Young People and Politics

[crazy canuck]

He was using an application to produce an argument.  He wasn't making his own argument.

He was using an application to produce a definition.  His argument was that he agreed with that definition.  ChatGPT had no way to force him to agree with its definition.

It's no different than quoting a book or movie and saying that you agree with that sentiment.  One can argue whether the sentiment is plausible, but one cannot argue that the poster's agreement with the sentiment is untrue.

I think there are a number of significant differences between quoting a book and what DGuller did.  DGuller cannot make an author of a book generate text that agrees with his point of view.  There might well be authors who have written something that is agreement with his views but DGuller had nothing to do with the creation of that material.  What text that the application he used spits out is the product of what he asked it to do.  It is not entirely surprising that the text he asked to be produced accorded with his own views. 

I don't think this is a mere quibble.  The practice of people producing self confirming text and then pointing to it is very different from quoting another work produced by a human who gave considered thought to what appears in the text.

[grumbler]

What if you thought a poster was lying? (Not speaking of this moment but more generally)

Then you could argue that you believe the person is lying, but that, again, is a statement about your belief, not the veracity of the argument that are agreeing with. "You are lying" is an unprovable, unevidenceable (is that a word?) claim.  "I think that you are lying" can be supported by evidence about why you believe.

[DGuller]

Your reading here is like the exact opposite of the intended meaning.

You frequently have nuanced takes, and I very much appreciate your wit - which is very contextual, usually self-aware, and rather dry. That's what I appreciate about your posts.

Writing that originates from ChatGPT obviously lacks that. I does not express your personality, it lacks awareness of the larger context and of our interpersonal and forum-specific history, and is therefore pretty uninteresting to me.

I appreciate the kind words.

Which is fair enough, but...

... if you consider "... then it's not a good use of your time for you to do it" (and therefore I had ChatGPT do it) in relation to a conversation with someone, then you can get pretty close to suggesting "it's not a good use of my time to respond to this part of your argument" or even "it's not a good use of my time to have this conversation with you at all" (even if by accident).

It doesn't have to mean that, of course, but you're relying on your conversation partner(s) to share your (unspoken) assessment of which part of the conversation is a good use of time and which parts can be outsourced to ChatGPT.

I guess I'm still not getting something fundamental.  To me it seems like what we're evaluating is inputs and not outputs.  What Valmy was looking for was the definition of "woke" that I operated under.  Valmy got it.  Why should it be relevant how much of my time went into producing something that would move the exchange of ideas along?

I get that when you pick out a gift for your spouse, maybe how much of your own effort went into it matters more than the value of the gift, but that's because gift-giving is a signalling kind of thing.  An exchange of ideas shouldn't be a signalling thing, IMO.

In the specific case of your conversation with Valmy you relied on ChatGPT to provide a definition of "woke". This left Valmy with basically four options:

1) Agree that ChatGPT's definition is authoritative.

2) Agree that the definition of woke was not a critical part of the conversation, and therefore "not a good use of time" to dig into.

3) Take issue with ChatGPT's analysis and therefore start an argument with ChatGPT by proxy.

4) Get pissy about the use of ChatGPT.

None of those options are especially good, especially if one of Valmy's core issues is that the definition and application of "woke" in the current discourse is a bunch of bullshit (and that seems to me to be a part of his position).

I'm also missing something here.  Why would anyone consider ChatGPT's opinion authoritative?  I said that I agreed with ChatGPT's take on it.  How often do you endorse the authoritative opinions?  I generally don't do it, it seems presumptious.  "Here is Britannica's definition of X, I fully endorse it" would kind of sound off, wouldn't it?

If Valmy wanted to challenge the definition that ChatGPT came up with, I'm right here.  Just like with the initial post with the definition, the ideas coming from me would be something that I think, regardless of what words are used to convey that.  I think it's ideas that matter, not words.

[Jacob]

Ideas matter for sure.

Personally I think that words also matter.

[Barrister]

Donovan McNabb had such a weird career man. He took so much shit for no reason.

