U.S. Capitol Locked Down Amid Escalating Protests

1. In the past, the wrong speech would result in both government, and private sector censure. You're selectively omitting the civil rights struggle, the communist witch hunts, the german witch hunts that preceeded them, the history of internment and concentration camps in this country, the suffrage struggle...

We didn't somehow magically arrive at the world of 2020, without a lot of people being punished for their speech.

2. Our information diet was never as diverse as it is now. Media, prior to the age of the internet, was much more of a monoculture of ideas than it is now. New, radicalizing information arose in university halls and books and rallies, not on the television.

3. People are no more, and no less willing to admit that they were wrong today, as they were in the age of, say, segregation-forever Jim Crow south.

This coup is not the result of offensive speech being restricted, or hurt feelings. It's the direct result of a few people with media and political influence actively directing their followers to undermine our democracy.

This could have happened in any decade - but it happened today because of the particular personalities involved. You elect a president that is very vocal about his lack of respect for the law, the election process, the presidency, or democratic institutions, and this is what you get. The only reason it is happening in 2020, and not 1920, 1960, or 2020 was because the personalities on the ballot in those years had respect for those things - or at least, were adults who managed to check their worst impulses.

When he said that he won't accept the results of any election that he didn't win (back in 2016), do you still think he was confused, or kidding, or misunderstood? He was just being honest. You can't let people who profess such ideas within reaching distance of political power, because they will happily burn the world down around them to retain it.

I think we should be able to see how our vote was recorded.

The whole system is based on trust. Right now that trust is being threatened (eroded?). Since there isn't a way to individually inspect the system, we have to rely on the word of others to validate it.

The government doesn't always act in the best interest of the populace and often outright lies to it. This begs the question, should we take their word for it?

A simple example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_industry#/media/Fil...

In 1950 the US produced 80% of the world's cars. Similar story for appliances and many other products. That wasn't a normal state. So slowly it went down.

So the US is slowly reversing to its mean. Remember, robber barons, the Great Depression, the New Deal.

Tomorrow, Congress will finish counting the electoral votes. I suspect that some, if not all, of the planned objections will not be made.

Those regimes that filtered information very narrowly constrained ideas to align with the status quo. That was sometimes good, but often held back people with minority views from finding and organizing with each other. Progressive social movements and positive new possibilities have come out of this, in addition to reactionary ones.

What we do have to do is figure out how to have a shared view of the world that is less authoritarian than in the past. People now try to get the private platforms to enforce particular viewpoints through deplatforming and such. I am sympathetic to this as a practical matter, but don't think it is a viable long-term solution, as it will just lead us back to where we were, except with different people calling the shots.