[monkeydreams]

When people start claiming that we are experiencing 'a world gone mad' or 'group hysteria' or, as in this case, "Definitional Collapse", it makes me wonder if that person's context or worldview is one of those that is under pressure.

The world is, as it always has been, tribal. The pressure to ensure that the out-group stays out and the in-group is protected is stronger than ever in the face of ever-present screaming voices from the out-group intruding on our lives.

We hold to tribes first, not beliefs. And we feel pressured to protect even the most lunatic fringe of our own before we make common cause with the most sane voices 'on the other side'

Trying to view the world through the lens of nominal logic will only drive you made with the inconsistencies.

[awb]

> When people start claiming that we are experiencing 'a world gone mad' or 'group hysteria' or, as in this case, "Definitional Collapse", it makes me wonder if that person's context or worldview is one of those that is under pressure.

I can’t find it, but I remember someone on HN sharing one of the earliest movies from the early 1900s of a farmer born in the 1800s critiquing “modern” (1900s) city life.

I can see how cultural/technology change takes some flexibility and effort to learn how to survive or thrive in a new environment and how that is probably annoying as you get older.

I’d imagine it’s like you mastered, excelled or did well at a game and now someone’s changing the rules. I’m sure it’s also embarrassing or isolating if the rules of the game change but you don’t/won’t adapt and fewer people want to play the game of life according to your now less popular rules.

But in watching that old video and watching my progressive friends get older and start to resist change, it seems more like a natural evolution for many to at some point firm up their beliefs and take aim at those who keep changing.

[nyokodo]

> We hold to tribes first, not beliefs.

By default yes, but we broadly overcome the default in many aspects of life so we should be collectively beating back political tribalism as much as possible. We’re not slaves to our basest instincts.

[monkeydreams]

> We’re not slaves to our basest instincts.

Individually, yes, but only in a limited fashion.

But with so many paths for tribalism, with each taking so much effort to bring under our conscious control, that the average person only seems to change the direction of their tribalism rather than bringing tribalism itself under control.

[nyokodo]

> in a limited fashion.

With the proviso that everything human is subject to limitation, I don’t accept the same degree of determinism that you appear to accept. An only marginally curtailed tribalism doesn’t resemble English Common Law, the Bill of Rights, the Geneva Convention etc, even in their imperfect implementations. We can do better and sure as heck don’t need to backslide.

[monkeydreams]

> I don’t accept the same degree of determinism that you appear to accept.

I have argued my point poorly, I think, to have left you with the sense I am throwing up my hands and saying fighting tribalism is pointless.

Probably a discussion for another day as I need to focus on work right now.

[senectus1]

We use beliefs to link tribes to a common cause.

A fantastic example of this is USA. so many different Abrahamic tribes all operating under the same beliefs to push a common social and political system.

Beliefs are earworms and dangerous.

[civilized]

Collective human nature is horrible, but it is at least not 100% consistently horrible. In the relatively good times we must make the wise rules that get us through the bad times.

[Apocryphon]

Articles like this that miss out the primal tribalist nature of politics always make me wonder when the author started paying attention to anything. Yes, everything since 2015 or so has been exhausting, but do they not remember the mental gymnastics of "Keep your government hands off my Medicare!", or any other number of farcical political expressions in the last couple of decades?

The examples in the article are pretty easy to rationalize once you understand the tribes. Modern anarchist antifa types are more keen to fight right-wing reactionaries than the government itself; thus anti-vaxxers, as a grassroots movement coded as right-wing, would be higher up on their agenda. (Historically who would the SPD Iron Front rather fight- the Weimar government, or fascist paramilitary street toughs?)

By that same token, "liberals" (who? Establishment Democrat Russiagater types?) support federal law enforcement agencies out of the perception that if far right forces take control, things would be even worse for them than rule by those existing bureaucracies. Ditto for deplatforming- but that hardly confers "blind faith" in tech giants and pharmaceutical companies.

Conservatives "casting off" Christianity seems to ignore decades of the American right falling into lockstep despite the personal flaws of its leaders, from '80s televangelists to Gingrich's infidelities to Bush's alcoholic past to all sorts of scandals. And any religion can have some degree of malleability to support cognitive dissonance and selective reading, so it so crazy to see Jon McNaughton pictures of a pious Trump in prayer?

"Democrats gin up a new red scare and call out for war" - the (D) focus on Russia is somewhat of an ironic turn after Romney was likewise mocked for some Russia caution in his 2012 campaign, but this is just a natural consequence of foreign interference becoming the narrative to explain the rise of the previous president. But are they even the ones calling for war, or is that a simplification of a situation involving many shadowy and mutually-interchangeable diplomatic and military agencies, foreign relations think tanks, and military contractors?

"Republicans care more about trans swimmers than small government" - has the author been asleep for the entirety of culture wars, which date back to the '90s if not the Reagan administration?

"You can easily imagine a world where vaccine skepticism was left-coded - indeed, in the Trump years it was!" - not really. There is that one high-profile quote of then-Senator Harris publicly distrusting a Trump-created vaccine, but the anti-vaxx movement has been around for a long time and it has been a pretty even stew of both far left lifestyle Green/New Agey and anti-pharma psuedoscience and far right and libertarian anti-government mandate sentiment which dips into anti-NWO conspiracy theories and the Mark of the Beast. Vaccine skepticism was not left-coded two years ago because that was when anti-5G was big too, and that definitely had conservative elements in it, and there was also not really any vaccine boosterism that was right-coded other than from the administration itself because they were trying to make a vaccine via Operation Warp Speed.

WSWS.org declaring Corbyn a "pseudo-leftist" is the easiest thing to understand of all. Leftist firing circles have been going on since like French Revolutionary times, and there are plenty of purist/kooky socialists online.

Beyond the viscerally ironic image of anarchists protesting in favor of government mandates (and are they really, or are they there because they're protesting the protesters?), his examples are easily deconstructed and understood.