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On the other hand, people seem to listen to what they like to hear. 'T digs coal' and 'climate change is mostly a hoax', 'we are going to replace <disgrace> wi

On the other hand, people seem to listen to what they like to hear. 'T digs coal' and 'climate change is mostly a hoax', 'we are going to replace <disgrace> with _something much better_'. I don't believe a majority believed it but they acted differently. So my tentative conclusion would be, the public is the problem. Which is sadly even worse than 'platform X is the problem'.

somenameforme 3y ago
An argument against this is that this is nothing new, yet the new radical divisions are. It happened both relatively recently, and extremely rapidly. If you described the state of society today to an American 25 years ago, I think exactly 100% would think you were borderline out of your mind, because it's all been just such an irrational and illogical trajectory from where we were headed. If you look at the big divide in the past, slavery, it was on a scale many orders of magnitude worse than anything we could debate on modern times, yet it still took society just under a century to completely collapse over it. And it's not like society was more impassive. In the midst of that century you had things like a vice president killing a Founding Father in a duel, over political disagreements.
- nuancebydefault 3y ago
  I believe you are referring to the N/S civil war? What do you mean about the collapse 100 year thereafter?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - somenameforme 3y ago
    Slavery was highly contentious, at all levels, from day 0 of the United States. That's where Thomas Jefferson's "All men are created equal." line came from. In the original draft of the Declaration, he included a lengthy diatribe against slavery, but it was removed in the final draft - presumably under pressure from slave interests. That conflict, over such a meaningful issue, still took near to 100 years to collapse into the Civil War. Back to modern times, I don't think it's hyperbolic to see secessionary momentum following the election next year, regardless of who wins, as an at least reasonably possible scenario. And if it does, then we're 9/10ths of the way there. And it's not even entirely clear what happened. It's just like things divided hard in an incredibly brief period of time.

somenameforme 3y ago

An argument against this is that this is nothing new, yet the new radical divisions are. It happened both relatively recently, and extremely rapidly. If you described the state of society today to an American 25 years ago, I think exactly 100% would think you were borderline out of your mind, because it's all been just such an irrational and illogical trajectory from where we were headed. If you look at the big divide in the past, slavery, it was on a scale many orders of magnitude worse than anything we could debate on modern times, yet it still took society just under a century to completely collapse over it. And it's not like society was more impassive. In the midst of that century you had things like a vice president killing a Founding Father in a duel, over political disagreements.

nuancebydefault 3y ago
I believe you are referring to the N/S civil war? What do you mean about the collapse 100 year thereafter?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- somenameforme 3y ago
  Slavery was highly contentious, at all levels, from day 0 of the United States. That's where Thomas Jefferson's "All men are created equal." line came from. In the original draft of the Declaration, he included a lengthy diatribe against slavery, but it was removed in the final draft - presumably under pressure from slave interests. That conflict, over such a meaningful issue, still took near to 100 years to collapse into the Civil War. Back to modern times, I don't think it's hyperbolic to see secessionary momentum following the election next year, regardless of who wins, as an at least reasonably possible scenario. And if it does, then we're 9/10ths of the way there. And it's not even entirely clear what happened. It's just like things divided hard in an incredibly brief period of time.