[whaaaaat]

Practice is important. And being able to say, "I disagree, and discussing it further won't change my mind" is important.

But many of the current political topics are life or death for parts of the community. Like, I know plenty of trans sysadmins for whom politics isn't just "well, one party advances ideas I support and the other less so". For them it's "One party will make my every waking moment a nightmare".

I understand why, even with practice, some political positions are simply intolerable for them. (And to me, this feels different than, say, "I have opinions about which rate I should be taxed" though I admit tax rates could be life or death for some people.)

[nataliste]

And this is precisely why people, not just Americans, can't disagree about politics over time. Politics always turns into someone having the perspective "civil disagreement cannot be tolerated because the stakes are too high for my side" which is anethema to reason and concord regardless of whether it's actually true or not.

Catastrophizing is always incentivized in the immediate term because it forces any interlocutor(a) to address it at the expense of any other topic and then the catastrophizer can accuse them of apathy and marginialization if they don't show the requisite enthusiasm and deference.

It's a no-win situation for anyone attempting to deescalate and many just check-out rather than deal with the litany of accusations, which I guess is another kind of victory for the catastrophizers.

[bongoman42]

This. I've had conversations with PhD folks who are genuinely afraid Trump getting elected will mean their naturalized citizenships will be reversed and they'll be deported. I've had conversations with gay Americans who asked me if they should consider moving to Canada because Trump may remove recognition for gay marriages. Both of these positions are so far out of the likelihood of things that may happen that there is no reason to think about them at all, and yet they do. There is little point in discussion at that point.

[locopati]

What reason do you think it's unlikely? He's talked about it. The Supreme Court has talked about it. The Republican party has talked about it.

[bongoman42]

Talked about what? Trump was in power for 4 years, neither of those things came even close to happening. Trump has explicitly said he wants more legal immigration. He has said he wants to stamp Green Cards on everyone graduating from a US college. Vance has explicitly said they're not looking to break up loving families.

[locopati]

why on earth would we believe anything they say?

[fragmede]

But what's special about Americans and politics? If I told my coworkers I think the Earth is flat, they'd think I was an idiot and shrug and then continue to work with me. But somehow knowing how I vote is a shortcut to assuming I've drunk the party koolaid and believe in everything the party does and then we can't work together? The extreme sides of both parties are just that, extremes, and don't represent my beliefs on any number of issues, but it's a two party system so you have to go with one or the other, or throw your vote away. Elsewhere, people can work together just fine knowing their coworkers voted for the wrong party.

[from-nibly]

Why not just throw your vote away anyway? Whats the point unless you live in a swing state? Also why give the government any ammunition to legitimize their existence in the first place.

[nataliste]

>Whats the point unless you live in a swing state?

The game theory strategy in the electoral college is to register and vote as the non-dominant party in any election. If enough people follow this strategy, the locality becomes a swing state and the party platform and candidates will reflect their interests.

>Also why give the government any ammunition to legitimize their existence in the first place.

Until the government collapses, they still control the monopoly on violence. Unless you're a radical pacifist and willing to be the sacrificial lamb, there is a pretty clear need to participate to the extent that the wolf of government doesn't eat you. The punishment which the wise suffer who refuse to take part in the government is to live under the government of worse people.

[from-nibly]

Worrying about which government is worse is a much worse punnishment for me. Also why not just let it get worse maybe it will help more people wake up.

[nataliste]

fragmede, 2017:

>I’m not sure what’s turned the tide for me, but I now believe there are limits to free speech. It turns out that some ideas are toxic, as in, people get sucked into them, are too stubborn/whatever to admit they were wrong, and become rabid believers of nonsense.

>Witness the adherents to the flat earth society or those that stringently don’t believe we landed on the moon, never [sic] the Googler’s sexist manifesto. Anti-semitic screeds like “the Jews run the banks and this is why you’re poor!” frequently leak into open comment sections of your local news’ website, or YouTube comments.

It's not just Americans. The worst offenders tend to be those that believe that they are immune to it.

[fragmede]

Not wanting people to led to believe in a flat earth, and being able to work with people that believe in a flat earth are two different ideas that I don't believe contract each other, but I'm honored you think my writing is worth reading that much of!

