Opinion: How to pull your family members out of the information rabbit hole

Sure, but it doesn’t mean it also must be the primary driver of your life or be brought into all things. “Everything is political” has to be one of the worst ideas to infect modern culture. Not because politics doesn’t touch everything on some level, or because everything can’t be political, but because if everything is always treated as a political act, then it is impossible to find shared humanity with people who don’t share your politics. And that inability to find shared humanity with your fellow human beings is what drives hatred and division at scale. If everything is political then the very act of hiring someone is political, and if the very act of hiring someone is political then all of us non-independently wealthy schmucks now not only have to contend with a job market in general, but also with whether our prospective employers think it is the correct politics to hire us. I’d really rather not live in a world where my employer has to decide if hiring me aligns with their personal politics.

Also because politics is identity for a lot of people, it also ties things together unnecessarily. Maybe your boss is a generally conservative type, and big on classic business practices. But maybe he's also not immediately closed to an idea if someone presents it with some merit. When "Return to Office" vs "Work from Home" becomes a political battle instead of a business decision, now it's a lot harder to have the discussion on merits, because the baggage of political identity has been tied to the issue too, and maybe now your boss feels pressure to make a political statement by ordering RTO. And you can say "well then your boss isn't smart" or "your boss wasn't willing to listen to an issue on merit" and those both might be true (or might not), but that doesn't change the fact that tying the issue to politics means a whole bunch of people who might have not had to deal with an RTO mandate now do.

>Being a woman, child, or less than independently wealthy means politics will affect you

I never realized having a penis means you are immune and untouchable by politics. My entire life has been a lie i could have just ignored laws, inflation and wars. Thanks for the enlightenment!

>Objectively flawed thinking needs to be nipped in the bud

I'm looking at this sentence in the light of my current struggles dealing with the irrationalities of so many things. I've spent enough lifespan pointing out the simplest logical falacies to no avail. Heck I lost my last job because I wouldn't shut up about my stupid desire for any sql isolation mode other than "read uncommitted" from our developers.

Sure, objectively flawed thinking doesn't seem to be that desireable, but its popular, people like what we would think is "objectively flawed thinking" or worse yet, can be talked into it by their local snake handling baptist preachers. I tried a few times talking politics for instance with friends and family but I can only quote facts from the best sources I can muster. What good is that if all my best sources of information isn't from you know who, or more importantly, when these folks believe you know who's assertion about what is "fake news"? The worst are the baptists, because they can believe practically any nonsense from their preacher because what baptist preacher is considered faulty by their own congregation?

I do applaud folks who still have hope, but its a condescending sort of applause, you know the old southern "bless your heart" or whatever your regional equivalent is.

> If a member of your family turned into a radicalized neo-nazi not talking about it is like abandonding them, just like it would be if they got a clinical depression.

I think it would be hard to find an adult with clinical depression who would choose to have clinical depression if it was a choice.

Believing that socio-political and economic theories like neo-nazism are superior is an opinion. It's hard to find folks without opinions.

* If someone is talking neo-nazism all the time and that's not interesting to you, then don't talk to them about it.

* If anyone is breaking the law to support some political cause... stay away.

What matters is what people do.

It seems people are looking constantly for reasons to dislike others. Looking for common ground may be a better way to connect.

The border for regular political discourse should be political movements that deny other peoples right to exist, based on natural attributes they dislike.

In the old times people would have been shunned (or beaten for being left-handed (in certain areas of the world) for example, a trait you're just simply born with. They tried to re-educate lefties so they use the right hand instead which lead to a whole host of psychological effects summarized in left-handedness suppression syndrome.

Then science came and whatever dumb superstitions people connected to left-handedness were seen in a different light and the superstition died out.

The problematic thing about today's anti-trans movement is that it is paired with such a distrust for science that they ignore every scientific evidence that would tell them that punishing someone for being trans is just as wrong as punishing someone for being left-handed. Just like there is a natural fraction of left-handed people in a population (which seemed to "rise" and then settled at its natural value right after society no longer punished it), there is a natural fraction of trans persons, gays, lesbians, bi- and asexuals, etc.

For me the Karl Popper's paradoxon of intolerance is a good guide. There is no need for members of a free society to extend tolerance towards the intolerant. In fact I think if we want to keep a free society we have a duty to fight back against intolerance in various ways.

Well said. I like the hurricane analogy. It's naive to think that it can be ignored. It will come around and affect you, and at that point, it might be too late.

> I should prepare for politics that can destroy my life before it impacts me, and preparing for it means talking to other people about it.

> If people don't vaccinate, and my baby gets measles before I can vaccinate her, she could die. If I have a complicated pregnancy, I could be forced to wait it out and get sepsis and die. If my friends get deported, they lose their jobs, homes, cars and I lose my connection to them. If I have to pay more for goods because of tariffs that is less money I can spend on my family.

> If I wait until my baby has measles, I have sepsis, or my friends get deported to talk about these issues and convince others, then I haven't adequately prepared for politics that can destroy my life.

I don't really understand this.

It makes sense that public policies affect one's risk of contracting measles or whether or not people get deported. What isn't clear is that one person has any measurable effect on those policies, or the opinions of others for that matter.

Generally in the US, people are pretty much on their own and would do best to take direct action to mitigate risks.

Maybe, but probably not the way you think. I can imagine that Niels Bohr might have appeared somewhat "out there" to his family members. Meanwhile, from his perspective, his family likely seemed perfectly reasonable.

I agree to some extent, but I don't think it is as simple as that. Part of being smart is the amount of information we retain. For some though, the more they learn about the world around us, the more depressed they get.