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Comment by eplanit | Hacker News Reader

As a US citizen, I've been wondering for almost 10 years now if we're edging towards a new civil war. In the past 5 or so, I've been worrying almost equally about the state of global affairs setting the stage for potential world war.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, we have been in a relatively stable world (9/11, Iraq, and Afghanistan notwithstanding -- none of them world war scale), but it now feels ever less so all the time.

If one has to have either a civil war or a world war (bizarre choice), a world war would actually serve to unite us, although our existing division is a weak starting place. A civil war destroys us from within, full stop.

My favorite conspiracy theory is that the CCP is sowing the division within us to drive us to civil war, whereby they win WWIII without ever firing a shot.

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Yea that's not a conspiracy theory at all. CCP/Russia most definitely have heavily targeted campaigns to sow disunity via the whole "USA is a dumpster fire" and "we're so divided" nonsense all over social media sites like FB/Twitter and Reddit. Of course Reddit being Reddit and so forth you get regular Americans gobbling it up and amplifying. Even worse when late-night hosts with big audiences do it. The strength of the United States is literally its motto - "e pluribus unum" - of course foreign countries want to oppose that.

What's annoying to me is having to lead coworkers though a rational thought exercise about "do you really think we're divided? as compared to what? how exactly do you measure division?" and so forth just to get them to admit it's mostly some generalized feeling and not some rationally considered measure.

I sometimes wonder why the US gov't doesn't put CCP/Russia on blast and make Americans more aware of this. Americans love a common enemy, and if they caught wind of how much they are truly being manipulated it might shift the narrative. Maybe that would embarrass too many citizens to realize the stuff they mindlessly parrot is largely a planted narrative.

> To be honest I sometimes wonder why the US gov't doesn't put CCP/Russia on blast and make Americans more aware of this.

Because CCP/Russia have already incorporated this into their disinformation campaigns. Anything anti-china is attacked as racist/nationalist. It got so radioactive that the government had to change the pattern they used to name pandemics.

> the pattern they used to name pandemics.

What pattern is that, exactly? Looking at the Wikipedia list of worldwide pandemics with more than 1 million deaths[0], only two were named after places, and one of those ("Spanish flu") was the result of wartime misinformation and/or racism.

Admittedly the other example on that list is "Hong Kong flu" from 1968–1969, but there are other recent outbreaks which are not included, like SARS, Swine flu, and Bird flu.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics#Major_epidem...

Here are the viruses targeted by this year's flu vaccine. Since the flu hasn't been politicized yet they're still using places in the names.

A/Victoria/2570/2019 or A/Wisconsin/588/2019

A/Cambodia/e0826360/2020

B/Washington/02/2019

B/Phuket/3073/2013

None of those are pandemics (parent's phrase) or "new human infectious diseases" (WHO term).

https://www.who.int/news/item/08-05-2015-who-issues-best-pra...

> What pattern is that, exactly?

That pattern used now (e.g. for COVID-19) is this:

World Health Organization Best Practices for the Naming of New Human Infectious Diseases (2015)

https://www.who.int/news/item/08-05-2015-who-issues-best-pra...

https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/163636/WHO_...

This is an improvement, as they note, on names that "provoke a backlash against members of particular religious or ethnic communities". The world has moved on since the "Spanish Flu" was named.

But I think that saying "the government had to change the pattern they used to name pandemics [because of China specifically]" is likely a misattribution and oversimplification of these guidelines.

The idea that "the government names pandemics" is both too general - a government is a huge diverse structure, if this was a governmental role, some named health body within it would have this responsibility; and also too specific - "the" government? which country's government would take on that role?

And it's not accurate - this is not any one country's government's role. Point of fact, COVID-19 was named by WHO: https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...

I'm with you that Chinese/Russian propaganda is a real thing, but your example is ridiculous.

> Anything anti-china is attacked as racist/nationalist.

This response always comes up when someone tries to point out racist and nationalist anti-china motivations, so clearly this argument is propaganda as well /s.

> It got so radioactive that the government had to change the pattern they used to name pandemics.

