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Covid is the only destabilizing event, and it looks as though the US system of decentralization resulted in a variety of outcomes, but overall non-destabilizati

Covid is the only destabilizing event, and it looks as though the US system of decentralization resulted in a variety of outcomes, but overall non-destabilization. Wildfires make the news bc they are inconvenient, but largely impact rural areas. Hurricanes are local events that cause damage, but US building codes largely prevent loss of life. Katrina is still a once in a lifetime event due to the flooding caused by failed levees. Political tension is nothing more than the rise of news entertainment. The two political parties are extremely similar. In 4 months or 4 years, Trump will be out of office and the news entertainment business will manufacture other controversies. The 3 big ‘problems’/destabilizing factors in the US are, student loans, massive prison pop, a great, but vastly overpriced health care system.

NoOneNew 6y ago
I'm mostly going to split hairs here. I mostly agree with you. But I'd say the real destabilizing problem in the USA has been the partisan attitudes in politics. You could almost claim that America is 2 countries, Democratia and Republica. That's how ridiculous our politics have become and why some of our problems, especially the ones you mentioned, have gotten so bad. I think they would always be "problems", but no where near as bad if all of our Congress would remember, "Oh wait, we are all Americas. We should be working together, not against each other." Edit: Why the hell are you getting downvoted so much?
- dcow 6y ago
  Yep. Just yesterday I encountered a pocket of “radical” anarchists that literally want to “utterly destroy the other side before rebuilding a good society”. Since when is that normal?
  - wtvanhest 6y ago
    I’m curious, where did you encounter them?
  - pnw_hazor 6y ago
    It is normal thinking for Marxists.
    - adamsea 6y ago
      Of course there are some who fit the description you imply. But there’s a huge range of political ideologies which have been influenced by Karl Marx and his intellectual successors - aka Marxism. Lol I think there was a Marxist hiding under my bed to get me the other night ;). Such an easy boogie-man word to use. Even scarier are those “cultural marxists.” Here’s some fact-based information: https://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/what_is_marxism.php https://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/what_is_marxism.php
      - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
        > In American capitalism's latest crisis, the combination of growing unemployment and worsening inflation has confounded all the usual experts. The most powerful nation in history cannot erase poverty, provide full employment, guarantee decent housing or an adequate diet or good health care to its people. Meanwhile, the rich get richer. Only Marxism, as an account ofthe rational unfolding of a basically irrational capitalist system, makes sense of our current chaos. In class struggle, it also points the way out. The rest is up to us. I'm calling baloney on the "fact-based information". That's not an objective source; that's a true believer being a cheerleader.
        adamsea 6y ago
        Ahhh, I see your point. Fair. I read about the first third and assumed the rest was just as neutral. TBH I should have looked at the author more carefully - I thought the page was like the NYU equivalent of Stanford’s online encyclopedia of Philosophy, sort of an anodyne online primer. Thanks for pointing that out. However based on my understanding I will say that most is the article seems pretty on point as being a description of the basics of Marx / Marxist thought. I’ll also throw in that I think this is the thought that should demand our attention: > The most powerful nation in history cannot erase poverty, provide full employment, guarantee decent housing or an adequate diet or good health care to its people. Meanwhile, the rich get richer. Don’t have to be Marxist to see that.
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    And why would anyone think that the kind of people who want to utterly destroy the other side are the kind of people who have the moral bearings to be able to rebuild a good society?
- wtvanhest 6y ago
  I expected downvotes with my comment because it is counter to what most people believe and the exact opposite message that the news gives. People heavily invested in politics will write off what I said immediately without really considering it.
- adamsea 6y ago
