I think an awful lot of Americans have family members on "the other side" even if they mostly associate with their own kind otherwise. So people know something first hand, completely apart from "journalism and social media".
At this point, the people I know who are on the right seem to be basically "waiting for the rapture", i.e. when the global conspiracy of literally everyone in the world against Trump will be revealed. While denying that they are a fan of the President, but both sides are criminal and bad, etc.
Discussing current events ends up being like watching Clint Eastwood argue with a chair. It clearly isn't fun for them, nor are they having any real dialogue. So it feels bad, and you try not to talk about politics any more.
I tried repeatedly with someone I know to propose that, if you don't trust anything in the "MSM", why don't you read the documents that are making news, the primary source when it's easily available? I rephrased it three times or so and it didn't stop the rant.
And I'm talking about someone who is really not that dumb, has a decent job, and is fine to talk to on other things than politics. But I just can't envision what a "serious effort" to break through would even look like.
I too know a few of the stereotypical "beyond delusional" types on the right, they do exist. But then I also know several onm the left whose take on things is "rather inconsistent" with a serious reading of the primary sources, and some reasonable, unemotional compilation. I imagine they are less crazy, and they are certainly better spoken (better vocabularies, etc), but I'd be interested to see an omniscient being's tally of the true distributed craziness out there.
Also, one shouldn't overlook things like confirmation bias - for every highly visible crazy you or I see, on either side, how many non-vocal people with reasonable ideas are there that the mind doesn't see, and therefore perceives to not exist (depending on the mode of thinking?
And then for those that do appear batshit insane - are they really as deluded as their words suggest? Your experiences seem to suggest so, but my question is: how do we go from the brutal discourse we've got going on now, to somewhere more reasonable? What actions do we have to take as a society, and as individuals (whether we "like to" or "should have to", or not), and what changes do we need to our social media platforms and media?
> But I just can't envision what a "serious effort" to break through would even look like.
I think both the way we report the news, and the way we discuss it, need a serious overhaul. The current approach of "news event/article --> social media argument --> go to bed -- > wake up --> (slightly updated) news event/article --> social media argument" is just an endless loop of outrage. I believe if we instead had some sort of a persistent model of each issue, showing all of the important attributes (with citations) and various and conflicting perspectives that we could refer to during debate rather than the latest news article, I think the conversation would be very different.
Compare how we discuss and analyze the complex matters and news of the world (which typically involve systems of some kind), versus how we do the same for complex systems at work - do the two approaches resemble each other?
At this point, the people I know who are on the right seem to be basically "waiting for the rapture", i.e. when the global conspiracy of literally everyone in the world against Trump will be revealed. While denying that they are a fan of the President, but both sides are criminal and bad, etc.
Discussing current events ends up being like watching Clint Eastwood argue with a chair. It clearly isn't fun for them, nor are they having any real dialogue. So it feels bad, and you try not to talk about politics any more.
I tried repeatedly with someone I know to propose that, if you don't trust anything in the "MSM", why don't you read the documents that are making news, the primary source when it's easily available? I rephrased it three times or so and it didn't stop the rant.
And I'm talking about someone who is really not that dumb, has a decent job, and is fine to talk to on other things than politics. But I just can't envision what a "serious effort" to break through would even look like.
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