[b112]

Is your argument that you're not involved enough in American politics to have responsible opinions about it, even though you're involved enough to comment in the first place?

I wonder who or what you're replying to here. Certainly, it has no relation to anything I've said in this thread.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't appreciate others calling it out.

Again, who are you replying to with this?

I said "take it easy", not "don't ever bring that up".

[mindslight]

You said "I'm not american" as the lead in to your comment. What was the point of saying this other than to disclaim the responsibility I invoked? (which technically wasn't even directed at you directly)

For the overall argument, you called out a comment for calling out a comment whose only contribution was to promote the term "DOW". If it had been a substantive comment that someone jumped on for merely using the term, you'd have had a reasonable point. But it wasn't.

[b112]

This team politics, the me-vs-them, this red-vs-blue that your country, and you, and everyone upthread was precisely what I was commenting on. It's sad, it's destructive, and both sides of your little game have created the situation you are in today.

Jumping on a guy because he corrected someone, and immediately presuming it had an entire slew of politics attached, instead of it being a mere technical correction, is prime example of everything wrong with the US today. Everything.

Me vs them. One word means a political stance. The wrong thing said, accidentally, you're the enemy. It's literally sad. I stand, as a Canadian, watching my brother make horrible life choices, and I want to help, yet I just see more anger and hate and discord.

None of this serves any of you well, it all serves your enemies. Right now, your acts, and the act of the guy super-upset that someone said DOW, serves your enemies. 90% of this is fueled by state actor controlled bots and comments, and you guys eat it up as manna.

So yes, I have an entirely reasonable point. The guy literally might have had no idea. I certainly didn't. You don't even know if that dude is american or not!

DOW is all over the news.

The presumption is wrong. The anger is wrong. The hate is wrong. The attitude is wrong.

On both sides. Of both sides of your little squabble.

I don't care who started it. The entire lot of you need a parent to come into the room, and tell just that, and that you both should go to your room.

And if you don't watch it? If you don't stop stepping out of bounds. If you don't halt it.

The rest of as are going to have to.

And that would be the saddest thing of all. For all of us.

[mindslight]

Framing the argument here as "both sides" team sport is not appropriate. Did these "state actor controlled bots" also create the term DOW? No, the needlessly-divisive propaganda is now coming directly from the White House itself.

I'm a libertarian who sees both leftist and rightist thinking as two halves of a complete analysis. This situation isn't "red-vs-blue". Rather this is social-media-psychosis-red vs everybody else.

If social-media-psychosis-blue was in power and similarly attacking our society, I would be calling that out as well! But they aren't, and they haven't really been in powerful national political offices, because so far the blue extremists' main political success has been to just sandbag the Democratic party. (ostensibly because blue extremism runs counter to the parties' sponsors' interests, confining professional blue extremists to culture war topics that most people see through)

As I said, the fundamental dynamic with the original comment is that "correcting" to "DOW" was its only point. If you just casually heard the term in some [likely government] news media, you're not going to rush out and repeat it as a correction for someone saying DOD.

But sure, we can't really still assign a known motive - maybe that commenter was pointing out the "war" part to try and highlight what this administration shamelessly wants to use "AI" for. But the easy way to avoid being jumped on is to include some constructive context for what one is actually trying to get at, rather than leaving readers to apply Occam's razor themselves. So either way, that response to it was not unreasonable.

[b112]

There is so much ensnarled in US mind-think here, it's difficult to respond cogently. Every fiber of your response is keyed to knock down "the other guy".

Let's start with this.

Framing the argument here as "both sides" team sport is not appropriate. Did these "state actor controlled bots" also create the term DOW? No, the needlessly-divisive propaganda is now coming directly from the White House itself.

You are literally framing the argument as left vs right, whilst trying to pin this very mode of thought upon me. This is because you cannot see the world any other way. Meanwhile, at no point did I ever, not once, say the correction was wrong. Not once.

So mired in this horrid quicksand, this "thought-scape" is your political world-view, that if someone says "Don't say that in such a mean way, be nice to one another", your immediate thought is "OMG! Siding with the enemy! Attack!".

The entirety of US political culture is now as that of an abusive family. The son that grows up with an alcoholic, abusive father, and is beat, yet the cycle repeats with his own son. It is learned behaviour. It is difficult to stop. Even desiring to do so, the son fails when he is the father. And you and all your brothers are caught in it.

The post I replied to painted "the guy", and you have painted "the guy", as someone on a mission to aid "the other team". His mere utterance of a single word, to correct to a name he believes to be the "new name", is viewed as you as a "bad thing".

And this is the problem I speak of. Not correcting someone back. The thought process and the mode of correction. As I said, the anger, the hate, the emotion. And it is emotion laden, not thought driven. It isn't logical, it's reactive emotion.

And yes, it only serves your enemies.

I'll be very blunt here, and I am speaking over decades, not right now. History is vital to comprehension of something like this. When the rest of the world looks at the US. When Canada, the UK, Europe, and all friendlies to the US look at the US?

We can barely tell the differences between your two political parties.

Viewed from the politics of another nation, your left and right are functionally identical. There's zero difference.

The above sentence should make you happy. It really should! It is a true sentence, and what it means is that there is more that binds Americans together, than that which pulls it apart. Yet I am willing to bet that your hackles bristled at such a concept.

