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Just to be clear: are you also bothered by all the Trump supporters and wrongthinkers who have had their friendships, familial ties, and careers ruined? Are you bothered by what happened to a figure like, say, James Damore? Or does your sympathy run out when dealing with people who have "objectively" dangerous ideas?
Why? He was already president for four years. Nothing happened to American democracy. It's doing just fine. What will make the next four years so much more dangerous than the previous four years?
The basic point you need to understand is that people argue and fight for reasons. It's not just random, and it's not just because people are stupid. You can't just have someone come along and say "have you all just tried respecting each other instead?" and then everyone claps and goes "ah, how could we have been so blind, if only we had just tried respecting each other instead then we could have avoided all this mess".
People fight because they have mutually incompatible views about how society should be structured, and it's impossible for everyone's preferences to be implemented simultaneously. Not everyone can get what they want; someone has to lose out. And no one is happy with losing out. There's nothing unique about our current situation compared to any other historical era. Open the history book to any random page and you'll find conflict.
It's not arguments in general that I take issue with, its how those arguments are conveyed. I think that you can argue while being respectful, but it seems like politicians have moved away from that.
Maybe I'm just projecting my own desire for people to be civilized when addressing conflict. When people start escalating their arguments into ad homs and inflammatory rhetoric, I disengage, I distance myself from them, or just stop talking to them all together.
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Oh, lay off him. He explicitly asked for "gentle guidance", and other than that not being it, I don't know what you're trying to accomplish by jumping on someone who's going through burnout.
I don't perceive him as not being gentle. I have no issue with his his comment. And yes, a lot of what I'm feeling is burnout.
Well, I'll leave you two to it, then.
I reacted the way I did because I sympathize a lot with the way you're feeling, but I come from the other side politically, and thought his type of response is not a particularly productive way to engage with what you're expressing.
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I'll be as gentle as the decorum rules require. If the mods think that my post violated the decorum rules then they're free to let me know. I don't think it did though.
If we took every request to be "gentle" seriously, then people could just preface every post with "please be gentle" and then soapbox about whatever they wanted to with the expectation that they would receive no pushback, which is obviously not desirable. This is a space for having your ideas challenged, so if you post here, you should expect to have your ideas challenged. I raised the points that I thought were a) salient for understanding the foundations of OP's worldview and b) possibly fruitful for a broader discussion.
It's not about rules and mods, it's about picking fights when there's no reason to. But he said he doesn't mind your response, so I'll bow out.
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