Why is America so divided? | Hacker News Reader

Why is America so divided?

news.usc.edu

14 pointspaulpauper31 comments

I like Ezra Klein's take. He shows that America has always had a very strong diversity of opinion, and so do many other countries. That should be a positive, not a negative. The problem is the inability to harness that and get things done, and that's a problem of the political system.

Just look at the way MSM including NPR handled Jussie Smollet case.

Facebook, Twitter, and the MSM.

MSM is really the root of the problem. The other two are just idiots parroting what some network told them to.

Facebook, Twitter, and the MSM caused the income/wealth gap and certain socioeconomic classes to move down relative to others?

MSM is very much complicit in this. See: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lbj-convince-the-lowest-wh...

This alone should be shouted from every rooftop, but now is relegated to snopes fact checking, apparently.

Yeah it's a political statement, a blunt one, but it's a candid statement of how to keep poor people poor.

How much is MSM responsible versus technology and economic progress in other nations bringing huge amounts of labor online that would cause prices for many types of labor to go down in the US, and labor prices to go up in poorer parts of the world?

To be clear, I didn't mean to say MSM is responsible, only complicit. If we had real, independent, healthy media, these issues and those responsible would be plastered all over.

Instead we're stuck with whatever the hell we have today, that seems mostly entertainment, selected outrage, outright lies, with a few actual happenings sprinkled in.

MSM = "Mainstream Media"?

If so, I wonder why it wasn't obvious to me.

Back when effectively only MSM was consumed there was much less division. To claim the so called MSM is the cause should require some more argument than gut feeling I think.

The narrative that everything is a zero sum game has been pushed for decades. “If they lose I win” isn’t anything to build a functioning society on.

One word. Netflixification.

When there were only 3 news networks, they had to create a middle of the road, news only approach in order to broadly appeal to everyone and since they only have the one outlet, they devoted a lot of resources to produce quality content with good fact checking and reporting.

Cable tv and then the internet opened up the flood gates for content. Now, instead of a few quality, middle of the road choices, we have every possible extreme niche option out there and the extremes have tended to rise to the top.

oh bull, this split was around before netflix.

It's never healed since the civil war. Just the colours of the flags changed.

No offense but anyone who spells “colors” as “colours” probably doesn’t have a real “boots on the ground” perspective of America’s divides and wounds.

About 45% of the country is just plain deluded. 10% doesn't care. The other 45% are presumably enlightened. Politicians are fighting to keep it that way.

Sort of misleading when only 53% of voting age Americans participated in the 2018 elections (relevant for emphasis, it was the highest turnout in 18 years).

Because the entire strategy of one of the political parties is to divide people by race, class, sex using misinformation to deceive in order to gain political power

I like how anyone could read this and think it applies to the other party.

That's because they are both correct. The ruling class uses identity politics to divide, and the ruling class isn't limited to one party.

It's a demonstrable fact that it is true of both. It's also a demonstrable fact that one is insanely worse. Doing every single thing the other does, at even worse levels, and then adds even more insanity the other one wouldn't even dare to try. It's the party that let their sitting president attempt to overthrow a legitimate election by violently interrupting a senate ceremony and then dismissed it like it was just a typical Wednesday in Washington.

One side tries to get rid of known sexual predators and racists. The other promotes them. One side lets at least a small amount of dissenting voices play the game. The other viciously attacks anyone not moving in lock-step with the current dictator, including the vice president. One side attempts to make voting more accessible. The other makes it less. One side believes in separation of church and State. The other does not. They both suck corporate dick but one does it in the back office, the other cups the balls while staring their employees in the eye, gurgling something about deserving a fair wage as they grab the safety helmet off their head to spit into, and tell them to get back on the floor and work hard so they can get some of that sweet trickle down.

I'd say you meant to post on Twitter but you're above the character limit.

Ask yourself which one has greater thought dominance among the kinds of urban middle and upper class youth, hipsters, university students, yuppie types, tech workers and also many elites that work in, heavily consume and dominate much of the mainstream and digital media narrative, and then ask how despite this supposedly "less terrible" dominance, all of the problems of division that you describe are so rampant regardless of which party is in power. Also, as for the January 6th events, shitty as they were, I take a moment to mention the completely dissimilar, in no way violent or destructive... fucking months.... of "protest" that were heavily fueled by a certain political tendency's media narratives, and those of political party that this media tendency heavily favors. Protests in the middle of a pandemic no less, which suddenly were not at all likely to be super spreader events because: reasons, hand waving, political ideology over basic science...

