[danaris]

The problem with this position is that politics in the current situation are not just about minor details of tax policy or whether to build a bridge here or five miles away there. They are an existential matter for too many people.

When the issue at hand is something like "I think black people deserve the same rights as white people," no, no one is ever going to convince me of the opposite. There is literally no point to me listening to someone who has that as their position (and you're damn right I don't want them convincing the audience either). Same with a number of other prominent issues at stake today.

So if someone comes at me with one of those positions, and doesn't seem, from the outset, to be already seriously on the fence, or to be presenting extremely easily debunked misinformation, yeah, I'm going to nope out of there. It's not worth raising my stress level to argue with that type of person, with or without an audience.

[rightbyte]

I think it might be benifitial to not assume one self is the good guy. It doesn't work on a macro level to assume that.

You could change black and white to Palestinian and Israeli and suddenly most of these 'I would never' would have a very nuanced view on the matter.

But, as I agreed, there is a limit on stamina to discuss with the outmost fringe people.

[danaris]

I don't assume I'm the good guy. I strive, every day, to be good, and to become better.

And yes, the issue of Palestinian rights in Israel, in particular, is extremely thorny, which I presume is why you picked it. There are extremes on both sides—both of which are very real positions that very real people are taking today, neither of which is supportable—and there are shades of gray in the middle, and if I had an answer to that question that didn't raise 100 more, I'd probably have already won the Nobel Peace Prize.

But there are plenty of people in the US who would genuinely try to argue that black people don't deserve the same rights as white people, and unless you are one of them, I think you're likely to agree that that is not a thorny issue: there's a very clear right and wrong answer. It's not conceptually analogous to the situation in the Middle East, even though the words sound similar.

The existence of hard moral questions without easy answers does not negate the existence of moral questions with very obvious answers that a large number of people are nonetheless very obviously on the wrong side of.

[zero-sharp]

What are some other, modern, issues that instantly cause you to lose interest?