I found the perfect solution; if I'm not man enough to take the heat, stay out of the forum and don't take it personally.
To be clear, no one insulted me directly, just people who think like me politically, and to others who don't. I understand being called small-minded or discriminatory, it's the comments like, "Piece of fu@king sh#t Republicans" that make me tune out.
I'm old and haven't participated much to in forums like this (the non technical side), but it just seems like people are meaner lately. I see it in the way people drive, reactiveness, etc.
I mentioned this to a psychological professional friend of mine. She said people regulate their emotions less than they used to (and of course that some act differently in the relative anonymity of the internet).
She told me about a longitudinal study of children of different ages where they noticed a marked decrease in the ability to regulate emotions over the years (starting in the 60's). We discussed reasons for this. It was incredibly interesting.
<< Off to see if a cooking forum is a better fit. >>
The forums are merely a representation of the whole. If you travel to different parts of the US you will find people even more ignorant than the ones in this forum, believe it or not.
The ultimate problem is that every issue boils down to which side you are on, what the talking points are, etc.. The ditto-heads will simply repeat the talking points ad-nauseum and use various fallacy techniques in their discussions; they have no interest in an actual debate, but rather they want to push forth their agenda.
In the real world, most people are more complicated than that. For instance, I am pro-gun, anti-government spending, but in terms of social issues am very liberal. I don't care whether "teh gayz" marry or not, and generally think organized religion in general is a sign of someone being brainwashed, no different than an adult who still believes in the tooth fairy. I agreed with the George Zimmerman defense and have been assaulted first hand in the ghetto section of town so I know what it's like.
The problem is that the ditto-heads, wanting to repeat the talking points they heard from their preferred talk show host, don't bother to try and understand the position of the other side to make a valid judgement of whether something is right or wrong, or what the consequences are. Either they are paid shills or they just don't have a big enough brain to step outside of their ego for two seconds to consider that it's possible that maybe the other side has a point. Since they don't have enough intellect to think for themselves they rely upon the opinions of others and think of themselves as being correct since the talking point opinions are repeated by the others who are doing the same thing, effectively forming a network of ditto heads which continuously reinforce each others stance.
Really to glean actual useful discourse from the forum, you have to simply ignore those on the extreme ends of the spectrum. There is really no other recourse. You could literally sit down and try to discuss something logically with these people, but in the end even if you had 100 years to try and go over something piece by piece, they only have the ability to repeat what is told to them from the talking heads on their TV set or what they hear from their talk show host of choice on the radio. It's literally the same thing as trying to teach calculus to a retarded person - their brain is so hardened in it's ways that it's the equivalent of cement. Once the opinion forms, there is nothing that you can do to convince them otherwise, even if facts are presented to the contrary.
It's a rather unfortunate human condition when this happens but there is really nothing anybody can do about it. I have seen it firsthand and met people like the extreme left / right of this forum and tried to speak with them in person and when cornered they simply ignore reality and start yelling in your face, even if you show them concrete proof that they are wrong. Ultimately they are just robots, endlessly recycling the verbal diarrhea that is put into their mouths from the talking heads - they have no will to think by themselves.
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