This post is kind of an example of something I find interesting and telling in today's society, and one reason our political divide is widening. The outright dismissal of all ideas because of the source, without any willingness to consider there might be merit there, and ideas worth discussing. The Twitter-sphere makes it so easy to simply disparage and move on to someone whose idea make one comfortable. But seldom has compromise and true progress ever been made without entertaining some ideas that make us uncomfortable. I think this is a big problem. So Archie posts a video by a known right-winger and says "listen to the 3 minute to 5 minutes mark" or something, and the response is "he's a right wing nut I'm not listening to any of it" regardless of merit. It happens the other way around too. To me this unwillingness to entertain ideas that might make us uncomfortable is a huge huge problem. We have to be willing to challenge our own paradigm if we ever hope to get any closer together in our political space. But in the current social media world it is just so easy to build a nice comfy cocoon of ideas, with plenty of ideas I agree with, and plenty of choices for confirmation bias from the other side, that why do I ever have to try to have or entertain an uncomfortable original thought ever again? I think that's a big problem.
