It’s only painful in a stable, peaceful society with a strong rule of law. In any other context it’s downright lethal. Take the extreme of Dark Forest theory; y

It’s only painful in a stable, peaceful society with a strong rule of law. In any other context it’s downright lethal. Take the extreme of Dark Forest theory; you can try to explain your position and values all you like, and while you do it just serves to broadcast your location to someone who already decided to kill you. That’s extreme of course, an hopefully fictional, but in the intellectual and social spectrum it takes two to tango. If I’m just trying to waste your time and energy, and you’re insisting on addressing every point of my Gish Gallop... I win. Suspending judgement is an interesting and valuable intellectual exercise, and trying to see other perspectives makes us better people. We have to accept however, that a time comes when just like any other approach, such measures not only fail, but full catastrophically. Just like an ardent pacifist, or an equally ardent militant, lack of adaptability is doom. Sometimes you have to sit down and talk, and sometimes you have to fight to the death. The trick, and no one has yet figured out a formula for this, is to know when to adapt and how much. Anyone who tries to tell you that the only way to deal with a Nazi is a bullet, or conversely, love, is wrong. It’s advice that sounds good, but it’s totally useless. When to to talk, when to listen, and when to reach for a sidearm is the real question and more often than not people don’t even acknowledge that; it’s too nuanced, too open to interpretation, and too messy. The thing is, it’s messy regardless of whether or not we choose to approach conflict (intellectual or otherwise) programmatically rather than dynamically.