U.S. Capitol Locked Down Amid Escalating Protests

I certainly don't know what the right answer here is, or even if there is one. The flip side of this polarization is the Internet has allowed discriminated groups to organize (e.g. see the "It Gets Better Project")

That has allowed traditionally marginalized news sources that embrace less-vetted news to shine. Say what you want about Alex Jones, but he was covering Jeffery Epstein's lolita express/island in 2008 and no one would touch that story back then. So now we have the marginalized news sources ending up larger viewerships than the national evening news. So while you do get real news which is less skewed left or right than in the MSM, it is wrapped with plenty of crap and is less vetted.

The news industry, politicians, and big tech censorship has made this problem. Now they get to lay in their beds. It sucks, I'm not a fan of what's going on in DC right now, but I also don't blame those doing what they feel they must for their country. They are merely products of the system that made them. Until the MSM and politicians decide to stop twisting everything for market share or political gain this will continue to escalate. And we know that won't happen sadly.

As a European I find the images from Georgia's vote counting absolutely astonishing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUiqaFIONPQ

Also, issue is not polarization itself. Issue is that chunk of Americans wants to revert election.

As it turns out, truth is a thing beyond price - which is to say, it is worthless.

This naturally leads to the natural balance being two parties, which has to oppose each other to the extreme in all topics, which then diverges further and further creating the US today.

Different variants of multi member districts or proportional representation allows for the both the progressive left and far right which today feel left out to form their own groups. They can then get into congress and slowly let the steam out while likely enacting some change which all can accept.

I find the "How did we arrive to this point" question interesting, because for most of recorded history, the masses of humanity have not been so different than they are today. If anything, "enlightenment" is a relatively rare occurrence.

Add to that a pandemic lockdown championed by one side who can mostly sit safely behind a screen while the other side loses their livelyhood in small businesses.

Something had to give. I hope this will be the limit.

If you would like more of this, continue to ignore non-virtual reality.

Done. You tell me which is which.

It somehow reminds me of Weimar Germany, with two very fringe (sometimes militant) opposing groups radicalising the rest of the society -- or the rest just ignoring the whole mess and going about their lives.

No, that has nothing to do with it.

Take a look on wide base social polls across Western countries.

The seemingly "extreme" right turn in Europe at around the refugee crisis wasn't one unexpected if you count that.

It's just that huge social mass was very latent, and quiet as nobody wanted to be stigmatized as a nazi. Now, it isn't.

You cannot "deaf it out," and expect the problem to disappear.

Terrible social rifts can last centuries in silence. Example: Greek independence war was more than a century ago, and seemingly forgotten before it gave Ottomans the last blow, and then 50 years later, Turkey. And it seems it never really ended given what is going on in the Mediterranean now.

In the "peaceful" Western Europe, Schleswig war has ended 150 years ago, nations of Europe embraced in brotherly love, and the legacy of the conflict was ceremonially buried 10 times over, but people of Schleswig still tell of icy silence.

My own impression is that this is far worse in the US than in most other first world countries. If I'm right about that, then explanations based on social media algorithms etc don't really work, because the same algorithms apply in other countries too. It really then needs a US-specific explanation.

Maybe, the US has just got too big and too diverse – I am talking here about political/ideological/worldview diversity, not ethnic/racial/etc diversity – to hold itself together in the long-run. Countries don't last forever, and the US isn't going to last forever either. Of course, it isn't breaking up this year, and I think other countries are likely to break up before the US does (such as the UK, Spain, Belgium, Canada). But maybe these current events are bringing that eventuality closer to us.

But having visited 43 states in the past five years, and making it my business to talk politics and religion everywhere I have gone (especially in the aftermath of the 2016 election), I have repeatedly been surprised by the simple commonness of people's hopes: for peace, justice, security, prosperity.

Most people with whom I spend my time seem to think that Trump voters are all just like Trump. But I have not found that to be so whatsoever. I have repeatedly been surprised and sometimes even confused by the reasonableness and sophistication of Trump supporters, especially in the South.

