An example is that I generally despise Jordan Peterson and most of what he says, but I often quote one thing that Jordan Peterson said (in the linked video) because I think it’s a good summary of why toxic positivity doesn’t work.
People (who hate JP) freak out when I quote him and say “Why tf are you quoting Jordan Peterson? Are you a insert thing that Jordan Peterson is?” And I’m like “No, I generally disagree with him on most points, aside from this one thing.” But they don’t believe or accept it and assume that I must be a #1 Jordan Peterson fan or something.
I think it can be considered a partial agreement, majority disagreement. Or a partial agreement with a person you generally disagree with. But I’d be open to other terms of how to describe this in a way people can understand.
Also, to avoid the controversy of referencing Jordan Peterson, if anyone has a better summary of the same concept explained by a different person in a way as well as he does, that would be appreciated too.
It’s because we live in an age where people use the tactic of “well I just like this one thing he said” as a gateway to awful shit.
Yeah I understand, and that does probably happen a lot. But we also seem to live in an age where we assume the worst of people… so even though it’s possible to partly agree with someone while genuinely condemning other aspects of that person, people are somehow certain that others are using that as a gateway to awful shit, as you say. (Not talking about you, of course.)
Stereotyping people, in my opinion, is nothing specific to our times. It’s a fundamental survival strategy baked into humans, as it allows to assess situations very efficiently, though not always effectively. Reflecting on this very nature is something that requires active will to constant reflection, or some trigger. A trigger would be a conflicting perception between direct communication like speech or written text, indirect perception like facial expressions and contextual perception, meaning knowing of the doing or previous direct communication of the communicating party. And this is where commutating on the internet strikes. It delivers a very reduced or selected set of triggers for reflection. With this though in mind I’d be interested to know if you notice a difference for what you described between different communication channels.