[nataliste]

Is flat earth actually catastrophical for you? It seems like other catastrophized topics are much greater points of passion.

>When Twitter pretends to be powerless to do anything about death/rape threats to women journalists, the light of civilization is dimmed, ever so slightly. When entire classes of people disengage from mainstream discourse because they are being threatened by bodily harm, maybe it is possible that it is disingenuous to pre-conclude that anything possibly resembling censorship will result in a dystopian police state where African Americans are still denied the right to vote.

Would you honestly be willing to work or discuss politely with someone that endorsed the ideas behind James Damore's memo? Your writing (at least as of 2017) suggests not.

[fragmede]

As you've thoughtfully pointed out, that was seven years ago in 2017. The world's changed since then and I've changed with it. Flat Earth is totally not a real issue, but it's a way for me to bring up the fact that unless we're working together as sailors and you're the navigator and the position of the stars above your flat Earth is going to get us stranded, the amount of shared reality we need to have in order to actually work is surprisingly low. At the end of the day we have to coexist, and I realize that I can know that someone read Damore and shares his views and is not in HR, and I can agree to disagree with them and still do things - work, grab a beer, go on trips - with them because the alternative is this loneliness epidemic I keep reading about.

[JumpCrisscross]

> being able to say, "I disagree, and discussing it further won't change my mind" is important

Though, I would argue, unnecessary. If you faithfully believe, challenge shouldn’t be burdensome. If you’re open to revision, maybe they have a point. I’m not Epictetus, but unless your conversation partner is an idiot or a bore, there is usually something redeeming there.

[whaaaaat]

It has an opportunity cost. It's not burdensome to be challenged, per se, it's burdensome to repeat that, "Yes, I think trans people are humans with complex interior lives who mostly want to be left alone. No, they are not coming into bathrooms en masse to molest you. Yes, they deserve to just get on with their lives. No, we shouldn't mock them for who they are" etc. etc.

It takes someone 3-5 seconds to "just asking questions" and it takes me much more than that to respond. There's an obvious imbalance there that leads to:

a) It's a lot more exhausting to respond than to ask

b) It's vulnerable to malicious askers abusing my good faith answering time

So while, with close friends, I'm happy to answer questions. Or with well meaning allies who genuinely want to learn and just don't understand. But like, random folks? On an internet forum? Nah. They can ask and I can say, "Sorry, let's just not engage."

[JumpCrisscross]

> it's burdensome to repeat that, "Yes, I think trans people are humans with complex interior lives who mostly want to be left alone

So…don’t. Listen to why they think that. The point is it’s fine to walk away still disagreeing but understanding why a little better.

> On an internet forum?

Oh hell no, I’m talking about in person.

[ungamedplayer]

Challenge response has a higher cost than challenging.

For example, would you debate with every flat earther you see? It's simply not worth the time spent. Maybe they fall into the idiot category though.

[KittenInABox]

I think this is however kind of lopsided. For example, trans people are a hotly debated subject but are only 1% of the population or whatever. An individual trans person might have to engage in this debate daily, but a non-trans person might only engage online voluntarily because they have never met a trans person IRL and the concept of one is a fun thought experiment. In that sense being able to say "discussing this topic further won't change my mind" may be an important part of simply letting politicized minorities go about living life.

[sunshowers]

We only have a finite amount of time on this planet.

[JumpCrisscross]

Yet we’re in this very discussion.

[diogocp]

> unless your conversation partner is an idiot or a bore, there is usually something redeeming there.

My recent experience is that even intelligent and thoughtful people start sounding like idiots when they decide to talk politics, and the conversations quickly turn into a huge bore. All I can do is roll my eyes.

[strken]

I think a lot of people genuinely believe that transwomen are grooming and raping children en masse, or at least trying to get into women's sport so they can win medals. The fact that this is both wrong and stupid and has no real non-circumstantial evidence does not stop them.

At some point people have to talk to each other, right? And that's where you have a discussion about how you don't think kids should go to the Folsom Street Fair either, but that you also don't think it's fair for a 39 year old transwoman not to be allowed onto the division F basketball team with her friends, and maybe you and your interlocutor both discover that the other side is a little more tolerable than you thought.