And rage at America's institutions - including surely dreams of raiding the Capitol and wrecking havok - is surely not limited to one party of political view. It's not a tactic I favor, though I do certainly hope to see this silly building fade into the irrelevance of the failed state.

The incentives of social media algorithms are influential in the way we think about each other.

We are constantly shown Trump supporters who can't form a coherent and fact-based narrative. We're shown 'antifa' who seem to prefer roving destruction and mayhem rather than an equitable society.

But neither of these tropes reflect anything close to the reality of 2020 America. We are a society of peaceful, educated, hopeful people. Travel. Ask. You'll see.

Things were going bad enough as they were... then the pandemic hit and people turned to social media as their primary means for safe socialization. The breakdown of social discourse over the last year has been disheartening at best and horrifying at worst.

Probably not a bad idea to keep the peace.

Or more practically, greater freedom for the states, and less federal power.

I used to appreciate grid-lock in DC under the idea that the less they got done, the less they'd do to me. Now I recognize that the best outcomes are a) when the lawmakers reach across the aisle and forge what both sides would consider a compromise and more importantly b) when the lawmakers we elect actually enact laws and run the country in a way that benefits the people they represent.

I suspect that our best way forward as a nation is to resume carefully growing the middle class. This will by nature mean that the financial elites (some of whom are clearly moral despots) will lose a small portion of their wealth. But it's amazingly analogous to the reforms at the beginning of the last century that started to protect labor from the robber barons.

I think the second step is to (yes, at a cost) restore at least some manufacturing capability to the US. This provides jobs to many who are NOT going to be talking tech on HN and also protects us (and the world) against there being potentially a single-source supplier of any given resource.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3791630 (sorry to those who don't have jstor... I'll try to find stuff)

This isn't an accurate representation of the US. There are 4 sides:

- extreme left

- left

- right

- extreme right

The proportion of each is probably around: 5%/45%/45%/5% (maybe 10/40/40/10)

The 5% on each extreme are the one making the news on the other side to instill fear from the "other side" (fox news depiction of far left Portland, cnn depiction of far right, etc)

And logically, the people who consume news the most have the most distorted view of the other side: https://twitter.com/HiddenTribesUS/status/114314670369397555...

Since media get money from more viewers, and since fear sells, unfortunately they have no incentive to make this better. Finding neutral sources while staying informed is a hard problem.

The reality is there is a conspiracy/are conspiracies that are coordinated by various disparate secret and not secret organizations whose goals sometimes don't but most often do overlap, and occurences like Q-anon and these protests are likely psyop techniques to distract potential genuine movements that might respond or create desired counter-responses in order to limit the fallout while the oligarchs catch up in the race against the internet as the last bastion of freedom of speech that could cause a neo-peasants revolt if the people found out the truth.

1) On web sites like this I've noticed a rule "Assume good faith". But in real life there are lots of people who say things in bad faith. In the case of PR people and trial lawyers and partisan politicians it seems to be in the job description to say things in bad faith. I have no solutions on how to fix this- I don't believe in God but I can imagine a deity punishing people who choose to exercise their free speech to profit on bad faith lies- but I have no theory of government to stop this behavior on earth.

2) We have a society based around money. People in this site like to whine about what Zuckerberg or whomever is doing but the guiding principle of society seems to be "he who has the money makes the rules". So if Zukerberg wants to weaponize Facebook against society the full power of the financial system will help him do it as long as he has the money/ property to control Facebook. I think in theory we could transition to a society where CEO and board members have their shares and/ or control of companies confiscated if they act in ways which harms society. (Perhaps putting things to a vote, i.e. a universal ballet: should Zuckerberg have his shares of Facebook seized and auctioned off under the theory he is harming society y/n)). Since this has never been tried as far as I know I don't know if my solution could even work.

One side effect of this personality type seizing power is that the Overton window has been inflated into a vast, festering portal through which our worst nightmares can crawl out. I doubt it was his intent, but it is the result.

You’ve almost got to admire the raw primitive energy and boundlessness of that level of id. How very sad that it has been employed to such feeble ends; it will ultimately have to be crushed for democracy to prevail.

