This is a boring thought, but it's my boring thought, and I'll post it because I kind of agreed with you until I realized it was kind of me you were kind of rai

This is a boring thought, but it's my boring thought, and I'll post it because I kind of agreed with you until I realized it was kind of me you were kind of railing against. If you made a list of things that "the other side" truly cares about, it's probably mostly what you care about. When you strip away what people are currently angry about, people mostly care about things that come down to "am I making the world better for my (possibly putative) children." It's a reductive view, but I think it's true in a useful way. That is to say, I think it's true for most people in a pairwise fashion, so it's probably true of you, and it's probably a useful way to think about other people you meet, most of the time. In the context of social media, it is profitable for people to be performative because that drives engagement and engagement is profitable. For this reason, social media is a terrible proxy for other people because is not one to one (pairwise) as above, but one to many. Thus, social media is a massive distortion if you spend time a lot of time on it, or if you spend a lot of time reading the thoughts of people who spend a lot of time on it[1]. I thought of giving exaggerated examples of "the other side" here but I don't even have to draw the pictures, the caricatures literally draw themselves if you think for just a moment. For both sides. Which is kind of what I'm driving at. Most people are essentially like you though, they just want things to be better. They aren't performance artists gunning for virtue signaling engagement, they just disagree with you about the implementation details. Sometimes these disagreements truly are utter incompatibilities, it's true. But there's an entire industry that now exists in convincing people with the same broad desires that the other side desires only to dash their hopes and dreams. My boring thought is that, broadly, there's a breathtaking overlap between what you want and what the (call them) deplorables on the other side want, and you're mostly just vigorously disagreeing on the cause célèbre you've been told is the keystone to everything this season. [1]: https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/04/the-new-york-times-would-really-like-its-reporters-to-stop-scrolling-and-get-off-twitter-at-least-once-in-a-while/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/04/the-new-york-times-would-r...