ensuring fair comment on social media.
Same goes for Covid, we’re seeing laws drafted in my country to prevent anyone from criticizing government lockdown. It’s actually quite frightening and contrary to a liberal democratic society.
Let’s just be very careful here. I think a discussion about getting along with others who have a different point of view than your own is fine – we deal with that every day even as orthodox members (us vs. them). However, politics itself has little bearing on helping others to StayLDS. I do recognize that some people live in wards where any non-Republican point of view is just wrong and struggle with that – fortunately I do not live in such a place and those places seem to be more rare. Attacks on individual candidates or party platforms are not consistent with our purpose and will be moderated. Again, let’s be careful and keep the purpose of the forum in mind.I live in another country. We have no Republican or Democrat wards here, although we do have other political biases, and a few Americans. We have a senior American missionary here who is non-affiliated and quite vocal about being so! One thing I am very thankful for is that even though biases do sometimes creep in, our local leaders encourage us to vote but they do not tell who to vote for. At the last election, I voided my ballot deliberately. We had four or five candidates and one of them was from a party I don’t vote for, ever, one of them had absolutely no information available (I would have liked to know more about him as a person), one was a weak candidate, and two of them were awful (including the party I’d normally vote for).
A member of our stake presidency is an active member of a party I don’t normally support, but he asked me whether he should consider running for them. I actually encouraged him, although he hasn’t done so yet, because I think he is a decent and honest man and we need more of those in politics, not just robots. So we have a major difference between us politically, but sometimes we need to see past that.
Here’s something I’ve noticed that might explain the huge polemic chasm between the two sides: I’ll start by saying I have friends and family on either side. Politically, I’m an independent, but that’s really beside the point. I do try to seek both sides of act issue.
What I’ve noticed is that both sides are basing their strongest opinions on two vastly different sets of “information”. When the bulk of information you access points to the other side or other candidate as being so awful, it gives you decreased sympathy and empathy for anyone who does NOT support your side. And really, it makes sense. How could anyone in their right mind not agree? They must be ignorant and misinformed, or just plain delusional or dumb! Yes, but the problem is you’re accessing a different cadre of”information” than they are, and the cards they’re playing with make it seem impossible for a rational thinker to agree or support your side.
This is what I have been noticing… And maybe being a guy in the middle helped me to have some access to the two different poles. I feel like I’m now kind of on a tightrope in the middle and the chasm has become the Grand canyon.
Then recently I watched “The Social Dilemma” and… Wow, an exclamation for my observations. A worthwhile documentary if you’ve not seen it.
We live in the age of disinformation.
And I don’t think it’s a grand scheme from some nefarious secret combination, but a natural effect of when super tech AI is allowed free reign in it’s quest for $$$. I’m an optimist, but I’m not sure how we are to save ourselves from civil war.
I find myself as a political moderate and pride myself on being able to see and converse with both sides. I believe there is an overlap between people that are able to straddle the divide between traditional Mormonism and post Mormon worlds and those that might also be bilingual politically. I do think that recently it has been more difficult to be a moderate because of the extreme polarization, name calling, and wild accusations.
One thing that I have done to combat my feelings of despair of things on a national level is to get further involved at the local level. I even ran for an open city council position (I placed second out of 9 applicants). Locally, the issues are not about abortion or gay marriage. Locally, the issues are about tourism, affordable housing, and road maintenance. Those latter issues are ones where we can find much more common ground.
Cnsl1 wrote:
What I’ve noticed is that both sides are basing their strongest opinions on two vastly different sets of “information”.
I definitely understand this. Somewhat related, we have tried hard to keep StayLDS from becoming an echo chamber where only certain opinions were welcome.
A few thoughts. – Two Sides. I don’t believe there are two sides. That is a media construct. The media wants to paint everything in black & white terms, because that polarization gets people more worked up which results in selling more advertising. The media has created a product of political anger and is capitalizing on it. The media divides into neat, sellable polarized packages. Think Red State/Blue State. It used to be that the only concept of red or blue was during the election. When Walter Mondale won the state of Minnesota in 1984, the networks showed the state in blue. But fast forward to today and Red State and Blue State are ADJECTIVES. People, real, normal, average people, have political views that are all over the map. I would describe it as a sort of amorphous blob of thought. Taking my own views as an example, I am for same sex marriage and am also for the death penalty. So, which “side” am I on? I can assure you, there are many republicans and conservatives who closed their eyes, bit their lips, and voted for Biden for reasons that have nothing to do with party politics; that doesn’t mean that they took his “side”.
