Comment by hyperbovine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hyperbovine | Hacker News Reader

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> One of the best things about the 'net is that, frankly, none of this really matters.

I disagree. I think the shift from personal to electronic interaction is largely to blame for the level of shrill nastiness that pervades our present-day culture. It's okay to express yourself in ways that would have been completely socially unacceptable, or just plain embarrassing, in past times. Social norms can be stifling, and self expression is good, but it's possible to take it too far. And on the internet, it frequently is. (Although this problem predates the internet. Talk radio in the 80s and 90s comes to mind.)

Nowhere is this more evident to me than in the realm of politics, where things really do matter. The process is seemingly held hostage to whoever can scream the loudest. The result is the sort of do-nothing congressional bitchfest which is currently pleasing to a whopping 8% of Americans. I read accounts of the way things used to work (30+ years back) in Washington and am amazed--it's like studying a lost civilization.

One of my hobbies is reading a lot of history, and I don't see much support for this narrative. American politics has long been really nasty. Take a look at the 19th century presidential campaigns: there is some pretty shrill stuff in there. The 1828 election in particular was really nasty. And people regularly fought duels---actually shot each other---over politics. Political brawls were not uncommon. A Congressman beat one of his colleagues with a cane on the floor of Congress itself!

Even today, offline culture somehow seems more nasty/violent to me than online culture. It's not only in movies that people get into bar fights over stupid things. They not only yell at each other, but actually punch each other, and occasionally stab or smash bottles over each others' heads. It's a crazy world out there.

Yeah, things used to be rougher, but they also used to actually get something done on occasion. Can you see the current congress accomplishing that?

The current Congress can't get anything done because one of the political parties has decided that it isn't in their interest to get anything done, to keep the other party from getting credit for it.

I don't mean to call out the Republicans for being uniquely unpleasant in this regard -- there have been periods when the Democrats have been just as calculatingly obstructive.

> The current Congress can't get anything done because one of the political parties has decided that it isn't in their interest to get anything done, to keep the other party from getting credit for it.

Hmm.

The House passed a budget this year. The Senate hasn't for almost three years.

The House passed an extension to govt financing/ operations. The Senate hasn't.

The House passed an extension to the payroll tax cut. The Senate refuses to even vote on it.

I wonder which party controls which branch of the legislature.

Absent a 60-member supermajority, passing a bill in the Senate requires both parties to at least agree to let it come to a vote. Passing a bill in the House does not require it to be palatable to the other party, the Senate, or the President, nor is it required for it to have any realistic hope of ever becoming law.

I didn't really mean for this to be an unpleasantly partisan post, just a statement of facts about the situation in Washington as I see it. The current Democrats in power have many flaws, but I see no reason to think their goal is to avoid action, because a lack of action would provide no benefit to them.

To argue that the House has genuinely tried to get things done during this session, I would think you would have to assent to one of the following two things:

1. Even with a divided Congress, it is not required for both parties to work together in a bipartisan spirit of compromise to pass meaningful legislation.

2. The current House of Representatives has genuinely tried to work closely together with Senate Democrats and the President in a bipartisan spirit of compromise to pass meaningful legislation.

Do you believe one of these things?

The Dems didn't even bring any of those things up for a vote (even on cloture), so how did the Repubs keep them from passing? (Actually, there were two Senate votes on budget proposals. One was an Obama proposal and it went down something like 97-0. The other was what passed the house, and it went down 47-53. Yup, the Senate Dems haven't voted yes on a budget proposal for three years....)

> a bipartisan spirit of compromise

I see that the repubs have given the dems some things that the dems want and the dems have refused "the deal" because they didn't everything that they wanted. How does that translate to "the repubs won't compromise"?

For example, the Dems claim to want an extension of the payroll tax reduction. The Repubs gave it to them. Is it unreasonable for the Repubs to get something as well?

I'm not saying that the Repubs are blameless, but it's absurd to claim that they're the only ones to blame.

You disagree, so please define this "bipartisan compromise" that the Dems are (at least somewhat) willing to do and that the Repubs are unwilling to do. Do you agree that this definition should be somewhat symmetric?

Note that the payroll tax extension package that passed the House did get some Dem votes. Do you interpret that as "some Dems were willing to compromise" or "Repubs offered a package that was acceptable to some Dems"? How, exactly, did you come to your conclusion?

The idea that Republicans are "compromising" by passing a tax cut really says it all here.

> The idea that Republicans are "compromising" by passing a tax cut really says it all here

You're not paying attention. Obama and the Dems DEMANDED a specific payroll tax cut, which the Repubs provided.

Which reminds me, for two of the three years when the Senate didn't pass a budget, the first two years of Obama's presidency, the House didn't pass a budge either and the Senate didn't even try a vote.

During those two years, the House was controlled by Dems and Dems had 60 votes in the Senate (until Kennedy died). How did the Repubs block things then?

We're talking about the time period leading up to the Civil War, aren't we?

I thought we were talking about 220 some-odd years of history as a constitutional republic.

Still, until Lincoln was elected and states started seceding, they did manage to pass routine funding bills. So that puts them one ahead of the current bunch of goons.

Was it Preston Brooks?

I remember reading about it in one of my american history class.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preston_Brooks

I'd watch CSPAN more if they had officiated brawls :)

I think it is true both that politics were more substantive 30 years ago and that many 19th century presidential campaigns were incredibly nasty.

There tends to be an ebb and flow in these sorts of things. I think that there is a clear case to be made right now that the decline in common news sources among people with different political views in the last 20 years has led to nastier politics. When everyone more-or-less agreed on the facts and many of the terms of debate but disagreed on what the outcome of the debate should be, I think the form that debate took was healthier.

But that period was the byproduct of a limited number of TV news programs all of which adopted a sort of consensus mainstream agenda, combined with a newspaper system with one or two papers per town that tended to do the same. This was a specific period, not an all-purpose "in the old days" thing.

In some earlier eras, it was common for there to be a number of different newspapers in a city, each of which had quite a different agenda -- as still survives in the UK, for example.

I'd suggest there's two types of trolls:

First there are the discourse enhancing trolls, those who provide value to a discussion by suggesting alternative, usually taboo points of view.

Then there's the troll trolls. You know the type. The ones who spew racist or derogatory comments just for the hell of it.

Many people commonly mix the two into a single bucket, which I think is wrong to do, since one is a ++ for a forum, the other a -------.

Anyway, that's my take on the situation as someone who has ran 3 mid size forums in the past.

I don't think the racist and similar ones are the worst. Usually people will just ignore them and they'll get downvoted to hell anyway. Example from Slashdot: "You forgot to mention that you're still gay." I read it and forget it. It doesn't mean anything.

The worst are the flamebaters. Another example from Slashdot (context is Firefox compilation hitting memory limits):

    A- My resource usage rarely goes about 1 GB with multiple applications open.
    B- If your usage rarely goes above 1GB then you're not a user of Firefox

The problem with this is that it's poised to incite a discussion between the people who feel strongly about the issue without adding anything new or useful.

> The process is seemingly held hostage to whoever can scream the loudest.

Some might say that the kabuki theater of American politics is now exposed for the facade that it is given how corrupt and captured our system really is... in fact, the corporatist coup happened a long time ago, and only with the Internet (ie, electronic interaction) is this layer peeled back and exposed.

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