He played for the Eagles. No better reason to take shit than that.

So to pick up on a 20 year old controversy...

Limbaugh said the following:

"I think what we've had here is a little social concern in the NFL. The media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well. There is a little hope invested in McNabb, and he got a lot of credit for the performance of this team that he didn't deserve. The defense carried this team.

But I mean - the issue of race and quarterbacks was very much a thing.  You can point to guys like Warren Moon - but look I live in Edmonton.  Warren Moon couldn't get a job in the NFL.  He had to come to Canada, play for the Elks (nee Eskimos) for 6 years (winning 5 championships, and 2 MVPs) before the NFL would come calling.  This was all despite the NFL being a majority-black league even at that time.

(By the way - Warren Moon is still a god in this town.  The Elks had a 75th anniversary dinner a few weeks ago - Moon came)

By the early 2000s that was finally, slowly, starting to shift at the pro level.  You had guys like McNabb, but also Michael Vick, Daunte Culpepper - but a black QB was still unusual.  I think Rush was probably wrong - that on balance the NFL would prefer to market itself even in the 2000s around white QBs, not blacks, but his opinion wasn't some crazy "beyond the pale" argument.  If you want a guy to give you "hot takes" don't be surprised when they're sometimes kind of spicy.

I think by the 2020s a black QB is no longer a novelty, and Patrick Mahomes has certainly shown you can win with a black QB.

[Barrister]

What if you thought a poster was lying? (Not speaking of this moment but more generally)

Then you could argue that you believe the person is lying, but that, again, is a statement about your belief, not the veracity of the argument that are agreeing with. "You are lying" is an unprovable, unevidenceable (is that a word?) claim.  "I think that you are lying" can be supported by evidence about why you believe.

This is more than just a pet peeve of mine.

Proving someone is lying (or in my job - proving perjury) is almost impossible.

It's one thing to say that someone is wrong.  If someone says something that is wrong, you can show evidence to support the fact that they're wrong.

The problem with lying - is not only is someone wrong, but that they know they are wrong.  And proving what someone "knows" is almost impossible absent a confession.

[Jacob]

Sorry Beeb - got distracted by the AI strand of the conversation...

I mean I thought I did.

But if I have your question correct, it is:

I want to reiterate that my initial point was about online spaces, about meme-culture, and social media (not about stand-up comedians) and I'm still curious if folks agree that the reactionary right has dominated that space (at least in the English speaking world)?

Yes, that's correct. That's my question.

So look - there is a dominant social ideology in the media that for lack of a better word we can call "woke" - pro gay rights, pro-womens-rights, pro-immigration, pro-trans - you get the idea.

If you want to question any portion of that progressive ideology - in the mainstream media - you get called out on it, and called out hard.  You might call it "cancel culture" even.

What you see in social media is not the "domination" of anti-woke voices - but rather that those voices exist at all.  Because you aren't allowed to express them in other social settings.

So essentially you're saying they're not dominating those spaces, they merely exist in those spaces - but because it's so hard to challenge the "woke orthodoxy that rules mainstream media" (not your words, but I think that's the sentiment), then it seems like they're dominating.

Now look - I get extremely frustrated with social media.  You can make very legitimate arguments - say about whether female trans athletes should be allowed to compete in the olympics as females (just to pick a topic from the news recently).  This was a topic you barely saw discussed in the "mainstream media" until very recently, and the discussion was rightly driven by social media.

But then I also see horribly racist shit about how black people are just inferior to whites.  Also on social media.  None of which I consider remotely legitimate.  All of which I see on Twitter/X on a regular basis.

But getting back to the word "dominate" - progressive voices are still very loud on social media / "meme space".  The online space is where the whole idea of "cancel culture" comes from after all - huge online mobs demanding people be fired because they said the wrong thing.

So I'm going to make an assumption.  You probably won't agree with it, and that's fine and you can tell me why I'm wrong.  What you see as "anti-woke" voices "dominating" "online spaces" is just those voices being allowed to be expressed at all.  10-20 years ago those voices had no outlet at all outside of shitty zines.

