On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 5:00 AM, Bruce Bostwick <lihan161...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> On Jul 26, 2010, at 11:58 AM, zwil...@zwilnik.com wrote: snip >> Don't overlook what is called "dog whistle" political statements. >> This names comes from the well-known phenomenon that a highly- >> pitched whistle will be heard by dogs, but not by people. And in >> polictics there is a similar phenomenon whereby you can say >> something that cannot explicitly be criticized when you you say it, >> but the people who are supposed to hear it will understand what you >> really mean. >> >> See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics > > One important thing to note related to covertly targeted communication > is that the right wing in general is not in the habit of making > broadcast public statements all that frequently to the general public, > for various reasons, not the least of which is that they tend not to > be well prepared for or tolerant of the inevitable criticism from more > moderate or progressive-minded audiences. > > The far more common practice in the right-wing community is to > communicate through viral chain emails, which can usually be counted > on to travel only to sympthetic readers and whose targeting leverages > interpersonal relationships as a filter to keep the communication from > reaching people inclined to question the content. This bears some > serious consideration. > > The Tea Party leadersip doesn't seem to be authoring a lot of the > viral content, but the rank and file membership use that back channel > almost exclusively, and given that the people in those channels tend > to be a vector for both Tea Party and neopentecostal theocratic > agitprop, among many other (and sometimes many much, much nastier) > subjects, there's no small amount of cross-pollination and > conflation. I have at least two ore three separate taps into that > vector, thanks to certain oddities about my family relationships and > my political leanings, and I can say confidently that about 90% or > more of what the Tea Party rank and file are saying isn't making the > news because it's targeted tightly enough that the media don't see it. > > And it's being mixed with a lot of theocratic and Christian- > nationalist messages, and various flavors of racist and/or white > supremacist content as well, and because it's largely viral, it's > nearly impossible to trace to a given origin, or stop in any > meaningful fashion. And I'm only getting a tiny fraction of the full > stream of it, and I get a lot. > > So this is a complex question, because while the Tea Party does > technically have a leadership of sorts, it's a weak one, and there's a > lot of leaderless-cell activity underneath the surface that's not at > all like the public face of the party. And I'm not sure whether > that's a feature of the design, or an emergent property Emergent property. Email is taking the place of beer halls. Fascinating. > of its > population and the methods they use to communicate. I'm leaning > toward the latter, although the leadership certainly doesn't seem to > be too serious about doing anything other than enabling it and > diverting outside attention away from what's going on. >From an evolutionary psychology viewpoint what is driving the expansions of these as yet poorly focused xenophobic memes is the relatively bleak outlook for a substantial part of what used to be the US middle class. The outlook isn't bad in absolute terms, but humans are sensitive to relative changes. In the long run, the xenophobia may focus or the whole movement could fizzle out if and when economics improves or something else distracts attention. Or if we were really unlucky, it could develop into a social spasm of the Cambodia/Rwanda type. Or it might be focused outward as support for a war. For a theory model on where these psychological mechanisms come from Google for "evolutionary psychology, memes and the origin of war." Keith _______________________________________________ http://box535.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
