Now we've had 'give quiche a chance', I'm going to dust this one off:
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A few points: Everyone's perspective 'feels' right to them. It's based on their experience, their filters, their conditioning. You can't argue with feelings. They're special.
One thing to bear in mind when *feeling* like responding to someone who is criticising your views, is that your ego, a grizzled street-plodder to whom the motto "SERVE AND PROTECT" long ago fell into irony, sees someone making a public attack on your opinions as a blasphemous attack on your own pure divinity.
To Ego, their contradicting view is an African American person with a chocolate bar in their hand. Ego identifies the clear and present danger. Ego thinks "HE'S COMING RIGHT FOR US!" and wants to shoot first and maybe replace the chocolate bar with a deadly weapon later. Ego has had a lot of coffee. Ego's wife left it and moved to the West coast. Ego's kid's call it 'Eggo'. In short: Ego wants to prove itself.
The way to 'win' is to acknowledge your ego is just a trigger-happy, out-dated warden, trying to find threats where they don't exist. It's got a life-times worth of ill-informed anachronistic prejudices and it wants to vindicate itself in any way it can. See it. Feel it. And then tell it to stand down. "That'll do, Ego, that'll do. Thank you for your service. Now step aside, the commissioner is talking."
With that out of the way, you are free to take on board your fellow fan's views as a point of reference (i.e. information that you previously didn't have) and see for yourself how it can be factored into a well-rounded and more accurate perspective.
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