Also,

>tries to get rid of known sex predators and racists.

Really? I'd say that for the racists, it depends on what ethnic group they belong to, and as for sex predators, there's no shortage of them on either side of the spectrum. After all the husband of a certain 2016 political candidate was very closely associated with Epstein at one time, among other things.

Edit: text addtion.

BLM was instigated by a real video of a cop executing a Black man face-down in the streets, and then escalated by more real videos of other cops executing more Black people extrajudicially, (all following decades of more real videos showing the same type of thing), and then escalated even further by the sitting president not showing a single ounce of empathy for those situations and then actively fighting it in some of the most unconstitutional ways the country has seen since the 50's.

Jan 6th was instigated by completely fabricated lies, lies that began months before there was even an election to be contested, again, by the sitting president. Made more effective by people the sitting president had just recently plopped into key positions that would be involved in controlling such an event.

One side scorned the violence for both events (showing sympathy/understanding for violent reaction to very real, very bad things is not the same as advocating), the other scorned one and excused the other using the same lies that started it.

Regardless of all that, comparing a coup to a protest is absolutely stupid. Only one side does that, because it lets them downplay a coup as nothing bigger than a protest when it's clearly a much bigger issue, so much bigger that, in the constitution, one is a protected right and the other is treason.

For one thing, the January 6th event was no "coup". It could maybe, very ambiguously, very generously speaking be called a coup attempt (a truly idiotic, inept one if so) and more plausibly you could call it a sort of protest of its own (yes, protests that get violent still get to be called protests even if they don't fit your personal political prejudice). Secondly, the vast tide of BLM-inspired protests was enormous and lasted for many weeks, with many flavors of violence and also in many cases what could very easily be called attempts at local government overthrow in some cases. Whether they fit such a description is arguable, but without a doubt they were in numerous cases no less violent than the January 6th events. Your comparison between the two is absurd and absurdly biased.

> For one thing, the January 6th event was no "coup". It could maybe, very ambiguously, very generously speaking be called a coup attempt

Firstly, we should understand that while "attempted murder" is a thing when the intended victim lives, this is an unusual situation. If I attempt to rob a bank, but I am arrested when I trip and fall running for a door with a sack of cash, the charge would be "bank robbery", not "attempted bank robbery", as that's not a thing. There is no distinction (1). No court is going to say "well the cash never left the building so hey, no crime!"

> (a truly idiotic, inept one if so)

If I attempt to rob a bank, with a water pistol, the charge would be "bank robbery", not "idiotic bank robbery", as that's not a thing. I'd be an "idiot criminal" but it's a regular crime, not a separate one. There is no distinction.

> plausibly you could call it a sort of protest of its own

It was protest, a protest about the election result, and also part of a larger plan concerning that election result, which cannot in any way be said about BLM. Other parts of the plan were to delay certification of the regular electors, pick alternate electors, change key states votes ... you know, coup stuff. They had a PowerPoint for it. The fact that the coup attempt did not succeed make no difference. The supposition (which we cannot be sure of) that it was not close to succeeding makes no difference.

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbery

"Robbery is the crime of taking or attempting to take ..."

To paraphrase Ogilvy, half the country is being manipulated by a political party using misinformation to gain power; the trouble is I don't know which half.

"Both" is a possible answer here.

“Both” is the PROBABLE answer here.

Ah yes, it's the other team's fault entirely (I can't even guess which party you're referring to).

This is nothing new, civil wars, companies imploding, open-source projects forks, what web3 means...

A group of people working on the same problem with subgroups clearly divided and deeply convinced on what the solution looks like

It has nothing to do with misinformation

And in the end no one is wrong, they just have to agree how to move forward or ideally result in a new paradigm that will satisfy everyone

Also this is not just America, it is probably happening most places, you can clearly see in the UK how people are divided

MSM creates problems and social media amplifies them.

This is nothing new, civil wars, companies imploding, open-source projects forks

A group of people working on the same problem with 2 subgroups clearly divided and convinced on what the solution looks like

It has nothing to do with misinformation

And in the end no one is wrong, they just have to agree how to move forward or ideally result in a new paradigm that will satisfy everyone

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