Do you really need to call those who don't "insufferable" though ?
And what conversation do you expect to have when those who feel fine putting down women are promoted to positions of power and laws and rules are currently being changed to the latter's detriment? "Hey, I want to talk, please answer."
Reading how you write, it seems all so intellectual, "open for debate", for discussion. What you seem to miss is that the debate already happened during the last decades (with an "s"), and that one side has realized they lost that rational debate, and refuses to engage anymore. Global warming was only the template (or maybe creationism was), and now there is no debate to be had with regards to trans rights, women's rights, minorities rights, or even if election results have to be respected. The far right found the way out of "losing the argument": they don't even engage.
Just see yesterday senator (senator!) Schmitt falsely accusing Jack Smith of perjuring himself and conspiring with Fani Willis, and calling him a "dipshit". Just one basic problem: Schmitt mixed up the Atlanta Hawks with the Iowa Hawkeyes. How did Schmitt react to being corrected on the spot by Klobuchar? Debate and discussion? Nope. Did he correct himself afterwards? Nope, he went to the Charlie Kirk show and doubled down on that basic mistake - turning it willfully into a bare-faced lie. Did Fox news mention any of this? Nope. There is no debate.
(And Schmitt is not only a senator but first in line to become VP for Vance's presidential ambitions. He is not a third-rate nobody I am picking on to unduly slime the right in general: he is a major political representative.)
Meanwhile you have little to offer than getting punched repeatedly in the face by people who will double down when you do not fight back. You are, in my opinion, "fighting the last war".
It may seem very pessimistic and it is. The USA was on the way to a(n un)civil war. The only thing that is saving you currently is the haplessness of Trump, causing pain to everyone equally due to his economic and military ineptness, turning everyone against him. But without that shared pain, half of US voters (amplified by a voting system biased toward conservatives) would have been fine with all the subjugation of women and non-white people, and they are not interested in any good faith "discussion" on those topics.
I mean, to clarify, I rarely find myself wanting to have a conversation about sexual assult, conversation type nonwithstanding. I also don't really come across people who would be genuinely "okay with sexual assault". But if I am going to have a conversation, I'd indeed appreciate that to not be like the aforementioned. Not that I'd think there's much to discuss per se, nor was this the actual topic of this subthread. Instead, it was rhetorics in political speech.
> Do you really need to call those who don't "insufferable" though ?
Yes, I do believe I do, because that is my genuine impression. There may be kinder ways to put it, so in a sense, I might be falling victim to this myself when I say such a thing, especially given various contexts. But then I am indeed not superhuman in any way (not in my compassion, not in my forgiveness, and certainly not in my Christianity). I just happened to find this to be the salient bit over time, among other reasons.
A kinder way to put it might be to highlight how this behavior I'm referring to is invariant to these political (politicized?) topics. Instead, I regard it as a matter of feeling really intensely about something, and that not being understood and appreciated by others. An act of desperation. And just like in any other situation when a person becomes highly motivated, the tools and goals involved become increasingly perverted, sometimes to the point of unrecognizability, or even their outright inverse. The topic doesn't even need to be moral. With enough pressure, this same process tends to invite self-identity into the picture, and then morality naturally gets dragged in. Strictly speaking, it's not even out of nowhere: if people really did think like I do, about all the things I recognize as crucial w.r.t. to the topic at hand, they would arrive at the same conclusions. Therefore, their failure to do so means their evilness and stupidity is tautological. Note the circularity of this however.
I think recognizing this kind of dynamic on oneself and others is thus self-evidently genuinely very important, and that failing to do so has severe consequences. I'm also frankly burned out over it, having read comment sections absolutely full of this for decades, which is almost certainly what's driving this for me, rather than any kind of superhuman goodness or intelligence. I have further also experienced the damaging effects of extrapolating too hard, and have been treated poorly by others extrapolating too hard. It really is just shitty. Unfair as it may be, holier than thou as it may sound, unbelievable as it may come across, acting hostile really does just suck. It does not lead to a faithful understanding of one another, the lack of which is the whole reason for this dynamic arising imo to begin with. Being understood being a gift, not a given, does not help. It's a genuinely painful hand to be dealt at times, but that doesn't mean a race to a rhetorical bottom is a sound idea.
