The title is a nod to one of the funniest lines from a Carry on film. Ever.
However this is not a post about revolutionary Roman senators stabbing Caesar in the back. Nothing so interesting. This about how all the gnashing of teeth I have gnashed, over right wing nonsense on YouTube, was largely my own fault. The YouTube Bots offered me the tripe and I just dived right in!
I did some investigating. I was concerned just how vitriolic I felt towards the nonsense that was on my feed. I was concerned I might never be able to deal, face to face, with these eejits if I met them in person. Nothing destroys a debate like one side screaming "ATTACK, ATTACK, ATTACK!" at the opening statement after all.
So I Googled it (other search engines are available!)
On the whole it came up with the stuff I kind of expected
Perceived threats to moral foundations, identity and group polarization, moral outrage as a protective emotion (quite interesting) and finally, the one that took me by surprise was naïve realism. I will come to this one last as I was unprepared for that response and found it most illuminating.
So the preceding causes I guess I understood as soon as I read about them. Yes I do think right wing politics is a threat to decent human society. Just look at all the pigeons coming home to roost from the Thatch years, long term unemployment, loss of industrial hinterland, lack of social housing, failure of privatised utilities. The list is quite big.
The paradigm is that the Labour government of the 1970's is still used by Conservatives to prove how useless left wing policies are (winter of discontent) although the Conservative government of the early 70's had a decent bash at it too (3 day week) and yet living standards rose pretty sharply over the course of the 70's and we haven't been as financially equal society since then.
Take you pick
Identity and group polarization - differing political views are seen as an attack on the group making it personal. The group polarization is all about them damned bots. Making me angry gets me engaged and I click more - dammit I hate when I surrender to my biology!
According to the protective emotion - Anger is considered a secondary emotion and I use anger as a way of providing urgency because I consider right wing politics a threat to our civilized society.
Naïve Realism was an eye opener though. Naturally I am the only objective arbitrator on here and anyone who disagrees is a right wing misogynistic facist. But it did ring true in many ways with me. I think it is natural to think you are the most down to earth, logical etc person in the world. I get cross though when people presented with the same information as me, formulate an opposite (incorrect obviously) and contrary viewpoint. Fascinating
This all lead me to a conclusion. And that is how important free speech and democracy are. Social media platforms are hailed by social media platform owners as the very essence of free speech (except their bots what they designed work by making you click on stuff that makes you angry because clicks mean money so they want to breed a world of pathogenic psychopaths that hammer on "like" buttons because it means cash to the owner.)
My example is a game show I have seen on the telly called "Wisdom Of The Crowd". It is a horrible game show hosted by a comedian who has better skills than this requires. The basis is that there is a statistical theory that if you get enough people to guess any value the average of all those guesses is, by and large, more accurate than any individual response.
I would attribute this to a Democratic vote too. That we probably get stuff right overall more often. Which is why democracies trump autocracies the world over. We may see everything very differently but when you throw it all in the mix and slosh it about a bit we will probably come to the right conclusion. Eventually.
Very irritating when I consider how much I dislike Brexit!
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