The “Other Side” Is Not Dumb

I understand all that, that's not enlightening. I am well aware of the emotional motivations behind the position.

They dropped in my estimation because they allowed this emotional reaction to endanger their children.

Really, it comes down to what you mean by "America"; my understanding of the "[president] is destroying America" crowd is that they're commenting more on destroying America's "America-ness" than actually dismantling the nation.

Right now, on the right, you have people making claims that Obama is a closet authoritarian bent on dismantling the constitution, taking away our guns, and forcing your small town to not have a nativity scene afront their courthouse this year. Turning back the clock by a decade, those sorts of claims are not very far off from the claims of people (like a rather-younger me) on the left that Bush (or, perhaps, Cheney) were intentionally using the September 11th attacks as a tool for stripping us of our constitutional freedoms. Although obviously not a majority opinion; those sorts of views were definitely not uncommon during the Bush era.

> "Stupid" implies that they make bad choices after being fully informed, which is often unproven.

I don't think this is a particularly universal definition. Willful ignorance that negatively impacts your own understanding of the world has always seemed to me to be very reasonably defined as stupidity.

Actually it is quite confusing for me as I am a moderate and liberals see me as a conservative and conservatives see me as a liberal and I get blasted by both sides for being dumb because I don't have 100% of their views.

I am for social programs so conservatives think me a liberal.

I am for freedom of religion and gun rights so liberals think me conservative.

However there can be like 30 different political viewpoints besides liberal and conservative. It is not a black and white issue but shades of grey and colors as well. The political charts they use are misleading and based on questions they ask I am either on the left or the right and never the same place.

I'm for basic income because people lose their jobs when websites automate stuff and AI programs and robots take over jobs. People need something to live on in order to get an education to qualify for a better job. You see new jobs are created but require a different skill set than the jobs that are eliminated. People used to learn how a typewriter worked and would have a room of 100 people typing letters and memos all day until the Word Processor and Laser Printer came into play and put them out of work. My own father had worked for AT&T with 1ESS Switches they had tried to convert to computers using Unix and he lost his job when AT&T was broken up, nobody else used the 1ESS they used IBM AS/400 systems instead or the PC and he wasn't trained in it. He struggled with finding jobs to make ends meet. Working as a janitor or working on factory machines for a pasta company. We went from being middle class to poor or lower middle class.

Anyway I never consider the other person I debate with on the other side of the screen is stupid or dumb. I figure they were educated in a different way than I was, grew up different, have a different view on life than I do.

The problem is citing sources to back up your claims, the Internet has websites that will support almost any claim. For even website I cite the other person can cite a website that says the opposite. Even more they can say the other website supports a contrary view to theirs so it must be biased, and thus discarded.

In college I had an Astronomy class, and the Professor argued with the book, and countered every theory with his own personal theory. The universe is not expanding, he would claim, Hubble is wrong about red shifts. Instead of a Big Bang, he claimed the universe always existed, etc. It as hard for me to learn from such a person. I was lucky to get a C from his class because I had to take notes on his personal theories to get test answers correct and not use the book to study.

At times I get voted down here because I write a comment that people disagree with. Then sometimes it gets voted back up by people who agree with me.

> People are pragmatic. We tend to invest in knowing the actual truth proportionally to how the issue is actually important to us. Hence most disagreements are about things that actually cost us nothing when we get them wrong.

This is even worse! You're substituting malice for stupidity. Someone who doesn't bother learning or even thinking about a topic but then takes actions that affect other people (like voting) should be ashamed of themselves: to me they're culpable in the same way as someone intentionally causing the same damage (tho I suppose it would be 50% as culpable for a binary policy). It's even less excusable when you consider that in your construction, the policy doesn't even affect them.

I've pretty firmly condemned lack of intellectual rigor for a long time, and by far the most common response I've gotten is "not everyone has the time or will to try to become informed on every issue". I fully agree, but I personally don't talk confidently about or act on any issue that I haven't at least attempted to learn about, and I don't understand why this is considered so difficult. The only reason I can imagine is wanting to feel and seem informed without putting in any of the time to become so. It's pretty despicable to me when that tendency ends up having real life policy impacts.