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Comment by slice_of_life | Hacker News Reader

> if you are unreasonable, you're most likely on the right. Most reasonable people are clustered with the left.

I hope you realize there's nothing reasonable about this statement. IMO, most times when the right has been considered to be unreasonable, so to speak, it has been a response to the left taking things too far. And yes, this includes WWII; there is no Hitler without communism.

This is not to validate nor justify any extremists' actions but rather to illustrate that even when you are supposedly trying to appear centrist, you really aren't and what's worse is that you don't realize it. When this type of thing happens, you end up with bad outcomes. If you're going to be reasonable, also realize you're biased as I am (rightist).

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Bringing this back to the topic at hand, it doesn't really matter if the left is going "too far", but rather whether the consumers of right-wing media think they are going too far based on the lies they are being fed. And at that point they'll "correct" with a new holocaust or civil war or whatever the very, very rich people who have the most to lose will support to protect their wealth.

> it doesn't really matter if the left is going "too far", but rather whether the consumers of right-wing media think they are going too far based on the lies they are being fed

But it does. That's exactly the point. It's a pendulum of sorts. A symbiosis where one cannot exist without the other in equal proportion. For any 'reasonable' discourse to happen there must be the acknowledgement of this fact; right or left, you come to the table biased. The one-sided blame game won't work because all it does is exacerbate the situation.

> very, very rich people who have the most to lose will support to protect their wealth.

Here's a fallacy that was debunked in the election. If the very rich are 1%-ers then how is it that so many sound-minded individuals chose Trump? The math doesn't support your statement.

When left goes "too far", we have Mao's China or USSR. Or it OK as long as left thinks it's not "too far"?

> at that point they'll "correct" with a new holocaust

Seriously ?

Your question is a bit cryptic. But yes, I believe tragedies on the scale of the the holocaust and the american civil war are a regular occurrence in human history and we've not seen the last of them yet. I think conservative estimates of climate change related deaths are already in that ballpark.

The death toll for the Iraq war was about a million dead for example, and likely only happened due to the influences described in the article, taking advantage of 9/11 (e.g. the surveys showing that Fox News viewers were more likely to believe Iraq perpetrated 9/11 than people who watched no news at all).

> Fox News viewers were more likely to believe Iraq perpetrated 9/11 than people who watched no news at all

They can be forgiven that considering that W perpetuated that lie as readily as the news outlets.

It's the pendulum I spoke of earlier at play.

Love your HN bio BTW. Too funny.

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