There’s no such thing as any season of goodwill when it comes to political debate on social media. It’s all about fury and outrage. Even when tweets are funny, you can taste the “anger inside the sugar coating of smug satire”. Rage is contagious – it spreads like an infection across online forums, which have a vested interest in stoking it. It’s part of what has been dubbed the “outrage economy”. Shrill, divisive opinions attract eyeballs and yield a “double payoff” for publishers and platforms, as posts are then shared by people who both agree and violently disagree with them. Sharers come to enjoy, even grow addicted to, this easy way of displaying righteous indignation. And “so the cycle of provocation continues”, as people yield to the temptation to correct perceived wrongness with “a caustic retort” online and one side’s scratch becomes “the other side’s itch”. Any sense of empathy or curiosity is lost in the “riotous rhetoric of online dispute”. We can’t do without our devices, but now and then we desperately need to log off for a few days to regain a sense of perspective.(Rafael Behr, The Guardian)

Moderation is what partly distinguishes Epicureanism from other philosophies. Yes, for good reasons this blog has liberal, un-didactic views – we should be finding ways to get on with one another, not using derogatory or foul language against those who disagree with us.  One can have passionately held views, but listen and understand the views of others, even if they have echoes of the days of Mussolini or Hitler.  Quietly asssembling your rational reasons for disagreeing is the trick, and asking (with a smile detectable in your words) “have you ever considered this from another point of view?”. Of course, dealing with mentally sick or deranged people is an altogether more tricky matter. Epicurus would advise us, in the cause of calm, to ignore them and refuse to engage.