> The only option is to plan and engage thoughtfully.
FWIW, I feel that that begins with getting real clear on one's deepest values and motives. I think what we're seeing in the USA is kind of like when a kid from a small town goes to the big city for the first time. US culture even after WWII has always been kind of insular and provincial. (As a kid, my world was divided into SF, the East Bay, and the rest of it.) Now with the Internet everybody is up in each other's faces (also driven by those clicks, gotta get those clicks) and we're a bit shocked, collectively.
It's a bit weird from the outside, as a non-american. When I was growing up there was a very narrow window of acceptable ideas in the US, anything else was "unamerican". "The two parties are basically the same" was a cliche when I was a kid.
The reaction to a relatively tiny number of new acceptable ideas in the discourse has been pretty surprising, even to someone who thought they already had a low opinion of American culture.
And yeah, sure, the ad-generated enragement feeds don't help. But it is clearly mostly the small town kid getting exposed to more ideas thing, no question.
Heck, when I was growing up, just being a nerd was enough to catch flak. I was once literally called a "poindexter" by a shirtless yokel while travelling by train though the Midwest!
Granted, there's always been an undercurrent of counter-culture in America. The Puritans had their witches. But by the 50's at least it was all buttoned up tight, and then exploded in the 60's and 70's, recoiled in the 80's, then everybody took a decade off in the 90's, and somehow in the 00's and 10's we all lost our fwcking minds.
The thing about mainstream American culture is that it pretty much had been under the thumb of mass media and religion. That's why the whole "fake news" attack is so devastating: our news has been fake. I read Noam Chomsky at an impressionable age and I recall the realization that we (in the USA) were living in what I called a "media blackout". Anything "they" didn't want you to know was simply omitted. It worked so much better than the Russian system.
haha ... yeah, that's kinda "the thing" you don't mention to Americans because they get mad. It's incredibly apparent from just outside the bubble (or half-in it like in Canada).
Every country with a heavily controlled media, with a people indoctrinated with a nationalistic fairy tale is having the same problems with the internet breaking down the old singular media narrative. The heavier the controls were, the larger the societal shock now.
It's ... touchy. We have all learned in the last couple years how to empathize with our American friends who just learned about Tucson or the MOVE bombing or something we learned in school that they just learned about from a superhero show or an apology. It's fine to blame it on your schools, it is definitely a bad move to mention the actual cause.
(I'm not "that guy" myself, but I bet he'll show up. edit: There we go: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25179187 Thank you zabhi. )
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> The only option is to plan and engage thoughtfully.
FWIW, I feel that that begins with getting real clear on one's deepest values and motives. I think what we're seeing in the USA is kind of like when a kid from a small town goes to the big city for the first time. US culture even after WWII has always been kind of insular and provincial. (As a kid, my world was divided into SF, the East Bay, and the rest of it.) Now with the Internet everybody is up in each other's faces (also driven by those clicks, gotta get those clicks) and we're a bit shocked, collectively.