Where I struggle is sometimes those "anti-woke" voices are important voices that should be heard - and sometimes they're the absolute worst racist / homophobe / anti-woman /anti-trans / anti-poverty pieces of shit who should rightly be driven back under the bridge where they came from.  I don't know how you can make the distinction these days.

So when I say "dominate" I mean that I've seen I don't know how many tens if not hundreds of thousands of memes supporting white power, racial stereotypes, denigrating women, denigrating immigrants, denigrating trans people, hating on LGTBQetc, anti-vax, pushing misogyny, etc etc. I actively weed that stuff out, yet I still see much more of it than what I would consider the left wing equivalent.

Similarly, going about my day on youtube the recommendation slide skews significantly and much harder to the right of whatever is my baseline, and very little to the left (and the most politically charged youtube stuff I watch is analysis on the war in Ukraine). And no, that's not because I categorize average Tory talking points as "reactionary right". Again I'm talking about plainly stated and unapologetic bigotry and hard nationalist takes.

It appears to me that in terms of online video content / influencer type stuff there's way more "reactionary right wing talking points as entertainment" product than there is left wing (or centrist) equivalent.*

(*one exception to this is the Israel-Palestine conflict, where there's a massive torrent of memes and other content supporting/ denigrating both sides, from a variety of viewpoints)

Now I think you make two points:

1) That this stuff is online because it's repressed in the mainstream.

2) That there is actually not more of the reactionary right wing stuff online (in spite of it being repressed in the mainstream, presumably unlike left wing stuff), it only seems that way because of what I'm used to / my bias. By extension, the political slant of those spaces (memes, influencers, online video content) is roughly balanced.

Is that a correct summation of your point of view?

[Jacob]

The problem I have with you, Sheilbh, is that you write at length and I usually find you make pretty decent points. So I typically don't have a lot to say to your posts, but I also don't want to ignore them when you respond to me

At the risk of triggering Jos especially (), this is perhaps also because the establishment has changed.

When Beyond The Fringe were doing irreverent satire, it was around the time that people were talking about "the establishment" as a thing. From my understanding I think it was an explanation of how, in the UK at the time, power was operated in a social as well as a political context - which became glaringly more obvious as British society became more democratic.

But the "establishment" then was bluff old Colonel Blimps, aristocratic shooting parties, out of touch pompous judges, Church of England bishops etc. That is not, I'd suggest, where power is exercised socially in Britain today - though I think there are probably some constants (civil service, barristers etc). For some groups they just no longer really hold power or influence, for others their own social make-up has changed dramatically.

I think the establishment is different now. And I think that's a little challenging for people who are broadly on the progressive side because I think their founding myth is fighting that mid-century establishment in various ways. At the kindest, I think it's a little bit generals fighting the last war.

Yeah, the nature of the establishment has changed. And perhaps that goes to dguller's and Beeb's points about how the discourse is dominated by the woke and non-woke voices are (unfairly) shut out and shut down.

It's not, I don't think, that the establishment itself is woke - but rather that the woke are adept at leveraging the mechanisms of the establishment. That is, if you're pursuing a woke agenda of some sort
your primary strategy is articulating arguments how the establishment is failing to meet its own stated or implicit sense of fairness and justice (even if hypocritical).

Conversely, if you're anti-woke, your primary strategy is to argue that establishment's stated or implicitly sense of fairness and justice is misplaced. It shouldn't apply to "those people" because they're insignificant or represent something negative for society.

Both sides like to posit themselves as political outsiders and challengers to the system, because that a source of political power; though of course both sides are enmeshed in the establishment to varying degrees.

(Note that I use the terms "woke" and "anti-woke" unironically in spite of essentially agreeing with what I think Valmy's position is that both of those terms are essentially bullshit and their very existence embodies a reactionary agenda - but they're also convenient in this context. Further signs of the continuing ascendance of the reactionary right, semantically and politically )

I think you're absolutely right this is possibly a part of it with young people.

