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by diryawish 1981 days ago
The right sees post-BLM riots which have led to numerous deaths and millions in damage and Antifa running amok in the Pacific Northwest and think the same thing.

We are too divided and it’s because of the media, both social and mainstream.

2 comments

You mean, it's always someone else's fault?
I think the poster meant that the Polarization is so acute at this point that the Polarization itself needs to be treated as distinct phenomenon (and remedied to some degree) before any progress can be made.

An analogy might be the phenomenon of Complexity in software.

That's not what it sounded like to me. It sounded like they were putting the blame for hazardous actions of others on the media (of an all-encompassing scope) for discussing the hazardous actions being committed.

Which to me seems like slinging jargon rather than registering any kind of context. To me, it sounds like a misreading of McLuhan more than anything. In fact, McLuhan's point was exactly that kind of misunderstanding and misreading should be avoided by not taking the context for granted.

But the presence of BLM-related riots simply isn't relevant to the stuff under discussion, where an upthread poster made a sideways argument that evidence for right wing violence was presumptivly suspect in the fact of multiple examples of exactly that kind of thing. The police station in Minneapolis that was burned down (to pick what most people would accept as the worst example of BLM-related violence) just shouldn't be part of a discussion about whether or not there was a threat against Amazon's data centers from the right.

This is pure whataboutism, basically. Even if you're right (for the record, I think you're right), you're applying it to deflect an argument against "your" side. Isn't that making the problem you are explaining WORSE and not better?

Surely you'd agree that step one to being less divided is to stop reflexively defending "our" side when bad things happen, right?