#political-polarization

#political-polarization

In the queer enclave of West Hollywood, some residents were furious at the sight of a Pride flag and a transgender flag lowered to half-staff to mourn Charlie Kirk's assassination. In the city of Los Angeles, an internal Fire Department memo saying flags should stay raised sparked conservative anger at Mayor Karen Bass. And in Huntington Beach, where MAGA politics are warmly received, officials pledged to honor Kirk's memory by keeping flags lowered for an additional week past the mourning period set by President Trump.

The goal is to make buttons intuitive, easy to use, and - predictable. But is the disclosure, about participating in social media and expressing approval, full and revealing? I guess it all comes down to what you would define as a "positive experience". As I write this, two messed up, intertwined things are happening. Both can be directly linked to how the engagement dynamics of social media, driven by technology such as "like" buttons, has negatively impacted global politics.

The assassination of Charlie Kirk is widening the political divide in America-and some people who have made critical remarks about the conservative icon are finding their personal information being posted online, opening them up to harassment and threats. One site, called " Expose Charlie's Murderers," has been taken offline after posting the names of 41 people that it claimed were "supporting political violence online." The site reportedly said it was working on a backlog of over 20,000 submissions before it was taken down.

We are going to channel all of the anger that we have over the organised campaign that led to this assassination, to uproot and dismantle these terrorist networks, said Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff. Miller added that It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie's name.

But Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican who has become a measured voice of the investigation into Kirk's killing, has urged Americans to resist "rage" in the wake of the shooting. Driving the news: Cox said on CNN's "State of the Union" that the country does not need to "sing Kumbaya and hold hands" - but rather, people must continue to engage with those with whom they disagree.

School is expensive, student loan debt is often onerous and job security for those with degrees has diminished - even more so with the advent of AI. Plus, at the moment new graduates are seeing higher unemployment rates. There's also growing interest and appeal for young adults in the skilled trades - becoming plumbers, electricians, etc. - especially as AI appears to threaten white collar work.

We see wild parties, holidays, weddings, family outings and close-knit friendship groups, wrote one Guardian journalist in 2015. She went on: Apart from commemorating a deceased person's life, you'll be hard pushed to find a really bad moment in your feed. Here, it seemed, was a modern iteration of the opium always purveyed by free-market capitalism, resulting in a constant stream of personal happiness and precious little recognition of life's more difficult aspects: social strife, inequality, disagreement.

Arguably the most remarkable aspect of the aftermath of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk's assassination is how irrelevant its actual perpetrator was to the immediate discourse. I saw the finger-pointing online even before I saw the news that Kirk had been shot. At that point, there was hardly any information about the incident-let alone details about the shooter or a motive.

Kirk has been one of the most divisive, especially divisive younger figures in this, who is constantly sort of pushing this sort of hate speech. And I always go back to hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions, Dowd continued. You can't stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have, and then saying these awful words, and then not expect awful actions to take place. And that's the unfortunate environment we are in.

We're so far from even where I was when I was there, 25 years ago, just would not have happened. And it is happening now. And we as a nation have to figure out a way to pull ourselves back from the brink. We still remain the strongest, most powerful country on the face of the Earth. But oftentimes, it seems post-9/11 that we are that country in spite of ourselves, in spite of our leaders.

I am calling on @elonmusk, @finkd, and @tiktok_us to remove the horrifying videos of Charlie Kirk's murder. He has a family, young children, and no one should be forced to relive this tragedy online, wrote Luna. These are not the only graphic videos of horrifying murders circulating at some point, social media begins to desensitize humanity. We must still value life. Please take them down.

"Wokeness", like "cancel culture" and "critical race theory", is ill-defined and used as a vague catch-all for things the right does not like. In large part, the war on wokeness has been manufactured by the right's elite. In part, the war arises from grievances of the base. There are even some non-imaginary conflicts in this war -at least on the part of the Americans that can be seen as blue-collar workers.

The cult of personality was apparent as Donald Trump's cabinet convened on Wednesday in a marathon session that could have embarrassed even a seasoned strongman, providing for three hours and 17 minutes of fawning television coverage. There was Steve Witkoff, the president's top envoy and negotiator, standing up in the increasingly gilded Cabinet Room, offering praise that could have made even Vladimir Putin blush.

More than five years after COVID-19 began spreading in the United States, a new conventional wisdom has taken hold in some quarters: Public-health officials knew or should have known from the start that pandemic restrictions would do more harm than good, forced them on the public anyway, and then doubled down even as the evidence piled up against them.

With the conservative majority's ruling in Rucho v Common Cause, gerrymandering was deemed a matter of political concern, leaving extreme practices unchecked and escalating polarization.

Attorney General Pam Bondi's directive to investigate the origins of the Trump-Russia inquiry reignites scrutiny of a politically charged topic that has long affected Trump.

A new study suggests that gold can be superheated far beyond its melting point without it becoming a liquid. Using an intense burst from a laser, a team heated a gold foil to 14 times its melting point, far beyond a theoretical limit put forward in previous studies.

In today's America, people leave their jobs because their boss hangs the wrong flag in the office. Long-standing friendships end because a vote was cast for that other guy.

According to the report, 57 percent of Americans trust nonprofits to 'do what is right.' This far exceeds the level of trust in other institutions, including small business, the news media, and federal government.

Consensus is in short supply in modern America, characterized by polarization along geographic, educational, class, and sexual lines, and media fragmentation. This fragmentation leads to widespread suspicion and loneliness among citizens.

The survey found that 64% of California voters said they thought American democracy was under attack, and 26% felt our system of government was being tested but not under attack.

Liberalism hinges on the belief that language can transparently describe reality, facilitating rational debate on diverse visions for a better society.