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Comment by TT3351 | Hacker News Reader

You say this like its the first time Americans have had to learn to live with having lost a federal election. Half the country is disappointed every four years. Starting to make concessions to terrorists because they got really upset after being lied to repeatedly makes no sense.

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The issue is the right feels underrepresented in the MSM, so they move on to alternative media which are echo chambers, which leads to things like these riots, and the response from the left creates further segregation and more echo chambers. Both sides remain confident they are completely, 100% in the right, because each is living in their own universe. This feedback loop has been going on for a while now and right now it's just going crazy.

> which are echo chambers

I mean, let's be honest here. There is a lot of good journalism in MSM; just about everything reported on from leaks and "anonymous" sources leading up to the Mueller report was later confirmed in the report or by first-hand witnesses(the matter-of-fact stuff, not necessarily the conclusions). Buutttt... CNN still has their "outrage" segments and echo chambers..

You’re almost close at the end there. The echo chamber of the MSM is worse because it has an air of legitimacy afforded by a history of journalism that doesn’t exist anymore. Once great institutions like NYT and NPR are scant more than propaganda arms for the left’s authoritarian communist regime. And you guys don’t realize you’re part of the echo. IMO the left is no different from us, we’re all trying to navigate this strange post truth world.

Neither accepts that it’s not just the other side distorting reality; both are oblivious to their own distortion.

> the left’s authoritarian communist regime

> you guys don’t realize you’re part of the echo

> we’re all trying to navigate this strange post truth world

I see what you did there, do you?

Hopefully you see what you did there as well.

Makes sense to me in the context of an assault on speech. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> authoritarian communist regime

Breitbart is leaking.

But honestly, care to elaborate? I'm genuinely curious.

NPR? I think that at a certain point you might realize that it would be worth taking a step back and reevaluating your information diet. When you accuse NPR of being a propaganda arm for the left's "authoritarian communist regime" is probably about that time. Way past it, in fact.

I'm really not sure where the whole communist thing came from, anyway. Go to the far left of the Democratic Party and you are still pretty far to the right of communists.

If you think that NPR is close to a balanced outlet, I'd venture you're unfortunately the one off. I wouldn't call them communist for sure, but more times than I can count they've shocked me with partisan or incorrect reporting.

What is your idea of a balanced outlet, then?

None! I wouldn't claim any outlet is. Read from many sources, from all over the spectrum, build a model of each ones moral foundations, find reporters who seem to be in it for good reasons and model them. There's no bastions of reliable news, just you vs a stochastic void of political claptrap, your only hope is to Thompson Sample the widest set of half-popular sources for nourishment.

This is related to another point that's been floating around in my head for a while. The amount of effort involved in just trying to get a balanced view of our political situation is insane, and few people are willing to spend that much energy. But even though few see the whole picture, most have very strongly held political opinions. This naturally tends towards echo chambers which is obviously really bad if you're in a democracy which vitally depends on everyone being well informed.

I think this is mainly because we set the wrong incentives, for example outrage drives clicks which drives ad money, though we can also throw evolution some shade for lacking foresight when it made outrage such a strong emotion and gave us a tendency towards reaffirming our own views.

In any case, I don't know how to solve it, and it's certainly not a new problem (I guess it's been a thing since democracy is a thing), but it seems the web amplified it a lot, to the point where I think it's to blame for our current political division.

> authoritarian communist regime

That's where you completely lost me. Yet another person who doesn't know what communism is and just uses it as a blanket, non-sense label for leftists.

Literally the biggest cable news channel in America represents their views 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. What in the world are you even going on about?

This is countering my point how?

RWNJ media is the MSM

My surprise that this acronym is even a thing aside, do you actually buy this?

Even if you do, the right pretty obviously doesn't agree, and you don't have to look far for evidence. If they wouldn't feel like they're represented unfairly in the MSM, they wouldn't keep complaining about fake news and the MSM in general.

Talk radio and the Murdoch empire are a large part of the MSM.

You have basically just repeated your previous point.

All the rally goers are not terrorists anymore than everyone who was at a BLM protest is Antifa.

We’ve got to be very careful here not to paint all of MAGA with that brush because that ends in a dark, dark place.

The oligarchs are laughing in the background as the divide and conquer strategy is working quite well.

So many servile people ready to give up liberties here because they want to punish the other, refusing to understand the implications of how such systems will be turned on them some point in the future.

All? No. But some? Hell yes!

Even when ‘leftists’ protest at congress, they go through metal detectors and demonstrate peacefully—no window smashing, no theft, no overrunning security lines. Trumpists on Wednesday literally hung nooses from trees and killed a cop.

Wisconsin says hi!

Also not like 5 congressmen were shot of anything: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_United_States_Capitol_sho...

There is a difference between disappointed and storming a goverment building to stop the offical event required to make it offical. That difference is a lot of anger. Honestly, I don't think America has seen this before. Not even with the war of independence, that was kind of difference since it was about not getting a vote and not that the vote didn't matter.

