First stop blaming the Russians and then tell your parties to work for the country and for themselves. I think best would be if people stopped calling themselves "Republicans" or "Democrats" and stopped identifying with a party.

I wish there were a way to dispel the tricks the media and politicians use to divide us such as religion and abortion. There are countless other issues that affect us, but many voters only care about 1 or 2 issues. The "polarizing issues" are then just proxies that won't have a material effect on most people anyway. But people are so susceptible to emotion, and I doubt there's a way around this.

"I see no reason for people not to identify with the major party that best represents them,"

But they have to keep their party accountable. I see it so many times that people complain about something when the other party is in party and as soon as their party has the power it's perfectly fine. Sometimes this reminds me of "Doublethink" in 1984.

> But they have to keep their party accountable

That's basically what I said in the sentence before the one you quoted to respond to.

It would be more accurate to say 'the Russian government and affiliated parties' (or just 'Russian government', if you're into the whole brevity thing).

Most Russians don't care what happens with American politics. We don't blame 'the Arabs' for 9/11, right?

That's pretty pedantic. With "Russians" it's pretty clear in this context that it means the government. When somebody in another country complains about Americans it's most likely about the government and not all people.

If 9/11 had been planned by a government we would also say the "Iraqis" and not the "Iraqi government".

> It would be more accurate to say 'the Russian government and affiliated parties' (or just 'Russian government', if you're into the whole brevity thing).

I was taking, based on what seemed to me to be exquisitely clear contextual clues, “the Russians” in the post I was responding to as “the Russians to whom blame has widely been attached”, who, yes, are the Russian government and certain regime-linked business figures.

“Stop blaming the Russians”, it seems to me, makes clear that the focus is those Russians who are currently being blamed, which is not the Russian population in general.

> “Stop blaming the Russians”, it seems to me, makes clear that the focus is those Russians who are currently being blamed

Yes, if you were to stop and think about it, this is the intended meaning. However, when people constantly hear 'The Russians' repeated over and over..

#notallrussians is an argument (like #notallmen) that contributes nothing to anyone because nobody has at any point said "literally all Russians". You're bringing nothing but noise.

You don't have to say it explicitly in order to carry the connotation across.

Except no one actually believes it's "all Russians". Everyone knows "the Russians" means "the Russian government". So yeah, just noise.

> No, not going to stop blaming the guilty, including the Russians.

Sure, but you're blaming the drop in the bucket.

> Is there something that can be done about our polarized discourse without trampling over our civil rights?

Actively and without consequence? No. Simply maintain self control and realize that the more dialog is open, instant, and global, the more it is subject to the loudest and most manipulative. Not necessarily ideal, but better than alternatives.

Having journalistic standards that were enforced by Law.

It's a can of worms, especially in a country that is as suspicious of it's government as America, but in my view, one of the biggest changes in people's views of the media (and "truth" in general) is the steady erosion of Journalistic standards - putting infotainment shows and opinion pieces on the same level of journalistic rigour as actually well written, high standard news stories.

News corps will continue to chase money, and money is tied to viewership - which gains from people being engaged through polarising, emotion driven content.

If there are no standards for this kind of thing, people will gravitate towards the stuff that gives you that hit of emotion, and they'll forgo and bend facts to present a story in a way that keeps their viewers at the expense of fair representation of facts, and bias.

In the context of social media, it's tricky, because robo websites and opinion pieces run rife through them, with pieces debunking them and/or apologising for incorrect facts not propogating as hard - so in my view there needs to be some level of targeted/intelligent regulation of social media as a news source. (Content aggregators perhaps taking some level of responsibility of curating what is being shared? Admittedly difficult to do this without getting Orwellian...)

But that's just my opinion, interested to hear if people think it's a load of BS or not.

Absolutely!

Is there something Congress should be doing? Perhaps it's not the thing for them to be involved in.

It's not clear to me what the role of Congress should be, perhaps the appropriation of funding to explore/build technologies and legal structures that are more distributed and less subject to concentrations of power.

Paul Frazee's 2018 JSConf EU talk on "Formalizing User Rights on the Web" makes an important observation: technology doesn't just interact with civics, it actually drives civics; it defines what the civic structure of a community is going to be (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-ffpAkviM0&t=920).

I think the proper "role" of congress is to send a message to silicon valley: fix the mess you've created, or we're going to fix it for you.

That there's a serious problem has been obvious for quite some time now, and Silicon Valley has hardly even tried to do anything about it. More likely, they've tended to tune their algorithms to best profit from it.

I'm a small government guy, but if they continue with this disingenuous "we had no idea!" song and dance for much longer, I'd fully support bringing a very big hammer down on the bigger players.

Disincentivize for-profit news.

Make negative campaign ads illegal. Elections are votes FOR a candidate, not votes against someone.

Are you serious? That is called censorship. Sure, don't let there be ads that reveal a candidate formerly ran a sex trade ring and is a pedophile ETC.

It's already regulated. They are forced to say "paid for by the committee to elect".

The public airwaves are regulated by the FCC. There is no reason to pay broadcasters to prevent some candidate from becoming elected.

For some reason, I cannot 'up' vote you. But I like your positive attitude.