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Counterpoint's avatar

Good stuff… after a couple of pointless Substack arguments and misunderstandings, I’ve been thinking about the nature of this online discourse. I love to debate, but I’m leaning toward thinking this just isn’t an ideal medium for it. Debate properly done requires enormous goodwill, and while you can cultivate it online, it’s still a public forum in the end.

So, I’m going to try to amp up the positive aspects of things for awhile and see how that goes. Cynthia W reminded me the other day that we should be thinking about what we can do to enact our values in the world. And it turns out I don’t value discord and animosity at all, and perhaps I should behave in a way that reflects that.

It also occurs to me that it is more challenging to lay out the positive aspects of your own ideas rather than going on the attack, so perhaps it will be a way to sharpen up the thinking too. That is until I forget all about this resolution next week….

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Laurie Mitchell Dunn's avatar

Thank you. I spent all morning and part of the afternoon trying to talk my husband down from a white-hot rage about gas prices and “greedy oil company executives”, somehow culminating in “why do I even bother to vote!” All fueled by reading the online news on what should have been a beautiful Sunday. I get angry too, believe me, but for my own sanity, I’ve learned to walk outside, breathe the air, look at the forest surrounding our house (we’re blessed to live near Taos, New Mexico), and do my best to maintain my equilibrium. Okay, curmudgeon rant (I’m 61): we as a country were better off when we could only watch the network TV news once a day in the evening and read a printed newspaper once a day in the morning. It let us keep the news in perspective to the vast majority of the rest of our daily lives, instead of constantly threatening to overwhelm us through our phones, tablets, and laptops. I’m tired of being angry all the time.

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