[mcguire]

Speaking as a liberal in a very conservative area, I'm in the same boat. I wouldn't really want to talk politics, but I'm absolutely not going to even if someone else does specifically ask. Liberals are made fun of and regarded as immoral and dangerous. (Which is kind of ironic, given that I have moralistic tendencies. Just Kantian rather than Biblical.)

[a_conservative]

I hope you can avoid becoming bitter. I've struggled with this myself. I appreciate your other response in this thread too. There is some real wisdom to avoiding politics in certain situations. However, if we never talk about things, how does anything get resolved? How divided will we become?

I'm not too surprised that you find conservative arguments unconvincing. In general, purely based on reasoning, I find liberal arguments to be a bit better (on average). Sometimes, they are a lot better. The question for me, is how much weight to put on reasoning. How much value does reasoning have? My personal experience is that reasoning works well for writing software or fixing a bug. It doesn't work as well when I try to use it to decide how I should run my life. In fact, my own reasoning has led me into the pits of hell. That changed my perspective, quite a bit!

I truly hope that you and your friends and coworkers can keep peace and good will towards each other.