“By now you’ve heard about Susanna Gibson, the nurse practitioner running for the Virginia statehouse who, news outlets revealed, had an account on Chaturbate. I never heard of it either. Honest. It’s a website where individuals and couples masturbate, have sex, and who knows what else. When I logged on to see what this was, I tuned into one couple in their underwear sitting on a couch, not touching themselves or each other, looking as passionate as two delayed passengers in the Amtrak waiting area. Other couples were more, um, kinetic.
Gibson, a Democrat, isn’t denying that she had an account on the site where she and her husband engaged in sex. She’s defiantly said she’s staying in the race, and her attorney vows to use Virginia’s revenge porn law to go after whoever leaked it.
The mother of two is right to stand her ground. Look, it’s up to voters to decide if sexhibition with your spouse is disqualifying. It wouldn’t sway my vote, assuming there was nothing illegal going on. Lots of Americans record themselves having sex. That a married and consenting couple does so not only on camera but online is not that big a stretch.
The showoffs on Chaturbate can get paid by admirers who leave tips. According to reporters who have seen some Gibson videos, the candidate and her spouse encouraged her audience to donate because it’s for “a good cause.” (They’re no longer on Chaturbate, but they’re popping up elsewhere.) What she and her husband, an attorney in the Richmond area, considered a good cause isn’t entirely apparent since the videos were made before this year’s race for a seat in Virginia’s closely divided House of Delegates. Whether the cause was their kids’ tuition or something more prurient, I do not know, but, to me, that’s her business.
There’s some dispute about whether Gibson and her husband asked the audience to pay to watch specific sex acts, which, apparently, is against the oh-so-proper Chaturbate rules. I’m not bothered by this alleged transgression, but I understand why it and the whole braggadocio of displaying your wares might be so off-putting to some voters that they take a pass on her. Fine. It’s a free country.”
“The Wall Street Journal recently ran an excellent bit of descriptive political journalism from Aaron Zitner looking at the evidence around rising partisan polarization and its potential causes—“Why Tribalism Took Over Politics. Social science gives us an uncomfortable explanation: Our brains are made for conflict.”
Drawing on time series data from the Pew Research Center, the WSJ published a remarkable graph showing the sharp increase from 1994 to 2022 in self-identified Republicans and Democrats (excluding independents and leaners) holding very unfavorable opinions of the opposite party.
As Zitner writes:
More than 60 percent of Republicans and more than half of Democrats now view the other party ‘very unfavorably,’ about three times the shares when Pew Research Center polled on it in the early 1990s. Several polls find that more than 70 percent within each party think the other party’s leaders are a danger to democracy or back an agenda that would destroy the country.
The article outlines various explanations for why this might be the case including demographic sorting, the alignment of ideology and religion with particular parties, and declining interactions between people with different views and partisanship. Zitner also summarizes some of the behavioral research on how the human mind gets warped by partisan identity:
Party allegiance can affect our judgment and behavior, many experiments show. When Shanto Iyengar of Stanford University and Sean J. Westwood, then at Princeton University, asked a group of Democrats and Republicans to review the résumés of two fictitious high-school students in a 2015 study, their subjects proved more likely to award a scholarship to the student who matched their own party affiliation. People in the experiment gave political party more weight than the student’s race or even grade-point average.
In a landmark 2013 study, Dan Kahan, a Yale University law professor, and colleagues assessed the math skills of about 1,000 adults, a mix of self-described liberals, conservatives and moderates. Then, the researchers gave them a politically inflected math problem to solve, presenting data that pointed to whether cities that had banned concealed handguns experienced a decrease or increase in crime. In half the tests, solving the problem correctly showed that a concealed-carry ban reduced crime rates. In the other half, the correct solution would suggest that crime had risen.
The result was striking: The more adept the test-takers were at math, the more likely they were to get the correct answer—but only when the right answer matched their political outlook. When the right answer ran contrary to their political stance—that is, when liberals drew a version of the problem suggesting that gun control was ineffective—they tended to give the wrong answer. They were no more likely to solve the problem correctly than were people in the study who were less adept at math.
These social scientific theories and findings make intuitive sense and are consistent with much of human history: people are tribal and tend to sort themselves into “us vs them” groups based on identity and shape their opinions, beliefs, and actions accordingly.
But individual level causes alone seem insufficient for explaining rising partisan animosity in American life. After all, human beings weren’t any different or less hardwired for tribalism in 1994 than they were in 2022. And other advanced democracies have the same challenges as the U.S. but without the intense partisan divides, culture wars, and mutual loathing based on politics.
So why do Republicans and Democrats today hate the other side so much more intensely than just a few decades ago?
Short answer: the media and political institutions did it.
