Once you have been exposed to this kind of paranoid thinking, there is no way of building relationships of any kind anymore. It is like a spiritual death.
What is the bubble? The world of friends and healthy relationships, or the cold shitty place with cultural wars and divides everywhere?
If you bring someone to the shitty place, you better have the guts to acknowledge that that person will never, ever see friendship anywhere.
Some relationships are easy because nobody is trying to sabotage them, others are hard because somebody is, others are hard for entirely different reasons. It's the middle case that I'm concerned with here. I agree that it's a pretty awful thing to harm a friendship by injecting it with unnecessary culture war bullshit but my claim is that in most cases it's neither of the friends who want that outcome, it's some remote third party who has decided to interfere. Sure it's a failing of one friend or the other if they take the bait, but they have not spiritually killed the other by doing so.
I can see the "complexity" of the world just as clear as the absolute points of view.
It's a choice. If I recover and see beauty again, it means it was all fine. It wasn't, it will never be.
People who use social triggers must not get away. There will be blood on their hands, and there is nothing that can be done to avoid it or hide it.
I have a friend who on one hand believes all of the anti-vax, evil illegal immigrate stuff and might even believe that Trump’s tariffs are okay. But on the other hand, I have never heard him say anything negative about other people, cultures, sexualities etc.
I consider him a good friend. On the other hand, there was this other guy I was friends with for awhile. He became full MAGA. It got to the point where I just couldn’t deal with him anymore.
I guess the people I won’t deal with or Trump conservatives (ie populists). I’m good with traditional conservatives we can usually even have polite intellectual conversations about politics.
I'm not sure how anyone could believe immigrants are intrinsically bad without racism tbh.
It’s relatively easy for someone to understand just by taking a slight step back out of their world view why a man may be attracted to another man or a woman may be a attracted to another woman or someone may be attracted to both sexes.
But trans goes against everything they know about science. And even for those who are very much “let you do you” thinks it’s a bridge too far to have biological men in women’s sports.
This is a bridge too far for even me (yes I know it’s an unpopular opinion) and I’m a “f*! the police”,BLM, universal healthcare, free college education, religious skeptical, increase the safety net and lean liberal
I'm (apparently, or so I'm told) a flaming lefty lib, who recently moved out of the Bay Area to a very "red" part of California. If I limited my friends to only people like me politically, I'd have to be a hermit. I basically take it as given that any new person I strike up a conversation with will not agree with my politics, so I just don't bring it up. Most of my friends got the hint clearly when they brought some of their Trump shit up and I immediately steered the conversation away. We have a good understanding--let's talk about positive things we have in common: hobbies, beer, cars, whatever. Don't bring up politics or religion, and you can make friends with anyone!
Some of them just can't bear to live even a few minutes without talking about their politics at every possible moment, and they're just not friends anymore.