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Notes -
I enjoyed reading your posts, and wish you well.
Out of interest in the phenomena you describe: I don't personally relate to this, though. The most fun I've had here in the past week was this exchange, where I poorly expressed an (imo) interesting, entirely non-culture-war concept, which led to a tangential discussion of how good-faith someone was being in a voice debate. The debater I was defending held the opposite of my object-level position. I mostly just enjoyed getting into the gears of some random topic.
More generally, less than half of my comments are directly related to the culture war, and of those that are, probably more than half of them oppose my partisan lean. Most of the posts I enjoy reading also aren't directly culture-war.
My favorite comments to read (aside from 'new true insights') are the ones that capably disagree with me - this often includes pro-religion commnts. While I oppose religion on technical grounds, there are clearly many tensions in the space between christianity and liberal atheism that aren't resolved and should be.
But I do discuss CW topics. So why don't I get heated at all, even though I have very strong views? I'm used to drama tier ironic insults, so partisan overstatements aren't notably high-heat. "Annoying partisan does bad-faith attack" just seems like ... yeah, most people suck at debating, even people who are good at debating still suck a lot of the time, I suck sometimes too, just ignore it and move onto the next interesting post. I try to situate political ideas relative to historical context and their consequentialist impact on society - comparing today's 'bad thing' both to the wonders of modern life and its grand catastrophes (which don't really inspire rage as much as they do quiet dismay). Not as a psychological trick, but as an entirely practical way to understand their impact. Maybe you believe civilization is decaying morally, maybe you believe AI is about to take over - and if these are practical things you're trying to understand and fight in a small way, what about atheist #5 or republican #17 doing annoying response #351 is interesting enough to be mad about?
Hopefully my fat acceptance post didn't contribute to this.
This post actually made me understand some of the points you've been trying to make elsewhere a bit more accurately. I do my best to view events in a historical context as well, but I think some of our prior disagreements stemmed from a different understanding of the significance of certain events and actions in politics.
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