YOUR POLITICAL OPINION IS PERFECTLY FINE

I'm sure that you're a reasonably intelligent person, you have decent values, you care about people around you, and you take a respectable amount of time to get informed before forming a political opinion (none of that is sarcasm).

But so are other people. You do not hold a monopoly on common sense, or morality.

A worrying proportion of online debate quickly devolves into a trench war between two camps. Every person of every side of every issue is totally convinced that they have "reality" on their side because they know the "facts" while the other side is "deluded" and "just pushing their agenda". Everybody spends their time telling the other side to "do their research". Everybody is completely convinced that people holding an opposing view are "biased", "dishonest", or "have a distorted view of reality" because "their sources are wrong".

Conversations of this kind are pretty unproductive as they create resentment and they are notat all likely to make anybody think again about their position. No matter how hard you are convinced of being the one seeing clearly, people on the other side are just as convinced as you are.

And everyone's like " :( "

I would like to end this post with a short list of humble suggestions on ways to be more persuasive and pleasant in your conversations about touchy topics.
- Spend less time lecturing people about how they can't think, and more time putting your ideas out there to show how good they are.
- Try to read more than the title and/or the first few lines of an opinion text before taking a giant dump on it.
- Refrain from attacking a caricature of what the other side has said.
- End your posts with a short list of humble suggestions.