But I hope you can see that there are a large number of people who see a physical assault on the peaceful transition of power as a threat to the continuance of our government. An existential threat.

We are never going to change our minds on this and you have no right to ask us to overlook it because that's sort of like asking us to ignore an arsonist who we know set a fire, who has proclaimed the desire to set fires.

Violence was used to disrupt the peaceful transition of power. Violence was used to disrupt the peaceful transition of power. Violence was used to disrupt the peaceful transition of power.

How can you possibly ask people to look past this? With a straight face?

You're one of those people, I suspect, who gets tripped up on literal definitions of things. It doesn't matter what, specifically, is an attempted coup and what isn't. People will use imprecise terminology and if you want to talk politics you may just have to grow up about that fact.

Violence was used to disrupt the peaceful transition of power.

I'm unsurprised that HN is being exploited this way, but I am pleasantly surprised that there are people seeing them in operation like yourself and the others speaking up.

The truth gets buried, ultimately, not by these bad-faith arguments, but by the giant thread above consisting of those who prefer to live in the world of the 90s where Republicans and Democrats worked to further their specific interests collectively in an organized fashion, and listening to both sides made sense.

I don't know if the memo is going to get out: those Republicans are gone. Those days are gone. Once the party has turned fascist I don't think there's going back, it's not like they can turn away from their deceived or delusional voters.

HN isn't a politics forum, its only function is to provide value for YCombinator. It can't address these foundational failures in human thinking.

But it's informative to see it struggle and fail.

Once you know a clock is broken don't use it to tell the time.

Burn it all down.

If it's that easy for Russians to influence our politics, why wouldn't the Chinese perceive that there is low-hanging fruit in running general disruption?

There is no good strategy to convince the unscientific. Your project of seeking a good strategy is deluded nattering which adds nothing.

Your strategy, in other words, is bad.

To reiterate: Referencing the bad arguments of other people is stupid. Don't do it.

Racists aren't going to be convinced that Black Lives Matter but if I spend my time pointing that out in every topic about a cop killing a human being I'm doing something wrong.

You talk past the topic. You get called out on it. You double down. You loftily say that we're talking past each other, when you're the one who tries to insist we follow you on a journey to how science is a religion.

Naturally your experience must be that people are talking past you. Because you don't know how to engage in the conversation, you just know how to divert.

If you insist on talking past the topic then pointing out that we're talking past each other is your first step to, maybe, perhaps, noticing that your approach to this conversation is the problem.

It is nothing like faith.

Don't make your problem with the available evidence a question of faith or you discredit faith.

Like I said, don't bring faith into politics.

If you believe that people who believe climate change is an emergency are taking part in a faith-based movement that is a huge logical error on your part.

Faith is a personal choice. Examining evidence and coming to a conclusion about what is real is a matter of logic and reasoning. They are completely different, and mixing them is not just poor form, it exposes your motivated reasoning.