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Awareness might inflame the tensions, to the extent you can't fight an enemy if you don't know he's there, but I don't believe the problems are people being "told" anything. The problems are genuine and irreconcilable differences in terminal values and mutually alien axioms. Once, those differences didn't exist or weren't known, so we muddled along, but there's shared knowledge now. We do, in fact, know what our fellows think, what they want, and what they vote for.
The Fruit of Knowledge has been eaten. We cannot now lose our awareness of good and evil.
I don’t think my point is to be “unaware”. My point is to turn down your level of exposure to the toxoplasma of outrage — and just as import, if you want some degree of normalcy— make it a social norm in your non-political spaces that we do not talk about politics here in places where the purpose of the group or activity is not political.
I don’t think our differences are completely irreconcilable. If you talk about big picture end goals, most people want the same things. Prosperity, health, safety, relative freedom, and an educated populace. If you gave that list of goals to anyone from communists to libertarians, from old school democrats to NRx bros, I think they’d all agree on those things as end goals. We actually have two problems: too much political news, and too many people who have made politics their personality. Neither of those have anything to do with solving the problems that exist in policy. In fact they prevent solutions as everyone is convinced the other guys are evil. And that thus compromise is evil. And here we are.
Of course if you reduce life to its broadest and least specific terms, we all want Good Things and don't want Bad Things. The problem is that there's no such thing as prosperity, or health, or safety, or relative freedom, or an educated populace. These aren't objective measures, they're vibes and negotiations, and the negotiations have been breaking down for decades.
Is it healthy or unhealthy to support trans rights?
Is it safe or unsafe to tolerate drugged-out homeless on the streets and public transit?
Can our nation be prosperous without disarming its citizens? Can it be safe?
You can't balance civilization on platitudes.
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The question that befalls those that are cursed with this knowledge is then, what to do about it?
Can war be avoided, can any side triumph without vast bloodshed, can compromises be negotiated, can assurances be made?
Separation. Erode federal power, establish common knowledge that federal power should not be enforced or respected. That's the best possible use of power, and even that is Russian roulette.
On an individual level, allow the Sort to run its course, cooperate with it if possible. If you live in the wrong place, move. That's just common sense.
This was apparently blue-on-blue though. Can't avoid that by sorting, unless the sort becomes fractal.
Was it? Not all democrats, especially in Minnesota, are blue tribers(although that is changing). This could easily have been blue on red-tribe blue dog.
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Whether it was blue-on-blue remains to be seen, but blue-on-blue is much, much easier to deal with than red/blue.
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