This mostly I think. It's always been a case of birds of a feather flock together. But internet communication has bridged distance and recommendation engines created echo chambers

Rather than accede to the changing political landscape, Southern Democrats maligned the new Republican Party as an existential threat because it opposed the expansion of slavery in the Western territories. Promoters of secession, called “fire-eaters,” knew they did not command majority support even within the South, so they deployed a rhetoric of fear and anger that condemned Republicans as “fanatics” and encouraged fellow Southerners to regard Lincoln’s election as “an open declaration of war” upon the region.

This hyperbolic language left no room for compromise or middle ground; it was intended to terrify voters into opposing Lincoln. The result was that Lincoln was not listed as a candidate in many Southern precincts, and his election, thus, surprised even moderate Southerners who believed he could not command an electoral college majority. By perverting the electoral process, fire-eaters swayed moderates to adopt their conspiratorial approach to politics.

Lincoln believed in the protection of minority rights, but he also believed in majority rule. Secession was, in his words, an appeal from the “ballot to the bullet.” That is, because Southern Democrats could not persuade a majority of voters to their standard (as they had for decades), they abandoned the political process altogether. This action, Lincoln felt, made self-government impossible. If the losing side in an election could always walk away, how could a nation ever remain intact?

1) The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It by Robert Reich [0]

- Reich drops the buzzword neoliberalism in favor of the word power. I like that as neoliberalism is a terrible phrase for the concept it describes, but make no mistake, it's the insidious, invisible nature of neoliberalism that put our country in a position where neither party served the people well. That is what Reich describes here.

2) The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News-and Divided a Country by Gabriel Sherman [1]

- There is also a Showtime miniseries based on the book you could watch. Pair with the movie Bombshell

3) Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer [2]

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52118381-the-system

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15981705-the-loudest-voi...

[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27833494-dark-money

From OANN to Fox to MSNBC; it's all us-vs-them, fear the others, be afraid, be angry, and stay tuned in for more.

Every time I visit your country I'm apalled and horrified by your news media. It's blatantly exploiting basic animal instinct and core emotions to hook viewers in order to sell ads.

You are a product of your media.

And then there's the network effects of Facebook, Twitter and Parlor...

In this case a charismatic demagogue (Donald Trump) has built a cult of personality around himself. He and his enablers employ many of the tactics used by other cult-like organizations, such religious organizations (e.g. scientology), or otherwise (i.e. multilevel marketing schemes). These organizations offer the opportunity to be apart of something "great" and "historic", to teach you how to be strong, to transform yourself from "zero to hero", and have fellowship with other like minded individuals who have the will and desire to improve their lives too. In return they demand absolute, unquestioning, and unwavering fealty.

This has little to do with political orientation (left vs right) and everything to do with Donald Trump. There is currently a "civil war" going on inside the GOP, and the most vicious attacks from the cult-of-MAGA tend to be aimed at members of the political right who voice even the slightest dissent and are thus deemed "insufficiently loyal" (i.e. counterrevolutionaries).

https://waitbutwhy.com/2020/01/sick-giant.html

1. Sampling. There’s a big universe of facts, and each media outlet reports on a tiny piece of this universe.

2. Stereotypes. When you read a news story, you unconsciously pattern match and associate it to related examples you have in your mind.

3. Context. When you read a news story, you subconsciously have some fascet of your own identity in mind (as a Republican, as a pro-choice person, etc.).

All three are in effect when stories are reported on and consumed. It’s a series of lenses that samples, then distorts, the truth in a way that given the same real-world event, different people may come to completely different conclusions about what happened.

I’d add a #4: fake news. This amplifies #1 significantly. It was less of a problem in Lippmann’s time since the News world was much smaller. He might have called this “rumor”, not news.

I've seen compelling evidence on 4chan to make me believe that there was some shadiness going on in this election, perhaps moreso than normal. However, even I can admit that it does not appear to rise to the level of systemic voter fraud that I would need to call this election a "sham", nor does it appear systemic by any measure.

Can you see the difference between "everyone I don't agree with is 100% incorrect and racist" and my statement? Can you see how claiming intelligent working people are "in another reality" might be divisive to the people you're (falsely) claiming to want to meet halfway?

