In the days following the election, Trump continued to refuse to concede the election that he was projected to lose by 7 million popular votes and 74 electoral votes, his baseless complaints of widespread voter fraud while he sought to overturn the results generated outrage among his supporters. Several of my conservative friends and relatives announced that they were leaving Twitter for Parler and leaving Facebook for MeWe. [1]
I had a few reactions to this mass announcement:
- We already have extreme political polarization in this country, but if Twitter becomes strictly for liberals and Parler is strictly for conservatives, then this will create dueling echo chambers.
- I’d rather be on the social media platform that has more people on it because then there’s going to be better content.
- I didn’t get why conservatives would be mad at Mark Zuckerberg since everyone I know on the left also hates him for doing too little to fight election fraud. I thought hating Mark Zuckerberg was the common ground both parties could agree on.
- Leaving a social media platform because it’s flagging obvious lies as “disputed” isn’t a great look, particularly when so many in our nation were seemingly willing to throw democracy into a dumpster the second their candidate lost.
- Twitter in particular has taken actions that are helpful to curb the spread of misinformation by cracking down on reported bots (if substantiated), and by asking if you’ve actually read an article before you retweet it. This is still very light moderation that to me doesn’t rise to the level of “censorship,” but for some it apparently does.
- Competition is generally good at keeping companies on their toes, so an alternative to Twitter and Facebook isn’t a bad thing (except if it is, in which case it will fail).
All of this made me curious as to why conservatives found Parler attractive, and it revolved around claims of censorship and anti-conservative bias. Unlike Twitter, which already seems very reluctant to do it, Parler doesn’t prevent the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories and doesn’t put warnings on “disputed” articles, claims or facts. It also doesn’t tee up articles based on an algorithm, and it doesn’t mine readers’ data to serve up ads designed based on their interests (mine are apparently weird history-related clickbait articles). What that means in practical terms, though, is that Parler (which only has 30 employees) also allows:
- Hate speech
- Inciting to violence
- Conspiracy theories
- Fake news and disinformation
- Disinformation posted by Russian bots
This made me think back to two very different experiences I had with media. When I was a young missionary serving in the Canary Islands, I remember an investigator we would visit with her most evenings when she got home from the restaurant where she worked. While we ate, she’d talk about things that happened or news stories. One day she mentioned excitedly that there had been a news story about a spacecraft in Russia that had landed on a playground and aliens had come out and were seen by local townspeople. She took this story at face value, and I was very confused.
“Where did you read this?”
“It was in the paper. It’s all over the news. I guess there really is life from other planets.”
I remembered watching the “V” mini-series in the early 1980s, and it was a real sensation, particularly the big reveal (spoiler alert, but c’mon, you can see this coming a mile off) that the friendly and advanced human looking aliens aren’t what they seem at all. This was revealed in the mother of all cliff-hanging scenes in which their leader, Diana, throws back her head, unhinges her jaw, and consumes a live rat. Yes, the aliens are dun-dun-dun reptilian overlords.[2]
That miniseries had aired over 5 years earlier than this conversation, but it was still what came to my mind. Were there actual aliens in Russia? It just seemed too hard to believe. I remained skeptical, and it’s a good thing. What I learned was that what passed for “news” in some countries wasn’t the same as say, the New York Times. Some of it was more like the National Enquirer. There weren’t always the same standards of journalistic integrity in other countries as I was used to in the US.
A vastly different experience occurred much later, ten years ago, when I was living in Singapore which is a very conservative country that is ostensibly a democracy with some roots in the English system, but very controlled, more like a benevolent dictatorship [3]. Before moving there, I had read that the media in Singapore was censored by the government, and as an American, that raised concerns for me, but I wasn’t sure what the censorship would look like. Would it be obvious propaganda? Would the stories be laughably stilted toward a pro-government view?
What I found was that, generally speaking, the Straits Times was a fairly solid news source with integrity but a unique perspective on the world and Singaporean affairs. It slanted anti-China (often calling them out for human rights violations in ways I never saw in other news sources), pro-western democracies (particularly the US and Europe), and very pro-economics. It selectively aired Singapore’s own dirty laundry[4], but only in ways that would encourage citizens to do better, not in ways that would harm the economy. In fact, during the Covid pandemic, their reporting was significantly better, more researched, and more detailed than anything I read in the US.