The Spanish Flu was named that way precisely so everyone would blame Spain. The participants of WWI censored any mention of the pandemic until the war was over, so Spain served as a convenient scapegoat.

This paper published by Harvard is an analysis of actual CCP propaganda tactics [1]. Arguing with people online about an issue you dislike just brings more attention to it. Instead, propaganda generally serves to distract. The average Redditor has no direct impact foreign policy in China, but they can riled up enough to cause politicians to focus on placating them rather than geopolitics. Indeed, if you observe the Russian propaganda ads on Facebook, they have nothing to do with Russia [2]. They're simply meant to sow discord.

[1] https://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/50c.pdf

[2] https://cbsnews.com/media/russian-ads-on-facebook-a-gallery/

> I sometimes wonder why the US gov't doesn't put CCP/Russia on blast and make Americans more aware of this.

A large amount of US politicians sold out to both China and Russia long ago. We recently had a president over $200 million in near outstanding personal debt to the CCP...

Check out which group of US senators and representatives went to have tea time with Putin on one of the recent 4th of Julys.

All of our manufacturing infrastructure is over there. There's no going back, because they're somehow able to dupe their constituents into believing they're actually hard on them while lining their pockets, especially with regards to China. Celebrities and corporations have also sold out.

It's going to be a great day of reckoning if some of these people ever learn that their leaders who've always told them they're hard on China and fighting against them are... actually not, lol.

Trump's mainland China nickname amongst the educated and literate is "Nation Builder" for a reason. With reference to their nation, not the United States. Certainly weird times we're in.

I hear this line of reasoning constantly from people who have had the system work for them. What they don't realize is that there is a huge portion of this country where the system is not working and thats where this discontent is coming from.

Their misinformation campaigns wouldn't work if there weren't real core issues with the society. The internet has empowered a generation the sees whats behind the curtain.

AOC said it best: Millennials have seen a situation where 9/11 happened in Middle School, the GFC happened in college and now the covid disaster has screwed hoards of millennials once again when they are trying to purchase a home and get on their feet. Majority of millennials have never seen a time of economic prosperity in their lifetimes. It is the complete opposite to what their parents experienced. With this reality is it any wonder where there is massive discontent that results in this division? The system has failed them.

>Majority of millennials have never seen a time of economic prosperity in their lifetimes. It is the complete opposite to what their parents experienced.

This exaggerated view is unfortunately quite common. It completely ignores the crises that previous generations had to go through, from WWII and the Korean War, to Vietnam, to depopulation of rural areas, to the Oil Crisis, to massive pollution in modern cities, to the mass lay-off of industrial workers starting in the 1980s, to inflation rates of 15-20%, etc, etc.

Oh wow this comment is packed with so many unrelated events spanning multiple generations. You fail to see that going into the 70s and 80s the societal structure shifted to a far conservative view in terms of taxation, regulation and other governmental actions. This leads to a direct correlation to the outcomes for Gen X, Y and Z which have had their upbringing in the decades since post-Nixon.

If you look at the raw numbers of how Boomers prospered in their life cycle and compare it to the trajectory of Millennials it tells a clear and jarring picture. Even more so for Gen Z which explain why they are eschewing capitalism at far greater numbers than Millennials ever did. Note: all of my comments applies to a lesser extent to GenX as well but AOC was referencing Millennials since she is one. The point is if you look at the trajectory from Gen X onwards it paints a picture of decline in most aspects of life.

WWII is really the Silent + Greatest Generation and does not excuse the decline that started after Boomers.

>so many unrelated events spanning multiple generations.

That's the point; the world has always been turning. In terms of post-WWII economic history, the current "crisis" in the west is neither special nor very great.

This academic view of things does not matter to the people who are living a reality where their parents have done better than them. You seem to be ignoring this fact.

Plenty of people are living a reality where they're doing better than their parents. I should think that includes a lot of the well-paid software industry readership of HN.

The majority aren't.

Repeating my previous comment:

You can pluck a small group from any generation and show that they are doing better. How is the cohort as a whole doing?

It appears that you are set in your ways and are not willing to actually look at how Gen Y and Gen Z are doing in reality. Every answer you have given is an excuse to lay blame on the millennials as if the majority of the generation made some critical mistake in their lives.

