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Comment by BlueTemplar | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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