As a business executive, I could see this agenda, and honestly, it made me wonder about some of the articles I had read in American newspapers. I had occasionally seen articles that were about topics I understood better than their authors, or that I saw differently, articles that sometimes sowed discontent with economic policies based on what I saw as a misreading of the situation, and that in turn created a widespread belief in benighted thinking. These types of mistakes have consequences and change the outcomes of elections and policies. Sense-making is probably the most important skill a writer has, taking complex information and rendering it more easily understood by readers, even if they lack the experience and skills of those who’ve spent decades hands-on in that field.
There are some narratives and tropes that are part of the vernacular and that go unquestioned in certain circles. Reading the news is often just the regurgitation of these same themes over and over. Only if we have more specialized experience or knowledge do we even know that we should question these familiar ideas. This is true in all cultures. When you encounter one in a culture that isn’t your own, it’s easy to spot because it’s a story that’s new to you but that others don’t question. It’s much harder to spot them in our own culture due to their familiarity and what seems like a lifetime of evidence to support them.
For a quick example, when my daughter was in elementary school, there was a homework assignment about pollution. The kids received a page with drawings of various types of pollution occurring, and the kids had to circle all the instances of pollution. One of the pictures on the page was a set of nuclear cooling towers. This pissed me off, because I knew that the narrative was that whatever is coming out of towers and stacks is polluting the air, but that is not true of nuclear reactors. Cooling towers are literally just releasing steam–water–into the air. They are not polluting. But the assignment did not make this distinction. I had to explain the accurate information to my kids so they didn’t grow up believing this false narrative. [5] I also wrote this explanation on the assignment for the teacher in hope that she would correct the spread of misinformation. I suspect she did not.
I’ve been reading Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, Talking to Strangers. He explains that as humans, our default is to believe other people. We are credulous, which is mostly a good thing because most people are telling the truth as they understand it, but it also makes us vulnerable to lies, deceit and unwitting misinformation. He talks about the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme, and that there was a man who had raised this issue repeatedly for years before Madoff was finally caught. The reason nobody at the SEC took his complaints seriously is because they, like everyone, is set to assume others are telling the truth (even though it is literally their job to find frauds and cheats), and the man raising the complaint was skeptical of everything and everyone, and he also (perhaps relatedly) was paranoid and had poor social skills. When the SEC failed to act, he decided to go to the attorney general. Rather than taking his complaints directly to Eliot Spitzer, he tried to pass him information in an elaborate and indirect scheme to keep his own identity hidden, but as a result, the person he handed the information to had no idea what it was, why it mattered, and also was not someone with direct access to Spitzer. It went nowhere.
It’s been difficult for me to contemplate how credulous some Church members are about Trump and how neutral Church leaders have been about his ill-fated attempt to overturn the election. One of the things Trump did very effectively is to drive a wedge between the two parties by repeating time-worn tropes about liberals that conservatives find appealing and credible. Many conservatives who supported Trump believed in him because he supported their anti-liberal bias rather than supporting his actual policies or principles. This seems particularly true among Church members who support him. Some of these beliefs include:
- Liberals are godless, hate religion, and seek an atheist nation.
- Liberals create victim mentality instead of personal accountability.
- Liberals want to control people’s choices and enforce unnecessary rules. They are coming to take away your guns.
- Liberals want to redistribute wealth through taxes.
I don’t agree with these statements personally (and most of the people I know on the left don’t use the term “liberals” to describe themselves), but I know that they are common conservative narratives. There are versions of these statements that are even more extreme. There are similar ones about conservatives. All of these can be rephrased in ways that are more accurate if we take some of the hyperbole out:
- Liberals seek to maintain a separation of Church & state, and don’t wish to preference any religion.
- Liberals acknowledge systemic racism, inequality and injustice, and believe it should be addressed.
- Liberals want to legislate things that protect people from being harmed by others, including gun control and mask mandates for public health.
- Liberals want to decrease the wealth gap and boost the middle class by taxing the rich and using that money for public programs.