The only thing I'd query is whether it's everywhere. It feels to me quite North American - see the insane online-ness of Ron Desantis campaign (although my understanding is that Farage is actually doing very well on TikTok). I'm not sure the extent to which it's a thing in Europe - I don't know if there's a meme side to Meloni or Le Pen, say.

Yeah, I don't know either - and I'd be very curious to understand.

... or CrazyIvan's perspective. How fertile is the Dutch/Flemish rigth wing memespace? Do they have more fun? I have no idea.

Yeah I mean I think there is always a risk for the left of becoming a bit censorious and worthy. Very serious and not very funny young people policing each other's politics is not really very new. You think of Brecht's The Measures Taken or films from the sixties on exactly these types of people.

It's just it used to happen in sub-cultures and it's happening in public now.

Yeah the stereotype of the po-faced holier-than-thou leftie predates the advent of online culture by quite a bit 

I know I always do this - but I wonder if in the actual politics, we're looking at the wrong place in looking at the social media/tech side of it? And if instead it's the throwback side that works?

I was thinking this looking at Farage's campaign. As I say he has an active TikTok, he tweets. But that's never really been a big part of his profile - and the striking thing about his campaign (and why he got milkshaked) is that it's quite old fashioned. He does campaign events walking round town (not quite on his soapbox but that sort of thing) and he does big (for a UK election) ticketed campaign rallies in the local theatre. Obviously he invites all the old media but actually he does politics in the real public space. Other party leaders/prominent politicians in the UK do very tightly stage-managed events - photo-ops with invited local businessmen, speeches to party activists etc. It's to reduce the risk of a mess up but is perhaps alienating - especially as what social media wants is authenticity which you get more from a real event even if it might go wrong.

Similarly I've always thought that for all the Tweets, the really extraordinary thing about Trump as a candidate was that he got TV. It was actually the analogue stuff he could really do - through a campaign based around rallies. And, again, the mainstream media would cover it a lot.

But also just thinking about Meloni and the FdI. At the age of 15 she walks into the local youth wing office of the post-fascist MSI in her working class district of Rome and joins up. But it's a world of activism and offices of youth wings of parties, and, from my understanding that's still a really big part of FdI. That they have a base of young militants is a really important part of their identity (as you'd expect from a post-fascist party) - and, for all we talk about the atomisation perhaps that belonging in a real, physical group doing stuff (with social events) is appealing?

By contrast I wonder if the mainstream parties have become so used to the "air war" and fighting campaigns that, to my eyes, still look like the Bill Clinton playbook from the 90s (which was groundbreaking in its day). It's the wrong type of old-fashioned and, maybe, to fight it you need to go back to accepting a bit of risk of an event not turning out right, putting on a show to get a physical audience in a hall (that is not just party activists), providing a youth wing where young people can do stuff etc?

I think that's definitely part of it - and typically I expect that political and social change are driven by a complex interplay of factors.

But if we take it back to the very first posts of this thread - the very significant drop in support for and acceptance of specific LGTBQ issues among young people in the Netherlands.

The reactionary right has definitely been in the ascendant in the Netherlands, so the "meatspace organizing and belonging driving belief" theory could definitely hold. But I'm not sure how we'd find out....

I've mentioned it before but I often think of Peter Mair's Ruling the Void and his suggestion that post-Cold War (in European party democracies) parties became detached from representing specific, real constituencies. Instead they tried to appeal to all, often through marketing archetypes like Soccer Moms or Mondeo Man and media strategy campaigns - and, doing so, undid the ties to their "real", physical constituency. Practically they couldn't bcause while you could, say, be a party representing the interests of workers or capital, I don't really think you can represent "everyone" in that way. There are always trade-offs and distribution questions. And it left a gap.

Yeah, if politics is about representation of "the concerns of people like me", going too broad would run the risk of losing the connection. It's not super surprising that if that sense of connection is lost, people and parties will reorganize about accessible categories of "people like me".

I'm 90% sure it's marketeers marketing themselves as scientists

Very likely

[Barrister]

Now I think you make two points:

1) That this stuff is online because it's repressed in the mainstream.

