Darren Remington Quotes

In the world today, we humans have become more self-absorbed, more tribal and tenacious in holding on to our narrow agendas; we have become consumed by the barrage of information inundating us; we are even more fickle when it comes to leaders.

Anybody who tunes into Rush Limabaugh already knows what he's going to say and is already inclined to agree. So it winds up creating tribes.

People of a certain political view tend to read material of only that point of view … except to cast contempt on the other points of view.

Ideological amplification happens when like minded people deliberate…they push each other to extreme points of views….The argument pool in a group of liberals will be only liberal. Likewise with conservatives, the other way…. Most of us on most issues do not have a ton of information…we might be steered away from moderation…. Political correctness is a good example of ideological amplification.

We have seen our discourse degraded by casual cruelty. At times, it can seem like the forces pulling us apart are stronger than the forces binding us together. Argument turns too easily into animosity. Disagreement escalates into dehumanization. Too often, we judge other groups by their worst examples while judging ourselves by our best intentions.

The stupidity of tribalism has made politics primarily about partisan identities, not persuasion or policy. The screamers on the right and left fuel one another. In a nation as big as ours, there is always someone somewhere saying something stupid—but tribalism takes this fact as its lifeblood. And it’s the excuse for otherwise civic-minded Americans to ignore the nuts in their own party and obsess only over the nuts in the other party. We’re tempted to think that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. It takes a genuine leader to remind us that most of the time, the enemy of our enemy is still a jackass.

Everybody seems to be imprisoned in their own sectarian or political affiliations. They don't seem to be able to rise above these things.

Each side had its uninformed fanatics. And each side had political leaders who fanned the flames with their rhetoric.

Neither party should be defined by pandering to the outer reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance, whether they be Louis Farrakhan and Al Sharpton on the left, or Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell on the right

The Internet is the single biggest creator of ignorance mankind has ever created, as well as the single biggest eliminator of that ignorance. It’s our ability to filter that eliminates the former and empowers the latter.

The politicians are not the only people who are in their own silos. Many of our citizens only watch or listen to the news that they want to hear, and if there is anything else, they turn it off. We all need to listen to the people who are on the other side.

In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: the attention of its recipients.

[…] a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

It bothers me when I look at Israeli society, on the divisiveness in it, and to polarization. I'm not just talking about left-right... but how individuals behave towards each other.

If I say I like one person, that means everybody that voted for the other person doesn't like me. So, why would I do that?

Research shows that if people are talking and listening to like-minded others, they become more dogmatic, more unified, and more extreme. Personalized Facebook experiences are a breeding ground for misunderstanding and miscommunication across political lines and, ultimately, for extremism.

Facebook Algorithms have got us all screwed up, where we only listen and talk to people with the same views as us, and I think it's not helping us as a culture to grow.

In the era of Donald Trump the echoes of Westboro are undeniable: the division of the world into Us and Them; the vilification of compromise; the knee-jerk expulsion of insiders who violate group orthodoxy; and the demonization of outsiders and the inability to substantively engage with their ideas, because we simply cannot step outside of our own.

When people silo themselves by belief, only affiliating with like-minded media organizations and people, we lose the opportunity for genuine conversation, much less persuasion.

We live surrounded by people who sound like us, vote like us, spend like us. We get only the news we want to. And then scream into the social media echo chamber that is designed to serve us up information we already like.

The extremists are talking too loudly, and everyone is convinced that only he is on the right side.

The separation of audience into tribes preferring to reinforce their own views with media of similar ideological stripe makes true debate impossible.

We make artificial divisions everywhere: Democrats and Republicans, black and white, millennials and baby boomers. Even those of us who are against building walls find ourselves pointing accusing fingers at those wall-builders.

The one thing ... that is truly ugly is the climate of hate and intimidation, created by a noisy few, which makes the decent majority reluctant to air in public their views on anything controversial. ... Where all pretend to be thinking alike, it's likely that no one is thinking at all.

The most active people in the country know different things, and because each one tends to hear mostly and deal mostly with people with whom they agree, they are reinforced not simply in the conviction that they are right, which is totally appropriate, but that they are the majority. So you have both sides, the Left and the Right, thinking that the majority of the country is really with them.