[Justsignedup]

This is silly:

“In my hometown in India, everyone talks about politics all the time. And most of us don’t agree with one another. But that’s okay. I can even tease other people about our political disagreements and it doesn’t get in the way of friendships. Why isn’t that the case here in the US?”

Because when you're in a homogenous in-group you can discuss politics and get annoyed, or heated, and shake hands and go home.

When you're not in an in-group, one side is discussing non-ideal solutions, and the other side wants to destroy you. And then you have to figure out how to convince a friend that their political ideology might kill you.

[lolinder]

Read the rest of the post. Indian politics are not somehow lower stakes than ours, the Indian subcontinent is not less diverse, and the author's friend included a specific example of people getting literally killed over their politics.

[nineplay]

I'm still puzzled over the article frankly. In India there's political violence and people are getting killed - but they still are happy to discuss politics with their friends and neighbors? There's a disconnect there that I'm not getting. Why are they talking to everyone about their political views if it might get them killed?

[lolinder]

That's the question that the Indian person is asking.

Here in the US we'll refuse to interact with someone if we find out that they're part of the wrong tribe, but our political violence is pretty low on the scale of what's possible.

There, they have a lot of political violence and from what I understand quite divisive political issues that put people's lives and livelihoods at stake, but apparently they don't have the culture of avoiding talking about it altogether that we do and they don't attempt to avoid associating with anyone who disagrees with them.

[shusaku]

When reading an article like this, I think westerners get guilt tripped. We must be wrong, just look at all the troubles we have. Maybe if we talked more things would be better.

But maybe the real take way here is that people in Indian should talk less about politics!

[whaaaaat]

I don't refuse to interact with people of the wrong "tribe", I make sure to ask for their political positions on, e.g., "should interracial marriage be allowed? Should we allow trans people to change their birth certificates?"

If someone is like, "Nah, those things are bad" then I'm happy to not associate with them because I find their beliefs abhorrent. It has nothing to do with tribal affiliation and everything to do with policy.

[zero-sharp]

>It has nothing to do with tribal affiliation and everything to do with policy.

This is absolutely not how a lot of people operate.

[kelseyfrog]

I'm sensing some sort of neurotypical/neurodiverse divide here.

I don't think it's unreasonable to live a morally comprehensive life. For example, I probably couldn't be friends with a white-supremacist even if they were kind, gentle, supportive, and caring. Some folks are able to look past those things and more power to them. I, however, couldn't sleep at night.

[nineplay]

Maybe they'd have less political violence if they didn't associate with people who disagree with them. I'm not sure I'm convinced that dying for your political views is a fair price to pay for conversations with your neighbors.

[lolinder]

I'm not convinced that the two are correlated. We did just fine associating with people of different political perspectives and discussing politics with them all the way up through 2008 at least, ~~without the violence~~. [Scratching this part out because it's drawing plenty of justified criticism. I stand by the rest, and this part was generally true—with small exceptions—from at least 1990-2008.]

The complete refusal to interact with someone who disagrees with you is a relatively new phenomenon that seems to have risen alongside social media.

[whaaaaat]

> We did just fine associating with people of different political perspectives...

We most certainly did not. Point to an era where there wasn't political violence in the US.

Jim Crow? Civil rights era? WTO Protests? Vietnam war protests? Rodney King? Stonewall? Like... this country has been violent about politics since this country was a country.

Growing up I was afraid to be even remotely "non-manly" because I was so worried I'd be dragged behind someone's truck.

[pdonis]

> We did just fine associating with people of different political perspectives and discussing politics with them all the way up through 2008 at least, without the violence.

No, we didn't. Look up what happened in the 1960s. And even that was mild compared to what went on in election campaigns in the 19th century in the US.

[shiroiushi]

>We did just fine associating with people of different political perspectives and discussing politics with them all the way up through 2008 at least, without the violence.

You must have forgotten the US Civil War, plus all the turbulence of the 1960s.

The big difference there was that, for the most part, the two sides were geographically separated from each other.

>The complete refusal to interact with someone who disagrees with you is a relatively new phenomenon that seems to have risen alongside social media.

If you're thinking of the early-to-mid 20th century, things have changed. America has become much more diverse, and co-mingled (in the past, immigrant and other minority groups tended to keep to themselves and not socially interact so much with other groups). White European-descended people are no longer the overwhelming majority (remember, immigrants in the past mostly came from Europe), religion has lost much of its power and many of its believers, homosexuality has become far more accepted, basically one side feels existentially threatened, and the other side oppressed.

[sunshowers]

Disagrees with you on what, exactly? Be specific.

[asynchronous]

There’s literally no way the nation of India is more diverse than the United States- we have the biggest spread of racial, and religious diversity on the planet, by far.

[lolinder]

With all due respect, please do some research on India before asserting something like this.

We're taking about a country with ~4x the population of the US where no single language has the majority of native speakers (the closest is Hindi at 26% [0]). 12 different languages are spoken natively by >1% of the population. India has diversity that someone born in the US can't even begin to comprehend.

I think it's hard for Westerners to understand because we view diversity through such a skin color and organized religion lens. 'Everyone' in India is dark-skinned and most are Hindu, so that means they're not diverse, right?

The trouble is that that's a very Western perspective on both ethnicity and on religion, one that doesn't carry over at all.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_...

[BurningFrog]

India has 450 languages, 5x the US population, all religions, and plenty of different races.

[sunshowers]

Actually there's a very easy empirical way to test this claim: look at the amount of subsampling pollsters do. In the US samples are typically weighted after the raw data is collected, by:

gender

age

white college, white non-college, Black, Latino/Hispanic, Asian

party registration

For 1000 samples you get the standard MoE of 3ish percent.

In India you start by dividing up the electorate into hundreds of strata, sample independently from each stratum, then piece it together. This results in Indian polling sample sizes being over 100k for the same 3% MoE.

This is pretty objective evidence of India's diversity.

(I am curious though if 2024 is going to cause pollsters to re-examine polling basics in the US. There are several major warning signs this year that polling is broken, even if it produces the right result in the end.)

[whaaaaat]

I think you need to spend some time learning about India. The US is FAR more of a monoculture than India is.

[theshackleford]

Not from any statistics I can tell you don't.

[selimthegrim]

They’ve had a little more time to work on it.

[corimaith]

The conclusion of this viewpoint is that you either turn everyone into the in-group or one group comes out on top of the others. Either way, diversity won't survive long under that.

[ziJsbcidanais]

That’s how it’s worked for nearly all of history. A decent read is this book (which was on obamas summer reading list one year): https://www.amazon.com/Great-Experiment-Diverse-Democracies-.... Diversity has never really worked before.

Diversity has historically been used to keep populations divided allowing a smaller group to rule over them. Plenty of historical examples (Italy, Ottoman Empire, etc) as well as literature. I think this is described in Machiavelli’s “The Prince”.

And both current US candidates are pushing for immigration/diversity (albeit from different groups, but the end result is the same). The real reason we can’t discuss politics is because our elites want us divided, and they have the means to accomplish that.

[orionsbelt]

What US political ideology are you worried will kill you?