Comment by cobertos 17 days ago
How do you avoid the pain of someone expressing a particularly hurtful political opinion (i.e. entire class of ppl should die) if you don't filter relationships by political beliefs?
I generally keep people's political opinions at arms length, as some relationships are worth the pain or lack of depth. But it has caused unforseen pain at times, and hurts when relations from different spheres interact negatively.
Hmm, sounds about right. I still feel like being around people when they express such radical beliefs reflects poorly on me and hurts me in some unexplainable way.
When challenging such beliefs I find some are hyperbole or a side effect of group-think. Rarely are they genuine, but when they are it's the most worrying. And that's usually when I stop engaging that line of thought.
That sounds so bleak.
What’s the endgame to this approach? Seems to me, folks with genocidal thoughts and feelings would find more positive reinforcement amongst themselves and less negative reinforcement everywhere else. Not great for the “genocide is bad” theory.
The negative reinforcement is supposed to be when they actually attempt to unlawfully kill others, a 9mm bullet goes through their head. Until then, they have the right to their opinion.
It's hard to imagine isolating them from counter points is going to mitigate their position.
I think there are ways a friend can be toxic without threatening death. This friend may encourage you to isolate from your jewish friends, or explicitly make your jewish friends feel unwelcome by saying slurs while in group settings. This friend is explicitly making you in the position where you have to isolate your own friend groups from each other to "keep the peace", i.e. you are forced to do the labor, instead of them, to handle the harm they are causing.
Like we all know a guy who we can't keep around because he keeps saying unhinged stuff, or creeps on any women, or whatever it is he does that ruins it for everyone else.
So I think it's more nuanced than just refusing to cut off heinous viewpoints. It's also how this person injects this view in your existing friend ecosystem.
This only works in so far as their actions are illegal.
But the premise here is these people have these beliefs and are working to make them legal. The idea isn’t that these people want to kill Jews, it’s that they want to make killing Jews the right thing to do.
Then, it becomes your problem. Particularly so if you are Jewish, but even if you are not.
This of course extrapolates to less extreme examples.
By interacting with the positive aspects of the person and ignoring or disengaging from the political opinions I don't like. If they want to kill jews or whatever, they have the right to that opinion, doesn't bother me so long as I'm not obliged to partake. I might engage the view but if neither of us are benefitting from the conversation there is no point in continuing down that particular path.