"both sides" hardly seems fair in this context. If your spouse is drunk and about to get in a car and drive you absolutely need to win that argument.

I am talking about the partisan-aligned culture war currently waging in the USA.

It takes two to tango.

Sometimes the "correct" people are such insufferable, hypocritical assholes that the other side will slice its neck to spite the body, regardless of how incorrect they may be. If people can't see this game of chicken being a pretty sizable part of our issues then they should check their own biases.

Thanks for proving my point, I'd perhaps rather watch the world melt than have your sneering ass running the show.

I kid, but it's a close call.

Please don't perpetuate flamewars on HN and particularly please stop posting personal attacks. We ban accounts that do that, and you've unfortunately done it repeatedly. That's not cool here.

This whole subthread stands out as particularly wretched but even in a context as bad as this, "your sneering ass" was egregious.

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

It's fun to think I'm running the show, isn't it. Yes, I fully own my unbounded contempt for the fragile-ego'ed patriots tearing the country apart. But I'm not running the show, am I? And that doesn't matter. The people running the show, Clinton and Obama and Biden and so forth, speak in diplomatic terms and offer olive branches and try to see the other side and it earns them nothing but vilification. Because the fragile egos listen to people who want to keep them angry and suspicious. Who treats them with greater contempt, the politicians who try to work on their behalf while being burned in effigy or the propagandists who lie to them to keep them aggrieved?

And how is anyone supposed to respect someone whose values are so askew and who is so easily led?

This is nothing new. Here's Lincoln on the same topic:

https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/cooperunionadd...

Please stop posting flamewar comments to HN. We've had to ask you this before, and we ban accounts that keep doing it. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.

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

I think perhaps you’ve misunderstood me. I don’t think that we should “punish everyone”.

I’m saying that both parties that are waging war are equally responsible for the war being an ongoing conflict. It doesn’t matter who’s right and who’s wrong, it matters that both parties are conducting warfare.

Remember the whole “deplorables” thing? That set the stage for a team identification banner that you can wear (or not wear) on the front of your face. It’s not one specific act by one specific person, it’s the willingness of the group to vocally and vehemently disrespect the other group as a whole, to subscribe to the belief that all of the people in the other group are Fundamentally Bad. As we all know, both of the groups at issue are doing precisely this, and have been doing so since before covid. It’s such a habit, that you’re doing it right now.

In a word? Disunity. If you are promoting disunity, you’re the problem. (As an interesting aside, this is fundamentally the root problem I have with the existence of nations and borders in general - all so-called sovereign states promote human disunity, to some necessary-for-their-existence extent.)

TFA explains why an ideological/culture war, beyond a certain point, means that any significant crisis or upset will result in useless, senseless, unnecessary, and preventable destruction. It’s a result of the partisan brawlers being constantly ready and willing to brawl with the Other Team, and has nothing to do with the ideology or positions of either of the warring factions.

The only way out is to stop warring.