[snegu]

There is something to this.

I am a big fan of the organization Braver Angels, which is working to reduce polarization and facilitate conversations between people with different viewpoints.

One of their biggest struggles is that they get significant participation from the "blue" tribe, but have trouble recruiting "red" tribe members. Some of this may be skepticism from the red tribe that they will be treated fairly, but I wonder how much is simply lack of interest in understanding others.

[a_conservative]

> but I wonder how much is simply lack of interest in understanding others.

Talk about assuming the worst about people! Let me present an alternate theory: The "blue tribe" is surprised by a "red tribe" reaction more than the "red tribe" is surprised by the "blue tribe".

I read about a study in the lead up to the 2016 election. Conservatives were asked to voice liberal opinions and vice versa. The conservatives were able to voice opposing viewpoints significantly better than those who leaned left wing.

This blog came up while searching for a source on that research and has some other information you might find useful. I can relate to the author's feeling of frustration very well! [0]

[0] https://ricochet.com/76902/archives/conservatives-understand...

[specialist]

Not surprising, given that modern movement conservativism started as a rebellion against the status quo New Deal & Great Society liberal concensus.

[majormajor]

It's hard for me to tell what that means. Does it mean conservatives are doing more work empathy-wise? Does it mean liberal views have more consistency or derivable-reasoning to them, so that they can be understood even without holding them?

> For instance,when conservatives express binding-foundation moral concerns about gay marriage—e.g., that it subverts traditional gender roles and family structures—liberals may have difficulty perceiving any moral value in such traditional arrangements and therefore conclude that conservatives are motivated by simple homophobia, untempered by concerns about fairness, equality, and rights.

This, for instance, seems to boil down to an appeal to authority or appeal to tradition, which, yes, is in the name "conservative" but seems quite circular to use as a reason to hold the position.

"Your position is reasonable on the basis of the dimensions it considers but it fails to consider these other important dimensions" is also MILES away from how popular conservative pundits represent liberal positions.

[a_conservative]

I don't know what it means. I can tell you that as I've become more conservative, I've been less able to express myself freely. I started off life as a liberal and spent most of my adult life not affiliated with a political party. Until recently, I felt like I could pretty much share my thoughts more or less freely.

Socially speaking, I would say that conservatives were generally fair game to make fun of or put down in some way most of the time. Sometimes it would be making fun of rednecks or hillbillies or maybe the Amish. Luddites were fair game to be made fun of. Oftentimes it was less about humor and put downs, but more about moral superiority. This was just my experience, and I'm sure other liberal/progressive/whatever people are struggling to feel accepted in their conservative social circle.

Now that I'm conservative, I talk a lot less about what I think in mixed company. It's simply too risky.

[mcguire]

Speaking as a liberal in a very conservative area, I'm in the same boat. I wouldn't really want to talk politics, but I'm absolutely not going to even if someone else does specifically ask. Liberals are made fun of and regarded as immoral and dangerous. (Which is kind of ironic, given that I have moralistic tendencies. Just Kantian rather than Biblical.)

[a_conservative]

I hope you can avoid becoming bitter. I've struggled with this myself. I appreciate your other response in this thread too. There is some real wisdom to avoiding politics in certain situations. However, if we never talk about things, how does anything get resolved? How divided will we become?

I'm not too surprised that you find conservative arguments unconvincing. In general, purely based on reasoning, I find liberal arguments to be a bit better (on average). Sometimes, they are a lot better. The question for me, is how much weight to put on reasoning. How much value does reasoning have? My personal experience is that reasoning works well for writing software or fixing a bug. It doesn't work as well when I try to use it to decide how I should run my life. In fact, my own reasoning has led me into the pits of hell. That changed my perspective, quite a bit!

I truly hope that you and your friends and coworkers can keep peace and good will towards each other.

[snegu]

I have seen this research before and it's very interesting! But I don't see how it explains why members of the red tribe would not be interested in reaching out and having conversations with blue tribe. What's more likely is your point below about conservatives not feeling safe to express their thoughts around liberals (which I mentioned as a possibility).

[mcguire]

You may be right; it could be that liberals like talking more than listening, or that liberals are good at expressing their opinions (and under the delusion that an opinion presented with logic and evidence automatically means the listener will be converted to that opinion) while conservatives are less so, failing to express their opinions in a way that penetrates that delusion. And unfortunately, I, being a liberal, don't think I have a good idea of conservative opinions. Fortunately, I live in a very conservative area and have access to that most excellent source of opinions, the local newspaper.

Last Wednesday's Jackson County Sentinel (http://jcsentinel.com/) has an editorial by Danny Gardner (https://muckrack.com/daniel-gardner-1/articles), "White House blames misinformation for low vaccination rates."

"Cubans have begun a revolution for freedom...begging US to help them gain their independence. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas warned that Haitians or Cubans who come to America by Sea 'will be returned'.

"Meanwhile, Mayorkas continues to insist that our Southern border 'is closed' while hundreds of thousands of migrants from around the world stream across the closed border to the extent more than one million have crossed this fiscal year. [My note: https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/cbp-enforcement-statistic...]

"Escalating violent crime rates continue to ravage cities across America. [Note: https://www.bbc.com/news/57581270] The 'Defund the Police' movement is alive and well and being cheered on by representatives in Congress. Critical Race Theory (CRT) is dividing parents, teachers, and children into racial and political identity groups in the name of ending racism....

"From January to the middle of May, fourteen states enacted 22 new voting laws. In Philadelphia last week President Biden claimed, 'We are facing the most significant test of our Democracy since the Civil War...' Are new voting laws tantamount to the Civil War?

