All the more reason to debate among ourselves.

One of the greatest risks is to have a precieved threat make everyone think they have to close ranks and stifle all debate. That is how projects (or even societies) die.

Do you not realize that ridiculously straw-manning people with different beliefs than you as horrible, evil, hateful, truth-hating extremists .. is the very "extremism" and "attempting to destroy ideological opponents" that you're supposedly fighting against? How do you not see the irony?

It's essential to understand that tolerance is not a moral precept, it's more like a peace treaty. It's a practical social contract that allows everyone to live in peace while exercising their rights. Treaties only protect parties who abide by their terms, and it MUST be this way, or a free society will be torn down by people who want to ban books, racially discriminate, and impose their religion on others.

Much has been written on this topic, you should avail yourself.

https://conversational-leadership.net/tolerance-is-a-social-...

> Treaties only protect parties who abide by their terms, and it MUST be this way, or a free society will be torn down by people who want to ban books, racially discriminate, and impose their religion on others.

In my experience, the majority of accusations of various groups or individuals wanting to do these things, are simply not supported by the available evidence. Meanwhile, accusations of the desire to discriminate, impose religion etc. are often cited as justifications for censorship.

Honest question: do you genuinely not think that there are ever groups of people with an ideology based on ignoring inconvenient facts in favor of their preferred agenda ? I don't think that it's that implausible to argue that this is at least in principle possible. If you're willing to accept that premise, the obvious follow-up question is how exactly you can effectively debate someone who quite literally is opposed to the idea of rational debate because it would require a willingness to prioritize facts over their ideology. At the end of the day, if someone isn't acting in good faith, there's not much you can do to interact with them fruitfully, so the best thing you can do is try to mitigate the damage they cause.

I try to be open to the possibility that I'm wrong about things like this, but even as someone who tends to be very hesitant to make judgments about other people's motives, it's hard for me to imagine how much more convincing the evidence would need to be in order to conclude that one of the major political parties in the United States has long abandoned any semblance of good faith. Having a civil discourse requires both sides to sit at the table, and that can't happen when one side is busy flipping the table instead.

> Honest question: do you genuinely not think that there are ever groups of people with an ideology based on ignoring inconvenient facts in favor of their preferred agenda ?

Plenty of people disagree with you (and each other) about which groups of people have these characteristics.

> the obvious follow-up question is how exactly you can effectively debate someone who quite literally is opposed to the idea of rational debate

I'm unclear on how "ignoring inconvenient facts" is supposed to imply "opposition to the idea of rational debate". But my experience has been that both are common among the most active and respected Wikipedia editors and curators. Just try to get one to give any concrete standard for what it would take to start or stop considering a source valid for WP:RS purposes, and then try to hold them to that. The combination of RS inertia with WP:NOR is the primary thing enabling citogenesis (https://xkcd.com/978/).

> it's hard for me to imagine how much more convincing the evidence would need to be in order to conclude that one of the major political parties in the United States has long abandoned any semblance of good faith.

If you think this is only true of one of those parties, you're part of the problem.

“Hey guys! Be nice to the Nazis!”

The first problem is thinking it's uniquely about "The nazis" when it's equally about comments like this.