The Partisan Divide on Issues

[Eric the Green]

(12-05-2020, 08:49 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(12-05-2020, 08:31 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(12-05-2020, 07:50 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: I just picked up a Shield and Brooks piece.  They quoted a psychological study saying the more you prove somebody has the facts wrong, the more tightly they will cling to their ideas.  They also reminisced about the good old days when you assumed the other side had good intentions.  They might be mistaken and misinformed, but you didn’t assume they were evil.  Assuming evil is more the norm these days.

It just reflects what tends to happen here.  The more you report on what is going on on Earth 1, the deeper the clinging to the Earth 2 fantasies get.

Yes, I watched it live. Fact-checking doesn't change emotions.

Neither has massive death.  But it worked with Atlanta and Hiroshima?  Does it not count if they are doing it to themselves?

It may be harder to learn from massive self-inflicted death, than death from an external enemy (as the Japanese and Germans did). As for Atlanta, much remained unlearned by the confederates, and much still remains unlearned. That is whom we still face today. And the massive death comes not only from covid, but from the massive floods and fires of today's climate change, which are sure to magnify in the coming years. They still refuse to learn from it all.

I often speak like a member of the blue tribe, and feel ever-more cut off from the red tribe. I note that the blues are always, as a rule, more willing to compromise and understand the red side, than vice versa. I even give some credit to the ideologies they hold to so fanatically and dogmatically. I can go a long way with their beliefs about Jesus and God, just not so far or in the same way as they insist that we all do. I don't want confiscatory taxes and infinite debt, and considering my own career, I have to say like Elizabeth Warren that, along with being a quasi-socialist, I am also a capitalist to my bones. I was raised with a mixture of self-reliance and silver spoons. 

It's just that the red tribe has gone so far off the deep end, and now so endanger the country and the world, that I realize the first priority is to defeat them politically. They can't be reasoned with or compromised with any longer, unless they begin to learn the error of their ways. I can see them as my fellow Americans, and concede that they have some personal virtues in their lives, but I would not object if they split from the rest of us. 

Now they insist that Trump's defeat is a fraud, even though Trump's own puppet AG has found no evidence for it, and even though 40 judges, even many appointed by Trump himself or other Republicans, and Republican legislators, reject his case. So it becomes hard to identify with them as my fellows, when in fact I feel much more aligned with Europeans and some East Asians and Anglosphere members than with these latter-day Confederates. And I attribute our problems more to these people than to the politicians and elites who do their bidding.