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U.S. Capitol Locked Down Amid Escalating Protests

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Re: U.S. Capitol Locked Down Amid Escalating Protests

#971

Post by sergefaguet »

dhruvkar wrote: post #47

Are there people here on HN that believe the election was stolen? I haven't seen any evidence, most of the lawsuits haven't borne fruit either. However, I also recognize that there may be blindspots/biases. I'd really like to hear from anyone who believes this, to present a cogent argument. I promise not to attack. I want to hear the argument from the other side. I also beseech the rest of HN to please refrain from a…

i believe so, but for reasons different from Trump's arguments.

the key point is that the media was extremely supportive of Biden and not of Trump. the margin of victory was small in key states. so if the media was presenting an even-handed position and not doommongering the whole time, it seems quite probable that Trump would have won.

so the argument is that the media elite has manipulated the population into doing something the population would not have done by itself. this is not certain of course, but it is a reasonable hypothesis.

hence the US is not a democracy but a country controlled by a tiny media elite which has cohered around its preferred candidate.

Re: U.S. Capitol Locked Down Amid Escalating Protests

#973

Post by tonfreed »

Broken_Hippo wrote: post #966
tonfreed wrote: post #904

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I blame the internet. Back in the days before it, we had to learn to live with those around us, now you can just go out and find someone as equally stupid as yourself. I call it the toaster fucker problem. Man wakes up in 1980, tells his friends "I want to fuck a toaster" Friends quite rightly berate and laugh at him, guy deals with it, maybe gets some therapy and goes on a bit better adjusted. Guy in 2021 tells his…

You certainly did not have to live with those around you before the internet, and were sometimes very much encouraged not to. It isn't like the LGBTQ+ community was treated well. It was perfectly acceptable to not hire a queer school teacher, nor was it such a bad thing for students to shun a queer classmate. Or you could look at marriage between "races" and the slurs you got from them. A core teaching of a number of…

Found the toaster fucker.

Re: U.S. Capitol Locked Down Amid Escalating Protests

#975

Post by tonfreed »

officialjunk wrote: post #938
tonfreed wrote: post #904

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I blame the internet. Back in the days before it, we had to learn to live with those around us, now you can just go out and find someone as equally stupid as yourself. I call it the toaster fucker problem. Man wakes up in 1980, tells his friends "I want to fuck a toaster" Friends quite rightly berate and laugh at him, guy deals with it, maybe gets some therapy and goes on a bit better adjusted. Guy in 2021 tells his…

other countries also have internet access. the impact on them doesn't appear to be the same. why is that?

My money would be on a more homogeneous culture. Look at somewhere like Australia, the Scandinavian countries or NZ where we pretty much share our attitudes with the most of the others in the country.

As opposed to the US where you're pretty much divided on whether you grew up in the city, suburbs or rural and then again on state. A Californian is wildly different from a Texan, who are again wildly different from a Wisconsonian. The UK is similar with the divide between the north and south of England, the Scots, the Welsh and the Northern Irish.

I think some of it is natural, but it's being amplified with the advent of globalism.

Re: U.S. Capitol Locked Down Amid Escalating Protests

#976

Post by tonfreed »

croes wrote: post #926
tonfreed wrote: post #904

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I blame the internet. Back in the days before it, we had to learn to live with those around us, now you can just go out and find someone as equally stupid as yourself. I call it the toaster fucker problem. Man wakes up in 1980, tells his friends "I want to fuck a toaster" Friends quite rightly berate and laugh at him, guy deals with it, maybe gets some therapy and goes on a bit better adjusted. Guy in 2021 tells his…

So it's not the internet but social networks.

Partly, I guess. The whole internet is a battlefield in the culture war now, though, and even completely unrelated subreddits start banning people who post in the "wrong" places even if they're otherwise following the rules. That and wikipedia is a complete mess now, instead of celebrating what we could build together academics are holding "edit-a-thons" where they tell students to put the lecturer's slant on everything. I have a feeling we might actually be in WW3 and it won't be nuclear, it'll be all about who can distribute their propaganda most effectively.

As an aside, even though HN has a distinct left bias I would say it's definitely one of the fairest forums I've posted on in the last couple of years.

