this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
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This is a bit of an unrealistic position, especially if trying to generalise past the boundaries of your friend group. Your friends trust you, so by all means, talk to them and try to educate them. But trying to change a complete stranger's mind is almost impossible.
And many of the positions the left refuses to "debate" are that certain groups of people should not be able to exist within society. Like, the left isn't refusing to debate tax policy, it's always about bigotry.
And let's just be perfectly blunt. The vast majority of conservatives screaming "groomer" at visibly LGBT+ people aren't going to have their minds changed. You can't educate someone who does not want to be educated. And demanding minorities stand in the firing-line and fruitlessly try to educate the people who hate them, sometimes to the point of hate-crimes, forever... You have to question the priorities of such a demand.
Sometimes caring for minorities means giving up on convincing hateful people.
Every political opinion has a reasoning and differences in political opinions are usually based on differences in the morals or ideals of people. So why do you have to hate or discredit the opinions that dont match yours?
Refusing to debate a topic (aka refusing to hear the other side's arguments) just leads no narrower-minded people. You cant have a reasonable opinion if you have only heard one side's (your own) arguments.
That is very vague. Because sometimes those "differences in the morals or ideals of people" are that certain demographics of people are inferior, dangerous, or otherwise shouldn't exist in society. That isn't something we should pretend is reasonable.
It's also not true that every political opinion has strong reasoning behind it. Some people just do not live in the same reality that we do.
But we HAVE heard them. We have heard them for decades. We have heard them over and over and over again until our ancestors had to fight multiple wars against them.
We have heard the racism and the sexism and the homophobia and the transphobia and every other little bigotry. Stop pretending we haven't heard them out. We have.
And after decades of listening and trying to have these conversations people eventually say "enough". That's not being narrow-minded. It's the opposite.
The more room you make for bigotry, the less room you make for people affected by that bigotry. And if one wants to hear diverse views, then one should listen to diverse people. Bigotry leads to echo chambers.