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The two most active threads yesterday were both threads that I've previously covered. The Gaza war thread saw somewhat of a revival of interest and gained over 800 new posts. The Speaker of the US House of Representatives thread was second with 325 new posts. The Republicans finally managed to elect a speaker so maybe that thread will see a decline in interest. Both of those threads were in the "Political Discussion" forum, as was the next most active thread. Titled, "When the smallest doubt is treated as support of the other side", the original poster complains that political partisans require full support for their cause of the day and consider the slightest disagreement to be unacceptable. This is a 12-page thread and I don't have time to do more than skim a few pages of it. But, I see that a number of examples of events, political causes, or topics are presented in which this type of thing has occurred. A point with which I agree may have been made earlier in the thread, but I noticed it in a post on the last page. That post suggests that social media and online communication has probably contributed to this phenomenon. In a world in which support for a cause is represented by changing an avatar or through short bits of text, there is little room for nuance. To the contrary, everything becomes very black and white. The response I referenced above also touched on what I think is the other side of this coin which is a hypersensitivity to disagreement. In subsequent posts, the original poster listed a number of things she claims that "you can't say". In fact, you can say them. No law prevents you from saying them. But, if you say them you may well have someone disagree with you and state their objection. As the saying goes, if you can't take the heat, don't go into the kitchen. In addition to the folks who are ready to pounce at anything less than full compliance with their agenda, there are a whole bunch of people who are very heat adverse and don't want to go anywhere near the kitchen. Going back to social media, I think that it reinforces both of these tendencies. The medium does not encourage nuance and polite phrasing is rejected for more directness. But, the type of thing that might be acceptable when said privately between two friends is unwelcome when it is essentially a public rebuke posted on social media. Another aspect of this may be rooted in the American two-party system. Whereas many countries have multi-party systems that provide for a variety of views, our two-party system encourages picking a side. This is reinforced when the media interprets "objectivity" as presenting "both sides". There are many issues that have more than two sides, but those nuances get lost. If increased respect for the views of others could be combined with everyone having a bit thicker skin, we might all be better off.