I disagree, as someone who observed this site as well as everything else, I can tell you at least for me my prior was heavily influenced by the shift in tone, sentiment, and desperation I observed there relative to the usual din of more front-facing social media grifters.
Oh, I think that’s just a convoluted way of saying you lived in a bubble.
It was quite clear that this was going to happen. No one on my timeline is shocked at all. In fact, I’ve been complaining about these deplorables since 2013 (even before the phrase was coined).
What bubble are you referring to? Saying it was obvious now doesn't say anything about having good predictive ability. My recollection is up until about Monday, most people were asleep on this. And then around Tuesday the zeitguest was this was going to be a dumb clown show. The number of people claiming that violence was inevitable and the capitol was going to be stormed, outside of the obvious circles, was in my experience marginal.
I wasn’t trying to offend you. Everyone lives in a bubble or several.
My timeline consists mainly of 80% American minorities and 20% graduates from elite US universities (with some overlap between the two groups obviously). What about yours? No one on my timeline was surprised. And if they were, they were privileged white people (no offense just being honest when talking about Harvard/MIT grads).
These insurrectionists complained all year about wearing masks. Some of them even shot retail workers because they were so upset. How could you not see this coming?
It’s sort of hard for me to tell based on your comments. Do you live in the U.S. and where about? I could see how one would be surprised if they lived abroad and only used mainstream social media to gauge what’s going on.
But if you’ve lived in the U.S. and read any of the think pieces in mainstream newspapers or even popular Medium articles over the last 4 years, you would have likely learned about the surge in domestic terrorism committed by white supremacists. There were so many articles, especially this past year in the summer. How could you not have read any of them?
Well, I do know that those sort of articles get downvoted on HN and don’t surface to the top. I’m not sure why articles with titles like “FBI confirms a surge in domestic terrorism” aren’t important to HN. (That was sarcasm.)
I literally had a conversation with dang@ the other day about this, and he didn’t believe me.
I live in the US. The specific thing I am talking about here is a) the expectation the protest would turn violent and b) the expectation that the protestors would storm the capitol. This thread is already too deep and I'm getting a bit burned out on responding to everything here, but in general my own bubble (point taken, no offense intended) implied the former was unlikely (through the eyes of centrist Republicans) and the latter was a fever dream but never actually could manifest in reality.
Oh, I see. My bubble was well aware of how violent these people are and were going to be. I mean, they like guns. They talk about killing people all of the time. They look and sound crazy. These are the people whose ancestors (adults and children) had picnics while watching men being hanged in the early-to-mid 20th century.
And my bubble was well aware that they were going to storm the Capitol because protestors often try to get past the police barricade and the police were going to go easy on them.
Note: I wasn’t downplaying that visiting sites like the one you mentioned was helpful. I do that from time to time as well to troll them but also to get the full perspective.
No, your comment was just inappropriate. dang@ is the moderator.
And I don’t have discussions with delusional people. I wrote a super long reply to someone else as you clearly saw. But they weren’t talking like brainwashed people.
But if you did want to delete your comment instead of being passive aggressive, please do so.