You are just too out of touch to reason with.

Yes, the challenges faced by Millenials are different from those faced by their parents. But I don't think they are harder than those faced by previous generations.

Yes, but those "previous generations" had oxygen in the tank, as in financial assets stored away from the good times, to survive the bad times. Millenials go pearl diving.

Try telling that to all those laid off in the 1980's, or those who had to abandon family farms in the 1960's and 1970's, etc, etc.

Ordinarily it is the older generation that looks to the past with rose-tinted spectacles. Millenials must be one of the few times when it is the younger generation that does so.

If you look at the arc of the whole generation and compare it to subsequent generations, overall the Boomers ended up much better off than their successors at the same point in time. Time is running out for Millenials to catch up. The oldest part of the cohort are in their 40s now so its looking as if they will end up poorer compared to their parents.

Poor people in the fifties did not have any financial assets.

Okay, so, what’s your point? There’s always some crisis in history. You’re moving the goalposts to weird places and leaving out all the boom times in the time periods you mention. Doesn’t seem like a good faith argument to me

Also, the Korean and Vietnamese wars were about fighting communism and imposing Western democracy on the East

Millennials also have high speed internet, smartphones, and video games to tune out local life that previous generations lacked.

Did previous generations have the same regulations in place that cause companies to restrict employment in crappy jobs to less than 40 hours a week so you need to move between job sites or work unsteady 'gig' jobs on the side? To avoid some mandatory benefits?

Previous generations had significantly higher tax rates for the ultra-wealthy and had wages that were in line with inflation. Those wages have stagnated for decades and all those taxes have been pulled back. All of this started to happen around the time of Gen X onwards.

In exchange we have cheap Chinese produced crap that shows the mirage of wealth but in reality there are external costs to all this tech that is not priced in when you go to pay for it. Costs such as the slave wages paid to the people who produce them and the environmental cost to produce and dispose. If US consumers had to pay the true cost of all these toys then it would expose the wage gap much more clearly.

You mention FB/Twitter but forget how much of a shit show our corporate media is. So much so that FB/Twitter uses them as the so called “fact checker” and act as proxy. If anyone has followed the media in last 5yrs, you know how dysfunctional and opposite to ideals of free press our so called mainstream news organizations have gone. A large portion of the country rightfully have zero trust on these once much respected media outlets. Just watch an hour of CNN or MSNBC or NYTimes or Fox coverage and you would know you don’t need CCP do divide us. Our elites running the media outlets and choosing which narrative to push on a given day will happily do t themselves.

Ironically, the market is the biggest division force in the US right now. CCP/Russia/elites propaganda machines are strong but they have never been a match for the US market. Is it an inherent flaw of capitalism or there’re different market structure to incentivize union.

But you are pretty divided from an outside perspective.

You still haven't universally grasped very simple things the rest of the world nailed almost a century ago. Little things like "vaccines are good", "Nazis are bad" or "Universal healthcare is a basic human right"

I get its a pretty young country all things considered but these are fundamental basics.

Oh please. There are plenty of anti-vaxers, political extremists, and ignorant citizens in the EU. I know quite a few of them personally. The US is a hundred times more unified than the EU, which has been teetering for a decade now. I think the situation is not nearly as bad as the American press says it is, but the EU is absolutely chock full of problems, just like everywhere else.

Granted you're very correct that American health care got way too profit driven which is causing accessibility and standard of care to suffer, but EU healthcare is not without its issues, just different issues.

parent comment didn't mention EU. vaccine avoidance is much less prevalent in developing countries compared to so called developed countries in my (limited) experience. and atleast we don't have that many flat earthers

We are already in a low-level Civil War and have been for quite some time. The important thing to understand is that digital / media / information warfare will be the future of warfare, both in the US and abroad.

Why? For better or worse, the average person in America is lazy. Arguing online is easy, but actually engaging in kinetic warfare over a sustained period of time is extremely difficult. Even the minor conflicts that erupt at protests are tiny and irrelevant compared to an actual civil war.

