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?

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?

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?

I’m curious, where did you encounter them?

It is normal thinking for Marxists.

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

> 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.

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.

>>> 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.

No. And you can see the consequences that are plastered all over the evening news.

Whether Marx has the right solution is a different question. But the problem is real. (Myself, I'd be inclined to say that Germany has a better solution than either the US or Marx. But I've never lived and worked in that system, so I don't really know.)

I agree : ). Don't think I'd call myself a Marxist but I think the school of intellectual thought he spawned (as opposed to the totalitarian governments mis-using his name) makes valuable contributions to understanding our politics and economy.

And yeah I like the German social-democrat model too.

Also, big-ups to us for having a fairly civil conversation : ).

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.

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/2017/1...

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.

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.

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 :).

> But “left wing extremism” isn’t on the top of the FBIs of list domestic terrorism threats.

Extremism (on either side) is absolutely on the top of the FBI's list of domestic terrorism threats.

This was from a hearing on August 4th;

https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndtx/pr/us-attorney-erin-nealy-...

Watching what's been happening in Portland every night for ~90 days now, or even what's just happened in Kenosha, I would be surprised if it wasn't the top of the FBI's list.

I agree. The FBI should be investigating those masked men in camouflage without any insignia or identification and with guns and rifles who were attacking protestors and hauling people off in unmarked vans in Portland.

;)

All we need to do is look at the numbers of deaths which occurred in the incidents we are talking about.

“In the deadliest attack on Latinos in American history, a 21-year-old white supremacist last August killed 22 people and injured 24 others at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas. In April, another white extremist went on a shooting rampage at a synagogue in Poway, California, killing one worshipper and injuring three others.”

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.voanews.com/usa/2019-deadli...

And so on.

Dylan Roof in 2015 murdering nine people who were at church, because they were black.

The right-wing crazy guy who murdered Heather Hayer by driving into a crowd at a protest against neo-nazis in Charlottesville in 2017

And so on.

To compare terrible attacks like that to the riots (separate from the peaceful protests) which have occurred, and destroyed property, but not killed people, is ludicrous.

And let’s not forget that people didn’t go into the streets for the fun of it - no one was doing anything until the police killed a man in cold blood, because he was black, exemplifying the racist violence (and domestic terrorism - look at the 1921 Tulsa race massacre - a mob killed at least 36, sent at least 800 to the hospital, and burnt a part of the city to the ground, leaving ten thousand black people homeless - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre) which black folks have sadly faced for a long, long time now.

And which people are sick and tired of tolerating.

Certainly any ideology can produce violent extremists. But conservatism and the right in the US currently has a white-supremacist/far-right extremist problem which the left does not have right now.

Currently, its the far right and white supremacist ideologies which are producing domestic terrorists that attempt (or sadly, succeed) to kill people.

Currently, there’s not a US equivalent of the Baader-Meinhoff gang (german left wing domestic terrorists from the 60s/70s) of which I’m aware.

So I hope the FBI is spending the bulk of their domestic terrorism resources combating the groups which at this time pose the greatest threat to the lives of American citizens.

If body count of individual actions was the only metric, I would totally agree with you.

I think current events have the potential to spiral into something much more destabilizing and ultimately destructive on a cumulative basis, even if there are not headline grabbing individual mass shootings.

Sure, and we're saying that white supremacy and police murders have already destabilized into something destructive. We've arrived.

> If body count of individual actions was the only metric, I would totally agree with you.

You never specified your other metrics ...

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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildland%E2%80%93urban_interfa...

https://www.pnas.org/content/115/13/3314

> 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.

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.

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.