2) That there is actually not more of the reactionary right wing stuff online (in spite of it being repressed in the mainstream, presumably unlike left wing stuff), it only seems that way because of what I'm used to / my bias. By extension, the political slant of those spaces (memes, influencers, online video content) is roughly balanced.

Is that a correct summation of your point of view?

Pretty much - although I don't think I would say "roughly balanced" because it's impossible to tell.  You can't do a survey of "all of social media" - you only see what the algorithm shows to you.

I don't know if you're like me - I'll click on crazy racist shit just to see what the crazy racists are saying - but in part that means the algorithm thinks I want to see more of that content, so I get shown more of it.  Same with crazy left wing stuff.  But I have no idea if one balances out the other or not.

If you see a turd in the swimming pool - it doesn't mean the pool is dominated by feces.  It's just so jarring when you see it because you're used to feces-free swimming pools.

[frunk]

Clicking on the turd is engagement, which means you are giving it exposure and money.  Stay away from the turds, it only supports it even if you never click on that particular feces ever again.

[Jacob]

French women voters swing sharply to far right
France's National Rally has sought to style itself a defender of women's rights — partly by attacking its traditional bogeyman: immigration.

Europe's far-right voters have long been predominantly men, but French women are now bucking that trend ahead of a high-stakes election that could usher in France's first far-right government in recent history.

Marine Le Pen's anti-immigration National Rally is tipped to win the most votes in a two-round snap election on June 30 and July 7 that could crush the liberal centrists of President Emmanuel Macron, and women are increasingly driving her party's surging political fortunes as it seeks to position itself in the mainstream.

On EU election day this month, the National Rally came first with a stunning 31 percent of the French vote, up from 23 percent in the 2019 EU election.

The most eye-catching aspect of this swing to the far right concerned women voters, according to an election-day poll that OpinionWay carried out for the Les Echos newspaper.

In 2019, 25 percent of men and 21 percent of women voted for National Rally — in line with traditional patterns. This year, however, the poll found that 33 percent of women had voted for Le Pen's far-right party, outpacing 30 percent of men. That's a striking 12 percentage point increase from women voters over five years.

The closing of the gender gap sets the National Rally apart from anti-immigration parties in other big EU countries.

In Germany, the Alternative for Germany party received 19 percent of men's votes and 12 percent of women's votes, according to a June 9 exit poll. In Italy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's Brothers of Italy received 30.5 percent of men's votes compared to 27 percent of women's votes, according to the Demopolis Institute.

This has not gone unnoticed among France's far-right politicians. Indeed, for years the far right has sought to portray itself as a defender of women's rights, partly by conflating the issue with its political campaigns against migrants and the dangers of Islamism.

Bristling at the suggestion his party would be bad for women's rights, Jordan Bardella, the National Rally's 28-year-old leader, took to social media this week to tell women he'd be a "prime minister who guarantees the rights and freedoms of every woman and girl in France."

https://www.politico.eu/article/france-eu-elections-2024-women-vote-far-right-policy-emmanuel-macron-july-7/

Interesting development in a number of ways - especially if this represents a wider and longer lasting trend as opposed to a short flash in the pan.

I guess this reflects what some of our right leaning Euro posters have been saying for years about the Left aligning with Muslim voting groups.

It'll be interesting to see if the Right can steal "women's rights" as an issue from the Left on a long term basis - it'll also be interesting to see to what it does to the part of the Right that traditionally has favoured old fashioned gender roles. Will we see hard-right feminists at some point?

How will this play into the culture wars as they're playing out in Europe? How will it impact right wing international collaboration (especially with places where the hard right is anti-feminist)?

[Josquius]

It'll be interesting to see if the Right can steal "women's rights" as an issue from the Left on a long term basis - it'll also be interesting to see to what it does to the part of the Right that traditionally has favoured old fashioned gender roles. Will we see hard-right feminists at some point?
 