And the very fact that they did, is the problem here.

--

Let's discuss state actors, because you seem unaware of how it works. The entire point is not any specific action. It is not about this administration. In fact, the current administration is a product of this decades, yes decades long propaganda by state actors.

The entire point, the easiest way to think of it, is that it amplifies any angst, concern, hostility against "the other team". Surely you are aware of Cambridge Analytics, well that's child's play in comparison, and what I am describing is not secret, or new information, it is well documented, well known, and simply is.

As your two sides become more hostile, you make poor choices out of panic, anger, angst.

Look at what happened with the last US election. Each side terrified about the other gaining power, and so one side hides that an octogenarian might be suffering from old age. Hiding this was a morally repugnant act. Meanwhile the other side chooses someone that much of their party felt they had no other choice but to go with.

Neither party should have chosen either these two. Each is choosing people so aged, so old, that they are barely capable of running the country. I wouldn't want an 80 year old person in charge of anything of this scope and size, yet each of your teams think this is just grand, great, a wonderful choice.

Why?

Because "OMG no, the other guy!"

Both sides are making choices, not with the goal of "What is best for my country", but instead "If the other guy gets in power, the entire country will be destroyed, so we must fight the other team, THEY are the enemy of the true America!". Meanwhile, 99.9% of the decisions made by an administration are functionally identical regardless of the party.

Whether team red or team blue in the last 50 years, the wars continue, the foreign politics is mostly the same. The US has been withdrawing from the world under each team, bombing the middle east under each team, and the list goes on. The debt isn't a problem because of the current administration, it's a problem because of all of them. Every administration for the last 50 years.

There are a myriad of ways to resolve this problem.

There are a myriad of ways to make it worse.

Making presumptions about someone because of one word they say, and jumping down their throat about it, is not how to make it better.

It's how to make it worse.

It's everything that's wrong with America today.

And I know you cannot see it, for your reply shows you cannot.

Look again at my words:

So cut the guy some slack.

Did I say don't correct him? Did I say he shouldn't be corrected? Did I argue whether or not the point was wrong or right? Nope. Not at all.

Instead, I simply said to take it easy in correcting someone.

In the lingo and context of my words in this reply to you, I was saying "Don't make it worse".

Your response was "OMG but he was purposefully aiding the other team!", without any knowledge that it was so.

My response was "be nice to one another, in how you argue".

--

I have written this response hoping that you may grok of what I speak. That you might understand that it is the way you are carrying your argument that is the issue. Not that you have a dispute. The presumptive, hostile response. The immediate assignment of motive and judge/jury/executioner attitude of "Nope, he said a word because of the other team!" thought.

It's all wrong.

It's wrong if it is them or you.

It's wrong no matter who does it, or why.

It doesn't matter who started it.

Go back to your room. You, and everyone else in the US.

Go back to your room, be quiet, and think about it.

[mindslight]

I'm not the one writing ever-longer screeds. Perhaps you need to reflect on your own anger here?

Factually, you have written a lot of things I do agree with. I'm not new to this rodeo. I've been around the left-right gamut. Reading Moldbug is actually what started the end of my rightist-fundamentalist phase.

I've never been friendly to this entrenched corporate power structure that backs both major parties as if they're sponsoring racehorses. I had been both sidesing up until June of 2020. I'm not sitting here going "How could anyone ever vote for Trump?!?!". In 2016, I was telling my blue tribe friends that he had a good chance of winning, as they stood there aghast.

But after an abject failure of a concrete term in office, where the guy basically never stopped divisively campaigning? When faced with a pan-political national emergency, his response was effectively dereliction of duty?? If he had merely led us during Covid, like any other President of the past thirty years (and like most state governors tried to do), I suspect he would have had a shoe-in second term.

So voting for more of that in 2020 or 2024? That is embracing the exact hot mess of crazy that you're condemning here. Obviously the people who voted for him did not feel that way. From everything I've been able to surmise this is due to their media sources making them think the Democratic party is just as crazy. But from what I've seen much of this is based around sensationalizing some otherwise banal realities, and the Democratic party itself is nowhere near as far gone as the Republican party - the prominent members are still basically milquetoast status-quo-supporting bureaucrats who pay some lip service to the extremists, rather than having been taken over by a strongman primarily pandering to the extremists.

For example, one concrete data point:

> We can barely tell the differences between your two political parties.

Do you think a President Harris would be threatening war with Canada? That should be pretty pronounced and quite pertinent to you, right?

[b112]

Your first sentence is bizarre, considering this post is longer than you last. And really, more engagement is a bad thing? Come now.

I feel you're still not getting it though. Because it's not about which side is worse, or who started it, or who's right about something, or who voted for who. It's about how this is discussed, how this is handled.

That's the biggest problem there is.

And yes, I said "barely", and it's quite true. A Democrat could easily be elected just as unhinged. An independent. Yet this sort of highlights my point.

If you stand Trump up against any other US president, just as with an ape or a human, he's literally identical on 98% of things. And really, it's more like 99.9% from an external viewpoint. Yet just as with an ape, that small amount can result in startling differences.

But your parties? The differences are barely noticeable.