Historian Niall Ferguson on the roots of today's political polarization 

How about compared with Starkey? You had him too?

Ignorance is bliss, then?

Spot on! I got off the youtwittokface over a month ago, and I am more productive, I sleep better, I enjoy my days.

@@ignaciobenjamindebortoli7819 no. Internet companies like FB, Instagram and online news outlets are designed (unintentionally) to make us unhappy.

@@ignaciobenjamindebortoli7819 which is better ? To be ignorant of something or to be horribly misinformed about something ?

OP, so true. Too bad we're all hopelessly addicted to our internet fix.

Yep, at the speed of light.

@Xadion And soon we might be the machines. Something-something #Transhumanism

🎯

The printing press of the people, and the high priest of our time (journalist/Big Tech) are so scared of it that they are taking it away.

No it ain't, ya jerk!... Just kidding. You're right, of course.

@@taylorc2542 Yahoo, must took away the comments section, which almost always provided more accurate and more facts related to the story, than the original author did. Sometimes, embarrassingly so.

You're a heritic!

You are so funny, Andrew Stover :)

At least you'll be anesthetized from this talk.

It made my mind travel into a different dimension.

LMAO. Now my head hurts......Thanks.

came down to the comments to see if I was the only one. Glad to see it was the first comment.

This guy is a crystal ball. I need to find what he's saying today.

*It's 2021 now* But wait, there's more!

It's scary how a lot of switch on people predicted this coming. Yet the wider western public was blinded.

Dr. Ferguson is very interesting to read and watch.. To me, he's one of the most poignant and profound thinkers of our time.

He’s regarded by some schools of thought to be quite pro-empire so, just like all historians (who each have their own angle), everything he says and writes should be taken with the ever-so-slightest grain of salt

He’s a wanker folks!

I have to concur. The truth of this does give me great apprehension, though, that we are only just at the beginning of what will a very tumultuous time in western culture.

"Even silence is being viewed as a political stance." - This is more terrifying than rioting. This allows those you don't even communicate with to decide for you what you think.

It's the false dichotomy or "false choice" logical fallacy. Since you're not for us, you're against us! Since you are silent, you condone racism! Since you didn't applaud the statue being torn down, you want slavery returned. "You're a heretic." "No, You're a heretic!" Wow. Good and timely stuff.

No, we are not "headed" there. We are there.

It is well and good to see you posting, Mr. Buckley. Yes, it is agreed that many Americans know little about history and the 30 Years War was the product of the first information revolution. However, Mr. Buckley, I am loathe on taking your advice because you're - ahem - dead. Well, as you know, it's rather bad form to take advice from a zombie even if said zombie is quite correct in his pontifications on the current political stratums affecting the aggregate politics of the United States.

"History started in 1776. Everything before that was a mistake." -Ron Swanson [[[BIGGER BANG]]]

William F. Buckley Jr, I'm sorry...did you say something??

It's analogous to teenagers and young adults implicitly marking their birth dates as the inception point of historical relevancy. As a teacher, I can't tell you how many times I've seen that. It seems that you have to live enough history yourself in order to understand what history means.

@Zarbi Zigoto .... Hell that is just the beginning of an America Critique. By spending too much time pursuing money, which you have to because that is the way the system works, you miss out on the rest of the world and its history. By needing to be armed you have to be weary of others who may also be armed. By not having not having a national health system you are always just two short steps from bankruptcy. A the same time you are under pressure to keep spending because the GDP is a measurement of national success...... As America is the greatest country in the world and that needs to be proven.

2018 I think, but yes, prescient as you said.

Maybe but the energy has to go somewhere so it will probably be 13 years of unrest and upheaval but orders of magnitude greater.

Yes, exceedingly so. When in the history of human culture was there not a huge wave of misinformation disseminated?

Jet fuel can melt steel beams. That's what "they" told me.

No. Burning jet fuel can compromise steel beams.

What are you saying? That the media was manipulated? How could that happen? |-)

@@robinbeckford314 many white Americans have been manipulated by misinformation outlets like QAnon and the thousands of Twitter accounts, including Donald Trump's, who spread dangerous nonsensical conspiracy theories.

"The more things change, the more they stay the same."

Human behaviour hasn't changed one iota in thousands of years. We've just improved the technology with which to slaughter one another.

The link on the bottom left at the end. longnow.org/seminars/02018/nov/19/networks-and-power/

@Scranvan Thank you.😊

If you think that was great you should search for his ''The six killer apps of the western civilization''. I saw this series on tv and it was comprised of 6 different episodes, each talking about a different aspect (''app'') that propelled the west to economic and political power.

I was looking for this. Thank you!

or "you're not a real American".