They're already a thing aren't they?
The transphobes are getting particularly insane in recent years. One of the options to vote for in my local constitency was a "party of women", which it doesn't take much scratching to find out aren't a women's rights group at all but devoted purely to transphobia as a single issue that is somehow more important than all the actual problems in the country.

Interesting development in a number of ways - especially if this represents a wider and longer lasting trend as opposed to a short flash in the pan.

I would be skeptical there.
The far right are popular because they promise pixies and unicorns in response to all the complex problems their country is facing. Man in the pub level "if the politicians just did this one simple thing everything would be fixed but they're too dumb/owned by the Islamic extremist jewish museli munching 592 gender wokerati to do that"
Actually give them power and ask them to do what they promised.... And it becomes clear just being a bigot and kicking a few minorities and foreigners does nothing to make life better for ordinary people.

[Tamas]

A challenge in containing the far-right on issues of Islam and the transgender vs. feminist fight to define what it means to be a woman, is that neither of those topics are without their controversies, but either you acknowledge those controversies and provide fuel to the far-right fire, or you act like those controversies don't exist, and with that you fuel the far-right fire.

So you end up with situations where we (as Western societies) felt free to be openly concerned about and then fight off the negative influence of one backward religion (Christianity) but now must pretend that those influences do not exist in a religion with tenets considerably more directly involved in the running of society and pretend there's no way the growing number of people belonging to that religion may cause challenges to our societies on the long term.

Or a situation where we insist gender is a social construct, but then men proceed to tell that there's one objectively correct interpretation of that social construct and women can't get to define their own gender.


So you see, those two paragraphs above. Do I really see things like that? Yes. Do I think these are key issues worth restricting individuals' freedom over? Hell no. But I also don't think they should be swiped under the rug. And by communicating these views, I find myself sounding similar to people I truly find reprehensible, because nobody else raises these points. Even though, I suspect from the rising popularity of the far-right, me and the truly reprehensible disgusting people who run and join far-right parties, are not the only ones thinking like that.

[frunk]

So you end up with situations where we (as Western societies) felt free to be openly concerned about and then fight off the negative influence of one backward religion (Christianity) but now must pretend that those influences do not exist in a religion with tenets considerably more directly involved in the running of society and pretend there's no way the growing number of people belonging to that religion may cause challenges to our societies on the long term.

I'm not sure I understand what this sentence means.

Or a situation where we insist gender is a social construct, but then men proceed to tell that there's one objectively correct interpretation of that social construct and women can't get to define their own gender.

Here's the way I think of it.  People are free to define their gender as they like, it's just that they don't get to impose that definition on others.  As a practical matter your gender affects you and perhaps a few people close to you.  Society at large really shouldn't be concerned with your gender except for a couple edge cases and to make sure that people are treated fairly regardless of that definition.

[Tamas]

So you end up with situations where we (as Western societies) felt free to be openly concerned about and then fight off the negative influence of one backward religion (Christianity) but now must pretend that those influences do not exist in a religion with tenets considerably more directly involved in the running of society and pretend there's no way the growing number of people belonging to that religion may cause challenges to our societies on the long term.

I'm not sure I understand what this sentence means.

It means that if a similar religion to Islam had its practitioners in similar numbers, except from members of the majority ethnicity, there would be more open discussion around potential risks of its further spread and how that could undermine basing secular values which are foundational to our political system but are against the religion's teachings.

Or a situation where we insist gender is a social construct, but then men proceed to tell that there's one objectively correct interpretation of that social construct and women can't get to define their own gender.

Here's the way I think of it.  People are free to define their gender as they like, it's just that they don't get to impose that definition on others.  As a practical matter your gender affects you and perhaps a few people close to you.  Society at large really shouldn't be concerned with your gender except for a couple edge cases and to make sure that people are treated fairly regardless of that definition.

Sure, I just feel like that should cut both ways and right now it doesn't, not in non-right wing public discourse. If female sex-ed members of the human race feel like they need safe spaces from male-sexed members of the human race (regardless of their societal gender), then male-sexed members of the human race should not be shouting the female-sexed members of the human race down saying they are intolerant.