Recently had a conversation with a friend who relayed the following.
This person has a lot of liberal friends on there but is conservative. This person mentioned that the liberals are very vocal on there but the conservatives are not. Further explained that the conservatives don't say anything because if they do they will be "defriended". It's starting to drive this friend crazy, they feel "oppressed".
An ongoing Tinker theme for a long time has been the "atomization" of society. I have read him on that with some real mixed feelings, and don't know what to think. I don't know if that is a formal concept or anything, but I don't know what to think of it. This person was pretty upset about the whole thing, to the point of thinking about "pre-emptive defriending" and giving up on liberal friends.
This was sort of new to me. My memory is that I used to regularly mix it up with Democrats and it rarely was a big deal. We would go at it and then do whatever,it could be put aside, and was regarded as much as entertainment as anything. My feeling is that that sort of stopped during the Iraq War, people wouldn't talk politics anymore publicly. The left grew more condemnatory then I could really ever remember, and it had an effect on a lot of people. Likewise, conservatives had no problem giving to people who were anything less than supportive of the war. So this is not tit for tat. Both sides did what they did.
Blah blah blah. But it doesn't seem like it has changed back. I still won't talk politics with someone unless I am very familiar with them. I don't know if the above is
I along with usually CS am quite skeptical of golden age theory, things used to be better in the past, but in reality things do certainly change sometimes better sometimes worse. Since the Obama election in particular for the first time in my life I hear people talking about whether they will move in or out of a state based on if it is blue or red. You might have heard that at a much smaller scale in the past, but now it is right up there with are the schools good, what is the job market, what is the weather, now "is it Democrat or Republican". I'm hearing that all the time now.
So is this really happening? Is this "atomization"? Is it something else? What is this?
For all the talk of bipartisanship, I have long suspected that the left and right can't really co-exist at the end of the day, not functionally. One will have to dominate the other and the small group will live as sort of an Amish ghetto, intellectually speaking. Look at the zoo animal, keep moving.
So I'm wondering if we're beginning this process. I've seen data the conservatives are moving out of blue states, but this may be incomplete. We'll see.
But that is getting off track. My question is more to do with "social media", are the left and right, or other groups doing a "run on the bank" sort of thing, are people silently executing their biases on people and restructuring their lives. I really don't know, I don't do the twits and facetubes and whatnot.
And I'm not saying this is indicative of liberal and conservative behavior, your experience may be dramatically different.