@@DylanVotaire or you are no Black enough I have seen that on Twitter

@@WolfsH0ok I've heard that from Biden himself. That's a DNC-approved take. xD

This is the subtext of his speech. It's what he's really saying. It is meant to direct concern away from clear rising authoritarianism and corporate hegemony and toward powerless people on Twitter. On one hand you have Trump caging children and kidnapping people in Portland, Modi in India, Bolsonaro in Brazil, etc. On the other you have @Foucaultfan6969 shouting on social media. Think about how much power these two sides have, if you are inclined to be worried about anti racism, which I am not. This is why I don't like this speech.

Interesting comment. Would the Metropolitan versus Rural also be a good split?

@@stephenconway2468 Yes it would but the urban and rural divide is already largely reflected in the blue and red state divide. The reason I thought of states specifically is because of their powers to make laws binding, and collect taxes from, their residents, and because they are already, to varying degrees, polarised. But then there's also the issue of what people want (as reflected in their online comments) and what they will accept in "real life". I have significant ideological differences of the government of the state where I live, but I'm not moving anywhere either because this is my home.

@@maddyg3208 - The reason I was interested in the increasing move to cities is changing the dynamic. However, you raise some excellent points

Highly unlikely to happen, because your basic premise is on shaky ground, to say the least. The reality is that most of the country is heading blue. Many of the red states are on the verge of becoming blue, e.g. Georgia, where a left-leaning black woman recently came within a hair's breadth of becoming the first black female state governor in US history. Actually, if not for voter suppression, most if not all of the Deep South states would currently be blue, mainly due to their large black populations, but also due to the fact that there are more liberal- or left-leaning Caucasian voters in those states than the hackneyed old cliches about the South would suggest. The larger cities in the South are almost uniformly blue, e.g. Birmingham, Alabama and Jackson, Mississippi, both being the largest cities in their respective red states while those cities are themselves deeply blue. And liberal, blue Metropolitan Atlanta makes up nearly sixty percent of the state of Georgia. On the conservative, red side, Trump's shrieking hordes of cult followers are overwhelmingly old and will have died off within the next twenty years. Also, in reality, hardly anyone in the US relocates from one state to another simply because they don't like how that state tends to vote in Presidential elections, which is the main criterion for calling a state red or blue. For one thing, most Americans do not have the financial resources to just up and move to a different part of this vast country. Moving from one region to another within the US is not like moving from Kent to Cornwall; it's more like moving from Ireland to Georgia (the country, not the US state). So no, the US is not going to bifurcate into two or more countries, no matter how much Professor Amy Chua and her handlers in the Chinese intelligence services would like us to.

@@stephenconway2468 Thanks

Anyone who thinks like that is refusing to learn from the wide breadth of human history available to them.

@@nicholashildenbrand8632 It's a joke from a popular comedy in the US.

LOL you were right

@@MW-vg9dn hahaa indeed...

You don’t even know......

You were right

Goddamn on the money with this comment

Same, watching this video had a light bulb go off for me.

Wonder what their exes think about that? - hey, you started it!

The new ideas spread by the printing press resulted in social upheavals and the wars that changed the European continent. It shifted the balance of power away from Spain and to northern Europe, establishing the world-leadership of the Northerners in the new oceanic era. Buckle up Buttercups!!!

Everyone gets tired of fighting eventually.

well, the Thirty Years' War happened...

He did say it took 130 years. Mostly empires, colonisation and expansion was far more interesting. A certain amount of acceptance between protestants and catholics, as well but religion did help shape foreign policy.

We got out of it in the past by inventing the nation state and giving it a monopoly (or near monopoly) on legitimate violence. But that monopoly is one thing that is now breaking down.

Listen to him in the Reith Lectures 2012. Very interesting public lectures he delivered.

Lutheranism is very popular in the US

That would be Martin Luther Koenig?

MLK believed in conversion therapy he would be cancelled today

Not all americans have US public school educations.

You can watch the full seminar here: longnow.org/seminars/02018/nov/19/networks-and-power/

What was the revolutionary innovation of that time?

@@TheJoelC17 Rome had for many centuries successfully incorporated migrants into the Empire, in fact that was the source of their military strength, and (as used to happen in the US) those migrants quickly became fully Roman. However those ideals went downhill over the centuries, and the Roman ruling class mismanaged the massive influx of Goths (who were refugees from the Huns) by exploitation, discrimination, corruption, and sanctioned profiteering from their deprivation (eg selling them dog meat at vastly inflated prices). I personally think it's a stretch to blame this on Christianity's teachings -- a "post hoc" argument -- when those teachings would have led to the opposite treatment, and the decline in governance and ideals had been steadily downwards since long before Constantine. I'm willing to be persuaded there are ways in which I'm wrong on both points, though. Or that I'm joining the dots incorrectly.

@@TheJoelC17 You fail to mention the attack of political Islam from about 720 until the 787 when the Catholic Church took seriously the intrusive Muslims. The purveyors of history are clueless or are they? Especially in regard to the Muslim attacks. Eaglegards 🦅...