It goes both ways too - the right still won't admit that climate change is a thing to be combated even though that it is facially obvious to anyone that climate change has at least some negative effects.

Furthermore the world is so complicated and technology is so powerful that people are more affected by simulated reality than real reality. Major events that affect people's lives are mediated by technology that can be used to convey falsity as easily as truth (perhaps easier).

At this point, even Trump telling people to stop (which, to his credit, he has) will not help, in the same way that democrats telling Antifa to stop will not help (I mean Biden has asked them to stop for months now, and they're still launching fireworks at the courthouse in Portland to the point the mayor is now begging for federal help).

Political violence has been normalized by the media (both social and not) to the point where, even popular politicians who disagree with the mob will become its victims.

The scary part is that some people perpetuated all this polarization and rage for money.

3-4 decades of utter gridlock has left the country with both a power vacuum and many aggrieved parties looking for a break from the status quo.

It's always been that way. We've been at war with each other since the very beginning. North vs South. Federalists vs Anti-Federalists. Nativists vs Pro-Immigration. Protectionist vs Free Trade.

Heck, just a decade or so into the republic a vice president and a secretary of treasury had a duel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burr%E2%80%93Hamilton_duel

The easiest tell is in the name. "United" States of America. If we were so united, we wouldn't have the need to put united since it would be self-evident.

The only times we've come together, briefly, is when we have a common enemy - whether it is natives, blacks, germans, japanese, russians, chinese, mexicans, etc. For a brief few weeks, the country was united after 9/11.

> Segregation of information sources? Politicization of media outlets? Self-reinforcing social bubbles? A combination of all of them and more?

Nope. You can have the same information and two people are going to come to two different conclusions. Forcing the entire country to watch CNN or Foxnews isn't going to solve the problem. It is just going to antagonize one side even more.

You can argue that it is impossible for a country as large as the US ( or china, russia, india, etc ) to be "united". Too many people across too vast a territory to keep everyone's interests aligned. Heck, you can argue that these aren't really countries but empires too. And all empires eventually crumble.

But the truth is that huge chunks of the population have lived under different realities in the US since the very beginning and has continued ever since.

The rioters/protesters are largely white as opposed to the more-diverse BLM protesters (more on that later). These people feel like the US Government, in general, and that includes moderate republicans, has failed them in the past several decades by sending their jobs overseas, or by allowing immigrants into the country who have taken their jobs. They feel like they're being left behind, which, in truth, they are. Blue collar jobs have been exported, en masse, over the years, and that's been a bi-partisan effort resulting in lifting countless people out of poverty outside the US, but putting incredible pressure on people inside of the US, particularly the middle class, who feel like they have few or no prospects.

And of course the irony here, when compared to the BLM protests, is that if a sizable segment of these rioters/protesters weren't racist they would understand that this is how Black American have felt _for a couple of hundred years_. Important note: this is not to say that these rioters/protesters are even close to being as poorly treated as the black community. Outsourcing their jobs and giving their former wages to owners/capital in the form of profits is SO FAR from the historical treatment of black Americans that someone will read this and consider it laughable to even compare the two. But they are getting a taste of what it's like when the government stops working for them, the formerly very privileged (not relative to the 1% but certainly to black americans) white middle class.

All of the polarization stems from that. "You've taken my opportunity and everyone else seems to be getting theirs and I no longer have mine. Fuck you. I'm going to break shit until you listen up."

The other is “living” in their little Jim Crow fantasyland.

What’s happing today is the result of reality intruding on their fantasy. It’s the same mechanism that causes earthquakes, or psychotic breaks when people can no longer keep up the appearance of being that up-and-coming Hollywood screenwriter.

Even Pence, McConnell, and Mattis are calling this what it is: a fascist insurrection, led by a failed President. So congratulations on the audacity to both-side this.

We lost our mojo. We forgot that leadership is not leaving anybody behind.

We left a lot of people behind, then we blamed them for not keeping up.

Sorry, on behalf of my class, I really am sorry. The consequences, when we face ecological catastrophe, could be very serious indeed.

