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comment by johnnyFive
johnnyFive  ·  2018 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Trump orders DOJ to declassify Russia investigation documents

My thoughts went down similar lines. No matter what DOJ does or doesn't do, it'll be plenty more ammunition for partisans of both sides.

I heard a story on the radio earlier today from some people involved in election infrastructure. One of them said that his worry wasn't the technological side or even the idea of foreign interference, it was Americans' complete inability to talk about anything political without falling into partisan ruts.





am_Unition  ·  2018 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    Americans' complete inability to talk about anything political without falling into partisan ruts

I think a lot of people, young folks in particular, have become pretty disgusted with the way political "discourse" has unraveled steadily over the last few decades, and especially how terrible people treat each other on the internet. It sounds pretty conspiratorial, but it makes me wonder whether the extreme political polarization is something that wealthy elites have actively tried to promote in an effort to turn people off of politics completely. According to wikipedia, though, we've just kinda flatlined at ~55% voter turnout over the last century. I think there's an (admittedly inconclusive) argument to be made that if more and more people are radically opposed to the other party, then a similarly sized segment of people must be getting turned off to politics altogether to maintain a stagnant voter turnout rate. I'm surprised that psychologists haven't linked people who attempt to keep up with the news (on either side) to higher rates of depression, mania, etc., but I'd probably only trust a case study of like N=10,000-ish anyway.

johnnyFive  ·  2018 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Hopefully that's so in the case of younger people, as it's going to take a broad cultural shift.

I don't see it as a plan, it's just a steady case of people trying to one-up each other in promising too much and blaming the other side when it doesn't work.