The introduction's tacky and condescending tone lost me. Does it get better?

I didn't like the intro either. The rest of the article is much better.

Came here to say this. The intro seemed to think it was much more clever than it really is. It's very easy to pick descriptive language vague enough that it applies to multiple subjects. I had to stop reading after that.

You're generalizing 62,984,828 Americans. When you look at a number like that, combined with all the possible reasons that people voted for Trump (think those who validly wished for a Ross Perot victory in 1992), it just seems rude and unnecessary to say this.

I get why you'd think it's rude/unnecessary, but I don't think it's a generalization to say it's very unlikely that anywhere near half of the audience of a blog post like this is on Team Trump. I'm sure there are Trump supporters that read and digest this kind of content regularly, but any familiarity with the typical cultural attitudes and media consumption patterns of Trump supporters makes it obvious that that's far from the norm.

You're taking a characterization of Trump supporters created by the media for entertainment assuming that is the world writ large.

Really? You genuinely think it's plausible that roughly half of the readers of this blogpost are Trump supporters? I'm really not taking an outlandish stance here... this post will have most of its traffic driven by HackerNews and Reddit, where California is an outsized plurality of the American audience, which went overwhelmingly to Clinton in 2016 (and even more overwhelmingly so in the densest parts of California where the overwhelming sub-plurality of HN/Reddit traffic comes from: the Bay Area and LA). Even if you believe that, all else equal, the average Trump supporter's media diet is about the same as the average non-Trump-supporter's, the demographics of these aggregators alone makes it more or less statistically impossible that what I'm saying isn't true.

Would you please not take HN threads into repetitive political back and forths? They're tedious, and don't gratify anyone's intellectual curiosity (the purpose of the site).

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I must have misunderstood. I'm not saying anything about the readership of HN, only that the characterization of Trump supporters in your post is based on media narrative and not fact.

> long-form data driven thinkpieces

That's not the same as "content posted to HN and Reddit".

TBH, you're probably right that this article is going to have a viewership where supporting Trump is less likely.

The pushback you're getting is that you didn't make that claim, you made a claim that implied the Trump voter base was not interested in "long-form data driven thinkpieces", which is a brand of hubris that many are getting tired of.

Ask yourself this: how do you know what the average Trump supporter's media diet consists of?

I know that every Trump supporter I know gets a hell of a lot from Fox and Facebook. They tend to spout off talking points about how Liberals are bad and this is bad and that is bad, without solutions or actual, practical proposals on making the country better.

The status quo on healthcare is not an option. Deporting every "illegal" is not an option. Banning Muslims is not an option.

I don't think Trump supporters are un-American, but I think they've forgotten some American values if they continue to support Trump the man. His leadership is the antithesis of America. If you're conservative, that's one thing. To be a Trumpian is to have missed civics class.

Do you ever stop and check how closely the things you believe line up with reality, or if there might be some things you're overlooking?

Everyone should, mistermann.

Yes they should!

I've read internet comments from many of them, met a few of them, and am friends with one. My friend regularly sends me articles from Brietbart and other conspiracy mongering outlets who write entire articles based on Jason Wohl tweets. People who consume /r/The_Donald, chain emails, and propaganda outlets like Fox News, Breitbart, and the like are Trump's base. They are typically not podcast-listening thinkpiece-reading latte-sipping yuppies.

Here, watch this BBC video [1] where they interview Trump voters about their views on the "mainstream media" (by which you quickly realize they mean anything that doesn't deal in pure pro-Trump anti-librul propaganda). Here's an article [2] on a study showing that pro-Trump people specifically like to consume fake news shared via Facebook.

But personally I didn't really need a study to tell me any of that -- how do I know? I live and breathe and observe the world and people around me...

And yes, this is a generalization and not true of every single Trump voter. Obviously. All I really claimed was that Trump supporters will definitely be a minority of readers of a blog like this.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-us-canada-38191313/no-tr...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/feb/06/sharing-f...

It's funny how all the Occupy Wall Street protesters on the news were homeless, all Obama supporters were welfare supported, and all Trump supporters are ignorant rednecks. Socialists are all unemployed and look lazy.

So weird how they all find their way onto the news. It's almost as if they were selected by image to fit a story.

What's even funnier is how easily even intelligent people on intellectual websites like HN can fall for such bush league propaganda techniques. I don't know how we can ever fix this problem if even smart people aren't able to see it.

There's plenty of Trump supporters in silicon valley. We may be democrats previously, but we really like what Trump did against China, even though the large corporations (who owns mass media) hated the move. Trump rejuvenated the economy, increased competitiveness of American firms, and helped to increase jobs and wages for American workers. He stood up against dictatorship China and is winning the trade war. He is a very flawed man, but he did great for America

He didn't "rejuvenate" the economy. He doubled the deficit and the economy is still growing more or less as fast as it was under Obama. His actions are going to make the next recession worse.

I think it does. The ending is the most interesting part, so perhaps browse there?

It gets better

"condescending"? Was there a particular passage which you feel had the 'superior talking down to inferior' characteristic?

Dialectical arguments tend to long, boring, and esoterical. I found the intro a mix of jocular and dialectical, which for me turned out to be the payoff for some of the article's repetitiveness.

Yes.

Same here, I ducked out. The title as well.

"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I wouldn't call myself a Trump supporter. But then, there hasn't been a presidential candidate in decades who I could wholeheartedly support. And yet I do like some of his stated positions. Even though I don't trust him any more than I trusted Obama, Bush, Clinton or Reagan. Or much less, really.

I hate Trump and I found the intro tacky. The equivalence made it seem like the criticisms of Trump were arbitrary, held only because I'm on the opposite side of him.

Yes.

If you like this article, I recommend the Martin Gurri book that is frequently chief in the article: "The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium". This article reads largely like a summary of that book. You'll also enjoy his blog https://thefifthwave.wordpress.com/

thanks for that. Marc Andreessen did a thread on this with some highlights that make me want to read it https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/1015665031474606081

Thank you, I will check them out!

Damn. This is the most coherent discussion of the Internet's impact that I've ever seen. Yes, it's a little smug. And it's long. But it's well worth the read.

And hey, it's kept me from commenting for several hours, as I've read it in breaks from work.

Indeed, very insightful. I myself is of similar opinion. The West is undeniably having a societal crisis now, regardless of what digits say about its economic wellbeing.

The West these days reminds me of USSR in the eighties.

Now that you mention it, it does. Perhaps sadly enough.