The amount of times I've been talking to some friends and I'll make a prediction or make an observation on what's going to happen in a political situation (or what to focus on), get disagreed with and called a tankie or pessimist or whatever, and then I'm correct 3 months later is driving me mad. Of course, they then start saying they need to protest against that or whatever. You would think at some point if someone is consistantly correct about stuff (that isn't hard to be correct on, I'm just like, the only theory reader and person who knows any real history in a group of americans) that you'd start to give them a little credit and maybe value their opinion a little higher, maybe even try to understand what's different between you and them????
Example: telling them ukraine has a nazi problem???? Why was this difficult.
It might just be me or something (likely) but it seems like it's a trend across the states.
it's really reassuring to hear someone outside has the same observation
i think it's partly a culture descended from 'pilgrims' who went to go do religion the right way, and partly that we have no goddamn control in our lives so we fixate on having The Correct Opinions cus it's the one thing we have full agency over.
edit: this is compounded by the fact that we all basically live the same. Same grocery stores, same pumps, same brands, same Hollywood sense of right and wrong. So when someone -- a person who on the face of it is a good person who treats others right and behaves largely the same way you do -- disagrees about something, there's all the cognitive dissonance that comes with it.
The real question is what to do about this issue? It is a principle barrier to dispelling brainworms because it requires fragile-gloves for anything lest you end up in the baddies bin to that person along with any potential gossiping they will go on to do.
I'm sure it's why it's so difficult to bring people back from supporting foreign wars once the news has told them they should, or why the "tankie" thought-terminating propaganda has been so annoying. Once you're put in the "this person's a baddie" box they shut down to all influence.