Someone or something had to exploit people’s tendency toward tribalism and sectarian politics for these trends to grow so rapidly.
If we look briefly at the time period covered here we can see how this partisan animosity was generated. On the media side, both MSNBC and Fox News began operations in 1996, and later evolved into the primary cable proprietors fueling intense partisanship on both sides of the aisle. If a person wants selected nuggets of information to dunk on the other side, they can get them all day long. If they don’t want them, they get them anyway. Likewise, social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter started in the early 2000s and grew exponentially over the next decade—along with lightning fast internet access and everyone having a smart phone. If a person wants to get outraged and yell at people randomly online, or listen in on others on a podcast or video doing it for them, there’s an app for that. If they don’t want it, some algorithm might boost the anger anyway.
When the Supreme Court eliminated virtually all restrictions on corporate and individual spending on politics in 2010, partisan advertising, organizing, and ideological combat soon became a multi-billion dollar operation. If a rich person wants to launch scurrilous attacks on leaders, parties, and other Americans—or advance a pet radical cause or culture war issue through a tax-exempt organization—nothing stands in their way. Small donors can now do the same.
The politics of this time period match the media trajectory with steadily increasing partisan hatred and little common sense. Bill Clinton was impeached in 1998 for his personal behavior followed closely by the lengthy and widely disputed resolution of the 2000 election in favor of George W. Bush. The 9/11 attacks temporarily united the country under Bush who then promptly squandered the good will in Iraq and with his grinding “war on terror” politics. The financial crisis hit—and despite some public optimism around Barack Obama’s historic victory in 2008 and attempts to break the blue-red divide—populist uprisings ensued and public discontent grew. The national mood further soured toward the end of the second Obama term and then Donald Trump won the 2016 election in an Electoral College fluke.
The rest of the political story—the “resistance”, the partisan Trump impeachment, the stolen election lies, January 6, and a second arguably more justified impeachment—is well known up until 2022 when Pew last tested this question. It hasn’t improved since as House leaders just this week launched another partisan impeachment inquiry (without a vote) into Joe Biden in response to multiple criminal cases against the former president.
Politics today is little more than raw hatred of the other side.
Although Americans have always been divided by politics, and psychologically prone to tribalism, the opportunities for these divides to be forced into all aspects of life grew substantially over this time period. People didn’t change. What changed was the ability of major institutions and companies to turn partisan inclinations into a serious business model built on mutual hate: Pick your side, pick your tools, pick your facts, and pick a fight.
The conditions were ripe for media, tech companies, and political organizations to become flame throwers of partisan hatred—and that’s what they did.”
New @FoxNews national poll of GOP race: Trump leads DeSantis 60 to 13. Ramaswamy close behind at 11, Haley 5, Pence, Scott 3 each, Christie 2. Trump was at 43 in February; has climbed steadily since. DeSantis was 28 in February; less than half that now. https://t.co/p6P0YEaCzKpic.twitter.com/OarFDF91Aq
I have filed a response to the government's opposition to my motion to compel production. My latest filing evidences relevance to my case by showing that undercover MPD detained Antifa who were conspiring with John Sullivan, and that bodycams are missing.https://t.co/S41gvhwRYvhttps://t.co/quQLE4U6Z1pic.twitter.com/MVnvMRHfJC
Antifa Logan/Leslie Grimes was arrested by MPD on the morning of January 6 for three felony gun charges. The next day, federal prosecutors dropped all charges. Meanwhile, the same prosecutors continue to hunt down entirely peaceful protestors from J6. pic.twitter.com/wgJVwc1SgU
Oh yeah. There is also a section about Lt. Lamond (former head of the MPD intel unit – now arrested for sharing info with the Proud Boys) being undercover near the NW scaffolding.
“CNN just spent an entire segment documenting how Joe Biden is a pathological liar:
Witnessed a bridge collapse in Pittsburgh in 2022 – FALSE
Grandfather died just days before his own birth at the same hospital – FALSE
Conversation with Amtrak conductor (who was already dead) – FALSE
Arrested during a civil rights protest – FALSE
Used to drive an 18-wheeler – FALSE
Visited Pittsburgh synagogue and site of 2018 mash shooting – FALSE
This isn’t senility. Thirty-five years ago Biden was already plagiarizing foreign speeches and lying about his grades in college.
When you lie about small things you lie about big things. If Biden can’t stop fabricating inane personal stories, imagine the whoppers he’s told about Burisma, Hunter, Ukraine, MBNA, China, etc.”
Aj, on the way home last night I was listening to Glenn Beck. Would you be able to find where he was talking to someone from Texas about plans for the government to take over 30 percent of the land by 2030 and then restricting the use of the land?
