| ▲ | solid_fuel 5 days ago | |
> How did we get to this point. I don't think we ever left? The KKK was still marching in the annual parade in my home town when I was born, in 1994. Emmett Till was lynched in 1955, and still - to this day - racists make a habit of shooting at the memorial sign. [0] Forget don't talk about politics or religion, there's still large portions of the US where you should avoid being visibly black or gay if you want to stay safe. [0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/emmett-till-memori... | ||
| ▲ | enricozb 5 days ago | parent [-] | |
When I say "how did we get here", I don't mean "how did we end up with these opinions (e.g. racism) on our soil". I mean something more like: 1. Why is discussing these things so difficult? So many internet forums are a pure deluge of unkindness, anger, and dishonest discussion. 2. There was a video of someone promoting their social media handle and asking people to subscribe with the backdrop of the shooting. How does someone end up acting like this? I do not think there will be a time where racism is eradicated like a disease, but I think it's possible to confine it to small spaces and individuals. Similar to how I believe the majority of views like pedophelia: people with those mindsets exist, they don't form (huge) groups, and are generally consistently condemned. With the values I believe the US to have (tolerance of opinions and religion) this will always be a constant struggle. Continuing with this disease analogy, the internet + social media has removed all possible herd immunity strategies to stupid ideas. People with any kind of ideology can search up their groups and commiserate, without ever encountering a differing viewpoint. Furthermore, people are offloading their thoughts more and more to LLM's, so much so that we're becoming the mental equivalent of those wall-e humans [0]. We're not thinking for ourselves. Other people are thinking for us, delivering those thoughts to us, pre-digested. This leads to reactionary behavior, I think. And in an environment with such a reactionary populace, populism becomes so easy to exploit. [0]: https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1100/format:webp/1*uFK... P.S. Sorry for the rambling. You're not wrong that the US has been, and still is, incredibly hostile to specifically identifiable groups of people. However, I think that the ability to discuss how to go about solving/remedying/containing this has been uniquely hampered in the last 20 years. | ||