– On invisible political bias. We all do this. We believe our views are the most pure. We believe we are fair, well informed, and unbiased. Yet, when we find people who don’t agree with us, we believe their views are the most corrupt. We believe they are unfair, uninformed and biased.
– On our Information Bubbles. I like what Cnsl1 had to say about information sources and I’ll take it a step further. I believe that when it comes to politics, we don’t form our views based on information. Rather, we find information that suits our views. Then we convince ourselves that the information was what caused us to form our views. It’s a bit ironic that in the “Information Age”, we now have the ability to be more narrow about the information we want to hear. When we choose to get our “news” from either Fox or CNBC, we are just reinforcing our own information bubble and becoming even more finely tuned to how we already see the world.
– On understanding others. I think the most important thing we can do when we try to understand others whose political views don’t match our own is to eliminate the crutch of assuming they are evil, misled, or idiotic. If we can’t see a valid reason why their views make sense to them, then we aren’t trying hard enough and IMHO are incapable of being a part of the solution to our divided world.
Great points OON. I especially want to ponder on the following portion: On Own Now wrote:
I believe that when it comes to politics, we don’t form our views based on information. Rather, we find information that suits our views. Then we convince ourselves that the information was what caused us to form our views. It’s a bit ironic that in the “Information Age”, we now have the ability to be more narrow about the information we want to hear.
The belief bias effect and confirmation bias. Yes. I agree, On Own Now.
And not only do we seek the info that aligns with our belief, we are hand fed that info through our smart phones and social media. We don’t have to seek very hard.
I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that social media is intrinsically evil. It may even be more so than online pornography, because even though that stuff is twisted, it doesn’t tend to destroy non-romantic relationships. I really think social media has poisoned the internet. Sure, I had fights on Usenet (which shows my age), Yahoo groups or trad forums like this, but social media is a whole new level of nasty. And it is a form of surveillance too.
More recently, it has taken on another more sinister edge: “fact checking”. Now this is okay when it comes to something like me posting that the Moon is made of green cheese (fact check: false)… But it has moved into areas which are contestable, and into the realm of opinions. It is a form of thought police/censorship. It even “fact checked” Trump’s tweet that a vaccine was near as “contested”! Now I’m not a fan of the Don, but Pfizer is near producing one and others are out there already. This so called fact checking is functioning now more like some kind of tin pot dictatorship’s propaganda department.
Roy wrote:
Great points OON. I especially want to ponder on the following portion:On Own Now wrote:
I believe that when it comes to politics, we don’t form our views based on information. Rather, we find information that suits our views. Then we convince ourselves that the information was what caused us to form our views. It’s a bit ironic that in the “Information Age”, we now have the ability to be more narrow about the information we want to hear.
The internet is the opposite of what it was twenty years ago, for sure. Or even Wikipedia in its early days, before it was taken over by a combination of bureaucratic bores and paid shills.
I think corporations love playing folk off like this. And it’s not just an internet thing. One of the heads of CNN admitted his channel was mostly infotainment. What gets me about so called “news channels” in the USA as a non-American is how partisan they are. Ditto news websites. MSNBC is so Democrat it’s painful, and Fox is so Republican, it’s also painful. Wouldn’t it be good to.see a news channel which criticized both equally, and pointed out their strengths and weaknesses… and gave third parties a fair hearing?
There is such a divide in US media that I know I can’t send certain people links from Huff Post on one side, or Breitbart on the other, because they’ll never even open them… And that is largely the fault of the outlets themselves.
On Own Now wrote:
A few thoughts.– Two Sides. I don’t believe there are two sides. That is a media construct. The media wants to paint everything in black & white terms, because that polarization gets people more worked up which results in selling more advertising. The media has created a product of political anger and is capitalizing on it. The media divides into neat, sellable polarized packages. Think Red State/Blue State. It used to be that the only concept of red or blue was during the election. When Walter Mondale won the state of Minnesota in 1984, the networks showed the state in blue. But fast forward to today and Red State and Blue State are ADJECTIVES. People, real, normal, average people, have political views that are all over the map. I would describe it as a sort of amorphous blob of thought. Taking my own views as an example, I am for same sex marriage and am also for the death penalty. So, which “side” am I on? I can assure you, there are many republicans and conservatives who closed their eyes, bit their lips, and voted for Biden for reasons that have nothing to do with party politics; that doesn’t mean that they took his “side”.
I hate the liberal and conservative labels as well.
