A small group of people always ruin these things for everyone else.
ie, the people who can't handle politics and think the worlds constantly on fire so they think they're justified in ignoring social grace and time/place taboos. The internet news machines have generated many thousands of these people.
I feel like they are becoming more popular and giving even less of a shit that other people don't want to be forced to listen to their politics at work or in other forced proximity environments. And then there's the people who judge you for not talking or 'resisting', as if not being politically engaged is equivalent to supporting the 'other side'. Then there's the overly-excited drunken political rants at parties, that's when they really let loose! /rant
The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority
"It suffices for an intransigent minority – a certain type of intransigent minorities – to reach a minutely small level, say three or four percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences. Further, an optical illusion comes with the dominance of the minority: a naive observer would be under the impression that the choices and preferences are those of the majority." [1]
That effect and illusion has really been amplified with Twitter and how the news media uses a handful of those loud voices as though they're the dominant or established opinion.
Combine that with the fact that the most intolerant don't budge, while the majority is flexible.
> ie, the people who can't handle politics and think the worlds constantly on fire so they think they're justified in ignoring social grace and time/place taboos.
That is likely correct but it doesn't change the fact that as an organization grows the chance to have such people in their midst grows and it's enough to have a few of these that culture shift will be required to deal with it.
That is, you can't really fire someone for "starting threads about politics at work"[1] until you come up with a rule that bars such discussions.
[1] Which of course will be portrayed by those fired as "silencing <social issue they care about>" but having published rules enforced equally usually should provide sufficient protection in court against such claims.
I hear you, but have you considered that the world's actually on fire? Perhaps you wouldn't notice because you don't live in the Amazon.
I don't mean that seriously, but it does serve a point. How can you tell if people are just ranting "because of the internet" and not because they are suffering and think your political inaction is contributing to their pains?
Because of your comment I will try to be more cautious about people complaining as they might just be attention grabbers but it's also dangerous to fully ignore them because it makes us uncomfortable.
We should be grateful people rant to one another, because it means we still believe we can help ourselves. If this was a dictatorship we were living in there would be no point in complaining to the neighbours.
You're proving his point. The Amazon is experiencing a more or less average amount of fire during its dry season as farmers clear/maintain cropland like they do every year. However, the internet media has turned this into sensationalism that captures people like you and turns them into doomsayers.
From nasa.gov:
> As of August 16, 2019, an analysis of NASA satellite data indicated that total fire activity across the Amazon basin this year has been close to the average in comparison to the past 15 years.
Who is to say that the status quo isn't alarming, "things aren't worse than last year" isn't a valid argument that things are fine in any logical setting.
And the internet has helped spread information, some of these issues may have been captured by Nat Geo in the 40s but others will have been missed. A status quo progression may be championed as an issue not because everyone previously accepted it but because no one was previously aware of it.
"As of August 16, 2019, an analysis of NASA satellite data indicated that total fire activity across the Amazon basin this year has been close to the average in comparison to the past 15 years. (The Amazon spreads across Brazil, Peru, Colombia, and parts of other countries.) Though activity appears to be above average in the states of Amazonas and Rondônia, it has so far appeared below average in Mato Grosso and Pará, according to estimates"
A status quo isn't inherently bad, and this one looks like it's been consistent for many years.
I wanted to clarify that my statement above isn't specific to this article. I was trying to make a general reply, with consideration to the rest of the thread, to that original point and general statement.
I'm not in a position to evaluate how dire this specific instance is with any sort of confidence in my findings.
I wasn't being serious about that. I was trying to say is that just as they can't tell if the Amazon is on fire because they don't live there, they can't tell if someone is being opressed by the system because they simply aren't this certain someone.
But this is true of everything, everywhere, all the time. The world is a complex place, and we have to make do with the knowledge we have at hand. It doesn't mean that we should be brash and unwavering in whatever our current judgement is, but we also can't endlessly refuse to form own judgements simply because we don't know everything there is to know in the universe.
I think even in wartime, people don't want to talk about the war all the time?
Also, there is a difference between specific calls to action and gripes that someone ought to do something. Some complaints are more useful than others. It seems possible to tell the difference?
Political discussions are an important component of Internet addiction and we shouldn't be naive about the bad effects of large amounts of low quality conversation in distracting us from more important stuff.
> How can you tell if people are just ranting "because of the internet" and not because they are suffering and think your political inaction is contributing to their pains?
In many cases, it's not the group which is allegedly suffering that is doing the alledging, but rather elites who are far removed from that group, and the "alledging" takes the form of straw men, motte/bailey fallacies, and definitions that are ultimately circular. Often, we _are_ in the groups that are allegedly suffering or surrounded by those group, and there are no clear signs that we/they are suffering as described (and indeed, the descriptions are often incoherent).
So yeah, bonafide suffering is pretty easy to spot, as is opportunistic "compassion".
There's a difference between ranting on a subject and creating this "You're either Wonkru or you are the enemy of Wonkru. Choose!" kind of atmosphere on a permanent basis.
The former can be eye opening and it can provide the necessary emotional push to get something rolling. The latter is meant to shut others down and suppress opinions - it's a playground for sociopaths thriving on ad hominem aggression.
ie, the people who can't handle politics and think the worlds constantly on fire so they think they're justified in ignoring social grace and time/place taboos. The internet news machines have generated many thousands of these people.
I feel like they are becoming more popular and giving even less of a shit that other people don't want to be forced to listen to their politics at work or in other forced proximity environments. And then there's the people who judge you for not talking or 'resisting', as if not being politically engaged is equivalent to supporting the 'other side'. Then there's the overly-excited drunken political rants at parties, that's when they really let loose! /rant