So I got into a really intense conversation on voice with someone last night in Second Life about the current situation and I realize that I got so far away from my original issue I still am not sure where they stand on certain things.
It was so infuriating and of course at the end he was wanting to be friends still and leave in an ok way and I was tired and side tracked and kind of agreed.
His way of dealing with things is part of the problem (which made him agrny when I said that ) . There is nothing inherently wrong with what he was saying ( which was that you shouldn't judge an individual because of a group that they are a part of but he took it to such an extreme that basically he was saying unless you can talk to someone and know exactly their motivations you shouldn't judge them by a label you have for them or a group they are a part of.
And there is no way to do that.
Plus he literally would not say anything about the police attacking the press because there isn't a way to know the context of the videos and people who are reporting what happened have their own biases and will interject that into reporting.
I got caught up in trying to clarify what he was saying so much it ended up in an argument about schematics and because he would say something like that and then make some statement that did exactly what he said I shouldn't do and when I stopped to try and untangle the contradiction be got mad.
The biggest thing was him saying that people need to change but he doesn't believe that people should influence how someone thinks by telling them they are wrong or that they need to change. After over an hour of him telling me I was wrong and trying to get me to change the way I thought. But because he hadn't directly told me I needed to change but cautioned me that what I was doing could be a problem it wasn't... trying to influence me or telling I'm wrong since he was cautioning me that the way I thought about people wasn't the way to get people to change... And having a direct conversation is what needs to happen instead of people writing or taking to groups in general terms about how they should change. Except the walked back on that to clarify he wasn't telling to change but cautioning me that it would be more beneficial if I didn't do certain things.
For example I was saying the police are targeting the press. He would object because I'm ascribing motive to people without understanding their individual feelings and also I'm getting this info from video that doesn't show the ful context and reporting where people have an agenda.
And then he is telling me that Trump has for for black Americans than anyone else so he can't be racist. And then cited unemployment numbers as a reason and he knows this from articles he has read. When I asked him how he can trust what he read when the person writing it has an agenda then I'm being nit picky and unfair.
Actually I was bitchy and said something like "but I thought I shouldn't trust what I read because people who report on things have an agenda and want support their own beliefs rather than be objective".
Also that I try to draw too fine a line on things and making impossible standards and then went on to say the Civil War wasn't about slavery but about the state rights to own slavery and it wasn't saying that slavery was good but at the time it was legal and so the South was trying to protect their legal rights which just happened to be the right to own people. Even though slavery is morally wrong you have to look at the histoical context of things (I think he was trying to say that because slavery was still legal it is somehow ok to own slaves bit also morally wrong and the people at the time didn't know that even though there were more and more free states and abolition movement) And that Lee and others weren't really racist and that Stephens was super racist so his Cornerstone speech shouldn't be taken as a message about the Confederacy as a whole but as his individual beliefs. Even though he was giving the speech and VP of the CSA (continued...)