Great article, wrestling with a prickly issue. I’ve struggled with the sense that we’ve become about as intolerant a society as we possibly can be. It’s very difficult to discuss this issue with any nuance, and practically speaking I tend to just code-switch aggressively based on my audience (and mostly stick to just a few smaller boards anyway.) But I agree, the groupthink that drives mass scorn — and the chest-thumping feelgoods that inevitably follow — are doing our society a disservice. If my views, my opinions and the presuppositions that drive them, are correct, then they will certainly withstand a disagreement.

Plus, I’ve been on the Internet since the ’90s myself (I was a first-gen SomethingAwful goon, myself) and if there’s one lesson you’d think we would’ve learned, it’s that you can’t fix someone being wrong on the Internet. It makes me insane that arguments against consensus are taken as de facto immoral acts, and it makes me insane that even engaging in that conversation requires engaging with that “if you’re not for us, you’re against us” mentality at all.