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Originally Posted by Fuzz
OK, I listened to it. I think it exposes a sense of naivety in her optimism, and I'd love to see it revisited in 5 years.
It's easy enough to look at this issue in it's own bubble, as they do, referencing gay marriage success. But it ignores the reality of the world we live in today, which is not 2008. I'd point to something like how our views on climate change swayed to the point people almost cared enough to do something, before throwing it all away, even as the world boils around them. The problem is that you are asking people to go against their best individual interests for the good of everyone. That takes a lot of work to convince, but near zero effort to blow over. And social media has made it super easy to blow this stuff up.
Truth and facts are largely irrelevant to the opinions of most people, as we've seen in vaccine debates. If you can tie it back to faith, all the better, because then facts REALLY don't matter. You are now using their eternal soul as a weapon, and it's near limitless what you can get away with when you do that, because people have had a lifetime of indoctrination to believe the unbelievable. But even without religion, you can easily generate massive amounts of lies and deceit that are close enough to being believable that the caution principle comes into play, and people grasp to not changing for safety, either from fear or uncertainty. Play it safe.
Education is the way out of this, but we've accepted 45 person classes, religious indoctrination as a valid educational path that even the average CPer puts their child into because it's not so bad, or it's the easiest geographic choice, and symbolic book burnings so we are moving farther from that path succeeding too.
Anyway, I think the core idea that if you just be nice and meet people where they are that you will eventually get there may have worked in in the past, but it's far to easy to take all that work and bulldoze it with one lie today. Or maybe I've just watched the world turn to #### and I'm far to jaded with humanity to expect them to do any selfless good anymore.
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It’s true, the world is different, but some of the rules are still good rules to follow and I think still work now. I think being nice and meeting people where they are still works, but it doesn’t work on everyone, and being able to identify the difference and basically who you can work with and who is going to work against you no matter what is important. As McBride says, it’s important to identify who is just looking for attention and ensure they don’t get it.
As I mentioned, there are lots of people (this forum is rife with them) who have good hearts but “imperfect” ideas and/or language. There are times where I read the way things are said, or the ideas people share, and it feels a little gross. But instead of jumping to conclusions you ask questions and see where someone’s heart is at, and if it’s good, most people can be persuaded, even if you can’t do it. But most of the time you can.
There’s people like Cliff who really can’t be persuaded, who haven’t evolved in a decade, who see challenges as attacks and resort to hate speech when confronted. I agree, you kid of have to write those people off and focus on the trees that are actually going to bare fruit because it’s too easy for any efforts to be wiped away by a tweet or blog that confirms their negative bias. If you look at civil rights movements, progress wasn’t made by convincing the people who hate you that they’re wrong, it was by convincing the every day, normal people that you’re just like them. Black civil rights have made immense progress over the last 100 years. But the KKK and white supremacists still exist. At a certain point, you realize a certain portion of people who lead with hate are never going to be convinced by the people they hate, so you hope you can convince other people and it spreads over time.
There are other examples here in the Israel conversation as well. Like kudos for all the effort some of you put in, but someone who hates Palestinians and think of them as sub-human so they seek out only info that confirms that isn’t going to be convinced by an AP article that they’re wrong. Eventually you have to write them off and focus on people with good hearts. That doesn’t mean they can never change, but put the effort toward something meaningful.
A couple other things discussed in the video which I think are important are the facts that:
- People are too prone to going down academic rabbit holes: there needs to be a better effort toward having real, normal conversations. People online love to list the five studies that prove their point, but what’s going to sway a normal person is just speaking in terms they understand and relating to them. That doesn’t mean it WILL sway them, just a better chance. How do you talk to your friends at the pub? Some people are disgusted by the idea of that being allowed here, but it’s probably better than overly academic nonsense.
- We cannot take progress or public sentiment (when it’s in our favour) for granted and skip or stop doing the work. The right is making the same mistake now, so hopefully it swings back in time, but anyone who says “they’re not going to roll back _____” is disingenuous or a fool, because we’ve seen that people absolutely will if your progress isn’t built on a solid base of support.
The policing of language thing I think is very important. I feel like we’ve kind of gotten to the point where the people most focused on it are stuck five years ago. For others, I think there’s been a shift from what is said to focusing on the sentiment behind it, which I think is good.
It’s genuinely a relief to see people call out hate speech on here. A few instances recently. And if that collection of people isn’t perfect in their views? Or say something kind of gross or not “politically correct”? That’s fine. I’ll take people who make an inappropriate joke or accidentally misgender people but stand up when they see hate 10/10 times. I think the shift is going that way in general. And embracing it is what is going to build that foundation of progress.