Comment by albumen
1 day ago
Or, online discourse has polarised opinion through The Algorithm promoting inflammatory, divisive content. In real life, when people talk, they see the other person as a human with more understandable motivations, and tend to find a lot more common ground.
So perhaps instead of "in real life, those divisions are much more hidden behind layers of politeness"; "in real life, divisions turn out to be largely illusory (or more moderate; or more understandable) once you get to know someone".
Most people in real life only have deep conversations with like minded people. In the polite company you just don’t talk about politics, religion or other divisive topics.
There is no illusion about how most rural Christian Americans think about gay people, minorities, liberal west coast elites, Muslims, etc.
No illusion about how many of those people think about Christians too.
I'm in the second most liberal county in the Northeast US and I'd say on a frigid cold night and they called a Code Blue people who go to church are manning the homeless shelter while LGBT...IQA+#@?^! people are tweeting about how Sarah McBride is a sell-out. Then again, the people I know who go to to church are the people who've been to federal prison because they stormed the gates protesting a nuclear weapons faclity.
And how many of those people voted for politicians that are systematically harming non straight people, demonizing immigrants, have no concern about inequalities in the justice system, etc?
I know a few socially liberal devout Christians. I know many others that on the individual level would try their best to make anyone of any religion, sexuality, etc comfortable. But still vote for politicians that campaign on policies that hurt the group.
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