These patterns repeat over time. Politics in practice, is reaching a meaningful threshold of consensus about some topic or clusters of topics. Our brains by design, evolution, or conditioning prioritize threats, negative information or information about a danger to our ongoing existence pings with significantly more signal strength.

Politicians, spokespeople, and pundits take advantage of that. Even good news is often coupled with bad news or negative commentary to elicit a response. Threats and negative things certainly exist, but you may have noticed the pundits with the largest following on social media have the most negative feeds.

Social media has accelerated this because it allows for faster transmission, more robust clustering, and faster attainment of consensus thresholds. Social media also incentivizes a form of operant conditioning. If you express the wrong opinion and someone comes along and mocks you for your bad thoughts, the person mocking you is likely to be given validation or reinforcement for the mockery—"You owned him," etc.

Real threats and dangers do exist. Locally, we had a political action committee try to capture several county-level offices. I and others formed bipartisan (technically tripartisan) coalitions of voters and volunteers to stop them. We did this with conscious respect for each other, where we agreed and had a strong and compelling mutual interest.

!PIMP !PIZZA !SLOTH

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