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Comment by superb_dev | Hacker News Reader

If we could solve these issues, maybe we could stop talking about them

Virtually every person I talk to who remembers will tell you that the 90s were the peak of just about everybody in the country getting along and feeling good about the future.

Then widespread internet and social media happened, which shortly led people into echo chambers while simultaneously gutting the institution of journalism.

We didn’t light the fire

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Los_Angeles_riots

“the most destructive period of local unrest in U.S. history”

>90s were the peak of just about everybody in the country getting along and feeling good about the future.

What? All joking aside, what the Fuck?

Rodney King. LA riots. NAFTA protests. Branch Davidians. Presidential sex scandals. First desert storm. Political correctness. Women's movements. Bosnia et.al. Rwanda. HIV/AIDS epidemic. Ruby Ridge. Wage stagnation. The final death of small town commerce due to Wal-Marts.

And these are just the things I thought of in the last minute. I'm sure there are a ton more issues I'm missing.

The people you talk to are doing what people have done since the beginning of time. They're remembering the past fondly while forgetting the bad.

Don't forget peak crime including the introduction of school mass shootings (Columbine).

I read this to the tune of we didn’t start the fire. Was nice.

Even minorities sometimes want to hear about something other than being a minority.

Especially minorities. Listening to liberal white people talk to other liberal white people about race is the eye-gougingly terrible.

I’m white, but I often notice all white panels discussing how awful white people are, but somehow neglected to invite a non-white person to participate in the discussion.

And when they do, it’s someone they hand-picked to say the things they want to hear.

I’ll note this though: I think the people who do this don’t really identify as “white.” It’s become a class marker. Your plumber is “white.” NPR listeners aren’t “white.”

What are you talking about? Honestly what weird strawman are you trying to set up?

NPR listeners aren't white? What are you trying to say here?

“White” is a socially and culturally constructed label, not an ethnic group. For example, Germans and French people in those countries don’t identify as “white”—they identify as German and French. It’s a label created in the context of racial politics.

My theory is that NPR listeners no longer really identify with the label “white.” They might acknowledge the label applies to them. But when they complain about “white people” they are referring to other white people.

Does force feeding develop an appetite?

When progressive "solutions" are implemented, if their success is measured empirically at all, they usually just make things worse. See e.g. the outcome of most educational reforms of the past 20 years, or the attempts in America's most progressive cities to solve homelessness by incentivizing and rewarding homelessness.

Not surprising, a lot of profitable rackets depend on those issues remaining unsolved. What would e.g. all the homelessness experts do, who collect billions annually to hold conferences where they agree with each other on settler-colonialism and the newest genders, if they were to actually solve homelessness?

Climate change is being solved, but it's being solved through technological innovation, not masturbatory discourse.

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