The trick to avoid being deceived isn’t to quit believing everything and everyone, to become so jaded and skeptical that we can’t function. It’s to see the narratives we assume are correct the way an outsider might see them. It’s to question whether something is a truism or propaganda. It’s to try to understand complex issues more deeply than the tropes would have us see.
In the Church, some of our most common tropes originate in apologetics, explanations we trot out to explain away unsavory aspects to our history such as polygamy, leadership failures, etc. Others tropes are common cultural beliefs members hold that they’ve heard repeated in Sunday School enough times that they assume they are required tenets for everyone, a shared worldview to be a Mormon. When you don’t agree, it can make you seem like a refreshingly wise person, a curmudgeon, or a heretic.
- What are some of the tropes you’ve become aware of as you’ve grown older?
- Are there some tropes you hear at Church that you’ve become skeptical about in time? How do you point these out?
- Do you believe there is too much censorship in social media or too little? What are examples of getting it right?
Discuss.
[1] Other social media “equivalents” include.
[2] According to a podcast I listened to about conspiracy theories, 6% of Americans believe that there are actual reptilian overlords running society.
[3] When the ruling party only got 92% of the vote while I was there, the news was that the party would undergo serious “soul searching” on this devastatingly low win.
[4] My favorite story was about how the young men completing their compulsory military service were blaming their Filipino maids for not packing their duffels correctly when they failed inspections. It featured the photo of a 19 year old Singaporean man heading to basic training followed by his 4’11” Filipino maid carrying his military backpack that appeared to be at least as large as she was while he walked in front of her, oblivious and unencumbered.
[5] If you want to talk about the dangers of nuclear waste, that’s totally legit. Just don’t lump “steam” in with what coal plants are pouring out like this school assignment did.
Well, the relative who proudly announced he was leaving Twitter for Parler is back on
Twitter to spew the things he’s “thankful” for this week. Don’t know if he will drop out again once the flood of thankfulness comes to an end.
In Church materials and Sunday scripted discussions, it’s not even tropes (trite explanations that may or may not actually explain anything) that circulate, but often just slogans and key words: Zion, Word of Wisdom, Priesthood. Take “The First Vision” slogan, which triggers the trope embedded in Mormon psyches from the short and endlessly repeated JS-History narrative (canonized), as recounted in somewhat more detail for 20th-century Mormons in Essentials in Church History by Joseph Fielding Smith. Smith was an apostle, but also Church Historian and (importantly for a Mormon audience) related to the original Joseph Smith (JFS was his great-nephew). So his account carried great credibility.
Only in the late 20th century did other authentic accounts of “the First Vision” become more widely known. Initially the Church just ignored them, then grudgingly acknowledged them, then finally embraced them and harmonized them, claiming they’re all really saying the same thing, even though they are plainly not. But most standard recitations (heard in General Conference and in LDS curriculum materials) still repeat the JS-History narrative, which of course is canonized and found in the LDS scriptures. Tradition trumps history almost always. Who really knows what an objective account or description of the claimed event would actually be?
There was great hope for ten or twenty years that the planned new semi-official LDS history would improve things (speaking generally, not just about the First Vision narrative). The “inoculation” trope that circulated in the early Bloggernacle was part of that hope. But the four-volume Saints project hasn’t really made any waves. Initially it received little attention from official sources and was hardly (never?) even mentioned in Conference. I don’t see it attaining much of the visible and credible role for mainstream LDS that Essentials in Church History did (and most members actually read that book). It’s not a new and improved Essentials in Church History. I think the Church is stuck with tropes and slogans. Members don’t expect any more than that and frankly don’t want any more than that. Historical ignorance is bliss, it seems.
Why do you just automatically assume that Trump is wrong to question the results of the election? Shouldn’t people be concerned when Republican poll watchers were not allowed to observe? Shouldn’t people be concerned when in the middle of the night hundreds or thousands of ballots are brought to counting centers when supposedly all Republican poll observers were not there. Shouldn’t people be concerned when whole stacks of ballots are counted as mail-in ballots but they have never been creased (i.e. they have never been in an envelope) and their mark for Biden was so perfect that it looked like they had been printed. Shouldn’t people be concerned when the counting abruptly stopped in the middle of the night to then resume when large numbers of votes for Biden are injected before counting continued. Why should Trump accept the results of an election where you have hundreds of affidavits from people that observed fraudulent voting practices in large enough numbers in many states to have an effect on the outcome?
