The issue with polarized politics is that it encourages one-mindedness. Instead of trying to understand where your political opponents are coming from, you are encouraged to reject them and their ideas as "the enemy". A very anti-intellectual "Us versus Them" mindset.
If two theses conflict each other at least one of them (perhaps even both) must be wrong. That is basic science. This is also why physicists still try to unify general relativity and quantum physics. So instead of accepting multiple ideas use your mind to
1. create predictions that each of the conflicting theses imply, such that the two theses will do different predictions, which if they can't be observed will convince you that the thesis was wrong.
2. develop an experiment with which you can observe these predictions
3. execute the experiment
This is too simplistic. They can be partially right as well as partially wrong. Is light a wave or a particle? Well, it depends.
Two opposing half-truths form a paradox. While some paradoxes can be resolved, by finding a deeper theory that unifies them, some cannot. To draw an example from the political realm -- more relevant to this discussion -- here are two truths:
(1) We are all in this together.
(2) Each person is responsible for their own life.
These are both true, but conflict. And I do not think there will ever be a final resolution of this paradox. In some situations, the first principle is more important; in others, the second. Hashing out which is which is a never-ending debate, and a critically important one.
> This is too simplistic. They can be partially right as well as partially wrong. Is light a wave or a particle? Well, it depends.
In this case both statements (light is a wave and light is a particle) are simply wrong and as current scientific matters stand the description given by quantum physics seems to be the correct one (at least for about 70 years no experiment could be given that has disproved it).
Are two sides of a bridge opposing each other or conflicting with each other?
In a client-server security model the client usually wants as much as it can take and the server wants to provide as little as it has to. Are these opposed, or in conflict?
Than it's not an opposition.
> In a client-server security model the client usually wants as much as it can take and the server wants to provide as little as it has to. Are these opposed, or in conflict?
Now you create a malicious client which will pretent it has little, say, computational power or network capacity. So the server will have to do lots of work. Voila - a good beginning for a DoS attack. :-)
So, yes, these goals are in conflict and such an attack is a falsification of the soundness of your security model.
When you say a "malicious client" you are misunderstanding the purpose of my analogy. A malicious client would be "the enemy". I'm talking about a client that is interested with engaging with the service, not just shutting it down. The client may like to have all the information and resources the server has available to it, (for example, perhaps a facebook user might want to see when people look at their photos, not just like/comment) but the server needs to consider the experience of all the clients and users, not just the one. So there is opposition (but not conflict!) between the two. The client will not be allowed to have this information, even though the server has it. Conflict would be manifested by the user abandoning the service (or attacking it, as in your example) because of this incompatible or insurmountable difference.
It all comes down to heuristics, and differing heuristics are not mutually exclusive.
The comment also fell for the trap of falsely equating opposition with conflict.
As a thought experiment, take the issue of abortion. GP is telling me that certainly either "Abortions should be allowed because of the mother's rights" or "Abortions should not be allowed because of the unborn child's rights" is WRONG. Tell me how anyone could possibly create an "experiment" which would result in a meaningful answer. How would you measure the morality and goodness of the event in a way that everyone could agree upon? Do you see the problem?
The problem here is that biological and neurological research has a long way to go to resolve the question after what week of pregnancy what level of consciousness or intellectual capacity is there. So at the moment there is no way to answer this question in an acceptable way.
To keep two opposed ideas in mind should be done with the aim of solving contradictions.
If you can distill a better abstraction you are solving the contradiction and you finish with only one idea.
In fact, a big part of the current disagreements is holding oneself oblivious to the different paradigms held by those with opposing views. If you presume they are working from the same assumptions, then of course the only motivation for their views must be malice or some other vice. But that is rarely the case.
For example, it's possible to appreciate that in the US people need some means of getting an education in order to get a job while at the same time realizing the demand for quality education far outstrips supply, which when paired with federal loans inflates the cost of education so much that it puts it farther out of reach for people.
That's a problem with a solution that exacerbated the problem while trying to solve it. Processing both doesn't involve telling deliberate lies, it just means the solution is more complex than we'd like to admit.