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Yeah, you can plant seeds... But you won't win anything. And the seeds, you plant will be absorbed by others looking on mostly.

I don’t think most of the people we are talking about are irrational.

They are arguing in bad faith.

It’s not that they are stupid, it’s that they’re stubborn.

And arguing against them actually poses risks because they will lie about what you said if they can use it to polish their lies.

my fist is a gift to the faces of bigots

Apple: I was a very far left leftist with strong values a d principles but then someone was rude to me on the internet and forced me to become a Nazi.

You kind of can, but for the most part, it is better to just not engage unless they are showing themselves to be an open and honest interlocutor.

The person making the argument could just be naive too.

I could see myself 25 years ago making such a statement in completely good faith, trying to see both sides and all that. But I was naive to think that both sides were also arguing in good faith.

But to be fair, that naive messenger would still be repeating an argument that originated in bad faith.

Unfortunately, the solution to the paradox boils down to "Might Makes Right". The bounds of tolerance aren't set by a consensus, but by whomever has the Power to Yeet.

And while this game seems satisfying early on (Yeet the Nazis! Yeet the Tankies! Yeet the Radical Centrists!) you do get into a cycle of purity where you're yeeting anyone who questions whether the last guy who got yeeted deserved it.

That leaves us with the age-old Martin Niemöller verse:

"And then they came to Yeet me - and there was no one left to Yeet back on my behalf".

What is the appropriate degree of tolerance? How do you prevent it from expanding to include people who would dissolve the institution? How do you prevent it from collapsing into a state of cult-like obedience to authority? It's a balancing act and one that the individuals with the power to silence fringe communities rarely have an interest in performing.

In my experience, most self-identified centrists, at least in the US, are to the right of what anyone reasonable would actually consider center. And I don't mean that in an "um ackshually the Dems are center right" way either, I mean they're often just Conservatives who don't hate gays (but do hate trans people) or something.

So is anyone rational actually leaving Godot? I saw that Redot, last I checked they were 52 commits behind, and their only 4 commits were changing any references of "Godot" in the code to "Redot"