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Comment by brobdingnagians | Hacker News Reader

A difficulty now is that we have morality police on both sides who believe strongly that they are right. And each side believes they are purveyors of uncomfortable truths for the other side. Both sides also believe in censoring their opponents. And both sides believe that they are the true defenders of American values. Fundamentally, America is divided into two sides who both believe they are fighting a Holy War against the infidels on the other side.

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Bothsidesism has become a tactic to normalize when one side does something asymmetrically and objectively awful.

You just demonstrated exactly what the comment was trying to express. Perfection.

And both things are true. Both parties do various bad things, and their supporters hide behind the "well the other guy is bad too!" argument. The best candidate is the one who has the lowest expected badness; and yes, their chosen party membership is a valid and at least somewhat-informative prior on badness, depending on your personal badness disutility function.

The amusing thing is that I genuinely do not know which side you mean to refer to here. I guess it really does prove the point above.

This is a comment that both sides would make.

One side: "This material is obscene and shouldn't be included in public school carriculums."

The other side: "We have determined this information is false and dangerous, and should be banned from all public discussion."

When you add in that the "false and dangerous" has proven time and again to be "true and embarrassing", and the attempt at censorship is more about protecting power than morals, this really is an area where bothsides-ism is a non-starter.

I expect this won't be a popular comment, but it is accurate. You can't change that.

Yes, but only one side has the guns.

> Yes, but only one side has the guns.

Aside from the unnecessary inflammatory injection of firearms, I'd like to clarify and say "only one side thinks only they have the guns". Not that this should matter in a civilized country.

In a civilized country, civil society and the rule of law don't depend on the ever-present threat of populist violence to begin with. The US is not a civilized country, and one side definitely not only has most of the guns, but has proven itself more eager to use those guns in the service of their ideological goals than the other.

> Not that this should matter in a civilized country.

It should be very clear by now that "civilization" is more fragile than we'd like to believe.

Society, including the systems that protect you from bad actors, could break down, and quickly.

When it comes to guns, the absense of "government" is an under-appreciated possibility.

Just look at how useful guns were to average citizens in the USSR during its collapse.

Wait: were guns useful in 1991 to non-gangsters?

I'm sure they were.

You acknowledge the rise of organized crime in a power vacuum, but doubt the utility of self-defense in that environment?

Individual self-defense against organized crime syndicates is not terribly effective. You shoot one guy, the capo shows up with 10 men to shoot you.

A broad organized militia may be able to monopolize enough force to keep organized crime in check... and congratulations, you've just reinvented policing from first principles.

> you've just reinvented policing from first principles.

Yes, in the absense of government protection (scroll up)

I didn't mean for it to be inflammatory, but it's certainly not unnecessary to the conversation. We can both-sides it all day, but the fact is that one side has a militia proudly ready to use force. Like other commenters have suggested, this isn't necessarily a concern with a functioning civil society. But if we descend into populist mob violence, the side that has eschewed firearms will be at a distinct disadvantage. I hope it doesn't come to that, but it's not so improbable as to be irrelevant here.

I assure you that both sides have firearms in sufficient quantities (I looked up the statistics before I posted) such that if one side attempted armed conflict, it would end poorly and with smaller families at the end.

… whoever’s in control of the government?

If you mean only one political party, no, both do.

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