I don't think the polarization merely contributes to these divisions, I'd say it's the whole point. It's easy to steer a democracy when 50% won't talk to the other 50%. Much more difficult if they occasionally agree on something.
I'm not sure I follow the metaphor. You can use a mirror to cause stress to one betta fish, but it seems like there would need to be more than just one fish and a mirror to capture this. I'm talking about the political machine working to ensure that 50% of voters are not friends with the other 50%.
I am asking what it has to do with friendship, implying that it has nothing to do with it. Unless... (now you complete my sentence either by denial, confirmation or deflection)
Uhh, nothing I guess. You need two fish for friendship (nevermind that bettas are too aggressive for that). With a fish and a mirror you only have one fish.
For friendship you need someone who doesn't talk like that.
Once you have been exposed to this kind of paranoid thinking, there is no way of building relationships of any kind anymore. It is like a spiritual death.
What is the bubble? The world of friends and healthy relationships, or the cold shitty place with cultural wars and divides everywhere?
If you bring someone to the shitty place, you better have the guts to acknowledge that that person will never, ever see friendship anywhere.
Wow, you see absolutes everywhere. Exposed once, spiritual death. World of friends, world of wars--pick one. It's all more complex than that.
Some relationships are easy because nobody is trying to sabotage them, others are hard because somebody is, others are hard for entirely different reasons. It's the middle case that I'm concerned with here. I agree that it's a pretty awful thing to harm a friendship by injecting it with unnecessary culture war bullshit but my claim is that in most cases it's neither of the friends who want that outcome, it's some remote third party who has decided to interfere. Sure it's a failing of one friend or the other if they take the bait, but they have not spiritually killed the other by doing so.
