I've been thinking about political compass and discussions across boundaries. I don't want to detract from the thread, but I do find that the ability to carry on genuine conversations seems to be limited to those that occupy at least adjacent quadrants.
I used to think this until very recently.
It was my observation that when talking with libertarians, we could always appeal to each other's shared belief in individual freedoms as a justification for one policy or another. When talking with Tankies or overbearing left leaning liberals we could appeal to a shared sense of goals but a difference of opinion on how best to achieve them.
But I realized this was just a comfortable way for my brain to understand things. There are too many exceptions in my opinion to make this a rule.
My new position is two fold:
1) This is the most important one in my opinion. They have to hold similar axiomatic moral beliefs as me. Things like "freedom is good" and "we should make the world better for the most people possible". I've seen and participated in discussions where that is not the case. For example, our resident homophobe
aCultureWarrior does not value freedom. He sees it as a path to sin. I was arguing with @
Alizia Tyler [banned lol] and I argued something along the lines of, "how does that help Black people?" and her response was essentially "why should I care about the well being of other races?". There is no common ground to be found there.
2) You must broadly agree about reality. Obviously there are many things that cannot be taken as absolute facts, but if we can't agree on basic pillars to build the discussion off of there can be no productive discussion.
For example, I have a childhood friend who I am still friends with who voted for Trump...twice. We discuss politics often. He isn't too sure about elections results and definitely believe some of the disinfo surrounding BLM, but he is certainly not so far gone as the QAnon types or some of the more fanatical Trump supporters like
Conservative. If I share a study with him or some data, he doesn't immediately reject it as Soros MSM commie propaganda like others do, and I think that is foundational to a good discussion. He also believes in things like equality, freedom, and justice as axiomatically good ideals. So it is possible to justify the benefit of policy based on those ideals.