Yeah, everytime Kenny the fascist comes to tell me the woah’s of the world from his perspective. They get one conversation when I establish their position. The second convo is to establish my own. The third and subsequent conversations are purposefully hostile.
You have to maintain hygiene when dealing with these creatures.
I wish more people simply… Learned how to shut up.
There are some people who have just been filled with so much wrong information over the course of their life that it’s impossible to reach them. Anything you say to them will have a keyword that puts their guard up, any fact you share would be fake news. It’s like their brains have been encrypted with the propaganda and hate. It’s pavlovian. I try to recognize it in myself and maintain an open mind but it’s hard.
Very true. And we have to remember that our own views are informed by years of study/observation in areas other people will not have paid any attention to. So often it would take a book worth of real life examples to give someone the same background experience, and they would have to read that book carefully over many months for those examples to sink in, and still then they might think those are cherry-picked examples, whereas you came across them organically.
It hurts man. Especially knowing that the road I took has crumbled behind me, like in those old Looney Tunes cartoons where someone redraws the road lines to lead people off a cliff. Everything at a user level online feels like an infomercial. All of it has that veneer of being fake and cheap, trying to sell you something while pretending not to.
I know what you mean. But it doesn’t have to be that way if enough people walk away and decide to do something positive instead.
So often it’s me typing out a big old comment. Realizing I can preempt some nuance to help the conversation. Thinking of a dozen more little nitpicks that might happen and realizing it’s just not worth it and it’s really the idiocy of the argument that’s making it so hard to explain myself.
You encountered Brandolini’s Law aka the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle: it takes an order of magnitude more effort to debunk bullshit than it takes to produce it.
Exactly that, one bullshit goes into circulation, it spreads everywhere strengthening its flawed position. And just like it was said, facts dont even matter at that point - requiring a novel approach to disprove it.
