I don’t think all friend need to share political views. Just from my own group of friends, I know our views vary wildly. I am libertarian, I don’t buy the COVID and climate change narratives and I just want to live my life and want to deal with as little of the government as possible. However most of my friends like big government (socialist welfare state) and do buy in the COVID narrative as pushed by big media and government.
In the past we’d sometimes have very heated discussions around the COVID situation (initiated by a friend who shares my views), but as I noticed people becoming very “aggressive” in the debate, I asked everyone to just not discuss this issue anymore. And happily everyone agreed on this.
So now we’re still all great friends, but we just avoid this very sensitive topic, which I feel is for the better. It’s not worth it to lose friends just because you don’t agree on some issues.
We do our discussions over Signal by the way, I haven’t used Facebook for many years now. Most of my friends have quitted Facebook. In the past we mainly used Facebook to organize group events (weekend get-togethers), but we use Signal for this functionality now.
>> I don’t think all friend need to share political views.
This is the #1 thing, and I upvoted because you said this.
I'm also mostly a libertarian, but I think anyone who doesn't get a vaccine is extremely stupid. I'm also prone to conspiracy theories - I tend to think 9/11 was an inside job, for example. But let's say you believe in conspiracy theories, like, let's say the government wants to kill a few million people. Who do you think they want to kill? The people who line up and take the vax? No way!! Those are compliant people (according to this kind of reasoning). The people they'd want to kill - hell, the people I'd want to kill - would be the people who refused the vaccine. So they can just let them die from the virus, or let out a stronger virus next year. Anyone who thinks they're "smart" for avoiding a vaccine has not thought about what the government would do if they really wanted to kill the non-compliant people.
But having said that: I don't believe that this is all being coordinated. I think there are just a lot of countries and health agencies that all have partial information and do the best they can with it. And a lot of individuals who try to make political impressions with it. But if it were coordinated, if it were a conspiracy, then the only logical people to kill would be the ones who refused vaccination. And again, I mean this as a libertarian. If you think this is a "test run" for when a really bad virus comes out, you can bet that if you're unvaccinated for covid you're considered an enemy. I don't know why a rational person would put themselves in that position when you look at all the evidence. And I know my balls still work after having a vaccine. To me the biggest proof was Israel being first up front to vaccinate the population. (I'm Jewish). I know Israel isn't in the business of killing Jews. It's in the business of keeping Jews alive. So when I talked to Israelis who were asking why I wasn't vaccinated yet, and I had to explain it wasn't even available in America, I was sure the vaccine was nothing to worry about.
In the past we’d sometimes have very heated discussions around the COVID situation (initiated by a friend who shares my views), but as I noticed people becoming very “aggressive” in the debate, I asked everyone to just not discuss this issue anymore. And happily everyone agreed on this.
So now we’re still all great friends, but we just avoid this very sensitive topic, which I feel is for the better. It’s not worth it to lose friends just because you don’t agree on some issues.
We do our discussions over Signal by the way, I haven’t used Facebook for many years now. Most of my friends have quitted Facebook. In the past we mainly used Facebook to organize group events (weekend get-togethers), but we use Signal for this functionality now.