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America today is contaminated with people who are utterly incapable of any form of reasoned discussion and this disability isn't limited to one side. From the o

America today is contaminated with people who are utterly incapable of any form of reasoned discussion and this disability isn't limited to one side. From the other side of the fence I'm sure you noticed the crazy folks who claim the vaccine is poison and covid isn't real. Reasoned discussion is possible between people on a variety of related topics but discussion with right wing crazy is completely impossible and if your discussion is critical of what is perceived to be the left wing position you risk being misidentified as one of the increasing number of nutbars with whom reasoning is impossible. At first blush the lunatics and those with nuanced perspectives are often indistinguishable, sometimes right up until the crazy links to rumble come out. Respectfully I don't think the majority who would self identify as left or left leaning hold extreme positions. If you are experiencing such I would question with whom you are engaging, where, and how. For example twitter is absolutely driven by assholes flinging rebukes at one another for likes and short messages and no meaningful threading don't make for reasoned discussions. For the last point look how this discussion has begun by painting everyone who disagrees with you with a broad brush. This itself doesn't lend itself to reasoned discussion.

bcrl 4y ago
This. I appreciate discussions across the aisle, as it's the only way that we, as a society, can solve the problems facing the world today. But when basic facts get thrown out the window and politicians can no longer distinguish between the propaganda they spew to play "to the base" vs the verifiable facts useful to having a coherent discussion about how to solve a problem, it is impossible to make forward progress. Twitter is an echo chamber amongst a lot of journalists, and so is Fox news. Shock-jocks used to be in the fringes (like Howard Stern), but that seems to be the only way to be profitable in the mainstream media these days. It is depressingly sad that local newspapers which were once pillars of their communities and able to fund deep-dive investigative journalism that enabled reporting on complex issues and corruption have now almost entirely vanished. Removing the profits from newspapers and replacing it with algorithmic sale of ads on the internet at scale has not, in my opinion, been a net good for society. And I don't think it is possible to address these issues in the current political environment.

bcrl 4y ago

This. I appreciate discussions across the aisle, as it's the only way that we, as a society, can solve the problems facing the world today. But when basic facts get thrown out the window and politicians can no longer distinguish between the propaganda they spew to play "to the base" vs the verifiable facts useful to having a coherent discussion about how to solve a problem, it is impossible to make forward progress. Twitter is an echo chamber amongst a lot of journalists, and so is Fox news. Shock-jocks used to be in the fringes (like Howard Stern), but that seems to be the only way to be profitable in the mainstream media these days. It is depressingly sad that local newspapers which were once pillars of their communities and able to fund deep-dive investigative journalism that enabled reporting on complex issues and corruption have now almost entirely vanished. Removing the profits from newspapers and replacing it with algorithmic sale of ads on the internet at scale has not, in my opinion, been a net good for society. And I don't think it is possible to address these issues in the current political environment.