@freemo Alas, when the talking ends, the fighting begins. Das ist nicht gut.
🇳🇱
@lordalveric Yup, it all started with 911, fear got the best of us and it was downhill from there... With this quarantine bullshit it worried me where this might take us now.
@freemo Yes, I am concerned about not only the quarantine BS, but also the border closings.
I can understand closing the borders, but the way this was done was without warning. Now, I cannot visit my wife in Poland. Kinda sucks.
But in general, there's a lot of disturbing things transpiring now. Germany will throw you in jail for up to 5 years or a €25,000 fine if you gather in groups greater than 50... but I think the bar is lower than that now.
It's gotten to the point where I'm thinking perhaps it would be better if I were back in the US, with all the shitstorms that await me there.
@lordalveric Im not concerned so much about the immediate actions, borders, or quarintine or whatever.. But the truth is this thing may very well be with us for years, maybe forever.. how will that fear be taken advantage of long term?
@freemo My thought precisely. We both know that whenever government say something is just "temporary", it usually winds be being exactly the opposite.
@lordalveric Yup... still waiting for that temporary Patriot Act to be taken off the books.....
@freemo Yep. Obama kept reauthorizing it year after year. I thought for sure he would end it. Boy, I could not have been more wrong. Yes, he's a stinky Democrat, but I was just hoping....
@lordalveric What are the links?
@stevenroose @lordalveric it represents how they vote on bills IIRC
Yea I just double checked to make sure my memory was correct, it was... links represent voting pair agreement. when two people vote the same they get a link, the more they vote the same the thicker the link. This apparently is then organized with a graph drawing algorithm, likely force-directed by the looks of it.
Here is the original video it comes from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEczkhfLwqM
@freemo
Thanks for posting the video... The meme skipped decades but in the video it looks life the break was about 1991. This would have been the election of 1990, mid term election of Bush #1, and it got more polarized from there.
"
The Democratic Party built on its majorities in both chambers of Congress. They picked up a net of one seat in the Senate."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990_United_States_elections
My guess is that the division after 9/11 and with Obama and Trump is a symptom of existing problems rather than something new.
Yes the polarization was starting just slightly before 9/11. My guess is if 9/11 never happened the polarization would have been transient and went away long before now. But 9/11 accelerated it and cemented it as a permanent fixture.
@freemo @SecondJon @stevenroose
I fear that you may be right on this. Where this will lead in the next decade or two is scary, to say the least.
May be safer to be here rather than there. And all the more reason to renounce.
@lordalveric Come the election it seems the US has a choice Trump or it seems Biden. Plus a political class more interested in arguing and infighting. Doesn't bode well for the next 4 years really, something has to change with the western political systems.
@zleap Perhaps the world's first global ideological cleansing? All this global warming this and CoVID-19 that, and we wind up taking ourselves out being at each other's throats.
@lordalveric I've shared this before but I will never not share it.