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Comment by SoSoRoCoCo | Hacker News Reader

> I also said that nuclear war was also on the table.

I think since he cowered so hard during his concession, he's done playing tough guy. He'll hand out medals and pardons and then run away.

I can't believe how much like "Animal Farm" this whole thing played out. Almost verbatim with the constant attempts to scapegoat Snowball/Antifa.

Although given that 80% of republicans think the election was stolen (and 40% of the population), this is just the start. I don't think Civil War is an exaggeration any longer, unless the Biden admin clamps down on the armed insurrection boiling over in the reddest parts of the country.

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Well, civil war is the least of it, it's hard to see how democracy itself survives as a method of government if half the country will just believe everything that is uttered by the latest freak of the moment, even when they've been lied to a thousand times before. Cults have always been limited in their impact by the very small number of people willing to join them -- so the cult leaders just disappear into the woods with 50 women to have weird sex parties. Democracy can't survive that behavior at mass scale.

It is a big mistake to think this is about Trump. Trump is a symptom of the dissatisfaction with the status quo not the source. Just go back and look at the reporting about how his message resonated and lead to his election.

Your comment is a great example of how to make things worse. You are asserting that "half the country" are mindless Trump cultists. This is just another version of Hillary Clinton's "basket of deplorables" attitude.

Resolving the divisions in the American electorate needs to be a tad bit more sophisticated than asserting that 70 million people have lost their minds and aren't worth listening to. In fact if that is the type of approach taken by the Biden administration I think things will get much, much worse.

80% of Republicans believe that Biden won through fraud. Why? It's literally because Trump just started saying so. I don't think this is about Trump -- I think that there is a large group voters who are only comfortable if they are in thrall to someone (despite their constant harping about "freedom"), and Trump is the man of their moment. This is not about "dissatisfaction with the status quo" -- I'm not talking about the people who said "damn, our guy lost and we still haven't gotten rid of the Mexicans, we gotta run a better campaign next time." Those are logically sound individuals who are just ideological opponents, nothing that a society can't handle.

Let's separate the ideas of "what is the situation" and "how do we resolve the situation." When my son was a toddler he once broke down into a complete meltdown because I told him he couldn't ever be an iguana, which he had seen in a book and decided he wanted to be. Obviously, I didn't find a way to turn him into an iguana. There are ways of calming down people throes of a mental episode without creating the reality that exists only in their minds. Sure, pop a proverbial pacifier in their mouths.

I also do think that the left in particular has gotten a little too soft in terms of "every life has value." The most prominent place is in death penalty cases, where they try to avert the executions of the most heinous murderers you can imagine. The fact is, not every life has positive value to society. If someone is severely damaging society, whether it's by stabbing women in an alley or by other mechanisms, the utilitarian optimum is often for them to die. When a horde of terrorists assaults the seat of the federal government to overturn the lawfully elected government, it's not just one Ashli Babbitt that should be shot -- 75% of them should be, with the other 25% left to go spread the news that this behavior is not tolerated and you will suffer extreme consequences for attempting it.

>Resolving the divisions in the American electorate needs to be a tad bit more sophisticated than asserting that 70 million people have lost their minds and aren't worth listening to

Yes. But we need to understand why so many people believe flat-out lies. SO MANY PEOPLE. What do you think is behind that? HOw do so many believe such literal NON-sense?

I say step 1: bring back the fairness doctrine. I'm baffled that Tulsi Gabbard, of all people, has been the only person to re-introduce a bill in favor of it in ~30 years since it was abandoned.

Clamping down is not notoriously effective. It has a tendency to build pressure, not release it.

Better to try and understand the complex psycho-social-economic factors that lead to this situation. Without a clear understanding of how a problem came to be, how can it be fixed?

By sending the people who participated or incited the riot to prison. Seriously, it's either that or the next coup will be successful.

Re-educating people has horrible connotations of Vietnam, Modern day China, etc and really doesn't work. So the most likely way of changing people's hearts and minds is war. Germans became peace lovers really fast after their country was destroyed end to end. Same with Japan.

As an American I hope it doesn't come to that. I fear we'll end up experiencing something like the Troubles. Low grade civil war.

I don't see any mention of reeducation in that comment, I see a suggestion to seek understanding of what's going on. A rather old-fashioned idea I must admit, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

> Clamping down is not notoriously effective.

"We find that the ban worked for Reddit. More accounts than expected discontinued using the site; those that stayed drastically decreased their hate speech usage-by at least 80%. Though many subreddits saw an influx of r/fatpeoplehate and r/C******n "migrants," those subreddits saw no significant changes in hate speech usage"[0].

I expect if Parler et. al. took similar stances against hate speech and open calls to violence, they would see similar results.

> Without a clear understanding of how a problem came to be, how can it be fixed?

You can't test a treatment without an intervention.

edit: fixed asterisks.

