Unfortunately I'm finding this sort of us-vs-them mentality starting to creep up even around HN, even though the guidelines suggest to assume good faith. It's

Unfortunately I'm finding this sort of us-vs-them mentality starting to creep up even around HN, even though the guidelines suggest to assume good faith. It's particularly weird when you play devil's advocate on some topic (which is really just a tool to promote evaluating topics from a different perspective) and people start jumping at you with pitchforks assuming you're "against" them. Last year, some thinktanks were saying that Trump giving voice to far-right was dangerous precisely because it shifted narratives in ways that extremists from both sides would start to feel validated and come out of the woodwork, and now here we are. I've read about a similar trend regarding portrayal of China in western media and their sentiment towards us in return. Frankly it's everywhere now. On the one hand we try to teach our kids that calling each other names and escalating fights leads nowhere, but then we turn around to look at social media and it feels like people never got that memo themselves. I'm always trying to avoid falling into that trap. A quote from Dalai Lama that always stuck with me is "I'd rather be kind than right, you can always be kind". There's a bunch of other similar quotes, and it's interesting that a lot of them are about self-improvement (ironically, self-improvement the same spiritual aspect that people criticize "religious" zealots for ditching nowadays)