Edit: I didn't really explain that very well. What I mean is that neither extreme finds the opinions of the other extreme tolerable, and that this is the result of paying too much attention to the long tail extremes instead of the middle of the bell curve.

[fragmede]

The topics of housing and drugs and energy and monetary policy and don't get more airtime because we spend time discussing gender and abortion. This is by design.

[rightbyte]

> And being able to say, "I disagree, and discussing it further won't change my mind" is important.

'Agree to disagree' is just an opt out. At that point there usually isn't any agreement upon what is disagreed upon in the first place. It is a debate evasion.

It is usually more honest to say 'I don't want you to convince me or the audiance otherwise'.

But ye there is some endurance limit the discussion need to respect. My point is that 'agree to disagree' is way overused.

[danaris]

The problem with this position is that politics in the current situation are not just about minor details of tax policy or whether to build a bridge here or five miles away there. They are an existential matter for too many people.

When the issue at hand is something like "I think black people deserve the same rights as white people," no, no one is ever going to convince me of the opposite. There is literally no point to me listening to someone who has that as their position (and you're damn right I don't want them convincing the audience either). Same with a number of other prominent issues at stake today.

So if someone comes at me with one of those positions, and doesn't seem, from the outset, to be already seriously on the fence, or to be presenting extremely easily debunked misinformation, yeah, I'm going to nope out of there. It's not worth raising my stress level to argue with that type of person, with or without an audience.

[rightbyte]

I think it might be benifitial to not assume one self is the good guy. It doesn't work on a macro level to assume that.

You could change black and white to Palestinian and Israeli and suddenly most of these 'I would never' would have a very nuanced view on the matter.

But, as I agreed, there is a limit on stamina to discuss with the outmost fringe people.

[danaris]

I don't assume I'm the good guy. I strive, every day, to be good, and to become better.

And yes, the issue of Palestinian rights in Israel, in particular, is extremely thorny, which I presume is why you picked it. There are extremes on both sides—both of which are very real positions that very real people are taking today, neither of which is supportable—and there are shades of gray in the middle, and if I had an answer to that question that didn't raise 100 more, I'd probably have already won the Nobel Peace Prize.

But there are plenty of people in the US who would genuinely try to argue that black people don't deserve the same rights as white people, and unless you are one of them, I think you're likely to agree that that is not a thorny issue: there's a very clear right and wrong answer. It's not conceptually analogous to the situation in the Middle East, even though the words sound similar.

The existence of hard moral questions without easy answers does not negate the existence of moral questions with very obvious answers that a large number of people are nonetheless very obviously on the wrong side of.

[zero-sharp]

What are some other, modern, issues that instantly cause you to lose interest?

[toofy]

> …It is a debate evasion.

> It is usually more honest to say 'I don't want you to convince me or the audiance otherwise'

i’m not trying to be mean but this is just wild. i’ve walked away from “debates” with people many times, not because i “don’t want to be convinced” it’s because too often i just genuinely don’t care what the person thinks about $ISSUE.

i mean, most of us went to university and many of us took those classes, many of us have been online for long enough to have seen every argument and every sophist angle countless times. i learned quick enough that many of these issues have no ‘correct’ answer, they’re personal beliefs with deep foundations.

we also learned early on that debates are silly unless there are actual subject experts (like recognized-by-their-peers-experts), strict moderators, and rules in place. randoms “debating” incredibly complex nuanced topics without actual experts is just… i mean…

…without those things it’s just rhetoric and sophistry. for the debateBros it’s about “winning” rather than coming closer to a truth. other than a few loud debateBros most people discovered these things in like sophomore year.

even more important, and this is just a personal opinion, but i find debateBros super weird and not in the good way. far too often their antisocialness just kills conversations. if someone is a grown adult and can’t tell the difference between a conversation and a debate they almost universally just end up making the entire atmosphere awkward. i learned pretty quickly when out with friends to spot randoms shifting into "debate mode" and we drag the conversation in a totally different direction to stave it off.

unless i know someone irl and enjoy them on a personal level theres almost unlimited things id rather do than spend my time "debating" with them. it boggles my mind how they just repeatedly fail to understand that adversarial debate is not at all normal conversation.

while i absolutely do enjoy passionate discussions of politics with a few family members (cousins, aunts, etc…) and a few friends, but with randoms? almost never. randoms "debating" outside of actual experts? nah, not a chance.

and it’s super important to understand that most of the current divisive topics don’t have “one” correct answer. often they don’t even have a correct answer at all, but rather many valid ways to approach and from multiple foundational beliefs.