Ah, you're a victim of it then.

@@tzenophile Can you expound on this?

@@mike9250 Never explain a good joke, they told me. Sorry you didn't get it.

@@tzenophile Just got it. Nice. I had thought maybe you were eluding to a form of sjw trope. My apologies!

I had a similar reaction from reading your comment. How's that for irony?

How do you agree that you are living in a time similar to that?

mobile phones are used by village idiots to watch cat videos & "pro wrestling"

Well his book on Empire certainly displayed no left-wing liberal bias

Peter Eastwood He also foretold, wrongly, that "there would be blood" ie violence following the 2008 financial crisis, such was its magnitude. Nevertheless he is an interesting mind.

My god, man. Ferguson is neither left-wing nor a liberal. Far, far, from it. This is a man that proclaimed the British Raj to be beneficial to the 'development of India', despite the many massacres, because the British left some railway tracks behind. He simply prefers his racism to be a little more genteel, less vulgar than some of the worst excesses of Trump or the Brexiteers.

Don Burgundy - The definition of right wing is something like adherence to minimal government intervention, free market economics, and acceptance of natural law inequalities. The present Tory party does not subscribe to any of those principles. So, Ferguson being a Tory does not make him a right-winger. Theresa May is a Tory, but to call her rightwing is ridiculous. Ben Tolhurst - Up to 1874 the British Raj was run by the British East India Company, which was a Crown Chartered monopoly. Free markets were the last thing they were in favor of. In fact, the whole British Empire was a rigged, paternalistic globalist endeavour for the benefit of insiders. One can't say it was left wing in the marxist sense as its genesis pre-dates Marx, but it was far from rightwing by todays standards. Empires and Imperial aspirations per se are not necessarily anti-left-wing. Look at the Soviet empire, the USSR. To imply (or assert) that Trump is rascist is to show that you have drunk too much MSM Koolaide. To say Ferguson is rascist when he is married to Ayaan Hirsi Ali is just ludicrous. I repeat, Ferguson is a left leaning, globalist, acedemic. I'll grant he is not an out and out marxist and has spoken against socialist regimes and restrictions. But he is still a big-government globalist, i.e leftist.

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Erica Worhatch White Fragility

Rape Culture

Brilliant and scary book indeed!

@Kojii Naz i'm guessing it's because Niall and I both saw the same newspaper article a couple of decades ago saying the internet was going to make the modern world most like the era after the printing press was invented

@Kojii Naz Get the stake, hay, and matches anyways. We have to play it safe

This is the capitalist system at work How can you blame It

took me half the talk to figure out that he was scottish and not english lol

@@trn0m961 wait hes scottish?

It always take a match to start the fire. This is pure speculation on my part but I speculate the match that will set the USA on the road to an information war will be the three events in 2019 that will set the nation ablaze: 1. Economic instability due to the stock market. 2. The collapse of the Federal Government executive branch. 3. Massive terrorist like attacks. You're seeing all three taking place.

movieklump what is eroi?

@@bigdog5128 expected return on investment. He's saying that human society has become dependent on the ability to reliably extract energy and grow to ever increasing bounds.

“Truth has been supplanted by feelings and altruism” could be applied to any point in history. You’re talking about something very generic and very different than what he is talking about and saying he’s wrong. I think you missed most of what he was saying.

Isak Källsmyr - Good question. Julian Assange?

I hope you never lose your hearing, good sir.

cine pobre it must be Fergusons heavy Scottish accent.lol

The deaf exist

@@bazzatheblue Its as soft a Scottish accent as its possible to have.

It's necessary for deaf people and for people who don't speak english as their first language and find subs useful in case they lose a word or two.

My dude, saying you disavow the concept or don't consider it important is one thing, but to refuse to accept it's existence strikes me as a strange species of ignorance.

@@PantomimeHorse The term "verbal violence" is a contradiction. Violence is physical. "Verbal" indicates the use of words. You might as well tell me that there's round squares.

@@Nonamearisto That's a fair point. And I hear you, I do. I just did a quick google hoping to add intellectual ballast to my argument, but the OED agrees with you. But words have a power of their own, and that power can damage other human beings, just a surely as a punch. I believe that all of us, as members of our shared society, have a duty to each other, to try to allow each other to live as freely as they can, and to reject the imposition, verbal or otherwise, of force onto others.

@@PantomimeHorse You were good until the fourth sentence. Then you degenerated into a mess of ideological polemic unsupported by the facts. Stop giving us these rambling speeches filled with nice-sounding buzzwords and phrases ("shared society", "duty to each other") which are vague to the point of meaningless and start making sense. There's no such thing as forcing someone to do something with words alone. Actions impose. Words are just sound.

@@Nonamearisto Verbal violence is just like when calling a woman ma'am is a microaggression

Deaf people

Adrian Caeran, 'cos he's from Scotland.