There's a lot more to this, mostly abstract, like how the internet I think is fundamentally boosting this by virtue of people from all walks of life being mixed together, who will inevitably be going (and not going) through very emotionally involved things, this being weaponized for (political) clout, or how I think there are fundamental theoretical limits involved with how much we can understand one another, and how fair we can and should be with one another. But I think we got way off of the wrong foot, and most of what I wrote was fairly abstract as is, so that probably wouldn't be any more compelling.
You'll just have to take my word for it that this really does bother me across the spectrum, put a pin on it, then see if you'll ever find it in any way relatable.
Just one point you made I can answer right now:
>It does not lead to a faithful understanding of one another
...Is that true, or is the raw, emotional, intense response the true, "faithful" nature of people? I find it more and more likely that the internet doesn't as much radicalize than free people to be their true, worst self, by giving them the justification to act it out. I think a lot about how civilization can be superficially nice.
A lot has been made of the progress since Jim Crow and yet it just took a gaudy clownish reality TV Star to see people feeling free to finally express their hatred of all that progress and wanting to subjugate back women and brown people. That is what they finally feel "safe" to say out loud.
- you cannot ever fully understand another person (would require you to be two people at once)
- a person cannot ever fully understand oneself (at best it would require a complete structural periodicity of thought)
- even if an understanding appeared complete, given the right context or sufficient time, it'd decohere (would require you to live (and have lived) their life and yours simultaneously)
This does have downstream effects on the idea of there being such a thing as a real person under the hood, but on its own this is not sufficient for exploring that I'd say.
For the record, I kind of both agree and disagree with the claim. It is of course possible to extract stable internal features by empirical probing, like conversations in various contexts, and it is entirely possible that some features remain stable enough for a lifetime, and for the person to interact with them in a stable way for a lifetime. But whether these really form a person on their own, one that is consistent, I'm not so sure. It also feels a bit shaky and convenient that they'd cleanly map to high level features like racism.
To tie this back to your concrete example, are those people acting like that because they're showing their true colors, or are they acting like that because they think that's what gives them social approval? If the latter, that'd mean that rather than them showing their true colors, the colors they're showing are actually more false than normal. And I don't mean this in the sense that the racist TV show host isn't actually racist, but why he is racist, and how that came to be, and how he keeps being that way. Is he racist or a people pleaser, who then in a sense "contracted" racism?
If the same person lived a different life in in a different culture, would they still be racist? If they really do have a base personality trait that makes them so, they'd have to be, but that's not really what we're seeing. Instead, this is a lot more culturally and historically modulated.
I remember watching a short documentary on Taiwan's youth and what their academic interests are. I pretty much laughed out loud when the host described it as most students having a profound interest in semiconductor manufacturing. Well isn't that a great and specific coincidence? Place with world leading semiconductor manufacturing plants having tons of youth interested in exactly that?
Consider our very own conversation. According to your very own words, you cannot help but extrapolate that I must be uncaring of women's sexual abuse, and have a lack of experience with sexual abuse myself. Your moral investment is clearly high in this, naturally meaning this is a sensitive subject for you, and that you are thus trying to establish friend from foe. I can very easily appreciate that, but consequently, it'd be hard to fault me if I went along for the ride, and took serious offense at what you just wrote. I don't think I need to explain why.
But this is no way to have a conversation. And indeed, people who are so amped up are rarely using their words for conversation. It's more of a torment nexus they unleash on those they find to be deserving of it. Surely, if you just accuse your conversation partner with one more blatantly objectionable hyperbole, they'll see the error in their ways (they won't, they'll just get even more amped up and radicalized instead).
Whether such perversion of discourse is acceptable to you, ultimately up to you. I'm a bit surprised you'd be in such disbelief why it's not so for others, however.
This is also reflected in political discourse. A common trope I encounter recently is "they'll tell you you're a monster but not that you're wrong". Indeed, things rarely fall into one category. How hurtful and how true something is are different axes that both exist. Would be awfully cool though if people didn't amp up the hurtfulness factor for funsies, based on whatever arbitrary moral justifications, then act coyly surprised when that's what takes focus. Or were at least candid about having done so.