I deactivated my first account 8 years ago, but got back on to re-connect with my old pals and acquaintances from back in the day. For that reason, it was fantastic.
After another year, I realized that I can't actually say ANYTHING interesting on this platform without offending someone. There's a lot of variety in my crowd. I have the sense IRL to know that not everything is for everybody, but that doesn't matter much on Facebook unless you want to spend hours and hours hand-crafting subsets of your friends for different topics (I don't). And I have zero interest in posting selfies or status updates of what's going on in my life, so that made the platform exceedingly boring and a waste of time for me. It's a shame, because it does work really well for "connecting" with people (in the shallowest sense of the word).
The only thing worse than people who are offended by everything is having to be afraid of offending over-sensitive people.
There's a lot of variety in my crowd
Which is a good thing. It's how it always was. You surrounded yourself with lots of different people with varying opinions. It's how you learned things. It was called being an adult.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scolia were polar opposites on the issues. But they were also very good friends. Because they were adults. They weren't children who had to surround themselves with familiar things that reinforce their own views of the world.
I remember in college, we were encouraged to seek out differing opinions. I remember a guy who once chastised me for not seeking a broad enough range of opinions. He said, "What's wrong with you? Don't you want to be challenged?" My understanding is that sort of thing would never happen on a college campus today.
Be who you are. If people can't respect you for having a different opinion, they're not adults, and they're certainly not "friends," Facebook or otherwise.
The frustrating (and silly) thing is that this argument is used a lot to attack left-leaning folks who _do_ engage with many people whose experience and world view are very different from them... like people who are homeless, immigrants from other countries, people who are racially minoritized, people who are disabled.
For many people who don't experience those kinds of life experiences, building relationships with those folks can be really tough and bring into question a lot of the foundations of their world view.
The argument that left-leaning people won't engage with right-leaning people often feels like it's used as an excuse for right-leaning folks to use rhetoric and hold positions that routinely disenfranchise and threaten the safety of the kind of people that left-leaning people have worked to empathize with and build relationships without consequence. That the people who continue to have right-leaning views don't seem interested in putting in the same _effort_ to empathize and build relationships with people other than themselves is both hypocritical and not surprising to me.
Finally, engaging with "challenging" opinions is all well and good as a mental exercise, but building and maintaining a relationship with someone is a project that requires continuous work (even as just a friendship) and I think it's worthwhile to be selective in the people who you put in that kind of work for.
There are varied ways to address the issues from different points of view. Parties have switched from one view to the opposing view over time, so by proxy of this we know there isn’t a “right” way and a “wrong” way but rather opposing philosophies that stress one thing over another. Why does one work better now and why will a different one work better tomorrow?
It seems that your stance is based on the idea that a large group of people simply adopts one viewpoint or another arbitrarily, that those solutions have not changed over time, and that because of this we should treat them with equal merit. I believe this is wrong, for a number of different reasons.
First, it ignores the outcomes of the actual policies as well as the framework of thinking that it supports. Someone who has a "different take" whose outcome changes whether I or my friends can afford health care or not is not an "equal but opposite" philosophy.
To build on that, because it ignores the actual outcomes and treats all ideas as equal, it supports a framework of hyper-partisan thinking, the idea that ideology is about who you are loyal to. In this framework, your belief makes sense: just because we're loyal to different parties doesn't mean we can't be friends! But again, it ignores the very real implications of those beliefs.
Finally, it also concludes that solutions to these problems, and the people who are in charge of supporting them, cannot evolve and improve, only be renewed as a way to for members of a party to pledge loyalty. Bernie is not a perfect leftist, and has certainly had some shitty takes and policies; sometimes people get better (and sometimes they don't). As our understanding of the plight of the common people grows and adjusts to the new realities we are faced with, different solutions will evolve on the left, and that is good.
The wording here demonstrates deep disrespect for people whose ideas, experiences, conclusions and understanding of the world differs from your own.
What I meant to wrote was 3 separate points:
- Bernie is not a perfect leftist
To be clear: I don't hold Bernie to the standard of being a "perfect leftist," rather stating the obvious that he is not one. And while I would love a candidate that agreed more with my viewpoints than him, I don't think he's a bad person because he doesn't.
- Bernie has had some shitty takes and policies
I do believe that Bernie Sanders, the politician, has not always wielded his power in my best interest; for instance, voting for the "Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists" joint resolution that has been used as justification for our military presence in the middle east. I would, in a glib way, rate that vote and the opinions he gave during that time as a "shitty take." I don't think that disrespects him as a person.
- Sometimes people get better (and sometimes they don't)
Sometimes people evolve their politics and beliefs as they learn more and the material conditions which they exist in change, which is good. Sometimes they do not, and that's bad. I do not think that adopting strictly leftist beliefs - of which there are a cacophony of differing, conflicting ones - is inherently good. Rather the lack of evolution is bad.