Twitter doesn’t just flag information, it will delete whole accounts if they don’t like what is presented. Why wouldn’t you prefer Parler instead of Twitter when Twitter shuts down the New York Post for simply posting an article about Hunter Biden? There are a significant number of democrats that would not have voted for Biden if they had known about the Biden information. The New York Post never did anything wrong and Twitter finally restored their account after leaving it locked for over a week.
Why do people move to platforms like Parler and Gab instead of Twitter and Facebook? Because they are tired of things that they post being deleted. I tried several times to post some information on Facebook about possible problems with the voting and each time Facebook would just completely remove my post. Yes, Parler might see some false information posted without editorial control, but that is not their job. Twitter has their 320 provisions because they claim to just be an open platform. They should lose their privileges or they should stop the censorship.
Let me tell you what was life-changing for me with respect to politics AND religion: As a right wing conservative fully active member of the Church, I was very comfortable consuming ONLY conservative talk radio / Fox News and official Church sources (or anything published by Deseret). That totally worked for me. Due to a high levels of confirmation bias, I was feeding the monster and the monster felt fine.
For reasons I won’t get into, I started exploring other sources of information about the Church and its truth claims and history. Just a couple of years later, Trump arrives on the scene and ruins the Republican party and the “conservative” movement in this country. So I begin to explore other sources of media. And wow, how my world has changed.
I’m not going to apologize for my politically conservative tendencies, nor am I going to do so for being Mormon. But I will say this: neither my firm views on religion nor my firm beliefs in the Church have withstood the forces of alternative information. I’m still the same person, but my perspective has widened considerably.
So my advice to anyone glued to CNN or Fox News or The Saints or Wheat and Tares is: don’t be afraid to explore the other side. You might be surprised by what you learn. As for social media: I think it would be a shame for the country to do a CNN/Fox News division with Twitter vs. Parler.
“Members don’t expect any more than that and frankly don’t want any more than that.” Dave B has spoken an important truth here. There are some of us in the church (mainly left-leaning, but not always) who want more depth, more nuance, more complexity and who want more answers than the superficial platitudes and slogans the church seems desperately to want to sell us. One problem with that is that we are clearly in the minority. Indeed, we are in the minority for exactly the reason that Dave B. stated: most members don’t want to complicate, risk or expand their faith. It’s no accident, for example, that in the Sunday school manual concerning the Book of Abraham, part of the preface to the lesson directs members to see the issue through the eyes of faith and to not pay attention to scholarly interpretations of the Book or of the messy narrative surrounding it. And make no mistake; many members feel that to delve into the issues of church history, revelations and policies that are clearly bigoted, the role of women, etc. means risking their faith, not strengthening or growing it. This plugs back into what hawkgrrrl discusses in the OP: narratives that flatten and simplify seem generally to be preferred to narratives that make things more complicated. And since so many “media” outlets do the flattening and simplifying for their consumers, consuming such media means that one doesn’t need to spend nearly the intellectual, emotional or spiritual energy that one would need to spend to really examine one’s own biases and assumptions. Not many people really want to do that. And to circle back to Dave B., I think a lot of people have trouble distinguishing between faith and blissful ignorance.
cachemagic, I think you ought to take josh h’s advice and broaden your viewing and reading habits — get information from reputable media sources as well as the right-wing sources you seem to be getting your information from. Keep in mind that dozens of neutral and independent judges (from across the political spectrum, to the extent that means anything when applied to judges) have considered the sorts of allegations you are citing as fact and quickly dismissed the cases brought by Trump lawyers repeating the same allegations. Judges have little patience for meritless cases with no factual support. You somehow find the lack of factual support compelling. You’re not the only one in America thinking that way. Buy you need to think a little harder. The earth isn’t flat. There are no alien bodies hiding in a hanger in Area 51. And there were no trucks full of phony Biden ballots delivered to polling places (ballots that would for some unexplained reason nevertheless elect a lot of Republicans down the ticket).
