this post is just for fun and meant to be light hearted.
context: I forgot that a chunk of the lemmy community kinda likes to petty and I made fun of someone irrelevant to the fediverse for being petty and angry at me, and I asked if anyone else got had any examples of pettiness. some of lemmy users sided with the person I was speaking with and treated me as though I was offended, which was kinda interesting.
I did think a scenario about asking a cop what the worst case of police brutality they witnessed?
Yea, I try to not go down that path if available, but just tonight for example we were talking about an athlete who I lost respect for due to their not getting the covid vaccine when it was mandatory. I expressed that given the timing, I can empathize to an extent, but at a certain point, this person just ignored any procedure and didn’t work for an alternative, which there were paths for. In reality, it shouldn’t be a political opinion, but vaccines have become political.
I generally try not to engage in political discussion in person otherwise, but if I get pulled into it, I’m not in the habit of letting bigots speak without pushback, regardless of my relationship (boss, subordinate for example) to that person or persons. Silence is complacency. I try not to stir the pot, I’m not going to keep quiet just to not insult someone’s opinions, but I do try to speak in a respectful manner for the sake of conversation rather than debate.
90+% of the time it’s a non issue because I try to take steps to not be belligerent, and often times that leads to some level of constructive conversation or it just pivots to something else and we all move on amicably.
remember that tennis player that refused the vaccine because they didn’t know what was in it and didn’t want to risk their health or performance to the vaccine. being risk adverse is fair, but the league or countries still had a vaccine mandate and its like they shouldn’t get an exception because of their conviction, but you could see that antivaxxers would use that to drive people to be anti mandate.
ironically antivaxxers and the right kinda set the example that i should be out and unashamed of my politics, because they were very loud about their politics until trumps second term