[rightbyte]

Well, nothing like a lengthy meta debate about lengthy debates.

I think I was quite clear that I accept the 'endurance excuse'.

I was trying to make the point that the 'endurance excuse' is used as as an escape hatch way too often to silence the debate by people often with the consenus opinion that don't want to risk losing a debate.

In general I agree with you points.

[toofy]

i hope i didn’t come across as if im “debating” something, apologies if it did.

[tourmalinetaco]

There is no party that will make “every waking moment a nightmare" for the LGBTQIAP+. That’s the same thing we heard in 2016, and nothing came of it then. And in fact between 2020 and 2024 there is definitely an argument that can be made that even under the “preferred” party things got worse. Ironically, that exact rhetoric has led to multiple terror attacks on innocent people.

[teg4n_]

>nothing came of it

I’m guessing you aren’t trans or know anyone that is.

Trans people were kicked out of the military under trump. Some republican governments are making it difficult to near impossible for trans people to get transition related medical care. Republican governments are making it difficult to even get identification documents that match your identity. Republican governments are trying to make certain identities to be considered profane and excluded from general society.

[firesteelrain]

“ In August 2017, the White House put out the actual policy behind those tweets. According to the administration, Trump would effectively return to the pre-2016 era in which trans troops could not serve openly. It would also ban the military from paying for gender-affirming surgeries, with some exceptions to “protect the health” of someone who had already begun transitioning. The guidance also allowed the secretary of defense, after consulting with the secretary of homeland security, some wiggle room to decide what to do with already serving trans service members — and it let them advise the president on reversing the ban.”

https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/7/26/16034366/trump-tran...

There are also no reliable numbers of any trans people who were kicked out of the military (if any). Many continued to serve that were already in.

[whaaaaat]

To be clear, I believe both parties are anti-trans. Malcom X was spot on with the Fox and the Wolf -- they both want to eat the lamb, the wolf is just a lot more honest about it.

I regularly argue that Biden has been specifically and materially awful to the trans community. Do not mistake me saying that Republicans want to do worse as somehow saying the Dems are good.

But anti-trans legislation, particularly at the state level, is rising dramatically. (With almost 700 bills introduced this year, compared to merely 10-20 10 years ago.)

The follow states passed anti-trans bills last year: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Wisconsin, West Virginia, Wyoming

I think, looking at that list, it's pretty clearly predominantly right-leaning states who are actually enacting legislation to make access to education, healthcare, mental health support, services, name changes, etc. more difficult. Like, I don't think that's even subjective. 87 bills passed in those states, and those states are the only ones who passed anti-trans bills.

[ChocolateGod]

> To be clear, I believe both parties are anti-trans

This is IMHO the most toxic and divisive topic not just in politics, but in society too, it touches upon a universal long and cultural fabric of sex division. What you may consider anti-trans to someone else is updating legislation to cover something they never thought it would need to.

Republicans or conservatives in general, may be opposed to same-sex marriage, but it doesn't specifically make them anti-gay.

For context, I'm not a conservative, I just try and be polite, respectful and understanding to those with opposite opinions, as long as they treat me the same.

[whaaaaat]

> may be opposed to same-sex marriage, but it doesn't specifically make them anti-gay.

It absolutely does make them anti-gay. "Gay people should have fewer rights than we do" is fundamentally an anti-gay stance.

[thatswrong0]

[flagged]

[dang]

Please don't do this here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[blackeyeblitzar]

> But many of the current political topics are life or death for parts of the community.

This is just hyperbole intended to stop debate and discussion. It’s not life and death to stop biological men from competing in women’s sports for example.