[0]https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3134666

> I expect if Parler et. al. took similar stances against hate speech and open calls to violence, they would see similar results.

I haven’t really looked into those platforms, but they’re new enough that they probably don’t have the tooling to do any of that. It took fb and Twitter years to build that.

I can't work out what r/C**n would spell could you share ?

From the citation:

> Though many subreddits saw an influx of r/fatpeoplehate and r/CoonTown "migrants," those subreddits saw no significant changes in hate speech usage.

They disappeared from reddit, they did not disappear from reality they just moved on to other place often time even more radicalized places with absolutely no chance of encountering differing opinions.

Reddit has become a Political echo chamber, I was pretty active in libertarian and a few other political subreddits years ago, i no longer am because it is just a Authoritarian left wing echo chamber, even the so call "conservative" and "libertarian" subreddits

My political views have not changed simply because I am not longer politically active in reddit, but to you that is "win"

It is not, it just makes it seem that way because your little corner of the internet is now a safe space free of any dissenting thought, in reality the cultural wedge is only getting larger

I'm not sure it's in the Democrats' best (short-term) interest to release this pressure. Trump has galvanized support for centrist Democratic politicians at a time when they were stuggling. Consider Sanders' support in 2016.

Perhaps I am too cynical, but at this point I would not be surprised if the Democrats stoke tensions for short-term gains, like the Republicans before them. I hope this does not come to pass, because surely this fanning of the flames would end with all of us burned.

By removing the problem. If somebody tries to destroy democracy, you first remove them from the position where they could do that, and then, once the immediate danger is gone, you can look at the complex factors.

Triage applies.

Upsetting Trump’s base is not some unforeseeable or mysterious accident. “When you are used to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”

I am convinced the perceptions of division are directly proportional to to the isolation of people claiming such division. It’s very easy to think absurd exaggerated things about some class of other people when you never talk to them.

(Goes back and checks where the most violent protests happened this year and who perpetrated them...)

Huh.

How would a civil war actually happen? I know this idea gets thrown around, but, I don't see how this would happen.

Usually, civil wars happen with the support of (at least part of) the military and there are 0 doubts about who the army will side with. Even with the high rate of gun ownership in the US (and even higher among right-wingers), there is no way civilians will actually be able to whitstand a focused, concerted military effort.

The only caveat to that is if someone high up in the US military decides that this is their time to act and will try to use current civil unrest for a coup, but that seems extremely unlikely.

Another scenario to consider is an IRA/ETA style insurrection, which, again seems unlikely, as both IRA and ETA had strong geographical and cultural components to their identity, which is not true of right-wing extremists.

What is more likely to happen is for low-level civil unrest to be around for a while, as long as Trump is still in power, but, as soon as Biden comes into effect, the state will step in and very quickly squish anyone they suspect of right-wing violence. Still, it will probably get worse before it gets better.

> both IRA and ETA had strong geographical and cultural components to their identity, which is not true of right-wing extremists.

A funny detail is that plenty of the treasonweasels who decided to storm the Capitol also decided to document themselves doing so on social media. And since they come from all over the country, they're being identified, named, shamed, and outed by people who know them. They're being fired from their jobs. They're being arrested for their crimes.

They thought they were simply the bravest spearhead, enjoying the support of the massive silent majority of Americans. In reality, everyone is tired of their respective crazy racist uncle, and are gleefully outing them.

The internet has made it possible to surround yourself virtually with like-minded people, thinking you're one massive family. But if you're actually disconnected in reality, if you're actually surrounded by people who really don't share your views, thinking your echo chamber is representative is a massive mistake.

It only takes a few people to inspire many. I really hope it won’t come to that, and I don’t think Trump is brave enough.

As for going up against the military, there are quite a lot of vets in that demographic.

The urban vs rural divide is both geographic and cultural.

I keep saying, Trump is not the problem, he is the symptom.

> I don't think Civil War is an exaggeration any longer, unless the Biden admin clamps down on the armed insurrection boiling over in the reddest parts of the country.

I don’t know the path forward to ensure peaceful governance, but I’m 100% confident that this is not it. All that this will accomplish is to polarize those currently sitting on the sidelines to choose and commit to a side.

More speech, not less. A "clamp down" on wrong think will result in martyrs.

They need to start explaining and persuading. Something Biden has not really been forced to do in this process, unfortunately.

How do you explain to and persuade people who refuse to listen or even think? At a certain point you’re just explaining into the void and have become the crazy person yourself.

You can lead a horse to water and all...

Americans generally mean something very mild when they "clamp down." Countries like Russia really know what "clamp down" means -- you go into an area and kill or terrorize everyone who openly defies you, rinse and repeat every 20 years.

It's been established that you can't fight hate with more hate. However, hate speech must be controlled in order for greater freedom of speech to flourish.

That is the strategy that led to this point, needless to say it hasn't been effective and something else needs to be done. There's also plenty of historical precedent showing it to be ineffective.

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