Wandering Views 
Oh, but Trump…..
“Performing in Online Porn Shouldn’t Derail a Political Campaign”
This is the Democrat party……
“By now you’ve heard about Susanna Gibson, the nurse practitioner running for the Virginia statehouse who, news outlets revealed, had an account on Chaturbate. I never heard of it either. Honest. It’s a website where individuals and couples masturbate, have sex, and who knows what else. When I logged on to see what this was, I tuned into one couple in their underwear sitting on a couch, not touching themselves or each other, looking as passionate as two delayed passengers in the Amtrak waiting area. Other couples were more, um, kinetic.
Gibson, a Democrat, isn’t denying that she had an account on the site where she and her husband engaged in sex. She’s defiantly said she’s staying in the race, and her attorney vows to use Virginia’s revenge porn law to go after whoever leaked it.
The mother of two is right to stand her ground. Look, it’s up to voters to decide if sexhibition with your spouse is disqualifying. It wouldn’t sway my vote, assuming there was nothing illegal going on. Lots of Americans record themselves having sex. That a married and consenting couple does so not only on camera but online is not that big a stretch.
The showoffs on Chaturbate can get paid by admirers who leave tips. According to reporters who have seen some Gibson videos, the candidate and her spouse encouraged her audience to donate because it’s for “a good cause.” (They’re no longer on Chaturbate, but they’re popping up elsewhere.) What she and her husband, an attorney in the Richmond area, considered a good cause isn’t entirely apparent since the videos were made before this year’s race for a seat in Virginia’s closely divided House of Delegates. Whether the cause was their kids’ tuition or something more prurient, I do not know, but, to me, that’s her business.
There’s some dispute about whether Gibson and her husband asked the audience to pay to watch specific sex acts, which, apparently, is against the oh-so-proper Chaturbate rules. I’m not bothered by this alleged transgression, but I understand why it and the whole braggadocio of displaying your wares might be so off-putting to some voters that they take a pass on her. Fine. It’s a free country.”
LikeLike
Bingo.
Those who complain about the “tone” in politics need to look at who is setting the tone, the media and politicians.
“Voters Aren’t the Problem. It’s the Media and Political Institutions.”
https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/voters-arent-the-problem-its-the
“The Wall Street Journal recently ran an excellent bit of descriptive political journalism from Aaron Zitner looking at the evidence around rising partisan polarization and its potential causes—“Why Tribalism Took Over Politics. Social science gives us an uncomfortable explanation: Our brains are made for conflict.”
Drawing on time series data from the Pew Research Center, the WSJ published a remarkable graph showing the sharp increase from 1994 to 2022 in self-identified Republicans and Democrats (excluding independents and leaners) holding very unfavorable opinions of the opposite party.
As Zitner writes:
More than 60 percent of Republicans and more than half of Democrats now view the other party ‘very unfavorably,’ about three times the shares when Pew Research Center polled on it in the early 1990s. Several polls find that more than 70 percent within each party think the other party’s leaders are a danger to democracy or back an agenda that would destroy the country.
The article outlines various explanations for why this might be the case including demographic sorting, the alignment of ideology and religion with particular parties, and declining interactions between people with different views and partisanship. Zitner also summarizes some of the behavioral research on how the human mind gets warped by partisan identity:
Party allegiance can affect our judgment and behavior, many experiments show. When Shanto Iyengar of Stanford University and Sean J. Westwood, then at Princeton University, asked a group of Democrats and Republicans to review the résumés of two fictitious high-school students in a 2015 study, their subjects proved more likely to award a scholarship to the student who matched their own party affiliation. People in the experiment gave political party more weight than the student’s race or even grade-point average.
In a landmark 2013 study, Dan Kahan, a Yale University law professor, and colleagues assessed the math skills of about 1,000 adults, a mix of self-described liberals, conservatives and moderates. Then, the researchers gave them a politically inflected math problem to solve, presenting data that pointed to whether cities that had banned concealed handguns experienced a decrease or increase in crime. In half the tests, solving the problem correctly showed that a concealed-carry ban reduced crime rates. In the other half, the correct solution would suggest that crime had risen.
The result was striking: The more adept the test-takers were at math, the more likely they were to get the correct answer—but only when the right answer matched their political outlook. When the right answer ran contrary to their political stance—that is, when liberals drew a version of the problem suggesting that gun control was ineffective—they tended to give the wrong answer. They were no more likely to solve the problem correctly than were people in the study who were less adept at math.
These social scientific theories and findings make intuitive sense and are consistent with much of human history: people are tribal and tend to sort themselves into “us vs them” groups based on identity and shape their opinions, beliefs, and actions accordingly.