Let’s clarify an oft-misused term you throw out: censorship. That’s when the government or a government actor suppresses speech (including writing and online publishing, of course) by a private person or entity. None of that is happening. There is no censorship. Editorial decisions that a magazine or publisher makes to run a story or not — that’s not censorship. The writer can take their story or article elsewhere. If a blog deletes a comment, that’s not censorship — the person can go comment elsewhere or start their own blog and publish to the world. If Twitter or Facebook puts a note on a post or simply refuses to post it, that’s not censorship — that’s editorial discretion again. Helping its readers discern mere opinion from demonstrable and possibly harmful misinformation. Like drinking bleach to cure Covid. The person so annotated or deleted can go post their comment elsewhere. Their speech is not suppressed. Not censorship. Private entities are not compelled to broadcast anyone else’s speech.
Keep in mind that “free speech” does not mean limitless and unfettered speech. There are recognized and accepted legal limits to speech. You can’t make threats to harm other people (if you do, you might go to jail). You can’t yell “fire!” in a crowded theater (again, if you do, maybe jail). Lying is broadly tolerated, but tell lies that harm people in particular ways and you may be liable for defamation. Lie when under oath, that’s perjury. And of course if you try to circulate lies, whether intentionally or naively, other people can respond by pointing out your lies and even ridiculing you for telling lies. That’s not censorship, that’s free speech in action. I’m trying to be gentle here, you’re probably a decent guy and you have commented at W&T before so good on you, mate, but you really need to rethink your opinions.
Dave B, I do regularly read Slate and know what many news sources are telling us. Here is where I am keeping information on the 2020 Election.
http://russellyanderson.com/2020Election/2020Election.shtml
I just finished reading Gladwells “Talking to Strangers” as well and the first thing that came to mind is it would explain why when so many Mormons undergo a major faith transition, it seems their “shelf” crumbles almost catastrophically. One day they are seemingly all in, and then suddenly its over. The reality is that since the default is to trust, a lot of things get red-flagged and put on the shelf over the years. And that can go on forever until there is one thing that is personal enough that a person decides they can’t trust church leadership in that one thing and then they look around with nee skepticism at related things and then suddenly they start to see a pattern and lots of things that were put on the shelf no longer seem likely to be true.
Whether its on covering up ecclesiastical abuse, or leadership pronouncements on race or lgbtq or gender issues or sad heaven, once trust is broken, its hard to see any of these as inspired by God. But until that point, its easy to keep coming up with reasons that they might be inspired.
Brother Sky brings up that sometimes false narratives are too-simplistic versions of the facts served up to make it easier for non-experts to digest, but at the same time, making it much easier to get to the truth of the matter. cachemagic’s points are the opposite of this flattening approach, and this is why conspiracy theories are so hard to shake. They are a “deepening” of information, adding complexity, but (when they are conspiracy theory rather than fact), they are based on incorrect assumptions and faulty facts. They are much harder to shake because their practitioners, including cachemagic, have “done their homework” and have a lot of “facts” that they’ve gathered and put together. It’s a whole different thing from those who simply consume whatever Fox or NewsMax or CNN or Slate put out there. There’s a lot more investment.
This was part of the reason that the SEC didn’t listen to the complainant about Madoff. He seemed like a tin foil hat guy, and the longer they ignored his complaint that Madoff was running a Ponzi, the more paranoid he became. In this case, he was correct. The SEC should have done its job better. In the case of Trump, this election was not nearly as exceptional as 2016, and Trump told everyone beforehand that he was going to contest it. He contested the results in 2016, even though he won! His claim that 3 million undocumented people voted in 2016 was unsubstantiated. He’s a guy who makes unsubstantiated claims. He also contests the result of his bathroom scale. He just can’t psychologically admit to anything he sees as a failure. As to the cases, if judges (who are coming from a variety of backgrounds) thought there were grounds to these claims, that would be worth looking at. They have thrown out all but 2 cases, and those were the same silly things that always happen during elections. As to “poll watchers” being barred, no, they weren’t, as Guiliani was forced to admit in court. People who claimed to be poll watchers but were not said they were barred. People who were admitted said they weren’t as close as they wanted to be, but they were the required distance just like Democrats. Regardless, the amount of conspiracy that would have to happen to pull this off (while these ballots voted R downballot) is staggering and has not been remotely supported by evidence. Sometimes a lost election is just a lost election. The number of ballots that would have to change is huge.
