Civility is useless when faced with an enemy of civil rights

The New York Times sent Vice writer and liberal Eve Peyser and its own rightwing columnist Bari Weiss swimming together. The revelation that they got along trivialises the problem

Can you like the person you hate? The New York Times has explored this question with an experiment. It brought together Eve Peyser, a writer for Vice, who considers herself liberal, with Bari Weiss, one of the paper’s most rightwing columnists. The idea was that social media stokes tribalism, amplifies negativity and pits us against each other. The pair were “Twitter enemies” but, if they got together in real life, perhaps they would discover they had more in common than they thought. So, off the two went, swimming. (Yes, you read that right, Weiss wanted to swim in case Peyser was wearing a wire.)

The good news is that no one drowned. Free from the hellscape of Twitter, where debate loses all nuance, the pair got along, well, swimmingly. Elated, Weiss ended her article on the experiment with a plea for more real-life engagement and less anger on the internet.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2BY6g5F
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