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.
I simply can't imagine the level of bias and filter bubbled amount of media indoctrination it takes to say this with a straight face.
The party of "freedom and guns" showed up with 500,000 people, left all their guns at home, but "attempted a coup"? Utterly ridiculous.
This is what a coup looks like: https://www.occupy.com/sites/default/files/field/image/scree...
Notice the number of guns vs. flags.
This is what a protest looks like: https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Jan_6_...
Notice the number of flags, and no guns whatsoever.
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.