American Politics from 2019 on

[pErvinalia]

[Tero]

Senate map. Democrats have to win 5 tossups. Republicans could get one of those.
https://www.realclearpolling.com/maps/s ... 24/toss-up

[Tero]

Foxnews: Biden is sitting in beach chair and Kamala is hobnobbing with her rich friends. People are suffering!
PBS: Shows Biden giving speeched at disaster area.
https://www.threads.net/@decodingfoxnew ... WKCoOQ3l7w

[Tero]

I did not want to start a whole new topic (maybe I should), but I am looking for a term or maybe academic concept for my idea. Why is it people are confused about issues and are often labeled low information voters? It is, I clai, because there is just too much stuff ouit there. Most of it is not factual. Compare this to the union worker in 1900 or the TV news of the 70s with Walter Cronkite. The worker read his newspaper daily cover to cover. Especially election years. He read the comics too, it toook 5 minutes. The TV watcher got the general idea of Vietnam from Cronkite. The war was going badly.

Now compare to today's Internet news consumer. There is too much. They lose interest. They are more likely to click around with sports, entertainement and everything that is not news.

Is this a concept in academia? The idea that the quantity of information available turns people away from current events etc. to plain entertainement.

[Sean Hayden]

l’ve seen the claim that when people first got their tvs the news was what everyone watched. Then entertainment started to take over, and to compete the news became more entertainment based. The same creep happened in politics when leaders discovered they got more traction when they put on elaborate shows. The switch to entertainment, along with a few other key changes, eventually corrupted what it meant to be a journalist for a lot of people. So, supposedly, you could consume all the news you want today, and you still may not be as well informed or prepared for reasonable discussion and disagreement as times past.

This is covered in detail in How America Lost Its Mind, Thomas Patterson

—//—

A disturbing thought I kept having while reading it was deciding whether he was describing problems that might have been avoided, or simply the results of our flourishing. If you rewound the clock would you get here every time?

[Brian Peacock]

I did not want to start a whole new topic (maybe I should), but I am looking for a term or maybe academic concept for my idea. Why is it people are confused about issues and are often labeled low information voters? It is, I clai, because there is just too much stuff ouit there. Most of it is not factual. Compare this to the union worker in 1900 or the TV news of the 70s with Walter Cronkite. The worker read his newspaper daily cover to cover. Especially election years. He read the comics too, it toook 5 minutes. The TV watcher got the general idea of Vietnam from Cronkite. The war was going badly.

Now compare to today's Internet news consumer. There is too much. They lose interest. They are more likely to click around with sports, entertainement and everything that is not news.

Is this a concept in academia? The idea that the quantity of information available turns people away from current events etc. to plain entertainement.

Perhaps it's not just the option-paralysis-inspiring quantity of 'news' that's the problem, but the way that it's accessed, often via curated algorithmic feeds popping into view populated according to what we've clicked on before and how long that window/page was open - plus the rise of targetted advertising which responds dynamically to real-time data gathered through our devices. In this situation it's easy to see how bespoke news echo chambers can abound, each one tailored to our specific collection of 'confirmation biases'.

Another factor might be that the primary source of party political information, comment and analysis now comes from people and organisations with skin in the game, from those directly associated and aligned with the political parties themselves.

Reuters: Overview and key findings of the 2023 Digital News Report

[Brian Peacock]

...

A disturbing thought I kept having while reading it was deciding whether he was describing problems that might have been avoided, or simply the results of our flourishing. If you rewound the clock would you get here every time?

Can't decide if that's fatalistic determinism or plain old teleology!

[Sean Hayden]

Yeah, thank goodness for the Dutch! Their example shows there’s nothing inevitable about the sorry state the rest of us are in.

[Tero]

Journalist Chris Hayes is coming out with a book on the topic of information overload in February:

Because there is a breaking point. Sirens are designed to compel us, and now they are going off in our bedrooms and kitchens at all hours of the day and night, doing the bidding of vast empires, the most valuable companies in history, built on harvesting human attention. As Hayes writes, “Now our deepest neurological structures, human evolutionary inheritances, and social impulses are in a habitat designed to prey upon, to cultivate, distort, or destroy that which most fundamentally makes us human.” The Sirens’ Call is the book that snaps everything into a single holistic framework so that we can wrest back control of our lives, our politics, and our future.

[Brian Peacock]

Yeah, thank goodness for the Dutch! Their example shows there’s nothing inevitable about the sorry state the rest of us are in.

[Sean Hayden]

Dutch innocence is the best innocence!

[pErvinalia]

Taking the piss out of the Dutch isn't the same when Scot Dutchy isn't around...

[Brian Peacock]

Journalist Chris Hayes is coming out with a book on the topic of information overload in February:

Because there is a breaking point. Sirens are designed to compel us, and now they are going off in our bedrooms and kitchens at all hours of the day and night, doing the bidding of vast empires, the most valuable companies in history, built on harvesting human attention. As Hayes writes, “Now our deepest neurological structures, human evolutionary inheritances, and social impulses are in a habitat designed to prey upon, to cultivate, distort, or destroy that which most fundamentally makes us human.” The Sirens’ Call is the book that snaps everything into a single holistic framework so that we can wrest back control of our lives, our politics, and our future.

"Attention is currently in the marketplace of ideas." - Peter Coffin, Custom Reality and You, 2018.

[L'Emmerdeur]

A judge in Georgia has ruled that county level election superintendents do not have the authority to delay or decline certifying election results based on their personal beliefs about those results. Georgia will be an important state in the presidential election--this is a loss for Trumpists in Georgia.

'Certification of election results is mandatory in Georgia, Fulton County judge rules'

A Fulton County Superior Court judge has ruled that election results must be certified in Georgia, according to an order handed down on Monday.

The order comes as a response to a lawsuit by Julie Adams, a member of the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections. Adams argued she should be able to forego certifying election results “if she believed the results to be incorrect or not sufficiently reliable,” but Judge Robert McBurney said certification is a mandatory part of election superintendents’ duties.

[Tero]

not only do we have poltical sheriffs and judges, even our polls are biased

Election analyst Simon Rosenberg recently noted that of the last 15 general election polls released for Pennsylvania, a state viewed by both sides as key to any electoral victory, 12 have right-wing or GOP affiliations.

But the flood of GOP pollsters had taken a toll. It demoralized Democrats and shifted dollars away from races that the polls claimed were unwinnable. Chief among these was the nearly successful Senate campaign of Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes. Those corrupted polling averages had him trailing the incumbent Republican, Sen. Ron Johnson, by as much as five points. Democratic donors believed the numbers and decided Barnes was likely to lose. Money shifted to places like John Fetterman’s race in Pennsylvania—a race he actually won quite handily.

https://thinkbigpicture.substack.com/p/ ... wave-polls