What are you suggesting by "the vote didn't matter?" Just because they might believe Trump's lies about the most recent election doesn't mean their emotions are justified.

> What are you suggesting by "the vote didn't matter?" Just because they might believe Trump's lies about the most recent election doesn't mean their emotions are justified.

I believe, they believe the election was rigged. Justified or not, it doesn't stop them from doing stuff.

Isn't the remedy to that to show them less of the guy who's been lying to them? How will allowing him to continue lying and myth building avoid further violence?

You could also have investigated voter fraud. You know, the whole reason why they came there to protest in the first place. That's an option. You will likely dismiss it because you've been told that there is no voter fraud, but dismissing something doesn't actually address it. Nothing about the objections brought up when states like Pennsylvania were being reviewed was actually addressed by the so-called winning side.

I wonder why Kris Kobach keeps coming home empty handed from his fishing trips

1) Why would it be necessary to investigate where there has been no evidence to show that an investigation is even warranted? Where does the line get drawn?

2) Even if they did investigate it clearly wouldn't work. These conspiracies are self sealing - lack of proof is itself proof. If you're capable of rigging an entire election, then of course you will be able to do it without leaving any evidence.

There is nothing to investigate. Did you read any of the affidavits filed with the so-called "fraud" lawsuits? There were election observers complaining that they saw lots of military ballots for Biden, which is proof of fraud because they "knew" military members were "supposed" to vote for Trump. There was another observer who complained that he saw an Asian person working the polls, which was proof that the CCP had infiltrated the elections. The lawsuits were just hundreds and hundreds of pages of conspiratorial nonsense like that. The lawyers filing these things are QAnon cultists.

How do you "investigate" allegations like that? If you've really fallen for this scam then you have been thoroughly brainwashed by the far right internet.

Everyone came forward with whatever they thought was suspicious, but we're at the point now where things that even sound like "voter fraud claim" are automatically dismissed.

Take for example, this: https://mapthefraud.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/DATASCIENC/pag....

If the thousands of votes here were fraudulent, the quantity is sufficiently high to assume that some organization is trying to interfere with the election. If there is an organization capable of creating thousands of fraudulent votes in this instance, then what instances are we unaware of that the same organization is also involved with.

I'm not asking for a 2-year investigation based on allegations of a pee pee video recorded in a Russian hotel, I'm just asking for:

"Republicans opposing Wednesday's electoral count have one proposal to deal with the controversy — that Congress delay action for 10 days so an "emergency" electoral commission can audit the results and investigate voter fraud claims in the contested states."

https://www.npr.org/sections/congress-electoral-college-tall...

Spurious speculation does not qualify as evidence under the burden of proof you would need to delay a Constitutionally mandated certification. You're explicitly calling for throwing away the Constitutional process.

They had 2 months to litigate those claims, why do they need 10 more days? After 10 days are they going to invent more nonsense claims and then insist they need more time? Delay the inauguration indefinitely?

> Take for example, this:

More crank garbage. The voting histories of every voter are public domain, if you think there are more votes than voters why are you trying to scrape some random web portal through questionable methods instead of checking the voting records directly?

If this allegation were really credible can you point me to a lawsuit filed by an by a plaintiff with standing (e.g. Trump or another Michigan candidate who allegedly had the election stolen from them, NOT some 3rd party QAnon crank) that presents this allegation to a court? If no such lawsuit exists why do you think that is the case? Maybe because no competent lawyer wants to destroy their reputation by arguing obviously fake conspiracy theories in front of a judge?

The people that lived through the American Revolution would strongly disagree with you that the current situation is worse.

I didn't say it was worse or better, just that it's not the same.

There was a little matter of the Civil War that might deserve some of your attention.

> I don't think America has seen this before

I think that says more about how boring & peaceful the late twentieth century was. The number of people old enough to remember more interesting times is declining quickly.

As a sidenote, this is probably why our Covid response has been so awful. We have no real living memory of a collective calamity.

Half of the Union literally seceded because it didn't like the winner of the 1860 presidential election.

That...is a pretty revisionist take on the civil war. More popular is the opinion that the south wanted to perpetuate chattel slavery for economic gain, masquerading beneath ‘states rights’.

I mean, damn, there’s a reason Buchanan is said to have caused the war—and it’s not that he just happened to have been president before Lincoln.

I didn't mean to imply slavery wasn't the motivator - but the trigger was the election of a (moderate-ish) anti-slavery president from an anti-slavery party, who explicitly called for the end of admitting new slave states to the Union. Secessions all happened between Lincoln's election and his inauguration, and the declarations of causes almost all cited Lincoln's election as proof of Northern anti-slavery intent.

Similarly, the refusal to accept Trump's loss is rooted in deep gulfs on identity and to a lesser extent on issues. I don't think you can separate the end-of-the-world paranoia from attitudes on BLM, for example.

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