Stay safe, people, and be kind

1) People prefer news coverage which confirms their previously-held beliefs (aka confirmation bias).

2) News outlets are financially incentivized to deliver news which confirms whatever beliefs we may have, since if we don't then viewers will change the channel. This causes news outlets to balkanize along various points on the political spectrum, ranging from extreme right-wing to extreme left-wing.

3) News outlets receive 100% of the gain of confirming our biases, but pay less than 100% of the total cost of doing so (aka "the tragedy of the commons").

4) Viewers end up consuming primarily (if not exclusively) media which confirms their biases. This becomes a self-reinforcing echo chamber.

5) Simultaneously, there has been a proliferation of media outlets. In the 1950s, there were 2-3 TV channels from which one could consume news. Today, there are 500 channels on DirecTV, and any number of internet news sites / Twitter accounts / etc. where you can get your fix.

6) In the old days, news outlets had to be moderate in their reporting, in order to appeal to the broadest possible audience. Conversely, the more sources of information there are, the louder any individual source must become, in order to stand out from the crowd.

7) With the internet, it's possible to create news outlets which cater to a minority of people who hold extreme viewpoints (aka capturing the long tail of the media market).

8) Over time, there are more and more outlets delivering more and more extreme reportage, and the news we consume becomes more extremist in nature.

9) Since our news diet plays a big part in shaping our worldview, over time we ourselves become more extreme.

I'd love to be wrong about this, since it doesn't bode well for the future of the human race. Someone please restore my faith in humanity by effectively rebutting the points above.

As a wise man once said, the chickens have come home to roost.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/06/roger-a...

This wasn't by mistake, or stumbling into it. It was a very purposeful attack on our democracy.

There has been a huge decline in how people are able to deal with uncomfortable conversations, so it's not surprising there is widespread confusion and frustration.

We're all somewhat guilty of sometimes not communicating perfectly, but which culture over the past four years promoted censorship? which culture promoted shutting people up and demonizing them? We will see these times very differently in the near future, I think.

edit: and of course this gets downvoted lol. When are we ever going to at least start listening without visceral emotional reactions, I wonder.

Start there, since that is the historic start point.

Many of these things are side effects of how networks of people propagate information, and where the people can be co-opted using specifically coded content.

The rest of it can also be seen as a trade off between 1-on-1 communication and Many-to-Many communications + speed of interaction.

Now even the reality that they are not a majority is too hard for them to understand.

In short, the major political 'camps' think about events with a different dimension. Conservatives think in the 'civilization vs barbarism' axis. Progressives think on the 'oppressed vs oppressor' axis. Libertarians think on the 'authoritarian vs freedom' axis.

The same event, when viewed through the corresponding filter, has different interpretations.

Going back further, before the existence of mass media, everything was more in-person/local. When you have a small community of people you talk to in-person, you’re going to be way more reasonable than on some global, anonymous, online community. Social media is a great example - it’s a breeding ground for arguments, conspiracy theories and extremism. People who would be perfectly civil to each other in person can be absolute assholes to each other online. How many email/Slack disagreements have you been in at work that instantly resolve the moment you move to in-person or video chat?

Some will say this polarization always existed, but I do feel it has gotten significantly worse. I don’t remember the 90s feeling this polarized, with people so unable to agree upon basic facts about current events. And I’m guessing the 90s were more polarized than the 50s.

One good thing - hostilities BETWEEN nations seem to be decreasing. I don’t think we’re on the cusp of World War 3 or any such thing, but hostilities WITHIN nations seem to be on the rise, at least from my “gut feel” view of my life so far.

On that note, life has been good for a long time in the west. War is an absolute atrocity, but it does put petty disputes into perspective, and build some sense of national unity. Since World War 2, life has been pretty cushy and safe in western democracies, so maybe we’re starting to make enemies of each other to fill the void?

My 2 cents

There's too much truth for most of us, so we hide in the comforting illusions of conspiracies and deception. (especially when in some countries, like the US, there's no checks on whether the information shared is accurate or not, and there's a shortage of fact checking even among the professionals....)

