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Comment by hourislate | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting how the Democrats have chosen to move against Trump and his supporters. They have no interest in bringing the country together, they are doing everything they can to divide it. The Tech companies, the media and even Pelosi and Schumer are really setting things up for a massive confrontation. For some reason they don't feel like they need to think about the 70 million plus that Voted for Trump.

Cancel Culture, shaming voters/supporters, Tech companies deciding what one side can say, etc. These folks will not be silenced, they will react and it won't be pleasant.

Junk away...

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I started reading hacker news regularly about 1.5 years ago and one of the main reasons I liked it was there seemed to be fewer comments like these than Reddit in addition to the interesting tech content.

Lately, it’s been just as bad. This comment is completely pushing a political narrative that relies on selective interpretation.

I started reading it circa 2008, created my account in 2009.

In a way, HN is still a reflection of society, although more civil due to pg (then) or dang (now) moderation, plus the fact that a lot of users knew each other back then.

Nowadays, I'm constantly amazed at how the right is able to turn ANYTHING into someone else's fault. The right divides the country ("let's own the libtards", "the election is a sham", etc) but no, it was the left! The right does a coup, but no, it is the left that cannot let bygones be bygones.

Do they think we are dumb? are they dumb? what is going on?? Black is white is black, war is peace, etc. etc. and no one even blinks at this.

Their unsuccessful, bloody coup and treason will be punished by legal recourse. The impeachment is already started up again to prevent deranged voters from dictating a second term. No one is blinking in the face of violence. Remain strong and resist.

Civil discussion is still possible if you refuse to feel ashamed for rejecting falsehoods, which may be the weakness we have taken on in trying to remain compassionate to other voices on HN, which emboldens evil.

I'm just surprised at how close the US came to stop being a democracy. A bit more planning about what to do when they breach the capitol, a few more Qanon captains across the river at Ft Myer, or a few 100ks more Trump supporters here and there in the polls, and things would look very different now.

And of course, this is just the beginning. Right-wing extremists now this; the sooner we realize that we are against an enemy that wants to overthrow democracy, the sooner we put a better fight against it.

>Do they think we are dumb? are they dumb? what is going on?? Black is white is black, war is peace, etc. etc. and no one even blinks at this.

It's a very old trick.

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” - Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Propaganda Minister (possibly apocryphal)

Well, a lot of the articles being posted push a political narrative along with subtle comments like yours that seem to suggest the opposing view.

Yeah this article should not have been posted.

And btw you’ve hit the nail on the head. that’s the thing, I firmly believe the poster I replied to is wrong and a lot of other uncharitable descriptions. It’s hard to let such bad claims just stand unanswered.

This type of article and that type of post I replied to is just asking for contention.

I don’t come to hacker news for that sort of asinine online argument. If I feel like that, there’s a hundred subreddits I could visit.

Not everything is “the democrats” or “the republicans” yet, sometimes it’s just “the lawyers” trying to cover the companies potentially very-exposed backside.

This is the real reason. These removals can be viewed through a conspiratorial lens, but in reality this is just companies taking the opportunity to remove legally problematic communities while they have the political support for it.

Funny how you mention all the things the 'left' is doing while omitting an actual coup d'état where more than a few people died. "Bringing the country together" is only possible when the extremist no longer have the loudest voice.

I'm not on board with all the virtue signaling coming from tech and the left, but you lost me at 4 years of continuous lies and storming the capital.

However, the other take on this is that half the country is unhappy enough that it culminated in storming the Capitol. Sure, they may not look very presentable or act very civilized. But they have numbers, power, and anger. Sweeping this fact under the rug is not going to help.

This is what I don't get about these discussions. Any time someone says "the liberals are not interested in uniting the country" someone comes back with "but these people are rednecks and they are bad!" They are still part of the same country (for now) and if it is to stay a country the leadership is going to have to figure out how to talk to them. Because the process by which these people become not part of the same country anymore is called civil war.

OK, so the question is why? The proximate cause is that they were told, baselessly, from all sides of their media bubble, that the election was stolen. Many of the rioters also were followers of a bizarre conspiracy theory/alternate reality game that tells them that this is all part of a giant master plan.

The media and political environment has not been serving its function of properly informing citizens so that they can make informed voting choices, and so you have people trying to overthrow the government based on lies.

Now, not everything people believed in the pre-internet media environment was factual either, but there was rough agreement as to consensus reality. Even in the last contested election, the 2000 one, people roughly agreed on the basic facts (butterfly ballots, hanging chads, etc), even if they didn't agree on what should be done about it.

I don't have a solution for this problem, but it is a very serious one.

People tend to fall for conspiracy theories and charlatans when they are desperate. We call a large swath of the country "flyover states". These people feel like what they are doing is the only way to make themselves heard. We respond by doing more to silence them. This is not going to end well.

> setting things up for a massive confrontation

There just was a massive confrontation, and the Republicans lost the Presidency and the Senate. Democratic leadership isn't afraid of another one.

I don't think we should assign blanket responsibility to the Democrats here. There is a powerful segment, including the media, cheering this on. But I believe most Democrats just want to move on.

The media doesn't want this to end because they are at an unprecedented level of power right now. They have just become the gatekeepers of thought; a monopoly of like-minded people in control of the truth. As soon as things queit down, dissent will resume (if there is any freedom left), but for now they are on top of the world. They want to keep this going, and will stop at nothing to prevent quiet.

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