[quote=@Kratesis]
I know you are just stripping posts of all nuance in order to get in a jab at your ideological enemies and beat up a few strawmen 
[/quote]

[quote=@Kratesis]
 I also imagine that we don't agree on the what that limit is and I also imagine that we don't agree on the cases in which the costs outweigh the benefits. Could we? Yes. Should we? Perhaps not in all cases; a question worth examining.
[/quote]

You know this actually does raise an unrelated question I have been considering for a while.

Why ARE people in this thread? What are your individual reasons for engaging? 


I tell myself that people are only ever convinced by gradual and continual application of data but that can't really be true. The idea that I am going to convince someone like Andre or Harbinger of anything is almost ludicrous and kind of gives the lie to the first point. I think it isn't a stretch to say that I am the most liberal and progressive of the participants, at least on any regular basis. Do I just like to keep up an argument so conservative bs doesn't go unchallenged? I don't know if that is really true either.

I guess part of the shock of November 2016 was that I had to admit that people are fundamentally different from me in what I consider to be negative ways. Liberals at the time spent alot of effort in the predictable circular firing squad, calling out Bernie Voters, Stein Voters ect ect but in my mind that completely missed the point. Well over 40 percent of people who voted genuinely thought that a racist, sexist, pussy grabber in chief was the right thing to do.

I have a tendency to assume that all people are basically like me with variations in temperament and educational levels. It really hadn't hit me on a personal level that I might be surrounded by the type of people who would look at a literal nazi march, watch a woman be murdered, and claim the real problem was with people who disliked nazis. It was outside my comprehension at the time that such people even existed. I suppose I think at some level that this thread is a good way to keep it in my mind that people might differ from me so fundamentally on an ideological level as to be nearly recognizable from my vantage point. I don't want to fall into the comfortable trap again. I wish more liberals would pull their heads out of the sand about the magnitude of the problem.