As to Biden’s son’s laptop, that story was crazy. The Post story was unsourced (aside from being about the most illogical and implausible chain of events I’ve ever heard) and making specious claims designed to influence the election by smearing one candidate’s son. It was very weird. I’m not sure Twitter should have blocked it, but it’s their right to do so, and it’s the right of conservatives to leave over it (although it seems like a piffle). This was no Comey gift like in 2016. It was a calculated and likely manufactured October surprise that Twitter would have let run if it didn’t seem so obviously fake. If additional news sources had picked it up, I bet they would not have blocked it. Ultimately, Twitter and Facebook have been taken to task for allowing Russian bots, lies, and fake news to influence elections, and they aren’t happy that it’s happened on their platforms. I don’t doubt they will make missteps to try to avoid that. Having said that, Parler has reportedly had a huge data breach of 5000 accounts. Unlike Twitter, to get a “verified” account, you have to supply all kinds of personal information, including driver’s license and social security number, things most of us wouldn’t want to provide (I sure wouldn’t!) and now they can see why–their information got hacked. Every solution is a ticket to a new problem.
Offended Trumpist conservatives who want to take their ball and go home to Parler where they can more freely tout baseless conspiracy theories, praise for their God Trump, and racism can go ahead and do just that. Those mean old liberals infringing on their free speech. Who do you think brought you free speech? That’s right, the New Left and the Free Speech movement who continued to push against norms of accepted speech from the 1960s through the 1990s. Now you wanna act like you’re the true defender of free speech because you say racist stuff and then act like a snowflake when someone points it out. Get lost, Trumpists. You’re truly pathetic. Truly deplorable.
Cachemagic,
“Why do people move to platforms like Parler and Gab instead of Twitter and Facebook?”
Because they’re butthurt sore losers who want to bury their heads in the sand and repeat evidenceless, soundly debunked conspiracy theories instead of actually facing facts and having reason-based discussions.
Fixed that for you. You’re welcome.
I’m actually sympathetic to the people frustrated with Facebook’s censoring. I’m not aware of any videos or articles that Facebook has removed that didn’t (imo) present false information, but it makes me really nervous when powerful institutions (especially government) seek to control information. Controlling information is the number one way to control people. Facebook should simply flag those articles as contested (or even as dangerously false) and provide links to more accurate information. People can then make an informed decision without institutional manipulation. It bothers me that so many people can justify Facebook’s censoring information because Americans are just so stupid they can’t figure out what’s correct on their own. I mean, they’re clearly right, but it’s not justification. The conditions that can justify that kind of manipulation/coercion have to be much more dire than COVID-19, imo. Censorship destroys trust. The result is that Parler will get all sorts of conspiracists posting and desiminating unchallenged falsehoods and these nut jobs will create their own weather.
Incidentally, the four bullet points from a “conservative” point of view is not a distortion of the four bullet points from the “liberal” point of view — they’re just different conclusions. There definitely are “liberals” who hate religion and seek an atheist nation. Just not all. Likewise, there are religious people who want their religious values to have preference in our national culture. Just not all. It’s completely fair to say that “liberals'” approaches to racism foster victim mentality, just as it’s fair to say “conservatives” aren’t doing enough to remedy the situation. It’s completely fair to say “liberals” feel more justified in compelling the public to obey certain rules than do the “conservatives”. But conservatives feel justified to compel women to forego abortions. The question is simply which values justify compulsion. Who should we worry more about? Unborn babies, or the elderly and/or the vulnerable? “Liberals” definitely want to redistribute wealth — that’s what they’re doing when they confiscate from the rich to pay to help the poor. “Conservatives” definitely accept that some people should simply suffer rather than that others be compelled to assist. Again, it’s a different set of values that justify compulsion. Or rather, the two groups may have the same values, but they prioritize them differently. To use these bullets as an example of the Trumplican crowd distorting the intents or messages of the “liberals” to create division is simply not correct. These differences are actually there, and while Trump emphasized them, he didn’t manufacture them.
