No, same thing exactly. I just finally got the widget fixed up and put on the sidebar.

Not to mention BBSs and LISTSERVs.

I am wondering how the whole Covid thing would have progressed without social media. Would everyone have just listened to (or read!) the news, and then gone and gotten vaccinated? I think about how simple the Sabine vaccine distribution was.

AMDG

I’m not at home and may say more tonight when I am. But in a word, yes. All in all I think social media is a cultural poison.

Spoke too soon. The notification just came.

Janet, that's pretty sad about your Next Door and local Facebook pages. I've heard others say similar things, but haven't really seen it myself. My NextDoor posts are 99% lost or found pets, and down to earth things like "please recommend someone to fix my sink". The local Fb groups are mostly that way, too. People get snarky about various local things ("why don't they fix that bump at x and y?") but it really doesn't get into political/cultural meanness very often at all. It helps that the groups are moderated, apparently by sensible people.

But at this point it's indubitable that social media in general has brought out some really bad stuff and is having a major impact on the polarization of the country. If someone you don't see very often in person or maybe have never even met is politically obnoxious, that tends to define the person for you, and he or she becomes The Enemy, or at least on the side of The Enemy. I'm afraid some people now think I'm some sort of Trumpazoid (heard that from my sister-in-law, not sure if it's original with her) because I tried to make the case that distorted and outright false versions of things he said were making him seem (even) worse than he is.

There is a really good article in the current First Things that reflects on the mob action against neighbors who are "undesirable" because they aren't the same "class." It is called "Class Acts" and is by
Casey Chalk.

My wife, perhaps because she is the “right kind” of neighbor, was included in a group-text chat regarding the offending family. The primary complainant noted that “the board” had been trying for months to “figure out a solution.” (It wasn’t stated whether the solution was to the smoking or the smokers.) Finally, after consulting a lawyer, the board determined that the smokers could be accused of violating a community bylaw that forbids “interfer[ing] with the rights, comforts, and conveniences of other unit owners.” The violation would be second-hand smoke.

There was more to the group chat. One participant shared several surreptitiously taken photographs of the wife smoking out of her third-floor window, wearing a halter top that brought to mind P. G. Wodehouse’s comment about a woman who looked as if she had been poured into her dress and forgot to say when. “It makes me sick,” the furtive photographer noted. “Ugh, terrible,” someone responded. One participant complained that her “view” every morning was of the husband, in his pajamas, smoking outside his house. Another noted, “The wife flicks the ashes into a coke bottle . . . class act.” Another lamented, “I can’t imagine what those kids are dealing with. ­Parents of the year.”

Perhaps social media has increased our aversion to face-to-face confrontation. That might seem counterintuitive, given that online platforms are often nothing but conflict. But it’s easier to curse and malign someone through the contrived community of digital technology. Social media not only facilitates the curation of pseudo-identities, but encourages us to view others as artificial. A few years ago, an acquaintance said some uncharitable things about me on social media without provocation. When I confronted her in person, she was surprised and defensive. It was as if she considered Facebook a screen for her bad behavior. In the anonymity of website comboxes, we find even more egregious examples of the trend toward unrestrained malice.

I don't know if anyone who doesn't have a subscription can access it, but here is the link, for what its worth. https://www.firstthings.com/article/2021/08/class-acts.

I put a whole lot of responsibility on Rush Limbaugh for “liberating” those “basest of human fervors.” I remember listening to him early on after reading about how popular his radio show was and being shocked by the hatefulness and cynicism of what he was saying.

Actually, now that I think about it, the url was automatically generated by the blog software. They are the ones who included the period.

I've fixed that URL now. Yes, it probably was the blog software. If you put a period at the end, contiguous with the URL, it wouldn't know that the period was not part of it, as it's a legal character in a URL. If you put the URL on a line by itself it won't have that problem.

Marianne, a further thought on Limbaugh: it is true that his success represented a breakthrough in its combination of abrasive pugnacity and wide success. Did you ever hear Joe Pyne? He was sort of the original of that type, and he died in 1970. But he was never anywhere near as popular and influential as Limbaugh.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Pyne

So I can agree that Limbaugh was a new thing, and all in all not a healthy one. Where I disagree is in holding him *especially* responsible for the "base fervors," which as I said were already very much in the air.

To some extent this is a question of taste, too. When I listened to him I found most of his pugnacity to be within the bounds of decency, and he could be quite funny. I don't think his parodies of liberal figures were any meaner than some of Saturday Night Live's lampoons of conservative ones. He definitely crossed over at times, though. The one thing I remember in that respect was his making fun of Chelsea Clinton's looks. That was contemptible.

I think he, Trump, and Fox News all represent an unhappy but inevitable reaction to liberal/progressive cultural dominance. Many reasonable conservative views, such as the anti-abortion one, were for the most part frozen out of decent company as defined and policed by dominant media and other institutions. So those three tapped into the frustration felt by those whose views were ignored. Class was/is an important part of the policing, as Robert says, and the voices of those three were/are pitched at a cruder and...let's face it, lower-class level than those of the more sophisticated.