I don’t really care about gay marriage anymore. It is a done deal in most of the west. People can get them if they want them, and if I’m invited I may even go (depending on who the folk are). But I don’t believe in forcing it on organizations by law. I also think the government should stay out of the marriage business except in cases of forced marriage, incest, child brides, bestiality and so on where they should intervene.
There is a tacit assumption that if you bat for one team you take on all its beliefs and must defend them. And we all supposedly belong on one side or the other according to such thinking. That is actually quite evil. I don’t belong to political parties because I don’t need such baggage.
Unlike you, I oppose the death penalty. Mainly because of the fact that innocent people have been executed. This supposedly makes me “liberal”. But I can understand why you do support it though, especially in the case of serial killers. Then again, I also think male multiple sex offenders (more than three times with adequate evidence, not just accusations) should face castration – this makes me “conservative”. It seems unthinkable to these binary people that I could be uncomfortable with the death penalty and war mongering but also abortion and euthanasia at the same time.
It is impossible to have a proper debate on immigration in today’s climate too. If I make a statement on it, many people’s brains flip to one position or another and can’t process nuance. The two positions we see getting promoted are what I call Open Door (“liberal”) and Closed Door (“conservative”), and I consider both of these very extremist. Open Door is crazy, IMHO, because it puts massive pressure on jobs, housing, infrastructure etc and lets in large numbers of undesirables/criminals, and creates brain drains in poor countries. The Closed Door idea is also crazy, IMHO, because it creates insularity, means a country loses out on some good people, and it also helps with creating new markets and innovation. The obvious answer is controlled immigration i.e. the Doorman/Concierge approach – you let some people in according to needs, but don’t shut everyone out… But that isn’t even a thing in a lot of debates.
The internet and social media are definitely a problem. I’m not that old, but I still remember when the internet was more “free”. Youtube was just a bunch of funny videos of teenagers doing dumb things, instead of a bunch of sponsored videos and professional influencers. Facebook was a fun place to share pictures, “poke” friends, and keep in touch with people you knew. Now it’s all politics. People used to have no choice but to interact with people of opposing viewpoints. You used to just talk to and associate with people who lived near you, and some of them had different views. Now a lot of social interaction happens in online echo chambers with strangers who agree with you, rather than with, say, your next door neighbors who voted for the other guy.
I’ve found that on the internet everything seems hopelessly polarized, but when you find people who are actually willing to have a real, civil, face-to-face (before Covid) discussion on political issues there’s a lot of common ground. Individuals’ views are often much more nuanced than what you’d expect from what gets posted on social media.
Quote:I’ve found that on the internet everything seems hopelessly polarized, but when you find people who are actually willing to have a real, civil, face-to-face (before Covid) discussion on political issues there’s a lot of common ground. Individuals’ views are often much more nuanced than what you’d expect from what gets posted on social media.
I don’t do social media (beyond texting my family…is that even social media?) but I recently read an article about the current U.S. election issues and jumped down to the comments (I thought of an interesting comment to make…well, it was interesting to me anyway) and was deeply saddened but not surprised by what I found there. Nothing but vitriol, condescension and dogmatic condemnation and worse, people calling their fellow humans horrible names. And this was being carried out by individuals from both sides. In the end, I just didn’t bother. It was just so depressing. I have really worked hard this past year to try to remain optimistic in the face of some really terrible things that happened generally and personally. I know there is still great good in all humans and great good being done right now. It just doesn’t make good clickbait.
Gerald, this reminds me of a line from the movie Wreck-It Ralph 2: Quote:First rule of the internet: Do not read the comments
For some reason, comment sections seem to bring out the worst in humanity. I once commented on some Youtube video (just some fun video, nothing remotely controversial) and someone replied to me with a mean comment. I would have been offended had it not seemed so absurd. I mean, there I am just posting a nice simple comment, and someone feels the need to insult me out of nowhere. Really?
There used to be a lot of talk about the problem of cyberbullying in schools. But from seeing the current state of the internet, especially with politics, it seems like cyberbullying has gone mainstream. We’re not going to get kids to stop cyberbullying each other if they see adults participating in similar behaviors every day.
I wonder if something about online interaction interferes with empathy. If you’re talking face-to-face and you say something offensive, you often get some sort of feedback in their expression, or can in some way sense that they’re uncomfortable. You can see that you hurt them, and then you feel sorry. But online you feel more removed. I wonder how many of the people who post horrible things on the internet would say the same things to someone in-person. Clearly there are some, but I think (or at least hope) that it would be a lot less.
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