1 – I don’t know what to say about the FB / Twitter / Parler / MeWe thing. To me it’s so discouraging because something is so broken – I feel like liberals and conservatives (broadly speaking) live in different factual universes, I don’t have a clue how we will bridge that divide, and splitting off into different social media platforms will certainly not help. (Not sure it’ll make it worse, though, since I think there’s already so much confirmation bias / backfire effect so it’s not like being on one platform was helping us understand each other.). Mostly I just hate social media for making everyone dumber.
2 – @10ac that’s a really interesting point. There are so many things in church that we can rationalize on an individual basis, but if you take a step back and finally dare to ask the question, “What if all of these issues have the same answer — that the church / Joseph Smith / prophets aren’t entirely what they claim to be?” then honestly a whole lot of things that didn’t make sense start to make a lot more sense. Like, you could look at Book of Abraham and Kinderhook and Adam Clarke / NT individually and rationalize each one. But then taken together, there’s a very clear pattern that’s a bit hard to ignore, especially when you add in the historical context of treasure digging & magical thinking etc. For contemporary issues like gays / women / blacks, you could also do all sorts of mental contortions to try to understand / justify, but then if you’re willing to entertain the possibility of “oh, so, just as in every other organization on earth, straight white men set things up to benefit themselves and were influenced by their own bias?” it makes a whole lot more sense. So you’re right, I think when that shelf finally breaks, it’s not just the shelf-breaker issue that breaks it’s a rush of all of the other things that you’re now able to look at with fresh eyes.
3 – I have wondered if being Mormon has made me too gullible / trusting. I am in general super trusting and have to work really hard to turn on some skepticism, even though I’m a lawyer which theoretically should have taught me to think critically …
4 – @cachemagic, (a) I assume Trump is wrong because he is a compulsive liar and has been lying his face off for the last four years, so he doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt especially since he was saying all along that the election was going to be fraudulent and that he wouldn’t accept the results (so, not surprising he challenged them and why would I expect those challenges to be in good faith?) but (b) yes those allegations are concerning, which is why I looked into each and every one of them and, along with the courts, found them to be lacking in factual foundation. Tweets and YouTube videos and “testimonials” and random stuff on the internet with no corroboration are not evidence.
5 – I was recently talking to a friend about how I really do understand why conservatives feel frustrated in academia and other circles (like mainstream media and social media) because they get a lot of pushback and their numbers in academia are dwindling and how I didn’t think that was healthy. She said, “maybe their numbers are dwindling because they’re just, like, wrong?” Something to think about! The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice …
I see a direct line from people who homeschool because they don’t want their kids to think anything that deviates from the micro of their worldview to Fox News/Newsmax/OneAmerica to social media echo chambers. And I think it will only get worse as people adopt the “alternate truth”, divorce reality and attempt to control other people’s attitudes and beliefs.
Today a quarter million Americans and growing are dead because people chose to believe that there wasn’t a virus or the virus couldn’t harm them. They gathered. They made not wearing a mask a calling. They still can’t or refuse to connect their behavior and their support of Trump’s dereliction and the number of their fellow citizens who are mourning or facing catastrophic medical bills.
The crazier the Right gets the more imperative it becomes to assert reality but I don’t see them willing to bend from their chosen conclusions. It can only get worse.
I have been thinking about the 9th commandment “Thou shalt not bear false witness”. Is there a difference between this and thou shalt not lie?
Cachemagic is not lying, he is saying what he believes, but he is bearing false witness, by repeating things that are false.
So there is a responsibility for us to be sure we are not repeating lies, even if we believe them.
Not sure how far this goes? If half the people you are adressing believe lies about the election, and the virus, and the solution you off is to be gratefull. Is that bearing false witness?
Does the 9th commandment matter?
Elisa, “I feel like liberals and conservatives (broadly speaking) live in different factual universes, I don’t have a clue how we will bridge that divide, and splitting off into different social media platforms will certainly not help”
I, too, am deeply concerned about the emergence of these different factual universes. As an American, I’m pained. As a strategist, I see hope. The more the conservatives descend into conspiracism and reject even their own, such as Tucker Carlson for revealing that a Trump lawyer failed to provide evidence of election fraud, and flock to other social media platforms that will never have the standing and popularity of Facebook, the more opportunity that provides Democrats to entice the small margin of reasonable conservatives to their side. And luckily a strategic coalition-builder and deal-maker won the presidency.
