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Comment by yashap | Hacker News Reader

This point rings strongly true to me. I have a number of members of friends/family who have become very difficult to be around, because they’ve become so intense/constantly outraged about politics, even if they are on the same end of the political spectrum as me:

> The research doesn’t reveal precisely why we tend to dislike overly political people, but it doesn’t take too much imagination to guess that constant foam-flecked political outrage makes one quite tedious. It also impedes our ability to think clearly: At least one experiment has shown that people become less accurate in interpreting data when the data concern something politically polarizing.

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This is basically why I stopped using Twitter. Reading a dozen of my friends expressing basically the same thought at the same time, even though I agreed with it, was just getting tideous. In hindsight it took me way too long to realise how much time I was wasting on it.

But Facebook and Twitter can sell many more ads this way.

We are manipulated into constant outrage for someone else's profit.

While not wrong, the country is headed toward a revolution / Cival War. Similar to when Mao or Lenin came to power.

So yea, emotions are running a little high right now.

I like to call that "violently agreeing". "You all seem to be having a violent agreement" usually defuses the situation with some humour ... the first time anyway.

A couple years ago all you heard about was kids who didn't want to get shot in school. Now it's communities of color who don't want to get shot by police. It sure is a lot nicer to keep my head in the sand.

There are always tonnes of terrible things going on in the world, throughout human history. Hell, my grandfather was an Auschwitz survivor, and his entire immediate family was murdered by Nazis.

I think Trump is a terrible, terrible President, causing a tonne of damage to America, but he’s not exactly Hitler, more of a poor man’s Putin. I’m all for having political conversations, even reasonably frequent ones, but barring a legitimate Hitler situation, I don’t want it to be the ONLY thing I talk about. There’s a lot more to life. Some members of my friends/family can talk about nothing else anymore, it’s nonstop outrage, and they completely ignore all social queues from people who want to change the subject. These people suck to be around. The article sums it up well:

> it doesn’t take too much imagination to guess that constant foam-flecked political outrage makes one quite tedious

What is the point of this comment? communities of people of colour and the poor were being brutalised by police and school shootings were regular occurrences long before the Trump presidency.

Presumably to put things into perspective regarding the prevailing zeitgeists of who's destroying the world.

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