Comment by UncleOxidant | Hacker News Reader

Comment by UncleOxidant | Hacker News Reader

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> We are “divided” now because we are basically in a battle for what is consensus reality

I'm concerned we're going to get to the point where people are willing to kill each other over what they consider to be their view of "consensus reality". That's happened often at other points in history. In many cases it was due to religious differences over what constituted "reality". I'm not so sure that many of these current squabbles over what constitutes "consensus reality" aren't religious in nature. Social media already seems to be pushing the limits of human nature in some destructive directions such that politics now is like holy war.

I think we need to focus more on the "consensus" part (including peacemaking and bridge building) instead of the "battle" part. I'm not seeing a lot of that happening. That requires a lot of humility as in we're all like blind people groping our way to figure out reality and none of us has the complete picture. Until we're ready to take on that kind of humility on a societal level, I think this "battle" you refer to can be a very dangerous endeavor.

In guess it comes down to: on what terms?

It wasn’t long ago that we regularly witnessed rhetoric hinting at putting people into camps and denying them access to food because they didn’t buy into the official narrative about vaccines.

Is that a better option? I don’t think so.

I do agree that there is a basis for building bridges and finding common ground but this is better done at the local level between people vs. trying to force it from on high. And definitely, in my opinion, not via some controlled medium.

> It wasn’t long ago that we regularly witnessed rhetoric hinting at putting people into camps and denying them access to food because they didn’t buy into the official narrative about vaccines.

And where was that rhetoric happening? On social media. Outside of China (and maybe some similar regimes), I don't recall any government official suggesting anything about camps or limiting access to food (even China delivered food to the people they welded into their apartments, so not even there), certainly not in the US.

Everybody's favorite "anarchist" himself, Noam Chomsky, promoted just such an idea.

(Proving that he's not really an anarchist.)

Of course, he couched it terms of plausible deniability but anybody with the ability to read between the lines knew exactly what he was saying.

This was during the environment in which small and family-owned businesses were being destroyed (yes, in America) and people were losing their jobs as well. It happened to a number of personal friends.

There were far worse excesses in other Western nations too, not just in China. The only reason things didn't go further in the US here is because Americans have fewer vulnerabilities than citizens in other countries do in the face of this sort of oppression.

And it was all cheered on by those who believed themselves to be on the right side of the establishment at that time. It was a regular thing to see and hear people fantasizing about the idea of forced injections, online and in real life.

And we learned about all this on, yes, social media (which was heavily censored at the time too).

The legacy media outlets were not telling the truth.

All this was only three years ago.

Things are a little different now, I'm sure you will find in many cases that forgiveness is possible in light of true apologies, but there will not be a forgetting.

And these things need to be honestly discussed if we are ever to achieve anything resembling national cohesion again.

Nor can we forget this:

https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/par...

Or this: https://web.archive.org/web/20200728203549/https://www.cdc.g...

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