I honestly didn’t expect Republican leaders to cower in fear after Trump lost. I thought that they would say definitively that Trump lost and move on, happy to rid themselves of someone they secretly loathed. The fact that they continue to fear the Trumpists actually gives me some hope. Democrats have a chance at rebuilding a new coalition that can make moderation great again. They just have to play their cards right. We can do this Joe and Kamala.
At least 50% of the country believed Jos. McCarthy’s lies about Communist infiltration of the State Dept & other parts of government. He, Roy Cohn & congressional enablers made Truman’s life miserable – but lying demagogues like McCarthy, Cohn, Trump & Giuliani eventually flame out and crash. Watch for it – but unfortunately the USA has always been susceptible to these kinds of psychopaths. In the wings: Ted Cruz, Mike Lee.
At least 50% of the country believed Jos. McCarthy’s lies about Communist infiltration of the State Dept & other parts of government. He, Roy Cohn & congressional enablers made Truman’s life miserable – but lying demagogues like McCarthy, Cohn, Trump & Giuliani eventually flame out and crash. Watch for it – but unfortunately the USA has always been susceptible to these kinds of psychopaths. In the wings: Ted Cruz, Mike Lee.
I’ve seen that most tropes we have in the church is in the way we can define things like revelation, prophets, spirituality and so forth, when the definition is rooted in cultural and secular point of views we can find a trope. I’ve seen that investigation in the scriptures and so forth is the cure to that.
I tend to be pretty centrist iny approach to politics, I used to follow John Oliver a bit, then grew quite dissatisfied with his bias against conservatives. The same thing happened after following Steven Crowder and his biais against Democrats.
I think a huge part in the divide between Liberals and Conservatives are in the axioms they hold unto.
From the perspective of European conservatives (which I am more familiar with) the disdain from left leaning activist towards religion and traditional values is concerning. Speaking of systemic racism doesn’t speak to them, they will think of an Apartheid regime as systemic racism, not something that, though calculated to be equal, ended up favoring a part of the population over others. A lot of the efforts to legislate and control is seen as infantilizing and decreasing the indépendance individuals can enjoy. Suffering and hardships are not seen as evils to be rooted out, but as inevitable components of life, so welfare isn’t seem as having the same role.
We may agree to all of that at varying degrees, the point is that as soon as we see the other party as amoral, rather than as working from different point of views, there will be divide. I think that encouraging critical thinking, diverse point of views and finding consensus rather than pointing fingers is best (but that’s kind of a tautology). Sadly I don’t see a lot of that in the USA
And conservatives can feel alienated, there are signs that show that. Twitter’s monitoring is still weird to me, telling that a picture, slightly religious is offensive or telling me that something might not be true is both word and infantilizing. Hearing that you cannot be both an intellectual and on the right is disheartening. And seeing the public space sphere being dominated by “woke” ideas, without much room to debate them is not a good sign.
That being said, Conservative media do need to calm down on the “victim complex” because to this point it feels more like a selling point and a way to seem legit than anything else.
John W,
You are one cool dude.
Did I say cool?
I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that. I meant the words you directed at Cachemagic (which, sadly lowers me to your level).
I’m going to use your comments to teach my kids how not to be.
Thanks for the example.
Happy Thanksgiving.
TC, nice try trying to land a jab (I couldn’t even make out what you were saying, it was like an incoherent diss).
On a more serious note, let’s recognize where a lot of conservatives are deriving their energy including catchmagic. It is not from a principled ideological framework (hats off to the few conservatives who operate in this framework). They are deriving their energy from a phenomenon that I call backlashism. They say deliberately outrageous things to incite a reaction from moderate and liberal folks (such as the idea that the election was stolen from Trump) and then act like a victim (a fake one at that) when others react strongly to what they say and weaponize their reaction against them. They treat the label “conservative” like a biological ethnic identity rather than just a set of ideas. They loudly tout empty slogans and put faith in demagogic leaders. They create a boogeyman out of “libruhls” and beat a strawman to death to feel strong. They succumb to raw tribalism because, hey, it feels good to part of a tribe. Feels good to be a victim. Let’s put an end to backlashism. Drive a dagger through its toxic heart.