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Comment by MINIMAN10000 | Hacker News Reader

I did and I was left satisfied.

I wanted to see their viewpoint on at the time "the hot topic" and confirm my suspicions that I truly don't consider their viewpoint rational or valid. It's like they start from a conclusion and work backwards to excuse it.

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> It's like they start from a conclusion and work backwards to excuse it.

Almost everything political is like this. What allows you to see the flaw clearly here is your bias is against theirs. It's harder to see this process when you align with the conclusion.

Come on, that subreddit was insane. We should attempt to understand and empathise with people we disagree with, but that doesn’t mean we abandon all intellectual standards. And frankly validating a space like that as a legitimate viewpoint for conservatism is an insult to conservatism and a kind of bigotry of low expectations.

I know it was insane. But I also think /r/politics is insane.

> It's like they start from a conclusion and work backwards to excuse it.

Without getting into any of the politics, isn't this exactly what you said you did in the preceding sentence?

> I wanted to see their viewpoint on at the time "the hot topic" and confirm my suspicions that I truly don't consider their viewpoint rational or valid.

But generally these ideas are immediately discountable by reality. T_D was generally conspiracy theories or even if there is an attempt at some genuine political or economic discussion, its never fact based (or cherry picked/lie through ommision/or presenting a paper thats 50+ years old as if its true in light of new evidence). How can you even give those sorts of opinion credence? If those posts were made in good faith, then those people are ignorant, but that's just giving too much credit.

That was my experience as well. It's a fascinating parallel universe, but it's not for me. It's kind of the same reason I watch a lot of Fox News.

I really value information and learning how different people think and what's important to them, but it's really hard to do that on forums so I prefer just talking to ppl. Preferably in a non-campaign year to get a less emotional account. Plus it helps me have a more balanced perspective b/c I can put face(s) to different sides and that prevents me from saying things that I can't take back

I love reading foxnews.com and some of my deeply conservative relatives' Facebook feeds, because they give a perspective I'd never see otherwise (even if I generally disagree). I'm on there daily, and I'd say I get just as much news from those sources as from others, like washingtonpost.com. I also sometimes go to some old school conservative blogs like nationalreview.com/corner/, as well as sites like Drudge and Breitbart to see what they think.

But /r/the_donald was just toxic. Even when I was in the mood to see more of that kind of content, I couldn't stand more than about 5 minutes of browsing that subreddit before closing the tab in frustration and disgust.

Honest question: how do you manage to work your way through that stuff without feeling incredibly shitty afterwards? Because whenever I have tried to make sense of them it was genuinely unpleasant for me to "reason along" with people that unreasonable (I'd almost call it painful, but perhaps that's a bit too strong).

I would highly recommend "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion" by Jonathan Haidt. He's a left leaning psychologist, and it's basically a PHD level dive into how morality works at a psychological level, with quite a few dips into cultural anthropology. Once I understood how my own moral systems worked and how very different moral systems function, it helped me avoid these pitfalls of negative emotion blocking my empathy and understanding of other people.

.... so like almost every other political platform theses days?

> like

No, just because something exists doesn't mean it exists to the same degree.

I visited there irregularly just to see what was happening. It was on another level like OAN and some shows on Fox News.

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