But individual level causes alone seem insufficient for explaining rising partisan animosity in American life. After all, human beings weren’t any different or less hardwired for tribalism in 1994 than they were in 2022. And other advanced democracies have the same challenges as the U.S. but without the intense partisan divides, culture wars, and mutual loathing based on politics.
So why do Republicans and Democrats today hate the other side so much more intensely than just a few decades ago?
Short answer: the media and political institutions did it.
Someone or something had to exploit people’s tendency toward tribalism and sectarian politics for these trends to grow so rapidly.
If we look briefly at the time period covered here we can see how this partisan animosity was generated. On the media side, both MSNBC and Fox News began operations in 1996, and later evolved into the primary cable proprietors fueling intense partisanship on both sides of the aisle. If a person wants selected nuggets of information to dunk on the other side, they can get them all day long. If they don’t want them, they get them anyway. Likewise, social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter started in the early 2000s and grew exponentially over the next decade—along with lightning fast internet access and everyone having a smart phone. If a person wants to get outraged and yell at people randomly online, or listen in on others on a podcast or video doing it for them, there’s an app for that. If they don’t want it, some algorithm might boost the anger anyway.
When the Supreme Court eliminated virtually all restrictions on corporate and individual spending on politics in 2010, partisan advertising, organizing, and ideological combat soon became a multi-billion dollar operation. If a rich person wants to launch scurrilous attacks on leaders, parties, and other Americans—or advance a pet radical cause or culture war issue through a tax-exempt organization—nothing stands in their way. Small donors can now do the same.
The politics of this time period match the media trajectory with steadily increasing partisan hatred and little common sense. Bill Clinton was impeached in 1998 for his personal behavior followed closely by the lengthy and widely disputed resolution of the 2000 election in favor of George W. Bush. The 9/11 attacks temporarily united the country under Bush who then promptly squandered the good will in Iraq and with his grinding “war on terror” politics. The financial crisis hit—and despite some public optimism around Barack Obama’s historic victory in 2008 and attempts to break the blue-red divide—populist uprisings ensued and public discontent grew. The national mood further soured toward the end of the second Obama term and then Donald Trump won the 2016 election in an Electoral College fluke.
The rest of the political story—the “resistance”, the partisan Trump impeachment, the stolen election lies, January 6, and a second arguably more justified impeachment—is well known up until 2022 when Pew last tested this question. It hasn’t improved since as House leaders just this week launched another partisan impeachment inquiry (without a vote) into Joe Biden in response to multiple criminal cases against the former president.
Politics today is little more than raw hatred of the other side.
Although Americans have always been divided by politics, and psychologically prone to tribalism, the opportunities for these divides to be forced into all aspects of life grew substantially over this time period. People didn’t change. What changed was the ability of major institutions and companies to turn partisan inclinations into a serious business model built on mutual hate: Pick your side, pick your tools, pick your facts, and pick a fight.
The conditions were ripe for media, tech companies, and political organizations to become flame throwers of partisan hatred—and that’s what they did.”
LikeLiked by 1 person
Inevitable.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Nope, no Antifa here….
LikeLiked by 1 person
Good for them. A return to actual journalism by them would be nice, though I suspect they just want him gone for another leftist Dem of their liking.
“CNN just spent an entire segment documenting how Joe Biden is a pathological liar:
Witnessed a bridge collapse in Pittsburgh in 2022 – FALSE
Grandfather died just days before his own birth at the same hospital – FALSE
Conversation with Amtrak conductor (who was already dead) – FALSE
Arrested during a civil rights protest – FALSE
Used to drive an 18-wheeler – FALSE
Visited Pittsburgh synagogue and site of 2018 mash shooting – FALSE
This isn’t senility. Thirty-five years ago Biden was already plagiarizing foreign speeches and lying about his grades in college.
When you lie about small things you lie about big things. If Biden can’t stop fabricating inane personal stories, imagine the whoppers he’s told about Burisma, Hunter, Ukraine, MBNA, China, etc.”
—
LikeLiked by 1 person
Here we go again.
But Biden will send money to Ukraine to repair their infrastructure while ours rots away. But hey, it’s a red state, so no biggie, right?
LikeLiked by 2 people
It’s simple really.
Keep the promise you made to get the chair, or vacate it for lying.
See, simple.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Aj, on the way home last night I was listening to Glenn Beck. Would you be able to find where he was talking to someone from Texas about plans for the government to take over 30 percent of the land by 2030 and then restricting the use of the land?
LikeLiked by 1 person
Idaho is at 61.9% federally owned.
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I thought the Federal government already had control of about that much, too.
LikeLike
I guess it is at 28%, so not much more to go to get to 30.
LikeLiked by 1 person