Livre d'Or

Thank you, this is really interesting and thinky. I think my problem is different from yours in that I tend to be a bit too confident in my opinions. I don't think people should have to constantly defend their views, but for me personally, it's good to be challenged. Just encountering views I disagree with (eg in comments sections) doesn't really help, because it's easy to dismiss everything as too obviously belligerent to be worth paying attention to. And yeah, people who deliberately post antagonistic comments on articles they disagree with aren't exactly the best representatives of the opposing point of view!

I think what I want is to be able to talk to people who share my core values, notably that all human beings are worthy of respect, but disagree about the details of how to live by those values. I agree with you that learning about different experiences is a good place to start, and in fact there's evidence that being exposed to differing experiences is more likely to change your mind than being exposed to arguments.

I agree that DW is quite good for this sort of thing, and I have a reasonably diverse reading list. But there's quite a high barrier to participation here. Partly because it's not really that user-friendly compared to a lot of more modern blogging sites, and partly because there's a sort of expectation that people will put carefully written, thought-out posts here, whereas more casual day-to-day comments go to Twitter or Facebook. And the structure of the site means that I'm a lot more likely to meet people I already have some connection to; this is a great strength for creating a virtual place where I feel socially comfortable, but less good for expanding the range of content I'm reading.

The truth is that I have moved quite a long way to the left over the last 10 years, and that's a lot to do with hanging out with and reading people who are more lefty than I am / was. I'm worried that I won't be that flexible in the next ten years, I'll just carry on holding the prejudices that I currently have, and simply dismiss anything that might show them to be wrong.