[Ajedi32]

The person I was replying to did exactly the same thing: "Without going too deeply, I sympathize with the writer on an extremely personal level." If you want to say I'm lying just because you disagree with my take on the issue then okay; I'm not going to expose intimate details of my life just to win an online argument. Just sharing my experience.

[xracy]

Communicating is hard, this is intended to be helpful and informative and I genuinely hope you take it that way. I'm being a little barbed with some of my feedback below, because you're engaging defensively, and I'm just trying to help because I was initially interested in having a different conversation with you based on your first comment.

Really importantly, I'm not saying that you're lying. I was offering some constructive feedback on what you said, because I was interested in your experience given that you've clearly reached a different conclusion from me. I was disappointed you weren't willing to talk about it, because I suspect if you're experiencing this and this is your advice you're just earlier in the process than I am. But if this isn't the case, I (and others clearly) were interested in this experience. I don't have a solution to this problem, and I came to this article looking for other ways people were navigating this experience.

> Just sharing my experience.

But you're explicitly not sharing your experience. You're just saying that you have experience, and then asking why someone would make a decision in this situation. In my response, I can either talk to:

1. Why someone would make a decision in this situation

2. You about your experience.

If you don't have experience in the situation, #1 makes more sense. If you do have experience in the situation, then I'm much more interested in the #2 conversation but to do that we have to be a little bit more willing to share some broad strokes about how things have fallen apart.

I shared my situation in response to this without making anything too personal/revealing about the family members involved. You'll notice I didn't make an appeal to having personal experience. I just described the experience, because I'm looking to have a conversation about what others have tried that has worked for them.

> The person I was replying to did exactly the same thing: "Without going too deeply, I sympathize with the writer on an extremely personal level."

2 things:

1. This is the age-old "if people on the internet jump off a bridge you'd do that too?" My initial response was trying to give you the tools to be better at this, and you're just being defensive here for no reason. I thought your question was still worth responding too, I'm just calling out to you that it's stronger without the appeal to experience that you're not backing up in any way.

2. This is a disclaimer on their own partiality towards one party in the original story. This is actually achieving the exact opposite of what your comment goes towards. It reads much more as "I am stating my bias and what I'm partial towards up front, but I think there is a difficult choice to make here and I'm not certain what the right path is."

By contrast your statements taken together read as "I have experience that tells me there's no reason to ever sever a relationship and you just have to take me at my word." But your initial statement could have been "Why would you consider severing the relationship?" and it would've led to less confusion from people interested in the experience.

[Ajedi32]

My point is that the article doesn't give any concrete reasons _why_ this man's family cut him off other than that they disagreed with him. It doesn't explicitly say he was ruining them financially, or that he refused to talk about anything other than politics, it just says he started believing online conspiracy theories and the author was unable to convince him otherwise.

I have some personal experience with that situation, and I find it unconscionable that his family would leave him under those circumstances. That's all I'm trying to say. If that comes off as "willfully misleading" to you, then so be it.

Now maybe there was more going on with this guy which would explain his family's extreme response, but if so the article doesn't explicitly say so. Re-reading your other response to my initial post, the reason I didn't feel a need to respond was because I felt like I had already addressed it in a reply to another comment. Your situation includes additional factors beyond what was described in the original article; that's totally fair. "It's one thing to hold different beliefs, and another thing to be constantly starting arguments over them and refusing to discuss anything else."

[xracy]

The concrete reason that I've stated here and in other places, is that the way conspiracy theories grow they eventually consume all of the topics you can discuss with a person. I'm guessing this hasn't been going on long. My situation started with 1 or 2 conspiracy theories that my dad kept mostly private and we only ever discovered because conversation landed there on accident. Had it stayed there, I doubt I would've cut him off. But we got to the point where the only safe things to talk to him about that wouldn't lead to a conspiracy-fueled tirade were food and the weather. And then he started on a diet that fit into the web, and suddenly we couldn't talk to him about food (what to eat/what we like to eat) without it being a part of the wider web of conspiracy conversations. At that point, I could've tried to find new things to talk about, but I could also just accept that I didn't really want to talk to my dad, because there were no interesting topics of conversation that didn't lead into a conspiracy web I wasn't always prepared for. <- This is why it becomes reasonable, and I hope in your case it never reaches this point. If it does maybe you'll come up with a better solution than I did, and think of this comment and come respond. I would really like to hear how you reach a better solution. For now, it seems like you're not to this point yet, and so I hope you never get there.

Spending $10000 on this bet is not an indicator of making decisions that could lead to financial ruin? The son states that's a lot of money for them. They also literally explicitly state he's spending money from a joint bank account on stockpiling things they don't need. They're not giving the amounts, but like, they tell you he's doing questionable things with money, and you can extrapolate from there as a reader. I'm guessing you've been raised around money differently, because I know you've had this conversation in a few other places, and haven't actually engaged with how problematic this is. But especially in today's economy where things are expensive and money can be tight, making solo financial decisions with joint money is absolutely cause to cut someone off.

Separately, I will say, there's not a lot of middle-ground for spending time with someone who believe's you're just wrong for being who you are. So the Daughter's decision as one of self-preservation, feels equally reasonable, and I think if the mother has to hear about how her daughter is a sinner all the time, or character attacks on her children a lot, then that could lead to needing to cut off the father as well.