"...In fact, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki earned the title of Miss Information with some of her comments about monitoring and correcting Facebook and other social media accounts that spread misinformation about COVID, particularly about vaccines.

"...More than 34 million Americans have contracted Covid-19, and well over 33 million recovered. Should they be forced to take the vaccine? How many have died after taking the vaccine? How many have encountered adverse reactions after taking the vaccine? [Note: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/ad...]

"Last year about this time and through the end of the year, the LEFT relentlessly attacked the notion of producing a safe vaccine that could help end the pandemic. The LEFT didn't get onboard with the vaccine until after President Biden was inaugurated. [I do not remember this.] Why? Was it a question of science?

"No one doubts, or should doubt that social media is full of misinformation. That is not news. The real news is the White House's threats to control what its current residents consider to be misinformation. Let's try an experiment: What if President Trump had won? Would some still refuse to take the vaccine? Would the LEFT enthusiastically encourage everyone to take the vaccine?

"Misinformation is not the problem. Politics is the problem. Politics says the border is closed...migrants fleeing Haiti or Cuba will be returned to their failed states...police are making violent crime rates soar...we can end racism by separating people by race...new voting laws are Jim Crow laws. Politics says we will tell you what the truth is and censor what anyone else says.

"Maybe misinformation is the problem? Where is all of this misinformation coming from?" [Elisions mine, my fingers are tired of typing.]

There's a lot of opinions there, including some hidden ones. (Cuban (and Haitian?) immigrants are good, Mexican, Honduran, and Guatemalan are bad?) Some of them I can see as worrying, although I have this strange feeling that Gardner is accusing the LEFT of doing things the right was doing for years. Anyone remember "alternative facts"?

I have a conservative friend who is very concerned about the illegal immigration issue. I'm not sure what his problem with it is, considering I try to avoid getting involved in rants. And especially since some of his best friends are involved in the construction industry, and we're surrounded by poultry operations, both of which might possible have some undocumented workers. I do wonder about his thoughts on the "wall", since he's a retired wildlife biologist and might possibly be concerned about blocking migration routes.

Anyway, back to the Sentinel. Saturday's copy has a letter to the editor from a local: "With the Maricopa County, Arizona adit of the 2020 election results in progress the question of whether the 2020 election was stolen and/or full of significant fraud. [Yeah, that's a sentence fragment. This one's a bad one. But that doesn't mean the opinions are wrong or invalid.] Previous analysis and reports have documented what appears to be a large amount of fraudulent voting, especially in the battleground states, an especially in big cities controlled by the Democrats.

"...Why did the [federal?] courts refuse to hear [cases about election fraud]? ... There were many reasons, but it seems from a Supreme Court standpoint the were influenced by leaving it to the state courts to rule in their own states. [Note: Sho' 'nuff. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25754949] Furthermore, one of the key considerations in the Supreme Court refusing to take on an election case was the threat of violence from the Left. [WHAT?!] The Left (i.e., Democrats) had been rioting, looting, and burning almost continuously since May 2020.

"...threat of violence...the violence of the Democrats and the support of the RINOs...Biden won Arizona by 10,000 votes, but recent preliminary audit results identified 107,000 fraudulent ballots. [I cannot find a reference for this. Maybe https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-elections-arizona-gover...]

"Virtually any and all forensic audits of one of the suspected culprits, Dominion voting machines, have been blocked completely. Antrim County, Michigan remains an obvious example of voting machine fraud with an actual ballot [count] flipped 30% of the voted so that Trump won that [county] by 65 percent to 35 percent. [Note: I think https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-elections-arizona-gover...]

"...So many, many people believe the election was stolen. This must be resolved before the next election. It would be great to conduct said audit and find that fraud was minimal and didn't affect the outcome of the election.

"The United States had a great four years under President Donald Trump who I consider to be our greatest President of the past 100 years. Why? He told the TRUTH! His actions "Made America Great Again". Now we are ruled by a political party that is "Making America Poor," and doing great harm to the prosperity and integrity of the USA. Our Founders produced a country that has been the greatest country ever.

"It was a country based on Biblical standards, men and women who were dependent on God, and people who were obedient to God's will. Trump wasn't perfect nor have the people been, but great things have been done.

"Corrections have been made. In large part, our current leaders have abandoned God's instructions to follow their own. Democrat Congressman Gerald Nadler said it so well, 'God's will is no concern of Congress.'"

Now, I (as I linked to above) did a look-see at the court cases about 2020 election fraud. In the ones that actually presented evidence, that evidence was examined by the courts carefully---many specifically mentioned allowing the plaintiffs extra latitude due to the importance. However, in all the cases, the evidence was very weak. (I didn't see any mentioning violence from the Left.) At the federal level, most of them were completely out of place. (And a surprising number died on a precedent set by G.W. Bush in 2000.) Audits have been performed (And by people with skills and experience. Cyber Ninjas? Really?); they just didn't provide the result this writer and many other conservatives seem to have wanted. So I don't have much enthusiasm for the opinion that the election was stolen. Sorry.

I was also in Texas when Lloyd Benson retired and his "safe" district was divvied up to ensure that Travis County would never elect another Democrat (https://ftp.txdot.gov/pub/txdot-info/tpp/maps/texas-senate.p...). So, yeah, I look at the recent spate of election laws with a certain amount of skepticism.

As for being dependent on God's will, let's just say I'm an atheist. Let's further say that, in my historical view, governing based on God's instructions was kind of a bad idea. For moral and ethical reasons.

That leaves me with a final set of opinions that I can't really argue with: I'm a despicable, anti-American, violent liar. Which may well be true. Heck, I might even have committed a capitol crime (https://www.amazon.com/Treason-Liberal-Treachery-Cold-Terror...).