Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid

Saying this: "The reactions to what I'm saying will be predictable" is a good attempt but doesn't really work I've found. Of course it's predictable, that doesn't make it incorrect.

Yes you guys have been played, but if you didn't see huge growing divisions within the united States well before Putin started to use social media then I don't know what to tell you.

I hope readers here can see that spammers and bad actors have been using social media to affect opinion for years and years before Putin was utilizing them to his benefit. You silicon valley guys set up a system that became doomed to fail. Trump and Putin are just catalyzing an already-collapsing system.

I understand that you are angry, it comes out in your text. But the way out of this is not to add more fuel to the fire unless you want to speed up the natural process of a decaying empire.

Everyone loses faith in their empire eventually. You see it in the increasing selfishness, fear and greed, no?

Killing Putin won't do much at this point except to temporarily satisfy the anger.

An analogy to me is the USA is sick and Putin is just an opportunistic parasite. A strong, healthy host would be able to defend itself.

"2) I'm a liberal Democrat and I'm somehow trying to target Republicans because I hate freedom.

I'm not spreading a narrative. I'm trying desperately to understand why articles like this from the Atlantic keep trying to explain the state of the country, when we already know the answer."

Like a disease, what started from a single cause quickly becomes multifaceted. At that point fixing the original cause is no longer enough. It's useful to know so it doesn't repeat, however.

As you can see in your example, during times of high stress people break down into what they care about most. Some into their love of freedom, others in their need to help. Some take risks under pressure, others hide. You can see the left and right divide based on a few of these and then everyone else gets pulled in by social gravity. Most of us believe what we believe out of loneliness, purpose, identity, not logic.

I am on the other side. I have zero faith in our institutions as they have literally killed my friends and destroyed my life. And so I have adopted a more libertarian perspective since I have experienced more good coming from individuals with good hearts than any of my experiences with our healthcare or education systems.

That doesn't mean I am correct. And I would be incredibly naive to not accept that there needs to be a healthy balance between all.

If it wasn't Putin it would be someone else eventually. You can't win the whack-a-mole game forever.

Let's say we could repeat things without Putin. Facebook and Google and tech companies would have kept growing naively, making it easier and easier to break the system over time. Eventually some team somewhere would infect social media and use it against the USA.

I would actually argue that when humans are exposed to too much information their ability to make rational decisions actually goes down, and we are more likely to use our emotion to make decisions. If you e ever felt burnt out, and overwhelmed by decisions you'll likely have felt something like this.

It is inevitable in my eyes. I think us humans make the mistake of thinking history happens because of the names. It doesn't.