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I swear to god americans have gotten dumber since i left. Its at the point they seem to be struggling to follow along in even simple conversations anymore. I keep needing to repeat myself and they just hear something totally different.
@freemo, I had a little conversation with a USAmerican who I (still) believe to be sort of a role model for intelligent online conversation and a leading authority about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act,
that left me firmly convinced that The Medium Is The Message,
i.e., that the social dynamics of conversations in Social Media make even the best of us overlook the most obvious facts in all the incessant partisan bickering.
We got into a bit of a dispute about the proper context of Bret Stephens's New York Times OpEd article,
80 years after 1 September 1939.
At some point the USAmerican got annoyed and blocked me,
which prompted me to shoot back at around 05:45 his local time, immediately before boarding the plane for an extended USA trip.
Long thread, and twitter tries very hard to censor the thread for hate speech (which is technically correct) just short of blocking it,
but maybe worth the read precisely because of that:
https://twitter.com/sfmnemonic/status/1167588228062502918
https://twitter.com/Tatzelbrumm/status/1168575251766288386
https://twitter.com/sfmnemonic/status/1168580054789578752
https://twitter.com/tat2elbrumm/status/1168811726265040896
https://twitter.com/tat2elbrumm/status/1168811961913622528
https://twitter.com/tat2elbrumm/status/1168812080704708608
https://twitter.com/tat2elbrumm/status/1168812194487816192
https://twitter.com/tat2elbrumm/status/1168812331805138944
https://twitter.com/tat2elbrumm/status/1168813007754973185
https://twitter.com/tat2elbrumm/status/1168813317235924992
https://twitter.com/tat2elbrumm/status/1168813456029552640
In a case of ridiculously unlikely serendipity, I met the guy, immediately before boarding the plane for the return trip from LAX to Germany:
https://twitter.com/tat2elbrumm/status/1205250528210325505
"You remind me of Hitler." — "Very funny."
@tatzelbrumm Thats a very good point and makes a lot of sense (and I intend to review those links shortly).
But to be clear, I'm not talking about social media, I know that dumbs people down 10 fold. I am referring to face to face conversations.
@freemo Unfortunately,
Godwin's Law¹ is leaking from online to "real" world conversations.
I don't notice it that much because in times of Social Distancing, I hardly have "real" world (offline) conversations any more.
@tatzelbrumm truth but I think the two are partially unrelated. In the USa it is larghely the consequence of radicalization/polarization. Online it is at least partly due to the medium.
@freemo I attribute the apparent dumbing down to the fragmentation of social media graphs into unconnected discursive bubbles, inside which different discursive contexts are no longer perceived to even exist.
Case in point:
A certain USAmerican is accusing me of "decontextualizing" Bret Stephens's OpEd article about
A Day That Lives In Infamy,
namely, 1st of September 1939.
But for that certain USAmerican (consider who he is and what he's infamous for),
The Day That Lives In Infamy
is 7th of December 1941.
@tatzelbrumm fair point, I think thats at least part of it for sure.
@freemo Now the thing that frustrates me to no end is that when I show them my Mother Of All Godwin's Law Violations,
which I would like to think is hilariously funny,
they just don't get the joke, because the context of
1st of September 1939
never occurs to them.
https://twitter.com/sfmnemonic/status/1168580054789578752
https://twitter.com/tat2elbrumm/status/1169782088595230720