Most people do to one extent or another, just it might be wiser to vett them from time to time. It's a way of dealing with overwhelming information.

1. Gangs

2. Ethnicity

3. Nationalism

4. Religion

Groups of people latch on to an ideology and act on whatever the leader tells them to do or what they see others do. You can observe this when looking at videos of riots or other mob like behavior.

Right now no social media company will get serious about targeted propaganda because it would cut into their profits.

But regulation can create a level playing field - the rules apply to everyone, so, more-or-less, everyone’s profits take a hit and now you’re not putting yourself in a weaker position vis-a-vis your competitors by addressing all these issues we are seeing.

Regulation can create a level playing field and solve the collective action problem by making all companies do the same thing at the same time, more-or-less.

The vast majority of the US population live in a very normal a-political reality that is largely untouched by narratives that drive the higher-engaged folks' perception of what is going on.

The sliver of the US population that genuinely occupy a different reality is dominated by people that occupy an almost exclusively right-wing media reality. (There is a left-wing media reality for sure, but it is microscopic, counterpunch is just not that highly trafficked!)

The riots in the capitol today demonstrated this quite clearly when contrasted with the protests that kick off the Trump presidency. The "women's' march" was a fairly clear statement in acknowledgement of Trump's presidency but a denial that it was truly representative of popular will. Today's demonstration & riot was populated by a mix of people consuming non-facts and fabulists exploiting those people. QAnon followers were prominent and appeared to be at least a plurality if not a majority of the participants. The people filming themselves in Nancy Pelosi's office were prominent neo-nazis or YouTube provocateurs (Fuentes and BakedAlasaka).

A few thousand people on the capitol overwhelmed a police force that was at least partially sympathetic and was certainly understaffed, in the alternate reality where the opposition to Trump were anti-democratic in the same way they would overwhelm any force arrayed against them in a similar way much more easily through sheer quantity, but they don't hold those views or endorse those methods.

Roughly 1/3rd of voters thing the presidential election was fraudulent, but closer to 1/5th think Trump really won according to Morning Consult, some of this is just facing the fact that the US has always been a bit of a low-trust/conspiratorial society. Some of what is going on is certainly better reporting on what is really happening - things that have actually always happened. Some of what is happening is just good old fashioned bad leadership!

Moreover my analysis and reflection of the last 4 years where in I awakened and gained a sort of political consciousness after previously in my life having zero care for politics in any way is

This is a particular evolution of democracy which I call Democratic theater and it relies on deceptive control of the population by the media and the intelligence and security apparatus to provide the illusion of freedom to prevent the need for delivering real results by keeping the population in a constant state of confusion and conflict by supporting both sides of an artificial divide to prolong the state of conflict

I guess some of the beneficiaries of this are upwards who can benefit from the enhanced media appeal of this division but I think the primary beneficiary is the status quo and it's done to preserve power in a system where people expect to be free but are basically constrained but given this outlet which is a sort of cathartic entertainment, the purpose of which is to channel genuine to satisfaction into controlled avenues so that it never actually emerges as revolution or organized political action that has any chance of disrupting the status quo in a meaningful way

I believe it's a form of controlled opposition where a cabal of intelligence security and media interests control both sides of the conflict and I believe these sort of mass phenomena are driven by masters of narrative control psychology sociology.

I started off believing that Trump would do what he said and kind of save America and root out these shackles and the cabal of interest that keeps them in place but it seems he was just a charlatan who couldn't deliver and perhaps never intended to. I now believe it's likely that Trump was probably compromised by the very same cabal of interests who got him to dance to the tune they wanted as a puppet for 4 years as part of his great charade

In essence all of this Democratic theater is more window dressing for business as usual.

I'm happy to hear different opinions and to update my own perspective but I'm not going to debate this it simply the belief that I've arrived at at this time after many years of reflection and thought.

I call it the toaster fucker problem. Man wakes up in 1980, tells his friends "I want to fuck a toaster" Friends quite rightly berate and laugh at him, guy deals with it, maybe gets some therapy and goes on a bit better adjusted.

