Winstonm, on 2018-February-05, 20:55, said:
As much as I admire Ken Berg, I think he has been wrong in espousing the view that insulting Fredo supporters does not good and may do harm. I don't think it matters to Fredo's troops. I think they wear insults as a pride button. If, after a year of Fredo's lies and attacks on democracy, those people who still support him will not change their views regardless of what is said by whom or against whom.
This does indeed get to the heart of how we see things differently. I almost always go back to direct personal experience in such matters, so I will tell you a true story. Back to 1960, I am engaged to the iron miner's daughter, I am up in northern Minnesota, my future father-in-law has taken me out to a bar to meet other guys. The discussion turns to the subject of race and the Twin Cities. The black population of Minneapolis was not large but they were sure this must be a problem. I simply talked of my experiences and by the time we left there was a noticeable willingness to think differently. I didn't call anyone names, and it probably helped that I was sill standing after a fair amount of drinking, but there was a shift in thinking.
I have known people who are sure that they are right about everything. We have all known such people. But most people are not that way.
Now to me. I mentioned this story before. In the summer of 1960 I was here in Maryland working for NASA before going back to grad school in the fall. Kennedy was running against Nixon. Easy choice, you say. But for me, a first time voter, it wasn't. I had been paying some attention to politics since I was very young, but put the accent on "some". I had worked while I was in high school, worked while I was in college, I was working a good deal of overtime in that summer, I was newly married. I paid some attention to the debates and such, but it was not a top priority. This is not so different from the iron miners. We have lives, not just political lives. The Harlem Globetrotters had played a game up in northern Minnesota which was probably the first and last time many of those guys saw anyone with black skin. They did not read black poetry. Not white poetry either.
People change their minds. But how? Not by being lectured at, but that only says how it doesn't happen. Human interaction seems like the best shot. Not a certainty.
One more story. In my youth, I rarely encountered anyone with black skin . This was St. Paul in the 1950s. Then I went to the University of Minnesota and that changed somewhat. I was usually aware of someone being black and this worried me. I was playing chess in a coffee house (Ten O'Clock Scholar for those who know the campus) and this black guy was watching, commenting on my every move. After a bit I said something such as "Look, you can play the winner. Until then shut up". Later I realized that I had treated this guy in exactly the way I would have treated a white guy and I relaxed a bit about whether I was paying too much attention to the color of skin.
Anyway, I recommend taking people one at a time. Let the sociologists do their groupings if they must.
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