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Comment by linuxhansl | Hacker News Reader

I think we live in a dangerous time. We have always disagreed on things and discussed and occasionally fought over them. This is healthy and needed (except any violence).

It is important to realize that even as we disagreed, we still used to agree on basic facts and then fought over what best to do next.

That is what is different now! We now live in a culture where any discussion can simply be ended with "Your facts are wrong", or "I have alternative facts". A reasonable discourse is not possible this way.

It takes just one "side" to take such a stance for society to fall into camps. I think that is what we see happening.

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> It is important to realize that even as we disagreed, we still used to agree on basic facts and then fought over what best to do next.

What are these basic facts that people used to agree on, but now don't agree on anymore?

Election results come to mind.

Wikipedia has a list of controversial elections in the US[1].

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

I know a lot of people who believe Gore won and that Bush stole the election. This is nothing new.

Tons of people in Florida with the same name as felons were purged right before the election. Those people were overwhelmingly black and likely to vote for gore. I think hardly anyone says that’s a stolen election, but it’s definitely a bit suspect. As far as I can tell there isn’t really any reason to claim 2020 was stolen, it’s 100% bs. No one was disenfranchised, although the house republicans tried to disenfranchise the entire state of Arizona on January 6th.

My entire family thinks 2000 was stolen and you at least slightly agree. These claims are not new to American democracy.

But who is disagreeing on facts? Stolen is an opinion about whether the purge qualifies or not. The 2020 deniers have no fact based claim at all.

Vaccine science

Anti-vaxxers have existed for as long as vaccines[1].

[1]: https://historyofvaccines.org/vaccines-101/misconceptions-ab...

Honestly the 1700s and 1800s were far worse in terms of both misinformation and mob violence than what we are going through now. Look at what happened to Andrew Jackson's wife, for example.

There was no golden age where everyone agreed on the same basic set of facts.

Was anybody beaten for solipsism?

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