I stay on Fb for similar reasons. For instance, there's a guy who graduated from my high school and who maintains a page devoted to it in the 1950s and '60s. It's all old photos, reminiscences, and milestones: birthdays, anniversaries, obituaries. He has a strict policy against political and religious discussions. Very enjoyable and not at all connected with any controversy.

I also have noticed that the frequency of political-religious argument on Fb has gone *way* down. Good that your friend had the wisdom to get off, if he can't resist that stuff.

I must say I don't really get the anti-vaccine stuff, except for people who think all vaccines are bad. I mean, I think they're wrong but they're not fixated on this one vaccine for obscure reasons. Some percentage of it is knee-jerk. When Trump was still in office, there were some prominent Democrats who said they would never take a vaccine developed under Trump. Seems like Chuck Schumer was one. I think a lot of right-wing anti-vaccine people are basically doing the same thing: Democrats are telling me to do it, so I'm not going to, they must have some sinister reason for it.

By the way, I was a little skeptical of it, too, not for any political reason but concern that it was being rushed and might be harmful. I had it anyway and experienced zero ill effects.

I think that a lot of people who found Limbaugh to be a "hater" and such simply didn't get his schtick. If you listened to him long enough you eventually figured out that he was by-and-large a satirist, which is why he always said that you had to listen to him for at least six weeks before you could "get" what he was doing. I'd surmise that many liberals never gave him six hours, let alone six weeks. Granted, his satire was very one-sided, which is why it tended to get old, and he did occasionally cross the line, but it was seldom really vicious or hateful. As you said, no worse than mainstream comedy's satire against conservatives and religious people.

I only saw Jon Stewart a few times, but my impression was that his major talent was smirking. Which is related to the class hostility we're talking about. Hold up a picture of some overweight badly dressed clod at WalMart and smirk, and you'll get a laugh from people of your class.

"When Trump was still in office, there were some prominent Democrats who said they would never take a vaccine developed under Trump. Seems like Chuck Schumer was one."

This is funny considering that the vaccine WAS developed under Trump. I think one can make the case that had the vaccine been announced as successful a few days before the election rather than a few days after Trump may have very well been re-elected. And it wouldn't surprise me one bit to learn that Pfizer delayed the announcement on purpose for that reason.

Pfizer just can't win. Its CEO is also being used to fuel anti-vaccine madness:

"Antisemitism has been an ongoing theme since the pandemic began, with conspiracies alleging that Jews are behind the coronavirus and are using it as a tool to expand global influence and derive profit. As countries begin administering the vaccine, Jews are once again the target of antisemitic conspiracies, mostly aimed at dissuading people from being vaccinated.

Much of the antisemitic messaging around the vaccine highlights Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla’s Jewish heritage. This fact provides antisemites with 'evidence' that the widespread vaccine effort is part of a calculated, long-term Jewish plot to institute a 'Global Jew Government,' a new iteration of the age-old canard of international Jewish control."

https://heartland.adl.org/news/racist-extremist-antisemitic-conspiracies-surround-coronavirus-vaccine-rollout/

Some interesting and maybe surprising data about the unvaccinated in this piece--scroll down to "America's Unvaccinated Big Cities"

https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/an-american-summer-meltdown

That kind of thing is a bit of machinery that automatically engages when anyone on the right criticizes a person on the left who's a member of an officially protected class. It's shabby, to put it mildly, and frustrating, but I guess within many circles it works.

What I've encountered more than once about Soros is not that he's part of a Jewish conspiracy but that he's a Jew who somehow collaborated with the Nazis. I'm pretty sure that's been debunked.

By "anti-vaxxers" in your first sentence, do you mean those who are opposed to all vaccinations or just the covid ones? I don't personally know any of the former.

I should have said "that I know" in that first sentence.

I can't say anything useful in the way of a generalization, because there are only a couple of people I know who very definitely refuse the vaccine, and one of them is that person I've mentioned, who I think truly has some mental "issues."

I blame the government, especially the CDC, and the media for a lot of the paranoia. They've made it pretty obvious that political considerations have been very important in their handling of the whole thing. It may have been something of a turning point when some group of "health professionals" said that BLM protests were ok, but other gatherings were not. They've lost the trust of much of the public, and that's a good environment for crazy or borderline crazy stuff to flourish in.

The medical establishment also pretended to a greater certainty about many things than was actually justfied. Humility would have been more effective.

The one thing I hear over and over from people left and right who have some measure of doubt about the vaccine or COVID policy in general is that the large amount of conflicting information floating around makes it impossible to know who to trust. This is pretty much where I've been since last summer. When it comes to COVID I take nothing I hear from anyone without a grain of salt. When it comes to the government, the CDC, etc., I'm very much in "trust but verify" mode.