The thing about "You should follow/be friends with people you disagree with or you're just in an echo chamber."

I mean, one thing about that is: we all do. We literally all do. There are no two people on this planet with identical minds or mindsets.

And another thing about it is, there's a reason the phrase "irreconcilable differences" exists. Some differences... cannot be reconciled. Should not be reconciled.

The ability of a racist to be friends with someone of another race is an adaptive survival trait for racism.

It helps them manage their own cognitive dissonance and believe they're a good person, it helps them launder their racism for a public that, on the conscious level, has accepted the idea that racism is a bad thing, overall.

Racists get a lot out of friendships that cross "political differences" lines, but that's a one-way street. I'm not saying their friends don't get anything out of it. They get... ordinary friendship things, probably. At a cost. And the racist gets all that plus cover for racism.

But the third thing about being friends with people you disagree with is... honestly, when I think different things than my friends do, I don't usually *disagree* with them. That seems like a waste of time. We simply have different perspectives.

This might seem like a semantic thing, depending on how you parse the meaning of the verb "to disagree", but like. If I'm going to go see one movie and a friend of mine is going to see another movie that I have no interest in... there's no need for us to agree.

If there's no need for us to agree, then there is no meaningful sense in which we disagree. If we decide to do a podcast where we bruit about our opinions on these two movies in a discussion we'll probably disagree, but at the point we're just living our lives? No.

On here every day I see somebody saying something like, "[TV series] isn't for me. I just don't find the characters engaging."

And someone will reply, "Well, I disagree."

And. It's like. What do you disagree with? You disagree that this person doesn't find them engaging?

Everybody's dealing with the world situation and the political news in the US in their own way. I don't know anybody whose response is *exactly* my own (and I don't know how I would know it if someone were responding in exactly the same way).

I have RTed threads in the past couple days from people I follow who have different takes than I do about things like the Biden camp's actions, Trump's fate, etc., because I find their perspectives are worth considering.

I don't think other people's perspectives are things that exist for us to agree or disagree with. They don't exist for us in the first place, but the value they offer is: here is another perspective to consider.

Maybe, in considering others' perspectives, you will change your mind. It might be to take on board characteristics of the other perspective, but it might be that the other perspective helps you see new things in your own beliefs. It might sharpen them.

The fact that so much of our social interactions (especially These Days) are happening in public or semi-public through text discourse is I think heightening the impression that debate, disagreement, is a means of arriving at the truth.

Certainly there's a lot in our culture (and I'm speaking of the US-centric anglosphere, and when I say this I'm not asserting there's anything unique or special about our culture, only that I can't see what's not happening around me) that prizes the idea of ideas that can "win".

And if you're thinking that the point of expressing an idea is to try to win in the marketplace of ideas (which, as I've explained before, functions more as a thunderdome of ideas), if someone expresses an idea that conflicts with your idea...

...then it can feel like this is an attack on your idea, and you *have to* defeat this idea, or concede the ground.

Someone doesn't like your favorite show? "I disagree."

Someone feels differently about a public event? "I disagree."

And it can feel like you have to vocalize it, and not just stating your own perspective unaddressed to anyone in particular as the other person did, because you might feel there's a point made against you that you must either rebut or concede.

But there isn't.

So there are the truly irreconcilable differences, with which you *must* disagree, and if you're following/being friends with people who hold those views you're in for a constant fight, which is exhausting.

But for people with whom your differences are not irreconcilable... I mean, unless you both like debates and this is part of why you're friends, that's a real thing that happens... just because you do not agree with them does not mean you don't have to disagree with them.

If that seems like a nonsense distinction, consider the difference between not liking something and disliking it.

And language is messy so those can mean the same thing, to the point that you generally have to specify "I neither like nor dislike [whatever]."

But as that phrase shows, it's very possible to not like something and not dislike it.

It's possible to not agree with someone and not disagree with them.

And if we did not have a culture that so prizes the idea of ideas winning out over other ideas this semantic split would probably not be worth exploring, but we do and it is.

I would have a hard time remaining friends with someone I'm constantly disagreeing with. I don't mean a friend who doesn't share all my opinions. I mean a friend where we are in constant disputation regarding our perspectives.

And so I'm not in an echo chamber, but I don't welcome people into my life whose ideas *require* disputation, whose perspectives I *cannot* let stand unchallenged.

Some people find disagreement bracing. Some people find constant debates over the merits of everything fun. That's not my perspective and, in a rare fit of internal consistency, I don't feel the need to argue with my friends about it, so long as they leave me out of their fun.

To tie off this train of thought: when people are talking about "not letting political disagreements get in the way of friendship" and whatnot, frequently what they're actually saying is, they don't actively disagree on those "politics", outside of bounded discussions.

Which again, is something we all do, even the most dedicated roving debate club members.

We all make choices about what is worth disputing and what isn't, and that affects who we can be friends with.

And frequently where the "don't let politics get in the way" people draw the line is, they can't be friends with someone who can't be friends with a racist or a transphobe or whatever.

I haven't actually done this; I just can't resist the wordplay. That's where I'm at. I'm getting my gallows humor in as we're all potentially lined up for the scaffold. https://twitter.com/AlexandraErin/status/1312614116285124608

Other people are too scared for humor to work for them. Other people find it inappropriate to joke about spiritual matters. Other people are sincerely doing what I joked about. And so on.

These are all perspectives I can appreciate.

I follow people who have all these perspectives and more. That's far from an echo chamber. But it's also not an idea fight club.