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Tell me this isn't what's happening right now.  Is it coincidence? Or is it being done on purpose?

 

 

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The Covington Scissor

Welcome to another controversy algorithmically designed to tear America apart.

 

In a short story published last October, “Sort by Controversial,” Scott Alexander imagines a Silicon Valley company that accidentally comes up with an algorithm to generate what it calls a “Scissor.” The scissor is a statement, an idea or a scenario that’s somehow perfectly calibrated to tear people apart — not just by generating disagreement, but by generating total incredulity that somebody could possibly disagree with your interpretation of the controversy, followed by escalating fury and paranoia and polarization, until the debate seems like a completely existential, win-or-perish fight.

 

When you start arguing with someone over a Scissor statement, Alexander’s narrator explains, “at first you just think they’re an imbecile. Then they call you an imbecile, and you want to defend yourself. … You notice all the little ways they’re lying to you and themselves and their audience every time they open their mouth to defend their imbecilic opinion. Then you notice how all the lies are connected, that in order to keep getting the little things like the Scissor statement wrong, they have to drag in everything else. Eventually even that doesn’t work; they’ve just got to make everybody hate you so that nobody will even listen to your argument no matter how obviously true it is.”

 

The twist in the short story comes with the narrator’s realization that several Scissors on the algorithm-generated list have happened already — the “ground zero mosque,” the N.F.L. and the national anthem, the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. So maybe somebody (Putin? the C.I.A.?) made this breakthrough first, and weaponized it against American society. “Of the Scissor’s predicted top hundred most controversial statements, Kavanaugh was No. 58 and Kaepernick was No. 42. No. 86 was the ground zero mosque. No. 89 was that baker who wouldn’t make a cake for a gay wedding.”

 

And now we have — well, let’s call it No. 40 on the Scissor list (meaning there’s worse, oh so much worse, to come), in the form of the videos of Catholic high school boys from Kentucky, in Washington over the weekend to attend the March for Life, some of them wearing Make America Great Again hats, in some sort of confrontation with a chanting, drumming Native American activist who was intervening in another confrontation between the teenagers and a group of black nationalists.

 

To understand what makes this incident so brilliant in its divisiveness, you need to see the tapestry in full, how each constituent element (abortion, race, MAGA, white boys, Catholicism, Native American ritual) automatically confirms priors on both sides of our divide. And you also need to see how the video itself, far from being a means to achieving consensus, is an amazing accelerant of controversy, because everyone who watches can pick up on a different detail and convince themselves that they’re seeing the whole tru —

 

 

Here's the short story that prompted this column. Warning - NSFW language at this link

 

https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/

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Certainly feels like it. We've had a pretty contentious back and forth about it going on ever since the story first broke.  Twitter has been a nightmare.

 

The thought certainly crossed my mind whether someone bad actor out there latched onto and juiced this story for all it was worth online to create more divisiveness. Remember, Russia's endgame is not necessarily to have a puppet in the White House, though they do - it's to maximize discord and division within our shores, no matter how it's done. 

 

Twitter suspending the account that was pushing this story certainly doesn't disconfirm the theory...

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This deserves a Sargent Schultz - VERY INTERESTING  

 

All I know, it seems like society is being torn in all directions because we are so centered on our differences.  We have so much in common but we major on our differences.  We have so much to celebrate but we look at the negative all the time (sounds like Husker Board).    We've become so introspective  we have lost perspective.  So yes, a Putin using media of all sorts could deepen the discord to create more fissures within the society. Then to have Trump as our President, who MO is controversy, division and strife magnifies it.  We need a uniter for our next president and not someone who will swing the pendulum on a deeper swing.  

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I'm sure it works on some, maybe a lot. But I don't think the people I've disagreed with on this particular thing are bad or stupid. I think they're normal people who have a different viewpoint of their surroundings than I have. But the surroundings are things we don't REALLY know the truth of. We just think we do sometimes. What we really know is how we treat people. All the other stuff is throwing opinions out about the world in general.

I should probably tell myself this more often 'cause I can be kind of a butthead sometimes and I was kind of a butthead to @B.B. Hemingway today.

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