You Are Still Crying Wolf

I don't live in the US but this election has made me extremely sad. The amount of false information on both sides, causing both sides to become even more entrenched into their beliefs and hostile to each other.

And like I said in a previous post: at the end of the day, blue states voted blue, red states voted red and swing states were won/lost on very, very few votes. If you removed TV and media from the equation (that is, if you removed the ridiculous 1+ year long campaign season in the US), this election would look as if it were just any old regular election.

People like to say Trump is an outsider but this isn't his first presidential bid and he seems to have been preparing for this for a long time. And for an outsider, he knows how to play politics really well. He knew to hijack the republican platform in his favour, for example. He played the media like puppets, giving him a ton of free air time.

There's very, very real issues with not just his campaign but the upcoming 4 years. The people he already appointed, or is considering appointing to his staff for example (including the famous climate change denier as head of the EPA; and people are also already mentioning Bannon here in the comments). But when the data is drowning in a ton of nonsense noise about assassinations, conspiracies and ad hominems, neither side even wants to hear the issues anymore. When you've spent a year building up a few grand canyons worth of divide between the two parties, no matter how loud you shout the other side is not going to hear you.

Edit: This quote deserves a highlight:

Remember that thing where Trump started out as a random joke, and then the media covered him way more than any other candidate because he was so outrageous, and gave him what was essentially free advertising, and then he became President-elect of the United States? Is the lesson you learned from this experience that you need 24-7 coverage of the Ku Klux Klan?

Edit 2: Sigh, the article's been flagged. There goes any hope of actually having a discussion about shit that matters.

Users flagged it, and were correct to flag it.

I understand the desire to use HN to discuss "shit that matters", a.k.a. political and social controversies, but it isn't what HN is for. Were we all to let it be what HN is for, HN would become like all the other places we come here to get away from.

This has been distorted by the political season. We can't expect to be immune to macro trends. But that makes it even more important to remind ourselves what HN is and isn't. Is: a place to gratify intellectual curiosity. Isn't: a political or ideological battlefield.