Overview: Politics

Covid-19 case numbers are now spiking in many counties across West Texas ... [but] resolve of ... skeptics appears to be stiffening... the denial of facts is often rooted in identity and belonging, not in ignorance ...people who deny science ... trying to uphold membership in ... a political or religious affiliation or some other group ... a commu…

my last column in this space is not about “cancel culture.” Well, almost... The quality of my work does not appear to be the problem... A critical mass of the staff and management at New York Magazine and Vox Media no longer want to associate with me ... orthodoxy in mainstream media, that any writer not actively committed to critical theory in …

marginalization of those with radical critiques... poisoning both the right and the left ...resentment and victimhood spread across the American right — an intellectual inferiority complex combined with a moral superiority complex ... Thinking was no longer for understanding. Thinking was for belonging ... Sarah Palin and Donald Trump reintroduc…

echo chambers and epistemic bubbles... systematically exclude sources of information... exaggerate their members’ confidence in their beliefs... work in entirely different ways... epistemic bubble is when you don’t hear people from the other side. An echo chamber is what happens when you don’t trust people from the other side...‘epistemic bubble’ …

a social dynamic in which it becomes more beneficial to hold those views than not. It’s the feedback mechanism by which people are punished for expressing any kind of nuance, doubt or divergence... moral outbidding, unchecked, that corrodes a group from within...the vanity of small differences, and the punishing of people for the most minor transg…

We may see ‘creativity’ as an individual trait... but real creativity depends on a community of likeminded people... what we call creativity is not the product of single individuals, but of social systems making judgements about individual’s products.... Brian Eno calls this community a ‘scenius’—a group of creative individuals who make up an ‘eco…

Groupthink produced a failure of the “wisdom of crowds” and an underestimate of Trump’s chances... political experts aren’t a very diverse group and tend to place a lot of faith in the opinions of other experts and other members of the political establishment. Once a consensus view is established, it tends to reinforce itself ... Social media, esp…

An MP blaming his own failings ... on evil Russians ... without a slither of evidence. Post-truth much? ... Remainers cannot accept that a majority of people are simply rationally opposed, to ... the EU.... he’s so stunned that there are people out there who think differently to him that the only way he can make sense of it is by imagining thes…

47% of Clinton supporters and 31% of Trump supporters say they have zero close friends who support the opposing candidate... The most segregated groups (those with the highest responses of “no friends supporting the opponent”) were young and black people.. Fewer than half the country has even had a conversation with someone from the opposing side’…

The majority of people reading this article on Medium probably haven’t felt the pains that Obama described, so they’re confused, like me, about the popularity of Trump... It takes more than graphs and psychological theory to explain this, but I’m going to try.

Brexit, as experienced by a British-Australian comms guy in Brussels.

The job of politics... finding common cause with people who aren’t like you. But current incentives seem to point in the opposite direction... I blame the internet ... You can’t take on inequality and injustice with a coalition of people who use the same slang, listen to the same music, and post the same emojis that you do.You have to be willing t…

Next week will see yet another physical meeting in Brussels dedicated to exploring the European public space, an irony which appears permanently lost to the organisers of the neverending stream of conferences, seminars and workshops which can be only attended by Brussels Bubble Insiders, and have neither webstreaming nor any online community (Euro…

Now and then the question arises: how can we get a transnational discourse on European topics underway, or create a European online public space? The two phrases in bold, above, both come from one of the latest posts on the topic, this time from Julien Frisch. They follow initiatives like Steffan's Bloggingportal.eu, which aggregates Euroblog…

Over on iBlog, Claus used a term that caught my attention:Networks such as ERRIN, which is funded by membership contributions and invests in what I would call “TRUST 2.0.”, help to establish that collective understanding and culture of cooperation and facilitate successful involvement in EU projects.While he freely admitted that "Trust 2.0 do…