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this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2025
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American conservatives arent good faith debaters.
And they feel much the same way about us. Almost like the only way to resolve the differences is, I dunno, discussion.
Yeah it worked out so well for America that they elected Trump twice and his style of politics has become more popular. But, I'm sure you can do what a nation and the people opposing him failed to do of changing minds through discussion.
How about starting with something easy first like convincing antivaxers to change their minds.
Oh, I hadn't realized America was secretly not super polarized and has plenty of actual spaces where people meet, interact and talk with folks with whom they disagree.
Lets ignore Canada almost choosing a prime minister that ran on US style culture war politics or Europe trying to push things like chat control or Germany with a growing alt right movement. Yeah its a roses everywhere in the world.
Lets give the alt right more of a voice its turned out so well.
I have no idea what point you're trying to make.
That doesn't work on the internet. Without face-to-face interaction the ability to empathize with the other side is lost. We're NPCs, just random encounters in the posting RPG. I'm someone that deserves to die and there's literally nothing I can say or do that would change their minds, they just want to collect my posts for their cringe compilations and bully me until I kill myself.
You can't empathize with anyone unless you can see them face to face? That seems worrying.
I think a lot of people empathize without meeting people, witness y'know, the mass complaints and protests about Palestine. I don't think that many folks have actually been to the Gaza strip.
We see videos coming out of the Gaza strip. Maybe "face-to-face" was overstating it, but we really do need to be able to see and hear people to make them real in our minds. We struggle to empathize with random strings of text on a screen.
You can still do it if you try, but when you're "debating" people the relationship is inherently antagonistic. People usually aren't going to try to empathize with the enemy, they're going to try to win. That's why debating on the internet does not work.
Watch, you'll now keep arguing with me because I can't convince you of anything, because I'm an NPC in the posting RPG. Your goal here isn't to listen to anything I have to say or trust that I have literal decades of experience arguing on the internet at this point, your goal is to defeat me and gain upvotes. I'm not real, I'm just something getting in your way.
That's a wild assumption. If I cared about upvotes, I have trouble imagining an approach more destined to fail than arguing for MAGA on Lemmy.
I also don't think everything has to be a debate. I love those and am always happy for it but really, just getting MAGA folks to interact with people whom they wouldn't otherwise is healthy. I think more good and possibly understanding our shared humanity comes of sharing memes or common interests.
Similarly, if we see the news or the things that are animating them, it's helpful. (A trivial example from years ago but that opened my eyes, I was pretty on the "cancel culture is a stupid made up complaint" and then while reading the National Review, they referenced "so you've been publicly shamed" which broke my heart when I read it. Then my opinion changed a bit.)
Yelling at people on the internet is rarely actually debating and even less often convincing.
Edit: ahhh, sorry, I'm on a phone and see I've got a note about you. I'll end this here.
Have a good day!
Debating someones right to live isnt a discussion.
I'm assuming you're talking about trans rights?
Show me where that exists in anything published by the trump campaign or project 2025.
As far as I understand, neither have said "we will murder all trans people."
These sorts of claims are exactly why I'd like to hear what MAGA has to say. It's just the same as people who claimed Harris was going abolish private property; undoubtedly some of her supporters were from our crazy Left fringe but to conflate them with her was, at best, mind numbingly stupid.
Do your own homework. Its in plain speech in both.
aka, "okay, I know they didn't say this but I feel it!"
Which is eerily similar to how republicans paint the Left on various issues.
Or maybe not engage with a million rage bots on Reddit before you have a chance to process news in a healthy way. I think it disables their emotional regulation.
Hell, just not engaging with social media would probably be the correct call for all sides.
This stuff is destroying our ability as a people to handle anything.