US Politics: The American Messias, Greenland and attacks on Jews voting Democrats. Or as we call it Wednesday.

[Martell Spy]

1 hour ago, Zorral said:

Darlin' -- we hate our life!

 

It's all over, dude.

Quote

 

Rosenberg, who earned degrees at Yale, Oxford and Harvard, may be the social scientist for our time if events play out as he suggests they will. His theory is that over the next few decades, the number of large Western-style democracies around the globe will continue to shrink, and those that remain will become shells of themselves. Taking democracy’s place, Rosenberg says, will be right-wing populist governments that offer voters simple answers to complicated questions.

And therein lies the core of his argument: Democracy is hard work and requires a lot from those who participate in it. It requires people to respect those with different views from theirs and people who don’t look like them. It asks citizens to be able to sift through large amounts of information and process the good from the bad, the true from the false. It requires thoughtfulness, discipline and logic.

Unfortunately, evolution did not favor the exercise of these qualities in the context of a modern mass democracy. Citing reams of psychological research, findings that by now have become more or less familiar, Rosenberg makes his case that human beings don’t think straight. Biases of various kinds skew our brains at the most fundamental level. For example, racism is easily triggered unconsciously in whites by a picture of a black man wearing a hoodie. We discount evidence when it doesn’t square up with our goals while we embrace information that confirms our biases. Sometimes hearing we’re wrong makes us double down. And so on and so forth.

 

Our brains, says Rosenberg, are proving fatal to modern democracy. Humans just aren’t built for it.

The Shocking Paper Predicting the End of Democracy
Human brains aren’t built for self-rule, says Shawn Rosenberg. That’s more evident than ever.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/09/08/shawn-rosenberg-democracy-228045

[Fragile Bird]

I laughed. That’s funny!

[The Anti-Targ]

1 hour ago, Martell Spy said:

Taking democracy’s place, Rosenberg says, will be right-wing populist governments that offer voters simple answers to complicated questions.

I saw a quote somewhere along the lines of socialism is a bad idea, because anything that takes a lot of explaining to people about how good it is can't actually be good. So, people like simple solutions. People like being able to look at facts without having to understand the context. They can understand "black people have lower IQs than whites and Asians" and it's nice and easy to just shrug your shoulders and say "It just means we're better, science proves it." No need to dig deeper and look at the facts behind the facts. You keep bombarding us with ever more nuanced detail and we just get lost.

People also get fatigue about health messaging: Fats are bad, now sugar is bad, now some types of fat are bad, now you have to think about the GI of carbs, wine is good for your heart...wait no that research was bullshit. Simple message: It's all the fault or fat, lazy, poor people who can't control their urges, that's why they are fat, lazy and poor, and alcoholics. Don't tax me to give handouts to people who can't be bothered fixing their own lives. We're all equal before the law, so there can't be institutionalised racism or sexism, if you are having a problem it's because you are the problem. etc etc.

The current form of globalisation (corporate globalisation) has failed to improve prosperity across the board. The simple response to that is retrenching back to nationalism, and the people offering nationalist retrenchment is the right, and parts of the far left (who are so far left they're basically right). The correct response is social-democratic globalisation, but that requires a lot of work so it's much simpler to be nationalistic.