I don’t think the sides are the same. Right wingers are much worse, particularly with COVID. Finger wagging liberals who wear masks in their cars and clean their pens or whatever annoy me personally- especially when they talk about ‘following the science’ but don’t actually look into anything.PeterC wrote: ↑Wed Aug 04, 2021 2:16 pmIt's become common to say that you don't like one side or another in an argument because you don't like the way they express themselves. That's fair, we have a right to dislike others' tone. But it's far less important than who actually has the facts on their side. Modern media spends way too much time discussing style rather than substance. That's how you get clowns like seitaka parroting buzzwords and thinking it's an argument we should even listen to.Johnny Dangerous wrote: ↑Wed Aug 04, 2021 7:08 amIt's really not that puzzling to me. First of all it legitimately brings to a head a bunch of seeming opposing things that really get people going - things like a desire for individual freedom and autonomy vs. a desire for communal good for instance. Both of those things are very important, but most of the public positions people take makes it seem like these notions are entirely mutually exclusive. They aren't, and in fact many Democracies were born through the conflict and synthesis of ideas that happened over just these sorts of tensions.FiveSkandhas wrote: ↑Wed Aug 04, 2021 6:47 am I am a vaxxer and a masker and so on. It is difficult for me to understand why this issue has become so political. And why the arguments are so rancorous and angry. It seems to bring out the worst in people. Very curious.
Social media (well, media generally but especially social media) conditions people to think in very narrow ways, where they habitually engage in over-generalization, black and white thinking (even more than normal), and it generally discourages real investigation of anything - and that's without even touching on the fact that there is so much pure bullshit on it. Disinformation, but also just bad information.
It then rewards the exact kind of behavior that exacerbates this stuff cyclically, literally gives you a dopamine hit for owning the libs, or for picking on the rednecks..or whatever. Now of course we even have individuals getting in on the game and monetizing the conflict. Watch the back and forth some time on Youtube between right and left wing shows. It's not all bad, and the right wingers are worse, but honestly the whole thing is just gross. The Trump years managed to weaponize a lot of the dumb, white hot rage simmering under the surface, and not just in the US, I don't think. That genie ain't going back in the bottle, whatever else happens.
I usually come down on the liberal/progressive side of the debate, but not always. Many of my loudest liberal friends and family don't actually know squat about "the science" of Covid despite obnoxiously aping talking points and finger wagging all the time, and don't consider at all lots of things they probably should as "defenders of the oppressed"; sometimes they end up reacting with the same kind of tribalism as right wingers, only in arguably smaller quantities, and I do it myself too.
I can give examples if needed but it might be too big a can of worms to be worth it.
I feel like one "side" happens to have a much more ethically justifiable, logical position overall, and in that sense seems to me to be closer to sanity, but is still full of plenty of bullshit, and the discrete "sides" themselves are a consumer product used to milk attention for money, despite the horrible consequences. The level of public discourse is as shitty as it is for a number of reasons, but these are some prominent ones from my perspective.
It's all a depressing shitshow.
However, I concede that antivaxx boneheads are a much more serious problem, obviously .
In my opinion though, the liberals doing this sort of thing are also a symptom of the broken dialogue, so I am not leaving them out.
Unquestionably parroting CDC talking points as if they were unchangeable gospel. - with a disease for which the data changes daily, and which the CDC doesn’t have an amazing record of modeling correctly is not ‘following the science’.
Not understanding the difference between decision made on mechanistic studies out of caution, and decisions made on large sets of data also is not following the science.
Liberals and progressives I know do this stuff constantly, and plenty of them don't know jack squat about the science behind public health decisions. It’s way less harmful because they are at least acting for others benefit generally. However, their constant appeals to authority in my opinion often add more difficulty in convincing the vaccine hesitant. Beyond that, it is not good to be completely uncritical of government entities who are not necessarily doing the most amazing job of handling the pandemic - that is not the same as "following the science" and it actually discourages valid questioning of things.
Take school closures as an example. There were serious, debatable issues there. Was it worth it on balance to close them? To me the jury is still out. The school thing was bad enough that eventually the "experts" changed their tune and decided that keeping schools open should be more of a priority, and that kids might be less of a vector than they thought. Some of the liberals I know balked and were like "what's the problem living through Zoom forever, not worth the risK" because they live bubbles where people can realistically do that, and they for some reason during this pandemic have decided that safety is the only value that has to be weighed in such decisions.
Obviously, it’s not the same sort of problem as people with looney ideas at all, but it I don’t think everyone who hasn’t been vaccinated is that crazy, and in those cases how people dialogue over this stuff matters.