I understand the feeling, fl. There are a lot of barbs thrown on here, especially toward the right leaning posters due to the current makeup of the community, and it’s hard to look past them. I also think it is challenging to assess posts except through our own biased lenses. Eg It is usually the case that everyone feels triggered. Studies on altercations show that both parties usually feel justified based on the previous acts of the other party. Another example is your references to “those people”, “jerks”, and their “shitty lives.” I think it quite likely that if you had met these people at a football game or other non-political venue that wouldn’t have these impressions at all. It’s often a matter of context and group identity. It is also quite likely that many of these other posters have nearly identical feelings about you. We already saw above that Davis felt provoked. And I would expect that some assume you’re a jerk with a shitty life. As it was put in the classic film The Rules of the Game: “The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons.” I do try to be fair, as you said, but I certainly wouldn’t say that I’ve achieved this goal. To my regret, I’ve undeservedly dismissed or denigrated the posts of others many times. I’m certainly not a moral authority, but I would say that I’ve witnessed you also being hard on other posters. Maybe they all truly deserve it, but if you find that the truly bad people are on the other side of the aisle, there’s a simpler explanation. Just a thought.
They used to be. Of all the MAGA casualties, the denial of facts and reality may be one of the greatest casualties
This is mostly true. It is really weird how it flipped. Prior to Covid I think Marin county CA was one of the places with a higher rate of unvaccinated kids in the country. However with Covid vax it was much higher than average vax. RFK jr was indicative of the anti vax left. While not an antivaxxer per se, even Bill Maher has taken skeptical positions on some vaccines and takes the position if you eat right and stay healthy you don’t need them (but apparently smoking copious amounts of weed is healthy) It just shows that these things become part of partisan and ideological identity, and that is affected not only by what people who you identify with do, but also not doing what people you oppose do.
Orthodoxy is the other great swaparooskie. The Left, being home to liberalism, was traditionally anti-orthodoxy. They have since become the Orthodox Church of rigid Leftist dogmati politics. Conversely, the right used to be home to Orthodoxy, and now are "the big tent" home to all manner of unorthodox schools of thought. (....oh, and speaking of swapaROOSKIES...)