There's also not much money to be made in actually destroying things, as compared to drumming up outrage (which is how the media, large and small, Alex Jones to CNN, makes its money.)

My favorite conspiracy theory is that the CCP is sowing the division within us to drive us to civil war, whereby they win WWIII without ever firing a shot.

This isn't a conspiracy theory, it's basic geopolitics. Every large state does this to each other. The US to China, China to the US, US to Russia, Russia to US.

>As a US citizen, I've been wondering for almost 10 years now if we're edging towards a new civil war.

I don't think the population is capable of a civil war just due to their health.

[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_the_United_States

What are they going to do? Fight each other on their Power Wheelchairs?

Yes I am aware of the far right arming themselves and training for years for a coming 'war'. I think with the Parler leaks + Facebook, I suspect the government knows the exact location of the overwhelming majority of these people and wouldn't hesitate to gun them down if some calamity broke out.

I agree that the CCP, Soviets and others are probably devoting some resources to spreading division. It is so cheap to do in the grand scheme of things so I guess that everyone including 'soft allies' might be participating but these tactics only work due to real issues in the society that have been unresolved for decades.

Besides...long term China has more serious problems to contend with. Things such as the coming population collapse, extreme climate change that threatens their food supplies, and growing unrest as the population starts to expect more and more from the CCP.

> If one has to have either a civil war or a world war (bizarre choice), a world war would actually serve to unite us, although our existing division is a weak starting place. A civil war destroys us from within, full stop.

If those are your options, what is wrong with being destroyed from within? The two sides can split the country and each get a share - say, in proportion to their numbers.

The British aren't exactly suffering after their empire dissolved. Life still looks pretty good for them.

There is no reason to unite people who do not want to be united.

> If one has to have either a civil war or a world war (bizarre choice), a world war would actually serve to unite us,

This is not only a terrible American exceptionalism thing to say, but also probably wrong if you look at history of failing states. The Russian emipre was it the brink of collapse before WW1, participation in that war lead to its collapse sooner then it probably would have.

From an outside view much of the world is long since tired of American exceptionalism, and American influence on the rest of the world. For many people the collapse of America would be a preferable option over the status quo. Me personally would prefer no war at all (neither civil nor world). However I would love to see American influence dwindle in favor of a more global solidarity of the workers of the world (including American workers).

> However I would love to see American influence dwindle in favor of a more global solidarity of the workers of the world (including American workers).

Pardon my assumption, but are you a software engineer in america? How would the downfall of American hegemony and union of transnational labor favor you?

Yes I am a software engineer in America (although from Europe originally). And to answer your other question, the downfall of America might favor me personally if it would be replaced with international solidarity of workers (as I am a worker my self). However my personal wealth is not my aspiration. Or as Mr. Spock once said: “The needs of the many, outweigh the needs of the few”. If I am one of the few, who’s benefits will marginally decrease in order for the needs of the many to be met. Then so be it.

Alright there Comrade... lets hope your vision for the future never becomes a reality.

Here's the real rub, there's many of us who would also fight to preserve the status quo or something close to it. You think many (most?) HN'ers with their 150K+ jobs want to live either individually or with their families at a much worse quality of life so some folks an ocean or two away can be a little better off? Big doubt.

The status quo, globally, is inequality and suffering for many. What a pathetic way of thinking that this must be defended with violence. It's unthinkable for you that this could be balanced out a bit more?

Just maybe they aren't thinking primarily of their own advantage.

There is only one road and it does not continue past a certain point.

Progress toward that point needs to be arrested or reversed judiciously, with rest stops along the way being some of the most useful.

Sometimes it can be worthwhile to point out that after WWII peace had been achieved but there were only three types of people in the world remaining.

Those that won WWII, Those that lost WWII, and those that were saved by the ones that won WWII.

Everyone else was killed.

That's what made it a world war.

Everyone living is descended from only these three types, spawned for better or worse out of their hard-won environment of unprecedented world peace.

Anyone dissatisfied with this, the only way they can change it is to start WWIII.

Got any ideas if there might be somebody willing to take us further down that road anytime soon?

