People today sometimes get uncomfortable with empirical claims that seem to clash with their political assumptions, often because they haven't given much thought to the connections.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
When you're surrounded by people who share the same set of assumptions as you, you start to think that's reality.
Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon.
The idea that there is a rational truth out there that is not embodied in a person's politics is something I can't understand or subscribe to.
In politics, religion and other areas of culture, people disagree on the worth of competing ideas. There is no equivalent to the scientific method that can determine in a robust way which ideas match the real world, and which ones can be ruled out. So conflicting ideologies persist indefinitely.
I understand that the nature of politics sometimes involves fending off frivolous, anonymous allegations.
Denialist arguments are often bolstered by accurate information taken wildly out of context, wielded selectively, and supported by fake experts who often don't seem fake at all.
A lot of people don't give much thought to what they believe, and it's easy for them to hold what often are two conflicting ideas in their head at the same time.
Political ideology can corrupt the mind, and science.
I think subsuming political and economic conflicts into some grand 'clash of civilisations' theory or 'the West versus the rest' binary is a particularly insidious form of ideological deception.
In politics, there's a kind of literal-mindedness. It's what you say, not what you mean, and you have to say only what you mean.