There's a guy who makes rather engaging Youtube videos, including one about Britain, the border between U.S. and Canada, the European Union, and a whole host of other topics he finds interesting with a level of humor, internet memes, and research that I wish more media would have. Recently he posted this gem.
The gist of it is that memes and information is spread the most when things make people angry, and in transmission thoughts that make people angrier are going to be more successful in getting spread. His conclusion is that after a while, instead of two groups talking to each other, or trying to understand each other, we end up holding up these totems and finding things more and more outrageous to be angry at them. These totems aren't necessarily reasonable generalizations, but they're the things that make us angriest.
(I can't for the life of me figure out how to embed a video, so here it is as a link).
Why it's relevant below the squiggle...
It made me think about the kinds of discussions that often end up happening here.
Don't get me wrong; we often have civilized even-headed discussion about what we find important, what we value, and what we need to do as Democrats, as progressives, as people to make society better, but it saddens me when we use language like Re-THUG-licans or other insults. It others people with fundamentally different axioms about life, and without a sort of empathy it's near impossible to construct a language to change anyone's point of view.
Anyway, this video, I think, makes for good food-for-thought. It also explains why it's so easy to find things to hyperventilate over. Calm, breathe, and realize that being angry in of itself in a vacuum doesn't actually help anything.
Finally, to refer to the title... this is especially good practice given that the presidential primary is coming up. I suspect the kind of vitriol here, sometimes directed at individuals, sometimes directed at groups, will be just as bad as it was during Clinton/Obama debates. It'd be nice if we could have discussions without ad hominem attacks flying around impugning the motives of everyone here.
P.S. ...yeah, I admit to specifically choosing a title to make people watch the video and read the thoughts.