Lately, it’s been just as bad. This comment is completely pushing a political narrative that relies on selective interpretation.

In a way, HN is still a reflection of society, although more civil due to pg (then) or dang (now) moderation, plus the fact that a lot of users knew each other back then.

Nowadays, I'm constantly amazed at how the right is able to turn ANYTHING into someone else's fault. The right divides the country ("let's own the libtards", "the election is a sham", etc) but no, it was the left! The right does a coup, but no, it is the left that cannot let bygones be bygones.

Do they think we are dumb? are they dumb? what is going on?? Black is white is black, war is peace, etc. etc. and no one even blinks at this.

Civil discussion is still possible if you refuse to feel ashamed for rejecting falsehoods, which may be the weakness we have taken on in trying to remain compassionate to other voices on HN, which emboldens evil.

And of course, this is just the beginning. Right-wing extremists now this; the sooner we realize that we are against an enemy that wants to overthrow democracy, the sooner we put a better fight against it.

It's a very old trick.

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” - Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Propaganda Minister (possibly apocryphal)

And btw you’ve hit the nail on the head. that’s the thing, I firmly believe the poster I replied to is wrong and a lot of other uncharitable descriptions. It’s hard to let such bad claims just stand unanswered.

This type of article and that type of post I replied to is just asking for contention.

I don’t come to hacker news for that sort of asinine online argument. If I feel like that, there’s a hundred subreddits I could visit.

I'm not on board with all the virtue signaling coming from tech and the left, but you lost me at 4 years of continuous lies and storming the capital.

This is what I don't get about these discussions. Any time someone says "the liberals are not interested in uniting the country" someone comes back with "but these people are rednecks and they are bad!" They are still part of the same country (for now) and if it is to stay a country the leadership is going to have to figure out how to talk to them. Because the process by which these people become not part of the same country anymore is called civil war.

The media and political environment has not been serving its function of properly informing citizens so that they can make informed voting choices, and so you have people trying to overthrow the government based on lies.

Now, not everything people believed in the pre-internet media environment was factual either, but there was rough agreement as to consensus reality. Even in the last contested election, the 2000 one, people roughly agreed on the basic facts (butterfly ballots, hanging chads, etc), even if they didn't agree on what should be done about it.

I don't have a solution for this problem, but it is a very serious one.

There just was a massive confrontation, and the Republicans lost the Presidency and the Senate. Democratic leadership isn't afraid of another one.

The media doesn't want this to end because they are at an unprecedented level of power right now. They have just become the gatekeepers of thought; a monopoly of like-minded people in control of the truth. As soon as things queit down, dissent will resume (if there is any freedom left), but for now they are on top of the world. They want to keep this going, and will stop at nothing to prevent quiet.