Guy in 2021 tells his friends that he wants to fuck a toaster, gets laughed at, immediately jumps on facebook and finds "Toaster Fucker Support group" where he reads that he's actually oppressed and he needs to cut out everyone around him and should only listen to his fellow toaster fuckers.

Apply this analogy to literally any insular bubble, it applies as equally to /r/thedonald as it does to the emaciated Che Guevara larpers that cry thinking about ringing their favourite pizza place.

https://battlepenguin.com/philosophy/the-fracturing-of-the-h...

Repealed in the 1996 telecom deregulation bill that cleared the way for the internet also took away the responsibility of the media to provide truth in the news.

Instead of charging for use of spectrum, it was given to TV and radio networks but they were required to provide responsible and truthful news.

Maybe that was a good idea ? Perhaps, the old timers knew a thing or two about how to keep an informed public so that democracy would work.

Go ahead and down vote me like usual. But I am not wrong.

I think the internet is only being used as a tool; Peter Turchin says its overproduction of the elites, too many lawyers and managers chasing too few positions leads them to fight more vigorously over a limited turf. It's turf wars gone bitter.

Another ability the internet has allowed is the creation of communities based around the type of information they consumed which always creates echo-chambers like you pointed out.

It's because of this that many have lost sense of the realities of other people and manifests its own distorted reality.

Not to mention, you also have multi-billion dollar companies utilizing algorithms to keep you there as long as possible, further propagating this effect.

Maybe it is social media's fault. Maybe, just maybe, social media and information overload (which reduces critical thought in that moment) is the problem. Nevermind propaganda & conspiracies - just the bubble effects + overloaded conflicting information causes some kind of mental disorder but on a national scale. Too much nonsense being internalize and associated with, on a weekly basis, at some point America will have to ask itself if it is all worth it (social media, 24/7 news & streaming (and not to mention porn and the warping of minds)).

Maybe it is just a result of your political system, that this was always the outcome, because you only have 2 sides. Our world and human life/culture cannot just be boiled down to 2 options. There are so much complexity, nuance and scope context that gets ignored if you are forced to pick 1 of 2 options.

Maybe it is just a result of your economic system & regulations and related social structure & social programs. Maybe, just maybe your people are so badly squeezed to live decent lives (esp when it comes to wages/labour vs the cost of living and your bizarre take on healthcare). Maybe it is the greed and tax system favouring "the already rich". Maybe it is because your political system has too much money flowing through it (much of your political practices are illegal elsewhere).

How can you convince a group of people that they are wrong or doing the wrong thing? When the battlefield is rooted in idealogical is very difficult to convince people otherwise (see religions). Trying to convince the people that invaded your capitol will be fruitless. Punishing them will be fruitless too. Nothing you do will change their minds, cause their minds have been warped to believe in a different reality to what the rest of the world sees.

All I know is that America has a lot of reflecting to do to find/re-find your national identity and to decide if the dragon you've been chasing is the right thing. I truly hope you can find a way without thousands of people dying in civil wars etc (nevermind covid).

I Can't wait for this attitude to inevitably cross the pond.

Currently you see many conservatives repeating the meme that losing the Senate means a Republican will never win the White House again. The belief being that Democrats will change voting laws, open borders and amnesty to Dem-leaning immigrants, and possibly even pack the Supreme Court and add DC and Puerto Rico as new states.

On the flip-side, similar sentiments were often expressed on the left of Trump heralding the end of American democracy. Republicans in power would permanently end fair elections through a combination of foreign election interference, gerry-pandering, dark corporate money, and voter suppression.

Disregarding whatever merits these views have, the fact that they're widely held by a significant chunk of the citizenry creates a dangerous equilibrium. Like you say, in a healthy democracy the losing side focuses its energy on winning the next election.

But if you think the other side's gonna use dirty tricks once in power, there is no next election to win. So you go all out it to stop the other side, and start looking for dirty tricks of your own. Now you've justified your opponents' bad opinion of you, and given them even more reason to win by any means unnecessary.

But I just don't understand how losing an election that was looked over by members of your own party, and won by similar margins which you won by previously, can be this controversial. Let alone the fact that the party still did really well in all the other ballots including house and senate.