I believe this akin to someone saying all Muslims are terrorists.
This really isn't the best way to start off a post imploring someone to respect other people's beliefs.
I'm glad you're posing this as a hypothetical because I believe that this way of thinking is what has actually divided the country. Blaming Trump for that is a cop out.
You're right about blaming Trump, if only because he's a symptom of a much greater problem.
First of all, a person's beliefs need to be respected, and it's the actions of people that define them, not their beliefs.
I would say that openly admitting to holding disrespectful or even outright toxic beliefs counts as a defining action.
Secondly, there are many people on both sides who hold their beliefs simply because they are misinformed.
True.
Don't like Trump's personality? I get that, but I see none of his political actions thus far to be anything outrageous enough to cause the lack of civility between the people that we have.
How hard are you looking?
I think it's less that it's "easy" and more that literally everyone is nuanced and complicated, and the only time we can't conveniently forget this is when we know them.
I guess.
Well, you've spent the last few posts describing how awful it is, so I think we can start with the premise that the bar on those alternatives should be pretty low.
Probably.
If you're implying there's some fundamental difference between the two, I don't see it. At least not in the context I'm describing: I was similarly "outnumbered" and found it similarly exhausting, but didn't think humanity was doomed because people stubbornly refused to agree with me. I didn't think the rules were unfair or flawed or that everyone was awful just because I wasn't constantly and immediately winning.
How nice for you.
This feels like a larger version of the same thing we all go through as young people, where we have that "why don't we just do X?" posture in response to the problems of the world. And then we realize logistics are a thing, or we Google "moral hazard" one day and hopefully we come out the other side more tolerant, realizing that the problems are problems because this stuff isn't obvious, actually, and lots of smart, well-meaning people think differently. Unless, of course, we refuse to learn that lesson and double down, and insist the system must be broken if the world isn't reshaped the way we think it should be.
Why not both?
Incidentally, if you think I was describing you just then, note how well it describes some Trump supporters, too. And that's the point: if your argument mostly boils down to "but they're awful!" you have to grapple with the fact that they sometimes think you're awful, too. That's why these conventions exist in the first place: they're not tools of oppression or the status quo. They allow people to co-exist amidst irreconcilable differences. They're protecting you as much as you think they're protecting all the awful people over there.
Am I supposed to infer from that "too" that I would've been right to think you were talking about me anyway? I guess it wouldn't surprise me anyway, nor would the idea that the other side would consider my views awful (or else we probably wouldn't be having this interaction).
I think so. I think one means you're not going to agree, but the other implies you can't even fathom how anyone could.
Duly noted.
Fights break out continually when they are provoked continually. Raising these issues in public is obviously not a neutral act.
Anyway, if your policy is essentially to argue with pretty much anyone who pushes back on the latest progressive causes, yeah, you're gonna find it exhausting. You'd find it similarly exhausting if you decided you had some kind of moral duty to argue with every movie rating you didn't agree with. Nothing remarkable about that. What's remarkable is deciding you need to do this in the first place.
Who else would do it?
I don't think that's real empathy, then. I'm not sure it's possible to genuinely empathize without being able to at least sorta find your way to the belief in question, intellectually.
Anyway, at minimum you'd need a general understanding of conservative thought that isn't just something patronizing about how people emotionally react to change, or whatever. And, to be perfectly blunt, I'm not convinced you really get the intellectual moorings of most conservative ideas.
It probably doesn't help that most of the conservatives I do get exposed to don't exactly display much in the way of intellectual rigour.
If what you're "explaining" is why something they believe is actually bigoted, then I think the "calmly and rationally" part is probably not a relevant factor in how it's received.
Some things you just can't be nice about, I guess.
If your posture is "zero sum," IE: there is no neutrality, and that any silence or agree-to-disagree is actually a form of aggression because it favors the status quo, then you've erased the difference between the people who disagree amicably and those that are disagree aggressively. So there's not much reason to be in the former rather than the latter if (when) you feel attacked.
I think there's probably no way to proceed with this discussion unless we actually get into the views themselves, because I think it's really just going to boil down to "but I just find these views horrible." I don't think they're actually unprecedented or unique or special in some way that leaves you no choice but to suspend normal rules of civility and debate. So we'd have to talk about your own views, and whether they're as reasonable as you think. Spoiler alert: I don't think they are. I'd even say some are straight-up logically invalid, and even self-contradictory. Though notice I've not felt the need to force you to defend them each time the issue has come up.
Anyway, I'm up for all that, and I think that's kinda the only thing left to be done or said. Anything else is going to leave us at an impasse where I talk about not hating people for believing different things and you think I'm asking you to shake a Nazi's hand, or something.
I would think it depends on how aggressive the status quo is in the first place more so than how strongly one agrees or disagrees about whether it should continue to exist in its current form. Also, why am I not surprised that you don't exactly hold my personal views in high regard (or possibly don't get the "intellectual moorings", but like you said, that's its own discussion)? As for the matter of suspending civility and debate, I'd have to ask what exactly about these particular views that you don't consider sufficiently exceptional.
This is my general position. There was a big ol' fight wayyyyy back in the first year or two of the site's existence about the prominence of Intermission over movie-talk threads, and there was even a major exodus of members who resented it when I suggested they maybe focus on movies, since that's the idea here. But that's what's sustainable: the thing that brought people here in the first place. The thing they have in common.
Things are definitely less pleasant here in many threads, but that's true in every corner of the Internet right now. This is a big problem with the discourse (and, I think, inherent to the very nature of mass communication, which people are not actually built for at all), but it's much bigger than this site, and I tend to think we've been hit with it a lot less than most other places.
Anyway, the answer is talking more about movies. I bring up the live-and-let-live stuff because that's an inevitable part of it. If you despise people in one thread, it's pretty hard to go good-naturedly fight about whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie in another.
You'd think so, but now everyone's arguing about the politics of the movies as well - you could start a "Is
Die Hard a Christmas movie" thread now and it stands a good chance of turning into arguments over Sgt. Powell's tragic backstory ageing badly or whatever.
Die Hard is DEFINITELY a Christmas movie.
And yes, the bickering and name-calling is *everywhere* these days. Twitter explodes with it daily. And don't get me started on how ugly so much of my Facebook newsfeed has been the past year and a half. There are too many people on both ends of the political spectrum who just can't seem to get on with their lives after the political issues of 2016. It astounds and scares me how little some people want to get on with their lives, how much they can hang on to bitterness over political beliefs.
It's FAR worse elsewhere than it is here.
Perhaps "getting on with their lives" isn't really an option in some cases. That obviously affects people in ways where the bitterness goes beyond performative arguing.