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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mad_Jack" data-source="post: 8759101" data-attributes="member: 6750306">Actually, it's the other way around - politics is just one of the more visible and current areas in which the ever-stronger trend of believing that one must "Pick a side" on an issue and defend it to the death has largely strangled any possibility of constructive discourse. Although the advent of the internet helped people to come together with others who shared their views and interests for mutual benefit, it also made it much easier for people with an inclination to attack those views/interests to do so. So, for several generations now, both online and in real life, people have become more and more conditioned to expect to be attacked for their views or interests and, incidentally and however unwittingly, trained themselves to react in a certain fashion. They've become ever more defensive, and ever more conditioned to lash out at those they perceive as attacking them. Sooner or later, that learned behavior just becomes an instinctual response, regardless of whether or not it's the appropriate one, because they've become so deeply entrenched in their views/beliefs that they can't separate those views/beliefs from who they see themselves as as an individual. Lashing out at those actually attacking them turns into lashing out at everyone who disagrees or has a different opinion from them because they also perceive that as an attack.Now we have entire generations of people* who believe that anyone who holds a different point of view or in any way tries to question theirs (sometimes even if it's just to better understand it) is somehow "attacking" them simply by stating their own views, because they're grown up not knowing anything else...To further conflate the issue, the perfectly legitimate discussion in recent years of the issue of respecting peoples' civil/human rights has bled over into some people honestly believing that people with other points of view are somehow violating their "rights" simply by existing...  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f644.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":rolleyes:" title="Roll eyes    :rolleyes:"  data-smilie="11"data-shortname=":rolleyes:" />As Thomas Shey mentioned, it often explains why people who essentially agree with one another are often coming to violent blows over what are sometimes just minor quibbles. Particularly here on a forum dedicated to something where One-True-Way-ism has been rampant since the very inception of the game itself...*This is obviously a generalization... Now get off my lawn, you damn Millennials!  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /></blockquote>

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