beth (defunct)

Ever since I learned about the paradox of tolerance a few years back, this statement made a lot more sense to me. I was pretty snared in the trap of "wanting to hear both sides" for a while, not because I genuinely valued right wing discourse (because, I mean, fucking look at it), but more because I assumed someone over there was genuinely reasonable and had something worth saying and listening to. That's probably still true, but honestly, at the state we're at, we can only do so much for the "fence sitters" who are only pretending to be centrist in good faith and the genuine fence sitters who are mostly cloaked by their exposure to propaganda and subsequent ignorance to the reality of minorities. I'm willing to extend empathy and knowledge to people like my dad who see themselves as right wing but are actually really open to socialist and minority issues, simply because that's how they grew up to view themselves as (the important nuance there is perceived self-identity, not true belief). But they have to show it to me, first; I no longer have the energy to extend to those trolls who trap me by pretending to be leftists simply to waste said energy with bad faith arguments and generally time-wasting bullshit, and even less for people who outright wear bigotry on their sleeve.

Uh, as an aside I don't know if the term "echo chamber" specifically is useful anymore. I get what you mean with that term - communities built away from bigoted influence that won't tolerate having it - but its value as a phrase may have been negatively tainted, permanently. Luckily we don't need that word to simply state that we have the ability to build communities away from bigoted influence, like this one. I don't actually know a good replacement for it, but I don't know if a lot of people actually will know what you mean when you say "echo chamber", or at least, you know, like I mentioned above, take the most bad faith interpretation possible of it on purpose.