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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

> The type of person that stormed the capitol will perceive this as an escalation.

Who cares? The type of person that stormed the Capitol has shown they are impervious to reality. Time to stop the appeasement.

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It's like we didn't learn from the '20s and '30s that appeasement doesn't work.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25692753.

Rhetoric like this is why they stormed the capitol.

They were also delusional about the imperviousness of their actions. It doesn’t seem like any of them expected consequences. Underlining that there are consequences should be productive.

There are a lot of people hurting in America. It’s a terrible precedent to prioritise people threatening insurrection.

No they stormed the capitol because they refused to accept the outcome of an election after their candidate availed himself of every legal avenue of challenge. Fuck those people. The rhetoric that drove them was Trump himself and his stooges in conservative media.

It's not the responsibility of normal people to indulge the crazy satanic paedophile conspiracy theories of total lunatics so that said lunatics won't behave like total animals. They stormed the capitol because they believed complete horse shit about how the election was stolen, when it wasn't, and they were incited to do so by the current president.

Please don't equate pedophile conspiricies with this when the former is demonstrably provable. (just because an obvious psyop like Q talks about the topic doesnt automatically make the topic false, on the contrary that could and lijely is part of the intended effect of the psyop)

It enables such dismissals of legitmate questions such as why was Epstein was seen as an intelligence asset? Ignore the facts and jump straight to calling anything you dont like a crazy conspiracy theory so you can ban it!

Read up on Dutroux - Belgiums Xfiles or the Franklin scandal or the Finders or... if you think satanist pedophile conspiracies arent real.

Qanon is exactly what you are describing though. Quoting from Bellingcat [1]:

"Here is the core of the QAnon myth: with the aid of a small group of military intelligence officers called the Q team (one or more of whom is supposedly responsible for writing the drops), President Donald Trump is waging a shadow war against a cabal of Satan-worshipping, child-eating pedophiles who are conspiring to obstruct and overthrow him. The military will arrest them en masse in an event called “the Storm.”"

You can see why people would be uncomfortable dipping their toes into that water when so many people have been led to believe in "obvious psyops". Conspiratorial thinking is healthy until it isn't. Be careful about how deep you dive my friend.

1. https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2021/01/07/the-maki...

I understand, but what I am meaning is that while I have yet to see any credible proof of electoral malfeasance, the other thing has evidence. What I propose is that this hesitancy is engineered as part of the psyop.

> Conspiratorial thinking is healthy until it isn't. Be careful about how deep you dive my friend.

A long time ago I made a decision, after particpating in what could rightfully be called a conspiracy myself (the Iraq war), that I will simply pursue the truth, and will always prefer the ugly truth to a beautiful lie. The fact is that much of the truth tends to touch conspiracy and I will not shirk away from it just because of that fact.

Fair enough. I respect you for being a healthy skeptic and requiring evidence.

>crazy lunatic theories

Just in the last four years: Anthony Weiner. Epstein. Dennis Hastert. NXIVM. Matter of public record. Just the ones that come to mind, out of the ones that came to light.

>horse shit

Check yourself. The state of Texas filed suit. Many states joined. Shame the SCOTUS punted, maybe cooler heads could have prevailed.

Stop treating these people like they are victims. They used force to attempt to stop the lawful, democratic transition of power by the joint session of the US Congress. The are traitors to this nation, full stop.

They can be both victims and traitors. As much as I’d like to live in a world where reason and reasonableness were innate, environment matters in determining a person’s mode of thought.

I like this NYTimes price someone posted elsewhere in this thread: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/opinion/trump-capitol-pro...

[Edit: This does not mean I think that the insurrectionists shouldn’t be held accountable! Though motivations can be complex, justice matters.]

No, rhetoric from the president is why they stormed the capital.

No, they stormed the capital because they've been fed a steady diet of lies and misinformation. Appeasing them does nothing but insulates them in their fantasy bubble. It's time for them to return to reality.

Do you have a better solution? You can't just continue to go along with people to avoid a fight. Some things are worth fighting for.

I would be very careful. There needs to be just the right amount of punishment. The goal is to get on board those who voted for Trump yet do not support the storming of the Capitol.

This is correct. In addition We need to provide an on ramp back into the mainstream for the radicalized. In addition we need to take real steps to stamp out environments that lead to radicalization. Hint: this starts before they log in to the internet, and you don’t become radicalized if your life is going well.

Plenty of people have done well out of radicalizing themselves for the Patreon revenue and the supplement affiliate marketing. Some of the people were arrested have turned out to have middle class jobs (which they were promptly fired from once spotted).

No, the radicalization is on the internet. And talk radio, and the TV.

I agree. That's an important point and I suppose that begins with the government focusing on enacting legislation to actually solve problems that would make people's lives better - healthcare, educational debt, financial assistance during the pandemic and so on - rather than say shutting down the government to try to erect a barrier.

> and you don’t become radicalized if your life is going well.

This is the kind of thing that we all would like to believe intuitively. But counterexamples are all too easy to find, unless you want to define "life is going well" narrowly enough that nobody qualifies.

Having a shit life is not a necessary or sufficient condition for radicalization. There is a correlation there, but I really doubt that it's the best predictor of who may fall victim to radicalization.

Yeah, the stories come to mind of some of the people that left Western countries to go to Syria to fight for Daesh, were caught there, then kicked out by Kurds and Americans to Iraq, where they were condemned and executed.

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