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Comment by champagnois | Hacker News Reader

We live in a time when the anchors on TV as well as the politicians running the government are telling their supporters to break laws.

Be it January 6th or the riots and looting we have seen for the past two years. Both sides have figures in their parties that are advocating for this madness and normalizing it.

I am a bit of a patriot who is pretty intent on leaving the world better than how I found it. I help people. I try to set good examples. This whole behavior of the right and left has left me thinking they are both morally bankrupt.

I disagree with the article. I do not feel like a sucker. I just feel all of this extremism is really sad and depressing.

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Which people go out and urge for looting?

While difficult to pull up from search engines, throughout the riots and looting sprees and jury trials, there were two things I can roughly quote having heard a number of times from figureheads on the left:

John Lewis's "good trouble"

and

"If we don't get (X), then we need to burn it down!"

and

Also the bizarre stuff where jurors in the Rittenhouse trial were being stalked by an NBC journalist who claimed he was illegally stalking the jurors under company orders (NBC then lawyered up and denies this).

All three of these instances were widely reported at the time and I remember them. They all reak of an authoritarian willingness to trample our traditions and rule of law.

"Fiery but mostly peaceful protests" said CNN.

> On the morning of Aug. 25, national correspondent Omar Jimenez was reporting live on a second night of unrest that had followed the police shooting of Jacob Blake. As Jimenez stood in front of a raging fire, the chyron at the bottom of the screen read, "FIERY BUT MOSTLY PEACEFUL PROTESTS AFTER POLICE SHOOTING."

Tribalism allows such outrages to be celebrated. I guarantee there are tribalists here now who are comfortable rationalizing and excusing the violence, looting, arson, terrorism and trespass.

First, they ignore you ...

Yeah, to get too into it is to become part of the problem.

My way of handling it is to not participate and to set a better example for good citizens to follow.

When (X) became part of the internet hate machine last year, I put a filter on my home networks and self hosted search engines that essentially erased their partisan poison from existence.

Using the internet should feel like visiting a library. It shouldn't be an endless firehose of advertisement and partisan hatred.

It isn't enough to see the flaws of one side, you need to step back and see the whole picture. Both sides are frothing at the mouth for their brand of authoritarianism.

> When (X) became part of the internet hate machine last year, I put a filter on my home networks and self hosted search engines that essentially erased their partisan poison from existence.

If you really did that then I tip my hat to you, that is a boss move!

> Using the internet should feel like visiting a library. It shouldn't be an endless firehose of advertisement and partisan hatred.

Ideally, but that's not possible in the world we live in. I am cynical about the hatred and the editorial spin applied to the propaganda that masquerades as news.

In my mind, everyone in media is a paid actor trying to push some agenda and are otherwise empty suits.

If our culture, money, and institutions are based on trust, then the last 5 years of media have run that trust out to the bitter end. The trust is reduced to the notion that "they wouldn't do that". 'That' being egregious awful things. Once 'that' becomes actual in the majority of minds, we're sunk.

I really did it.

Context:

I am essentially making a hobby of rebuilding my family's filtered version of the internet, leveraging the same powers as the tech giants.

With my setup, instead of promoting partisan hate, the front ends for search and internet access in my home send us in the direction of improving our focus, improving our connection with our own cultural history, and promoting content that reminds us of the great scientists and inventors that made our world possible...

Why expose my children to content that tells them to hate themself or others? Why expose them to areas of the internet full of foreign disinfo agents and their useful idiots? How about give them the experience I had in the 1990s... Freedom from the noise.

Wow, you have an interesting skillset to pull that off.

Would be a nice little business if you could publish a domain or subsite blacklist that I could subscribe to and somehow plug into my kids' and my browsers to add at least a little friction to their browsing. I'm of the same mind as you, I think, in that you shouldn't allow negativity and hate into your brain or else it will take over. You are taking it to another level by promoting human advancements and nobility.

The 90's internet was special, I agree.

Planning to try and do something like that.

Please, please publish this. This is something I hope to accomplish and it would be wonderful to understand how you do it and reduce the workload of maintaining a network like that.

Why are you carrying on with this "both sides" garbage? If you couldn't see an asymmetry under Trump you must be blind.

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