  IMHO while both political parties are deeply flawed and both corrupted by the power of big money in our system, this whole “partisan divide” thing that makes it sound like there’s no difference between the parties is silly, and inaccurate. The Democratic Party and the left has its problems. But “left wing extremism” isn’t on the top of the FBIs of list domestic terrorism threats. Of course ideally we all should be working together. But just like saying “all lives matter”, “working together” is often a way of denying historical truth and the flaws and struggles of our nation. Hacker News is supposed to be fact-based, right? IMHO folks should go do some googling about what political scientists - experts who work with reason, facts, are deep subject-matter experts and rational debate - have to say about the current functioning of the US political system. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/2017/10/13/16431502/america-democracy-decline-liberalism https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/2017/1... They talk about tribalism but it’s nuanced. And it’s not a simple “both sides need to listen and work together.” Sorry for the rant.
  - NoOneNew 6y ago
    I do agree about the tribalism issue and the fact if both sides would stfu, they'd realize how similar they are instead of desiring to split hairs. But yes, there have been plenty of left wing terrorists. Ilich Ramírez Sánchez I think is the most famous one (Carlos the Jackal). Plenty of other ones, but he'd be the... Timothy McVeigh mixed with Bin Laden of left wing terrorism. That and citing Vox is like citing Fox News. No. They're different sides of the same coin. That and political science isn't a real science. Even the stuff I might agree with, it's all so warped in bias, I want to vomit.
    - adamsea 6y ago
      Vox and Fox are not alike. Fox News is notorious. Simply look at the racist or race-baiting things Tucker Carlson says - or what he doesn’t say. There’s no equivalent behavior at Vox of which I’m aware. Fox News is literally a right wing propaganda machine. Vox may have a bias and you may disagree with it but it’s not regularly engaging in fear-mongering, untethered from any sense of journalistic ethics or responsibility. Folks may not like hearing this but we all know this is true. Plus the particular article I linked to has interviews with reputable folks (Harvard profs, etc) so if nothing else it’s a source of reasoned opinion. Lastly, political science is obviously not a hard science but it’s filled with people who have spent their careers reading about history and politics and studying it so, there might be some signal in that noise there :).
_jal 6y ago
Thinking systemically is important. The 2003 East Coast blackouts were caused by a "local" problem in Eastlake Ohio. What are the second-order effects of Houston losing a substantial fraction of normal function? Alongside Covid? Now what if something else happens? Emergency management seems like a far away thing, until it isn't.
mindcrime 6y ago
FWIW, I gave your post an upvote, but I will nitpick this ever so slightly: Wildfires make the news bc they are inconvenient, but largely impact rural areas. The idea that wildifires are just "woods burning out in the middle of nowhere" is, if not inaccurate, at least incomplete. There is, in the United States, a substantial amount of what is called "Wildland / Urban Interface" zones where urban areas impinge on adjacent wildland areas. And homes and other structures being built in those interface zones are a huge problem when large scale wildfires break out. And while large-scale loss of life due to wildfires isn't commonplace, massive property damage is at times. That said, I wouldn't classify wildfires as a "destabilizing" level problem. But the impact of wildfires should not be trivialized either. Ref: https://www.usfa.fema.gov/wui/ https://www.usfa.fema.gov/wui/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildland%E2%80%93urban_interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildland%E2%80%93urban_interfa... https://www.pnas.org/content/115/13/3314 https://www.pnas.org/content/115/13/3314
xg15 6y ago
> Political tension is nothing more than the rise of news entertainment. I would agree with that but still think the effects of it can't simply be ignored. A significant part of people worldwide get their basic understanding of what's going on in the world from news media - and then go on making all kinds of day-to-day descisions with that knowledge - and in the case of US citizens may go on to vote. News media show a cropped and distorted version of reality, but they can also pull the actual reality closer to their distorted version.
adamsea 6y ago
And white supremacy. Which used to arguably be a stabilizing element of the US, because it was the de facto law of the land. Now that it’s in contention we see white supremacists attempting to destabilize things to maintain/regain said supremacy.

