I think this is overblown. Most people do have reasons for what they believe.

I know everyone hates it when people “both sides” things these days, but one thing I do see both sides having in common is a refusal to honestly engage with and comprehend the other position. This doesn’t mean agreeing. It means understanding what someone believes and how they might have gotten there.

Where the echo chambers and other things that you mention do come in is in reinforcing that dynamic, in reinforcing each side seeing only a straw man version of the other.

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ratelimitsteve 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

>Most people do have reasons for what they believe.

You're equivocating between reasons as in causes and reason as in rationality.

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mxkopy 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

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api 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Straw men made in echo chambers.

I know a good number of conservatives and some MAGA people. I know zero people who believe those things.

Meanwhile here are some of the things right leaning people I know think about liberals and leftists:

They hate Christians and would outlaw religious faith if they could. They believe that humans are a cancer upon the Earth and therefore are anti-natal and anti-family and want us to die out. They hate the actual working class and want to import tons of immigrants to depress working class wages. They want to be able to give hormones and do gender surgeries on minors without parents permission. The “LGBTQ movement” wants to add “minor attracted persons” and legitimize pedophilia. Etc etc.

I know a lot of liberals and leftists and I know zero people who believe any of those things either.

This is all straw man bullshit.

People are refusing to honestly engage with each other, so we are devolving to violence. This ends with riots, civil wars, pogroms, or dictatorship, or maybe all of the above.

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croes 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Sorry but "I don't know people like that" is anecdotal evidence and is part of the your echo chamber.

Maybe listen to the people Mehdi Hassan debated with here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2S-WJN3L5eo

	▲	nkg 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		That was so entertaining! I know it was not your intention but thanks for the link.

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mxkopy 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Check my edit. It’s not a straw man because the poor uneducated south never left their attitudes towards slavery behind (or otherwise rediscovered/were reintroduced to them for political benefit). Believe it or not, people actually have extreme nationalistic and ethnocentric beliefs - if things were so rosy in the world as they are in your bubble, people wouldn’t be getting shot

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api 5 days ago | parent [-]

If it’s just the south why did the entire country shift right in the last election.

You can always find extreme fringe people who believe anything. There are not enough of them to sway national elections. The reasons for huge swings at the national level must be more inside the Overton window than that.

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mxkopy 5 days ago | parent [-]

“If it’s just the south” like the south isn’t the larger of two cultures that define the U.S. historically.

Again, it’s not out of pocket for the US to be blatantly racist. You say these are extreme beliefs (and they are objectively) but in the US they never were really fringe. Compare that to whatever you made up for leftists, there’s no historical precedent. The “both sides” way of thinking is just not moored in reality here.

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api 5 days ago | parent [-]

It seems like you can't even do it.

You're not alone here. Most people, including most on the right, seem like they can't do it either. People can't look at someone else's position honestly without assuming the worst possible version of it.

Where I do think your points about algorithms hold is that the algorithms have trained people to think this way. In the echo chambers bashing straw men and vilifying people is how you get upvotes and shares and likes. Look at most of X for the right, or any lefty subreddit for the left. These places are a bunch of people beating straw men.

All the things I listed are things I've heard right-wing people say about people on the left or liberals. When I hear that kind of thing I remind people that I know lots of leftists and zero people who believe those things, that those are either straw men or lunatic fringe positions held by tiny numbers of people.

Similarly: very few Christians are Dominionists, very few Southerners think the Confederacy should have won or that slavery should come back, very few people anywhere think the US should be a whites only ethnostate. There are people who think these things but they are minorities. I'm sure if I went fishing I could find pro-pedophilia-normalization LGBTQ people or anti-human pro-extinction greens, but these are also very fringe views. As I said you can always find a kook.

Most people are not crazy, but crazy people are loud. The question people need to ask is: why would a non-crazy person vote for Trump? Or if you're on the right, why would a non-crazy person vote for Harris?

	▲	judahmeek 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Your statements that very few people do X requires sources: https://www.newsweek.com/many-americans-have-more-common-whi...
	▲	4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[deleted]

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hnewsenjoyer 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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diogenescynic 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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