
Ask HN: Musings on what is wrong with US politics - unexaminedlife
1&#x2F;2  (too long, see comment)<p>Thankfully still employed during this brutal situation, but have had plenty of time for self-reflection and reflection in general.<p>It consumes quite a bit of my thinking recently, trying to find new ways of unwinding what&#x27;s happening in US politics, and some things have started to become less opaque to me as I try to reason about this.<p>One thing that struck me recently, which I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ve ever heard anyone talk about is the following.<p>I&#x27;ve recently started following some threads on a few &quot;trending topics&quot; on Twitter, and digging a little deeper into, and even conversing with, some of the people writing flaming Tweets on these threads.  I can&#x27;t say the &quot;research&quot; has been extensive, but I&#x27;ve noticed quite a few &quot;right wing&quot; replies tend to be from accounts flagged as &quot;problematic&quot; or &quot;alarming&quot; on the &quot;Trollbot scale&quot;, but strangely enough in some of the cases I&#x27;ve gotten responses from these people, which made me recognize that it&#x27;s likely some of these accounts are being flagged for BEHAVIOR and not for being an actual BOT.<p>It would seem, to the casual observer, that perhaps this categorization is biased toward the &quot;liberal elite&quot;.  But then it sort of struck me...<p>If you try to imagine the daily working lives of blue-collar Americans.  Many of them in factories or doing extremely menial jobs, perhaps that&#x27;s how they&#x27;re interpreting the way in which they need to be interacting with Twitter in general and conversation threads specifically.<p>Sort of like if you were to imagine yourself on an assembly line.  You&#x27;re doing the same thing over and over and over again.  You&#x27;re never asked important questions about the state of the company or anything meaningful or thought provoking to speak of.  You&#x27;re there to &quot;do your job&quot;, and if you&#x27;re not doing enough of that THING then you&#x27;ll be told about it.<p>(see comment for 2&#x2F;2)
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unexaminedlife
2/2 So imagine, knowing this livelihood as your means to an end. It's how you
get paid and how you feed your family. It's obvious to the rest of us that
this is not the right way to engage in conversation. But it's something they
are capable of being efficient and effective in the "political dialogue" in
this country. They find things that will "trigger" their opposition and cookie
cutter the process of (a) finding the threads and matching those with the
GIFs, JPEGs, (b) pasting them into the threads. This is obvious troll-like
behavior, but perhaps the only way these folks recognize an trajectory toward
having an impact.

When I think about this, as a potentially accurate way of depicting what is
happening, it's grotesque and makes me want to lash out in general at our
education system in how we've built an entire army of citizens who treat
political dialogue / civic-engagement as a line-chef treats the food that
comes to their station.

Would love to hear other interesting takes on their perspectives as to how
they're seeing US politics play out in the world today.

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unexaminedlife
And by no means am I trying to isolate "right wing", it's just where my "deep
dive" led me. If I had to guess there is probably comparable behavior from a
large portion of blue-collar "left wing" folks as well.

