I hope you understand how exhausting it is to have to deal with so many other people being like this with little in the way of backup - for every ideologically similar user on here there are like half a dozen who aren't and have no problem arguing with me at length.
I'm sure it is exhausting to take stances that morally require you to litigate so many things, and litigate each of them as if they were of crucial importance
and perfectly obvious to any reasonable person. But there are other ways to approach the inherent unpleasantness of, well, other people.
And I think you've been around long enough to know that I understand quite well how exhausting that can be. And you may recall that I somehow managed to argue for what I believed without thinking the fact that I had to do so was some kind of horrible commentary on humanity, or a good reason to question basic civility, or whatever other special pleading you care to use to imply that your discomfort with other viewpoints is somehow worse or more valid than everyone else's.
Yeah, well, a lot can happen in eighteen years, especially when it comes to online discourse and how it's gone well beyond milquetoast agree-to-disagree conversation that exists at a remove from any sort of real-world ramifications that can't really be applied as much now that the discourse has "evolved" and the Internet itself has its own real-world ramifications. There are obviously degrees of disagreeability at work and everyone seems to have their own idea of where to draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable, but if we're going to talk perspective then I think part of that is recognising the flaws in thinking that the "compartmentalised" disagreements are automatically better for favouring ineffectual both-sides-are-valid compromises over blatant zero-sum games that are at least prepared to acknowledge that some ideological differences (not all of them or perhaps most of them, but at the very least some of them) are irreconcilable.
Whether a difference is
irreconcilable is a separate question from whether it's
unconscionable, or whether it needs to be fought continually.
As for empathy, I question how much that actually matters when it comes to understanding where people are coming from on a particular issue
Seeing as how "understanding where people are coming from" is almost the literal definition of empathy, I'm not sure how you'd go about questioning that.
and how much you can extend to people who aren't particularly interested in returning the favour.
Nobody's asking anyone to be nice to someone who's being crappy to them, if that's what you mean. Though even if someone is being crappy, the context of just what you're insinuating about them probably plays a role. If people hear it suggested that belief X is bigoted or even just ridiculous, yeah, you might get some snippiness from the people who don't think it is. That kinda stuff poisons the well pretty quick.
The Scarlett Johansson thread was full of users who just wanted to rant about "outrage mobs" or whatever rather than extend much empathy to people who might be affected by any actual consequences of the whole scenario
I don't know how you can say something like this right after defending the idea of taking a "zero sum" posture. You don't see the connection there, or how it demonstrates exactly what I'm saying about degrees of disagreeableness?
Closed Thread
So that's why forum doesn't stir up. Because what else is there to do than to rate movies you watched random grades from 6 to 8 and give some generic opinions on then?