While you're talking about next time like it's years away, they are planning more of the same as early as the 17th, and the 20th itself seems like a juicy target, especially if the Capitol police hierarchy continue to aid the terrorists. Twitter's reasoning for banning the realDonaldTrump account is that his last tweets must be suspected of being dog-whistles to encourage further terrorism. In particular, they interpret "I'm not going to attend" as "I won't be harmed however indiscriminately you shoot or bomb". What if the bombs brought by the terrorists go off - inside the building - next time?
Yeah all possible. The Arab Spring revolutions were all planned and executed through dog whistles on social media so we'd be fools to underestimate how it could continue to work that way with ease.
What gets me about this is they wave the American flag while dividing the nation, forgetting that one of our primary values as a nation is united we stand, divided we fall. It's as true then as now. This is all the work of foreign psyops dividing us deeply and so many of us are just too stupid to see it. It's one thing to disagree on Globalism or Economic policy, civics choices and so on, but it's gone beyond that into a sense that it's 'our America' against 'their America' when our whole concept all along was to enable OUR America to be the one where we all had a voice, and yes we won't always agree with one another, so we let the majority decide, for the most part, on policy, as that is what Democracy is about, much as many wish to demonize this as being 'Mob Rule' whenever that opinion goes against theirs.
Only for some this is about racism - for most they think it's about opposing communism, socialism, globalism, islam etc... all of which if they understood the concepts beyond the fact that they've been made 'trigger words' that indicate 'alien agendas we need to hate people for embracing because we would never agree to take on those concepts (whatever they actually are)' - and the truth is they rarely actually understand those concepts at all.
The left is being equally radicalized to trigger-hate 'capitalism' without it being very understood either - 'it's a system designed to make slaves out of everyone but the wealthy' I often hear, when in fact, the goal of the system is to make it possible for anyone to break free from poverty.
We all need some honest education out here that unifies how we speak about things rather than turns particular words into emotional bombs where we hear them and suddenly cannot think anything but positive or negative about them. Yes, we have problems and need to fix them. And if we weren't stuck with a government that's mostly serving the whims of wealth and we could truly have more honest and educated discussions about these issues and why and how our systems are designed to fail as a feature rather than a bug, we would maybe be able to start releasing our anger and start working better together and the solutions start looking more obvious.
But we also have to figure out how to keep all this whispering in our ears things we sorta agree with that then keep pushing us to further radicalized edges from making it impossible to understand without demonizing the people at the other side of the boat. We are ALL part of the problem at times.
One thing that MIGHT help is a game like this. How? I cannot say how many ways my perspective has changed due to seeing the world through the various consequential, rather than intentionally manipulated, lenses of our perspective in playing 'the state'. I have realized that the world will NEVER be safe from the technology we invented for war without eventually globalizing into one peaceful and harmonious nation. I have realized that our prehistoric origins must have left a very deep scar on our psyches that make us all act in certain ways that often runs counter to the idea of a cooperative society, much as it also gives us the imperative to work in cooperative manners as well. I know we can promote or propose or color the results of a particular religious or political worldview with the game as it is structured and I like that we try NOT to color things to one given conclusion but rather show all the pros and cons that people claim about them, perhaps in an effort to show how imperfect every system actually is. And the more honest as designers we are in this effort, the more we help to get people to see how much we may actually agree about a lot we THINK we disagree on.
We can also do more to show how such ideas can be weaponized and used to tear a nation apart without war even being waged. We can show how destabilizing the leading nation may become a hugely destructive problem for everyone. We can show that such a leading superpower may be exerting great expense and power out of an understanding that it is responsible for letting a blackball tech genie out of the bottle - thus responsible for never letting that technology that could tear the entire planet apart from ever being allowed to do so. We could show why rival powers desperately want to cast the world into that destabilization so THEY can ascend to that place of supremacy instead, and how dangerous a goal for all of us that actually is because of the likelihood of absolute devastation that would engulf us all if they ever get their way.
Yes, globally, the US has overexerted its power, and yes, understandably, we've made enemies out of nearly everyone, and it makes sense why we can see nearly every rival nation doing all it can to create unrest here - if we destroy ourselves, it seems that 'war' may not be necessary to allow them the room to 'breath' without our policies and embargoes and other forms of financial diplomacy tools 'holding them down' - often I'm sure in ways that feel very unfair.
Funny how any 'player' in this game would feel that way about a leading entity and how easy it is for our prehistoric tribal brains to demonize and mistrust the intentions we don't understand of others - particularly others with power, and how we never really feel comfortable unless it's 'us', whoever or whatever groups you put yourself in the Venn Diagram of Humanity into are 'in charge'. And few of us care if we are deserving of a punishment so much as we care we aren't experiencing one.
But I'm going to pause to make the point again - and it stands for us ALL on this one small rock we could easily destroy with our frustrations boiling over - United we stand, Divided we fall. Globalism doesn't HAVE to mean we must figure out how to suppress most people on the planet - it CAN mean that we can somehow learn how to respect the wide variety of our worldviews and rejoice that our differences, thanks to our ability to specialize in varying ways based on those differences, make us stronger in a greater union, not weaker.