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Comment by ToucanLoucan | Hacker News Reader

As a fellow trans woman, we've been the scapegoat for reactionaries, at least documented, since the rise of the Third Reich. And if we're honest, probably before that.

Fixing society-scale problems is really hard. Being angry at people who make you feel a bit weird inside is easy. People reliably choose easy.

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I'm not going to pretend to understand your stuggle, but I will echo it through my lens. I am not trying to hijack your point, inasmuch support it with my view.

I uses to think that it was about fear of the unknown, or as you've said "Being angry at people who make you feel a bit weird inside".

I now firmly believe that it's a modern form of tribalism. Having an "other", whether as a scapegoat, a fear inducing device, or a target is simply too convenient to ignore. Whether or not one is a globalist is orthogonal to the fact that people ultimately decide, or evolve to see through a different lens.

I would say it slightly differently: humans themselves are tribalistic, and politicians are looking for ways to tap into that to gain and hold onto power.

One look no further than Vietnam for how the government learned to use intranational xenophobia to manipulate different slices of the public into identifying as separate groups that could then be played off of each other. Since then, there has never been as successful a political movement, because we have been turned against each other by state-driven manipulation. AFAIK, this is well-documented policy intended to “maintain civil order” (i.e. prevent the revolution that is so richly deserved).

"tribalism" is a dog whistle

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