The Internet has become like a huge city with ideological ghettos. It is quite possible to spend all of one's time online in a complete echo-chamber where all of the sources for the information you get are sourcing each other and nobody's biases are challenged or checked.

For that reason, I do not like arguing with people I don't know about anything political/ethical/phylosophical/etc. online.

If I know someone, there's personal context that I can access to help me understand where they're coming from. It helps to know where personal boundaries are -- we need our boundaries pushed from time to time to challenge unreasonable biases.

However, when I don't know someone personally and they start throwing their personal opinions and values into a conversation with no historical or personal context, I say:

On Facebook

This comes from a thread of a conversation I'd been having for a week-and-a-half with a personal friend of many years on Facebook. His name is Marko. We were talking about media attacks against Trump when out of the blue a Facebook acquaintance of his who I had never met before named Mariana chimed in with stuff that showed that they weren't following the information in the thread. Normally, I just ignore people who do that, but she kept posting and pushing, so I made this response:

I thought this was a very well-thought reply that expressed my position clearly and politely. I figured it would be received at least marginally well, because even though we hadn't built up a positive history, we hadn't built up a negative history, either. In other words: this was an olive branch to decency... I thought.

This is what she said:

...

uhhhh....

It appears as though my olive branch was returned with a non sequitur. So I took that as an answer to my question about whether or not this person was capable of rational discussion: no.

Do you get this?

Have you ever tried to get to know someone before having a political discussion with them? It's much harder than it looks. For some reason people seem averse to forming a positive connection before sharing potentially sensitive views or opinions.

I think this apprehension to form a personal connection with someone of a different worldview stems from a sort of high-horse position of thinking that your own views are self-evident. Many people online seem to think that their expressed opinions are clearly right, and anyone who can't see that is just stupid. This worldview makes diversity look like opposition, and the world becomes a more hostile and galvanized place because of it.

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