Not just uninterested, but actively conspiratorial. It's hard to talk with a Trump voter when it veers into territory like "world leaders are withholding a cure for cancer" and "the Pope has a secret base in Antarctica."
"For years, as a conservative radio talk show host, I played a role in that conditioning by hammering the mainstream media for its bias and double standards. But the price turned out to be far higher than I imagined. The cumulative effect of the attacks was to delegitimize those outlets and essentially destroy much of the right’s immunity to false information. We thought we were creating a savvier, more skeptical audience. Instead, we opened the door for President Trump, who found an audience that could be easily misled."[1]
[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/04/opinion/sunday/why-nobody...
On the Right, we see the same thing with your side. Total blind faith in blank slate theories of human equality, and uninterested in the piles of twin studies and metastudies that clearly demonstrate innate differences between demographic groups, even actively conspiratorial. It's hard to talk to a Hillary voter when it veers into "Conservatives are all anti-science but the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study and the vast consensus of geneticists on MAOA-L gene expression is a racist conspiracy by white men."
Predicating policy (e.g. education, criminal justice, employment) on fundamentally wrong and unscientific assumptions about people's capabilities inevitably leads to gross inefficiencies, and mental and social health problems.
So what? Why don't we focus on getting to a situation where all the people have the same opportunities (access to education, nutrition, equal treatment under the law, etc, etc, etc) and THEN we can worry about precision policymaking based on the differences.
I'm probably considered a wishy-washy, bleeding-heart, virtue-signalling, liberal cuck (or whatever the hell the current deliberately antognistic buzzwords are) but I actively disliked Clinton and to a slightly lesser extent Obama.
People need to stop painting eachother with broad brushes. It's naive sports-team tribalism that gets us nowhere other than a highly polarised and aggressively charged shitshow.
"Even though everyone knew the rules of the game up front, Trump is not actually the legitimate president because his popular vote tally was lower",
"Trump is not a legitimate president because the Russians may have been involved in releasing some 'routine, not interesting' emails",
"Even though the U.S. has interfered in over 80 elections in the last 20 years (including Russia in 1996), and even though a significant percentage of the mainstream media is foreign owned, and even though there is significant foreign money and foreign influence involved in every election, this election is not legitimate because Russia may have helped release some emails",
"Enforcing existing immigration laws (and shoring up abused immigration laws) to protect American jobs and wages is racist"
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I could go on for days, but the point is that people in general will say and believe a lot of stupid stuff if it helps their team. Pretending only people on the other team do it is pretty out there.
A conspiracy would be more like "Bush did 9/11", which the left was guilty of for a while. Eugh.
"Trump has had or wants to have sex with his daughter..see, here is this picture of her sitting on his lap when she was 12"
"Trump stayed in a Russian hotel room, found out the Obamas had previously stayed in that room so hired prostitutes to urinate on the bed in front of him"
"Russia sold 19% of their state owned oil company to an unknown party and there is a document 'procured' by the Never Trump movement that says something about 19%, so Russia made a deal with Trump to get him elected and give him 19% of their oil if he would lift sanctions"
And agree also on discussion, plenty of conspiracy theories on all sides that are actually probably worth discussing.
It's all about "Motivated Reasoning," a term I learned from Jonathan Haidt.
For things we want to do, we ask ourselves, "how can I?"
For things we don't want to do, we ask, "must I?"
Since I've learned this, about 95% of discussion has been reduced for me. It doesn't make things easier though. It's hard for me to take that so many people are operating in such a biased way.
And it's even harder because it means really thinking through concepts like fairness, immigration, sexism, etc. These are not easy to reason about. And it takes a lot of time.
I think what also contributes is the idea that the brain will twist and contort reality to protect foundational beliefs (beyond my own observation of human behavior, there are a number of studies backing this up). We make decisions based on what we believe to be true, and the more decisions based on and built on a belief, the more foundational that belief is to our life. The more foundational a belief, the harder the brain will work to protect you from facing something that contradicts the belief head on (because directly facing the fact, without being prepared for it, that a significant number of decisions in your life have been based on false information could cause real system damage). Changing foundational beliefs must occur in steps, as you can only move so far from the current belief at once. And in the other direction, we much more readily accept anything that reinforces our foundational beliefs, even more so when being bombarded with ideas that may challenge those beliefs at the same time.
Religion and politics are extremely foundational things for most people, thus people are much more likely to overlook facts contradicting their beliefs and accept irrational ideas that happen to reinforce the belief.
> Since I've learned this...It doesn't make things easier though...
Same.
EDIT: Another complex/interesting idea to think through is that Us vs. Them is baked into human nature. You can change who "us" and "them" are, but I don't think you can change that there is always an Us vs. Them, and that "us" is always the good guys and "them" is always the bad guys.
"Russian hacking": Allegation supported by multiple law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
From there social pressure, motivated reasoning, and the usual garden of cognitive biases lead people to believe there is more evidence than there actually is.
I voted for neither of the Status Quo Party candidates, because they both make me sick. Yet even as I wiped the vomit from my chin, I couldn't help but notice that the primary complaint about the election results was that the voters knew more about one of the candidates and her organization than she wanted them to know. Did we ever care about objectivity? If a losing R candidate made the same complaint, all of these pundits would laugh at that candidate: "Oh, someone leaked your email? In which you discussed the dirty deeds you did your poor little primary opponent? And the way they got that email was by phishing you? Well, boooo-hooooo! Next time use two-factor, sweetheart."
But that's not the complaint!
The complaint was that, based on the leaks of private emails, it was possible to construct innuendo that was untrue. Take the entire Spirit Cooking thing, for instance. It would be one thing if Podesta had participated in a Satanist ritual and didn't want people to know. But he didn't actually participate in one. People just insinuated he did, based on a vaguely-plausible interpretation of a private email between family members.
I don't think anyone really found the way the Hillary campaign treated the Bernie campaign to be "dirty deeds", just politics, and I certainly don't think that's what swung the election. (Maybe I'm wrong.)
Innuendo isn't some magic spell that requires eye of newt and leak of email. There was lots of innuendo about other candidates too. I especially loved how they piled on poor Johnson for forgetting the name of some benighted hellhole he had no plans to invade, ever. If the Russians' plan was a Xanatos Gambit of let's phish Podesta, then we'll publish his dinner invitations, ...., then Hillary will lose? And that worked? In that case they're smart enough to own us no matter what we do.