>>87606034I disagree, that era of acceptance died when centralized social media took over. I think it was the late90s -early 2010s when subcultures thrived thanks to forums and IM enabled hobbyists and weird cultural niches to congregate and coordinate. Mainstream largely was never affected and let the subcultures be for the most part. Compare the youth of then, you had goths, ponyfags, emos, jocks, weebs etc. But now, the α-ers have polarized into fairly uniform values of good and bad.
Part of this is
>>87619167 said. I think what social media does is that it requires you to make an identity out of literally anything. When something, ie religion or politics, become part of people's identity, and people can never have a fruitful argument. By definition they're partisan.You're attacking the identity of the person, not the objective thing. Which topics engage people's identity depends on the people, not the topic. For example, a discussion about a battle that included citizens of one or more of the countries involved would probably degenerate into a political argument. But a discussion today about a battle that took place in the Bronze Age probably wouldn't. No one would know what side to be on. So it's not politics that's the source of the trouble, but identity. When people say a discussion has degenerated into a flame war, what they really mean is that it has started to be driven mostly by people's identities.
More generally, you can have a fruitful discussion about a topic only if it doesn't engage the identities of any of the participants. What makes politics and religion such minefields is that they engage so many people's identities. But you could in principle have a useful conversation about them with some people. And there are other topics that might seem harmless, like the relative merits of Japanese dub and English dub, that you couldn't safely talk about with others.
Most people reading this will already be fairly tolerant. But there is a step beyond thinking of yourself as x but tolerating y: not even to consider yourself an x. The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.
