The culture war is killing us [video]

The Hill is nothing but liberal propaganda.

Billionaires buy corporate media to inject views in the populace that benefit the billionaires. If they're good at playing the slow game and lobbying congress, they can influence the thinking of a generation of people through education and media.

Millenials don't think like boomers who don't think like the Greatest Generation who don't think like their parents generation before then.

Your history classes don't clearly convey the way the general public thought in previous generations. Its very interesting to learn about previous generations thoughts and opinions on very similar issues that we see today.

People had the same intelligence back then as they today, they just didn't have the library of scientific knowledge and surprisingly a lot of knowledge on their viewpoints is largely forgotten by the public.

Bring on the down votes haters. People have the right to know.

Or the Mega corporate and political organizations that fund them to do so. Get money out of politics. Period.

But that's the same game. Just pass the blame. Yes, let's recognize media, foreign state, etc roles in all of this. But let's also take responsibility and therefore control of the situation ourselves.

I don't know if there a good way to add value and insight to this topic because even insight is going to be zero sum and partisan, but here's a shot.

Sectarianism is something I've talked to acquaintences about for a few years, as I was thinking about how to make predictions on how current events were playing out, and the precdents I thought would be useful as a model to anticipate were an environment like the Troubles in Ireland, or the Years of Lead in Italy, and to a lesser extent, a re-run of the 1968-1970s U.S. era Weathermen type conflicts, but I think this emerging conflict will be even more of a melee.

It's still just skirmishes between very small physical groups that will probably move into terrorism and assasinations over the summer, and with tacit or direct approval and funding from within institutions to keep it going. Over a decade or more it reduces to a tawdry mix of organized crime and blood sport for the politically protected. And that's the optimistic version.

The factors and populations today are much larger, and the general destabiliztion of America both domesically and internationally is creating a power vaccuum, which a lot of different parties are rushing in to seize the void. This vaccuum idea predicts China's current aggression on Hong Kong and Taiwan, Russia on Ukraine (and the whole region), and Iran on Israel as a direct result of domestic instability in the U.S., because these powers know it's democratically impossible to be able to mobilze a draft for a ground war to defend your allies, so they're making their plays. While that shifts the discussion away from immediate domestic concerns, those players are absolutely involved.

The fashionably Girardian view would ask, who will be the scapegoat that lets all these groups save face and gives them an out for peace, and how grisly will its end have to be? I'm pretty sure it's going to be us thoughtful types, and maybe there will be a pogrom against rationalists, because if there is one thing everyone can agree on, people who write like this can be very annoying.

I think moving away from First Past the Post voting systems is a good thing, but it is not the panacea people are hoping it will be. Just because people can vote for viable third parties does not mean that polarization will go down. It’s possible that more parties may increase divisions.