> My favorite conspiracy theory is that the CCP is sowing the division within us to drive us to civil war

It's not a conspiracy theory, it's a full-time job for a large number of Russian KGB, and Chinese state security employees.

Not mutually exclusive. I could easily see a future where the breakup of the U.S. essentially sparks WW3 as every regional power takes the fall of the global hegemon as license to make war on its neighbors. Could totally see China taking Taiwan and eventually Japan, India and Pakistan erupting in bloodshed, Russia invading Eastern Europe, [the Middle East is already in flames], etc.

It also wouldn't surprise me if the CCP or Russia or both are conducting propaganda campaigns to break up the U.S. without them firing a shot. These strike me as very shortsighted; the threat of an external adversary is pretty much the only thing holding large empires together, so both of those are next on the break-up list of the U.S. splits. (Arguably, the primary factor behind political divisions in the U.S. was the breakup of the Soviet Union; without the external threat of communism we have nothing to remind us that we're more alike than different.)

> My favorite conspiracy theory is that the CCP is sowing the division within us to drive us to civil war, whereby they win WWIII without ever firing a shot.

How is this a conspiracy theory and how is this a bad thing? The so-called Cold War (i.e., WWIII) was won by the USA "without ever firing a shot", by exactly the same method: sowing division within the socialist bloc. Do you think that the U.S.-influenced division of its enemies was a bad thing? Would you have preferred an all-out war between the two nuclear powers?

Some would argue the actions of the US in Afghanistan during the Cold War led to 9/11 as blowback. That one event permanently altered the US's path and helped to show that the empire is declining.

In terms of civilisational collapse 9/11 is meaningless, and all of the damage done by response was a series of unforced errors on the US's part. They didn't have to tear off a nose to spite their face.

>They didn't have to tear off a nose to spite their face.

That is the civilizational decline made clear by 9/11.

Actually it was the Soviets that were in Afghanistan during the Cold War, not the US.

Are you seriously ignoring the US's role in arming the mujahideen?

Not at all but somebody else would have done it anyway.

The Soviet Army's fate was sealed not much differently than the US Army's was early into the operations.

Others having much more to lose through Soviet aggression would have stepped up to the plate except US arms dealers had first right of refusal for things like this.

Re “without firing a shot” - the US fought several proxy wars as part of the “Cold” War and fired a lot of shots.

Replace CCP with Russia, and it's not a conspiracy theory.

Correct.

https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Pillars-of-...

In my view, the primary reason we are edging toward a new civil war is that politicians have decided to wield the law as a weapon in the growing urban/rural cultural divide.

Classical liberalism is a necessity for pluralism, and pluralism is necessary for a country as diverse as the United States to survive. As soon as you drop "live and let live" as a fundamental principle and start trying to micromanage personal choice, you're on the road to division.

The Right should stop trying to ban gay marriage or abortion or TG folks from public schools. The Left should stop trying to ban guns or family gatherings or large sugary drinks or the rebel flag or traditional pronouns.

Until American can break the habit of trying to control one another and make other Americans live a certain way, we will never live up to E Pluribus Unum.

EDIT: Case in point...

> ... should stop trying to ban ...

Or perhaps these contentious social questions should be decided by the individual states, and citizens should be free to move to states which best match their views?

It would be nice to think that the federal government could just ban "bans", but deciding what is and isn't a ban (or which bans are strictly necessary) is an equivalent problem to the one you are trying to solve.

I never suggested that the federal government ban "bans" and, perhaps, the fact that you immediately thought of yet another government ban is emblematic of the problem I am describing.

In any case, yes, to some extent, federalism is a partial answer to ensuring a baseline liberalism.

> traditional pronouns

Nobody is banning traditional pronouns.

In many parts of the world they are being soft banned.

Yet. And somebody certainly is.

Would spice things up a bit. Might not be a bad idea.

I don't think there will be a civil war, or if there would be, the outcome will be inescapable and perpetual tyranny.

The technology we have today is such an overwhelming advantage and every tyrant's wet dream.

At this point, we can only hope for an illuminated and benevolent tyrant, something like a emotionally mature Elon Musk.

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