NoOneNew 6y ago

I'm mostly going to split hairs here. I mostly agree with you. But I'd say the real destabilizing problem in the USA has been the partisan attitudes in politics. You could almost claim that America is 2 countries, Democratia and Republica. That's how ridiculous our politics have become and why some of our problems, especially the ones you mentioned, have gotten so bad. I think they would always be "problems", but no where near as bad if all of our Congress would remember, "Oh wait, we are all Americas. We should be working together, not against each other." Edit: Why the hell are you getting downvoted so much?

dcow 6y ago
Yep. Just yesterday I encountered a pocket of “radical” anarchists that literally want to “utterly destroy the other side before rebuilding a good society”. Since when is that normal?
- wtvanhest 6y ago
  I’m curious, where did you encounter them?
- pnw_hazor 6y ago
  It is normal thinking for Marxists.
  - adamsea 6y ago
    Of course there are some who fit the description you imply. But there’s a huge range of political ideologies which have been influenced by Karl Marx and his intellectual successors - aka Marxism. Lol I think there was a Marxist hiding under my bed to get me the other night ;). Such an easy boogie-man word to use. Even scarier are those “cultural marxists.” Here’s some fact-based information: https://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/what_is_marxism.php https://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/what_is_marxism.php
    - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
      > In American capitalism's latest crisis, the combination of growing unemployment and worsening inflation has confounded all the usual experts. The most powerful nation in history cannot erase poverty, provide full employment, guarantee decent housing or an adequate diet or good health care to its people. Meanwhile, the rich get richer. Only Marxism, as an account ofthe rational unfolding of a basically irrational capitalist system, makes sense of our current chaos. In class struggle, it also points the way out. The rest is up to us. I'm calling baloney on the "fact-based information". That's not an objective source; that's a true believer being a cheerleader.
      - adamsea 6y ago
        Ahhh, I see your point. Fair. I read about the first third and assumed the rest was just as neutral. TBH I should have looked at the author more carefully - I thought the page was like the NYU equivalent of Stanford’s online encyclopedia of Philosophy, sort of an anodyne online primer. Thanks for pointing that out. However based on my understanding I will say that most is the article seems pretty on point as being a description of the basics of Marx / Marxist thought. I’ll also throw in that I think this is the thought that should demand our attention: > The most powerful nation in history cannot erase poverty, provide full employment, guarantee decent housing or an adequate diet or good health care to its people. Meanwhile, the rich get richer. Don’t have to be Marxist to see that.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  And why would anyone think that the kind of people who want to utterly destroy the other side are the kind of people who have the moral bearings to be able to rebuild a good society?
wtvanhest 6y ago
I expected downvotes with my comment because it is counter to what most people believe and the exact opposite message that the news gives. People heavily invested in politics will write off what I said immediately without really considering it.
adamsea 6y ago
IMHO while both political parties are deeply flawed and both corrupted by the power of big money in our system, this whole “partisan divide” thing that makes it sound like there’s no difference between the parties is silly, and inaccurate. The Democratic Party and the left has its problems. But “left wing extremism” isn’t on the top of the FBIs of list domestic terrorism threats. Of course ideally we all should be working together. But just like saying “all lives matter”, “working together” is often a way of denying historical truth and the flaws and struggles of our nation. Hacker News is supposed to be fact-based, right? IMHO folks should go do some googling about what political scientists - experts who work with reason, facts, are deep subject-matter experts and rational debate - have to say about the current functioning of the US political system. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/2017/10/13/16431502/america-democracy-decline-liberalism https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/2017/1... They talk about tribalism but it’s nuanced. And it’s not a simple “both sides need to listen and work together.” Sorry for the rant.
- NoOneNew 6y ago
  I do agree about the tribalism issue and the fact if both sides would stfu, they'd realize how similar they are instead of desiring to split hairs. But yes, there have been plenty of left wing terrorists. Ilich Ramírez Sánchez I think is the most famous one (Carlos the Jackal). Plenty of other ones, but he'd be the... Timothy McVeigh mixed with Bin Laden of left wing terrorism. That and citing Vox is like citing Fox News. No. They're different sides of the same coin. That and political science isn't a real science. Even the stuff I might agree with, it's all so warped in bias, I want to vomit.
  - adamsea 6y ago
    Vox and Fox are not alike. Fox News is notorious. Simply look at the racist or race-baiting things Tucker Carlson says - or what he doesn’t say. There’s no equivalent behavior at Vox of which I’m aware. Fox News is literally a right wing propaganda machine. Vox may have a bias and you may disagree with it but it’s not regularly engaging in fear-mongering, untethered from any sense of journalistic ethics or responsibility. Folks may not like hearing this but we all know this is true. Plus the particular article I linked to has interviews with reputable folks (Harvard profs, etc) so if nothing else it’s a source of reasoned opinion. Lastly, political science is obviously not a hard science but it’s filled with people who have spent their careers reading about history and politics and studying it so, there might be some signal in that noise there :).

_jal 6y ago

Thinking systemically is important. The 2003 East Coast blackouts were caused by a "local" problem in Eastlake Ohio. What are the second-order effects of Houston losing a substantial fraction of normal function? Alongside Covid? Now what if something else happens? Emergency management seems like a far away thing, until it isn't.

mindcrime 6y ago

FWIW, I gave your post an upvote, but I will nitpick this ever so slightly: Wildfires make the news bc they are inconvenient, but largely impact rural areas. The idea that wildifires are just "woods burning out in the middle of nowhere" is, if not inaccurate, at least incomplete. There is, in the United States, a substantial amount of what is called "Wildland / Urban Interface" zones where urban areas impinge on adjacent wildland areas. And homes and other structures being built in those interface zones are a huge problem when large scale wildfires break out. And while large-scale loss of life due to wildfires isn't commonplace, massive property damage is at times. That said, I wouldn't classify wildfires as a "destabilizing" level problem. But the impact of wildfires should not be trivialized either. Ref: https://www.usfa.fema.gov/wui/ https://www.usfa.fema.gov/wui/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildland%E2%80%93urban_interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildland%E2%80%93urban_interfa... https://www.pnas.org/content/115/13/3314 https://www.pnas.org/content/115/13/3314

xg15 6y ago

> Political tension is nothing more than the rise of news entertainment. I would agree with that but still think the effects of it can't simply be ignored. A significant part of people worldwide get their basic understanding of what's going on in the world from news media - and then go on making all kinds of day-to-day descisions with that knowledge - and in the case of US citizens may go on to vote. News media show a cropped and distorted version of reality, but they can also pull the actual reality closer to their distorted version.

adamsea 6y ago

And white supremacy. Which used to arguably be a stabilizing element of the US, because it was the de facto law of the land. Now that it’s in contention we see white supremacists attempting to destabilize things to maintain/regain said supremacy.