Re: U.S. Capitol Locked Down Amid Escalating Protests

#977

Post by teloli »

umvi wrote: post #72

How did we arrive to this point where a huge chunk of the population is in one reality and another huge chunk of the population is in another reality? Segregation of information sources? Politicization of media outlets? Self-reinforcing social bubbles? A combination of all of them and more?

All these years exporting democracy, you just might have run out

Re: U.S. Capitol Locked Down Amid Escalating Protests

#978

Post by raxxorrax »

u801e wrote: post #883
umvi wrote: post #72

How did we arrive to this point where a huge chunk of the population is in one reality and another huge chunk of the population is in another reality? Segregation of information sources? Politicization of media outlets? Self-reinforcing social bubbles? A combination of all of them and more?

This has always been a tendency for humankind: 1. Gangs 2. Ethnicity 3. Nationalism 4. Religion Groups of people latch on to an ideology and act on whatever the leader tells them to do or what they see others do. You can observe this when looking at videos of riots or other mob like behavior.

I doubt it, but the accusations of it drove people in opposition, especially those that did not care about it.

Of course not caring about it was decried as privilege. This was self-victimization to a large degree. People in western nations overwhelmingly did not care about any of these things anymore.

Re: U.S. Capitol Locked Down Amid Escalating Protests

#979

Post by inglor_cz »

skissane wrote: post #374
umvi wrote: post #72

How did we arrive to this point where a huge chunk of the population is in one reality and another huge chunk of the population is in another reality? Segregation of information sources? Politicization of media outlets? Self-reinforcing social bubbles? A combination of all of them and more?

> How did we arrive to this point where a huge chunk of the population is in one reality and another huge chunk of the population is in another reality? My own impression is that this is far worse in the US than in most other first world countries. If I'm right about that, then explanations based on social media algorithms etc don't really work, because the same algorithms apply in other countries too. It really then…

Or maybe the algorithms that promote this kind of bubble creation have been perfected on English content and are less efficient in other languages.

Re: U.S. Capitol Locked Down Amid Escalating Protests

#980

Post by apostacy »

harmmonica wrote: post #721
umvi wrote: post #72

How did we arrive to this point where a huge chunk of the population is in one reality and another huge chunk of the population is in another reality? Segregation of information sources? Politicization of media outlets? Self-reinforcing social bubbles? A combination of all of them and more?

I'm sure in this very long thread some folks believe that those items you list are symptoms of the problem and that the root causes are much more simple. That huge chunk (I'd estimate it at well into the tens of millions of US adults) feels disenfranchised (right now they literally feel that in way in that they believe their vote doesn't count, but also figuratively) because opportunity has been "taken" from them. Ta…

> The rioters/protesters are largely white as opposed to the more-diverse BLM protesters (more on that later)

> And of course the irony here, when compared to the BLM protests, is that if a sizable segment of these rioters/protesters weren't racist they would understand that this is how Black American have felt _for a couple of hundred years_.

Why is what people look like so important to you? It sounds as if you are saying that if a group of thousands of black Trump supporters did exactly the same thing, it would be ok. And that the BLM rioters over the summer were somehow more acceptable because they were more diverse.

How is that not pre-judging people by how they look? Whenever I ask people this, they essentially tell me that while they can't know exactly what an individual is like by their skin color, they can use skin color as a proxy for other characteristics, and make inferences about how that person has been treated in life by how they look. So in a roundabout way, yes, they are making unjustified pre-judgements based on people's skin color.

Is this really ok?

You can see interviews with David Duke where he clarifies that he doesn't hate every black person, he just assumes that black people in general are not compatible with our society, but that there are individual exceptions to this. Klansmen will tell you in interviews that they don't hate black people purely because of how they look, but how they act, and that they are using their skin color to infer how they will act.

Height is a visible characteristic that is strongly correlated with success in life, do you use that to judge people as well?

The truth is that purely through numerical probability you can make pre-judgements about people based on their appearance. I for one however go out of my way not to. That doesn't mean that I am blinding myself to people's physical characteristics or trying to erase them of course. It merely means that I won't condemn or excuse people's actions because of how they look.

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