[mindslight]

Yeah, I do get that. But I think most of the desire for that comes from having way too much of the opposite. As I touched upon in my last paragraph, we need a middle ground - becoming completely passive in the dialog is just overcorrecting in the other direction.

The real problem is the lack of mediating authority in any of these dialogs. We need some bit of common sense that can say (for example), 1. yes there is a valid concern with previously male athletes calling themselves women and competing in women's events, 2. you have a point with the pronoun thing but you're also kind of a dick, and 3. no thanks to the "Marxism" screed that I can get any time I like from my uncle.

Perhaps we're just going through a societal phase where that type of mediating authority has been distorting the discourse for too long (Aluminum tubes! Yellow Cake!) and so we've rejected them. But without any moderating judgement, debate devolves into extremism - every camp takes their reasonable foundational critiques and uses them to logically infer self-consistent nonsense. Then you either rally behind them or another camp, or you're going to get pigeonholed as doing so anyway.

We appreciate Joe Rogan for exposing us to diverse viewpoints. But without taking an active role in their explanation, is he actually doing that job? Or is he just appearing alongside a presentation that we could have sought out on our own?