I don’t know if you feel the same zk, but I’m losing patience with my right wing friends.
They tend to have a Trump like attitude about things. They use lots of sarcasm and “duh, you’re so stupid” type arguments. So, we’re supposed to be the nice intellectual, ivory tower elitists who take it quietly and politely. But when you dish out the same rhetoric, they get all in a tizzy.
ZK, do you feel that you give more in your friendship with that person? Is it an assymetric friendship where you have to be more patient and forgiving?[/quote]
I try to avoid talking politics with my friends. If a right winger brings it up, I try to change the subject. Even if it takes a couple attempts.
This particular friend kept bringing it up. We played golf together regularly, so we’re out there for 4 hours at a time. He never got the hint that I didn’t want to talk about it. So, I gave in and talked about it. I think I was at least appearing to be respectful of his views, and I think I was able to hide what I was really thinking. I was thinking, god, he’s an idiot. Not unintelligent. I know him to be somewhat more intelligent than average. But an idiot nonetheless. Not because he disagreed with me, but because he had nothing to back up his statements/arguments. Some of which were entirely nonsensical, and could only, in my opinion, have been believed by someone as intelligent as him if he was both unskeptical and had been emotionally manipulated. After a few of these (long) conversations, he said, “it’s great that two intelligent guys who disagree can talk politics and not get angry at each other.” And he was right about neither of us being angry (to this point). I wasn’t angry, I just thought he was an idiot. My opinion of him got lower every time we talked about politics. He was unskeptical, irrational, and couldn’t answer basic questions about his opinions. Again, my opinion had nothing to do with whether we agreed on anything.
So one day he posts some nonsensical rwnj stuff on facebook. I private message him on facebook, asking him some basic questions about that post. This time I mentioned that I thought he’d been emotionally manipulated by the right-wing noise machine, and I pointed out why I thought that. He unfriended me on facebook, and we haven’t talked since.
It’s not for fear of losing friends that I don’t talk politics. It’s because 1) what’s the point? and 2) I don’t want to think they’re idiots (and I don’t want them to think I’m an idiot, which, regardless of who’s actually an idiot, they probably will).
