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Comment by jfengel | Hacker News Reader

how quickly and easily vast swaths of our political leadership would sell out to completely destroy our Constitutional principles

This is not something done to us by leadership. This is a democracy; we voted for this.

We have another election coming up momentarily. We have the opportunity to put a stop to this. There's good reason to think that the election will not be entirely fair, but there are limits: if people are genuinely against this, they will turn out and say so.

We'll see what happens, but even in the best possible case, tens of millions of people will come out to say "Yes, destroying American science is exactly what I want". This is not a leadership problem. This is an us problem.

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It is an information problem. A majority of voters believes in the nonsense that is spread on social media, and are not properly informed about important topics.

Social media is allowing both views and the against is winning. But the mainstream media is under the thumb of fcc and too afraid to challenge so they keep neutral (or like Fox is a cheerleading) and that's where the disinformation is coming from.

No? In what world is there a government agency in the USA that prosecutes anti-Trump journalists? That's most of them, ffs. This is just conspiratorial bullshit not at all based in reality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_attacks_on_journali...

You forgot the /s.

Or did you forget all the journalists kicked out of the Pentagon, the exclusion of the associated press over their use of the internationally recognized name for the Gulf of Mexico, the threatened cancellation of FCC licenses of ABC and CBS regarding their reporting, etc.

Proper information is readily available, and everyone on social media has been constantly exhorted to avoid scams.

At this point if people are being taken in by the really obvious and bald lies, the problem isn't a lack of information. They're just plain stupid.

Yes there are a lot of stupid people and they have been hacked by billionaires that can trick them a million different ways. Thats the entire issue!! Stupid people can’t defend themselves from this because they don’t realize how stupid they are.

When you have a bell curve of education and intelligence, around a third of the population will always believe simple lies based on vibes and outrage, and will vote accordingly.

If your media system profits directly from lies and outrage, and there's a class which specifically weaponises lies and outrage for self-servingly cynical ends, the outcome is predictably suicidal.

Nobody voted for this. People voted for the proclaimed plans , but that turned out to be lies and deception solely for getting the votes.

Tons of people voted for this.

It's like people forget Trump had an entire first term and a movement all over social media espousing their authoritarian ideals and accelerationist goals.

January 6th happened during his first term and half the country cheered. He had supporters in the government talking about a coup back then.

They literally published their plans in an itinerary. It had bullet points and everything.

And to this day people still support him. That's how you know the "nobody voted for this" line is just hogwash. A third of the country still supports everything he's doing, and they would vote for him again if they could.

No one who voted for Trump this time gets to plead ignorance. Complicity or stupidity, those are the options.

Absolutely.

Anyone who still voted for Trump is tacitly in support of the Jan 6th rioters and therefore, essentially, no rule of law, no Constitution, just "what this guy says, goes".

And a majority of voters choose that. That's scary for the upper 50% of the bell curve.

It's also scary for pretty much any other country because whilst the US has its own cultural bias, there's something deeply humanly emotive that's being tapped, and can therefore be tapped in many, many other democratic countries.

"This is not something done to us by leadership. This is a democracy; we voted for this."

In many ways the current evils of the US are abusing the ways our government is least democratic.

The way the Senate and the electoral college weakens the power of some votes, the checks of Congress on the executive branch, and the appointment system of the Supreme Court all relied on political norms to confer stability. Those norms are being broken in favor of raw political power which is undermining the checks & balances fundamental to our country.

In few other stable democracies would such slim electoral victories result in such sweeping power. Our nation has relied on norms and civility for its stability as much as law, and discarding those makes our democracy substantially worse.

Trump received 49.8% of the vote, 1.5% more than Harris, and his power and ability to engage in corruption is virtually unchecked. In other countries with stronger democratic systems he would be forced to compromise to attain a stronger majority.

"landslide"

According to Alex Karp, who leads a data analysis company. And therefore it should be impossible to trust any data analysis coming from said company.

While I do agree this is an "us" problem, let's not pretend that the populace at large comes to their conclusions in a vacuum. Leadership is actually still a thing, even in a democracy, and I'm just dismayed at the utter spinelessness of so many in the leadership class, who are happy to indulge the masses in their fantasies and lies.

There was a recent video that made the rounds where judicial nominees were testifying in the Senate and they were all asked "Who won the 2020 election?" These people are not complete idiots - they know who won the election. They all gave the same bullshit "well, Biden was certified as the President elect" non-answer simply because they knew that if they told the truth they would face Trump's wrath. Profiles in Total Cowardice, every last one.

The people are fairly irrelevant these days. We just saw this week how Israel and billionaires can just spam AI slop adverts to replace a popular candidate with a complete no one.

Boomers will see the ai generated video and believe it immediately.

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