First off, I don’t base my views on “what Americans are like” with what people post online. Just about everyone I know personally has just gone off the deep end it seems.
People I’ve known for decades who were “right of center” have now drifted to the far right. Where they used to support separation of church and state, small government, etc. they now want the government to tax the poor, establish a Christian ethnostate, and are openly talking about “the coming revolution”. Meanwhile, most everyone I’ve known who is leftist wants the government to disarm them, claims to be pro-LGBT but blindly supports any Muslim country and blindly hates Israel, and thinks Joe Biden is the “greatest president EVAR”.
Am I just in a weird bubble where 95% of the people in my life are politically and philosophically dipshits? Does anyone else experience this with people they actually know? I feel like I’m going crazy when I can be talking with a “leftist” about trans rights in Texas and then the very next conversation is about how wholesome they think the average Palestinian is in Gaza. Is there anyone else who’s at least left of center and recognizes that religious zealots in the Middle East want to kill you and shouldn’t be supported and religious zealots in YOUR OWN FUCKING COUNTRY want to kill you and you shouldn’t disarm yourself?
Just what the fuck is going on in this country? There’s so much disinformation and paid trolls that I don’t base these views off what’s online. I just run into the exact same lunacy with nearly everyone I’ve known my whole life.
I think this because I’ve spent over a decade of my life trying to understand where people come from and getting nowhere with helping them. I’ve read the scripture they share with me and they just ignore rebuttals and tell me I have “an unteachable spirit” or I “can’t understand their gospel”. I’ll listen to the podcasts of political thinkers they listen to and hear absolutely nothing of substance, nothing that actually provides a foundation for their beliefs beyond “wouldn’t it be nice if we had X”.
The only progress I’ve ever made is by recently telling people they have no clue what they’re talking about and calling them a dipshit or asshole where appropriate. It’s insane. They don’t care about studies, stats, facts, whatever. No attempt at rational debate changes their mind in any capacity. But having the “quiet and patient” person in their life snap at them seems to do something at least.
Sounds like you’re talking to koolaid drinkers and religious, not the politically motivated. Only religious morons and the painfully immature treat “the truth” as an absolute thing you know or don’t know. ESPECIALLY in politics, where EVERY choice has positive and negative consequences to balance.
Trying to get an informed political opinion from a religious zealot is about as useful as getting your calculus homework finished by toddlers…
Sure, but they’re still the people I grew up with in life. I won’t let them be part of my life if they truly believe that the January 6th seditionists did nothing wrong. But I still care about them and try to talk them down from this.
They’ve been through years of programming fed to them by professionals. As just some schmuck that doesn’t understand their beliefs, you’ll never be able to undo what has been done. It’s sad, but they need a LOT more than “Wait. You mean Trump REALLY DID LIE?!? I had no idea! This changes everything!”
I mean, I grew up in the same church environment. So I do understand their belief system intimately. The problem isn’t any understanding on my part, it’s their mindset. They want to make their current beliefs right, not to find the truth and be right. Recently, verbally insulting and degrading them has actually given me results. So maybe their tendencies to do the same to others out of hate is just projection.
You should know that a religious upbringing comes with HEAVY emphasis on faith. By the time you hit adulthood still believing in things with ZERO evidence … how do you expect those people to be able to discern truth!? They’ve spent their lives ignoring truth in favor of faith…
and you wonder why they believe nonsensical things… They can be good people who still don’t know a fucking thing about politics except what they heard on Fox, which absolutely will have them spouting hate.
All they need are words to give them confidance in repeating it. Not facts to back it up. Their faith will make them think their misguided confidance is truth.
First of all, nice bait, looks delicious, think I’ll chow down.
This mindset sounds closer to the problem than to the solution. Do you truly believe that the best way to interact with an extremist is to blindly judge them, then assume that they will question their entire worldview because one person, who has made no good faith effort to understand them, decides to call them names?
Many extremists, though perhaps not most, feel the way they do because they honestly believe they are doing the right thing. They listen to the lived experiences of people they trust and discount the words of people they do not. The blind judgment of others only ‘proves’ to them that it’s all one big conspiracy, everyone else are sheep, and that they are the only ones who can think for themselves.