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Comment by mmcgaha | Hacker News Reader

Everyone knows Republicans are racist homophobic xenophobic bigoted nazis. Why would they want to admit that to some random over the phone?

The rhetoric that we are using to describe the other party is not necessarily helping our cause in the long run. First it is pushing folks with legitimate disagreement away from public discourse. Second it is creating a good-guy/bad-guy scenario that is the equivalent of tribalism. At this point I can pick between a political talk show or professional wrestling and get about the same quality of content.

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Do you not think that the mainstream Republican party has moved radically rightward over the past 12 years?

It's not spending its energy discussing Laffer curves and energy policy, and whether or not someone can be fired from their job for being gay, or if we should invade another Middle Eastern country anymore. It's spending its energy seriously talking about QAnon, and how the COVID pandemic is over, and and how there's a vast liberal conspiracy that destroyed the integrity of this country's elections, and how their president will think about whether or not he will step down if he were to lose the election.

These aren't weird views held by a bunch of powerless cranks on the party's fringe. This is the sort of stuff that the party bet the farm on this year, and has largely paid off with the voters.

In any sane world, an impartial observer would look at that, and conclude that it is all absolutely crazy. But we no longer live in a sane world, so there's now no shortage of people apologizing for, cheerleading, or just ignoring that kind of behaviour in their elected officials.

> But we no longer live in a sane world

One way to deal with this type of dysphoria would be to spend some quality time with people who hold views different from the ones you have, and it would be much better if you didn't do that online, but in person - for reasons that I'm sure you understand well, since you are an HN reader.

Or, you decide that everyone on the other side of the fence is completely bollocks. But will this make your life better?

I have two friends whose parents have gone down first the anti-vaxx, then the flat earth, and more recently the QAnon rabbit hole.

They describe it like losing a family member to a drug addiction, or a cult. Quality time with their own family is no longer a thing that can happen, because how dare the children suggest that basic pandemic precautions be taken, or even think of supporting the vast pedophilic democratic conspiracy.

Pray tell, how should they bridge that chasm? This is a serious question.

It's well and good and morally smug to suggest that the problem is that 'you don't spend enough time talking to people holding insane beliefs'. The problem is that you can't use reason or empathy to get someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.

I was talking about opposite side of the political spectrum but obviously not insane people.

It seems you are grossly mischaracterising people of a certain political orientation which brings me to think that maybe you never really attempted real contact and/or you didn’t try hard.

Some of those conspiracies you mentioned don’t even have any link with any specific position on the political spectrum e.g. here in Sydney some politically progressive suburbs are amongst those with the lowest vaccination rates and as you probably know this is also true in many other large cities across the world https://www.smh.com.au/healthcare/rich-suburbs-have-low-immu...

> Pray tell, how should they bridge that chasm? This is a serious question.

It's not a serious question, it's a self righteous rhetorical question.

Instead of grousing about the tone of the question, could you answer it?

I'd be happy to forward your suggestions to them - they'd appreciate being able to visit their parents every once in a while without being subjected to a firehose of crazy.

Yesterday's flavor of that unsolicited firehose was "They called those four states for Trump, and Biden is at 215 now."

I've done that. It doesn't really help because there's no effective, scalable antidote to enragement engagement, herd behavior and people who are susceptible to emotional manipulation.

It's not like red state people have a monopoly on this behavior, but it seems to be a bit more common among them.

Politically we seem to be in some sort of positive feedback loop of anger/fear/suffering -> lashing out -> more anger/fear/suffering. It's scary.

Even in person? What you described is normal online but I would think it wouldn’t happen so often when you are face to face

You should really edit your comment's first paragraph to make it clear that it's not your opinion.

I agree that there is currently an atmosphere where people don't necessarily feel comfortable talking about their political leanings among strangers.

> You should really edit your comment's first paragraph to make it clear that it's not your opinion.

It's clear from context.

My eyes roll faster than context arrives.

Deliberately appearing as a troll until the crucial context arrives to reverse the entire meaning is a shit narrative device when discussing serious issues. Save this stuff for stupid memes.

> Deliberately appearing as a troll until the crucial context arrives to reverse the entire meaning is a shit narrative device when discussing serious issues. Save this stuff for stupid memes.

Even with the context it's obviously a troll, because the poster spends the entire first graph building a straw man. The underlying implication is that Republicans are somehow persecuted against by a nameless group who believes all of these negative attributes apply, but no evidence is presented for this.

Because of geographic polarization, the majority of Republicans live in communities that are majority Republican, and the majority of Democrats live in the communities that are majority Democrat. The majority of Republicans face zero social penalty for admitting their support for Trump because most of their friends, family, neighbors and coworkers are also voting for Trump. The 0.1% of Trump voters who live in Silicon Valley are wildly overrepresented on HN, which is why you see so many people whining about being too oppressed by their lefty coworkers to admit that they are Trump supporters, but that is not representative of the actual lived experience of most Trump voters.

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