'Agree to disagree' is just an opt out. At that point there usually isn't any agreement upon what is disagreed upon in the first place. It is a debate evasion.
It is usually more honest to say 'I don't want you to convince me or the audiance otherwise'.
But ye there is some endurance limit the discussion need to respect. My point is that 'agree to disagree' is way overused.
When the issue at hand is something like "I think black people deserve the same rights as white people," no, no one is ever going to convince me of the opposite. There is literally no point to me listening to someone who has that as their position (and you're damn right I don't want them convincing the audience either). Same with a number of other prominent issues at stake today.
So if someone comes at me with one of those positions, and doesn't seem, from the outset, to be already seriously on the fence, or to be presenting extremely easily debunked misinformation, yeah, I'm going to nope out of there. It's not worth raising my stress level to argue with that type of person, with or without an audience.
You could change black and white to Palestinian and Israeli and suddenly most of these 'I would never' would have a very nuanced view on the matter.
But, as I agreed, there is a limit on stamina to discuss with the outmost fringe people.
And yes, the issue of Palestinian rights in Israel, in particular, is extremely thorny, which I presume is why you picked it. There are extremes on both sides—both of which are very real positions that very real people are taking today, neither of which is supportable—and there are shades of gray in the middle, and if I had an answer to that question that didn't raise 100 more, I'd probably have already won the Nobel Peace Prize.
But there are plenty of people in the US who would genuinely try to argue that black people don't deserve the same rights as white people, and unless you are one of them, I think you're likely to agree that that is not a thorny issue: there's a very clear right and wrong answer. It's not conceptually analogous to the situation in the Middle East, even though the words sound similar.
The existence of hard moral questions without easy answers does not negate the existence of moral questions with very obvious answers that a large number of people are nonetheless very obviously on the wrong side of.
> It is usually more honest to say 'I don't want you to convince me or the audiance otherwise'
i’m not trying to be mean but this is just wild. i’ve walked away from “debates” with people many times, not because i “don’t want to be convinced” it’s because too often i just genuinely don’t care what the person thinks about $ISSUE.
i mean, most of us went to university and many of us took those classes, many of us have been online for long enough to have seen every argument and every sophist angle countless times. i learned quick enough that many of these issues have no ‘correct’ answer, they’re personal beliefs with deep foundations.
we also learned early on that debates are silly unless there are actual subject experts (like recognized-by-their-peers-experts), strict moderators, and rules in place. randoms “debating” incredibly complex nuanced topics without actual experts is just… i mean…
…without those things it’s just rhetoric and sophistry. for the debateBros it’s about “winning” rather than coming closer to a truth. other than a few loud debateBros most people discovered these things in like sophomore year.
even more important, and this is just a personal opinion, but i find debateBros super weird and not in the good way. far too often their antisocialness just kills conversations. if someone is a grown adult and can’t tell the difference between a conversation and a debate they almost universally just end up making the entire atmosphere awkward. i learned pretty quickly when out with friends to spot randoms shifting into "debate mode" and we drag the conversation in a totally different direction to stave it off.
unless i know someone irl and enjoy them on a personal level theres almost unlimited things id rather do than spend my time "debating" with them. it boggles my mind how they just repeatedly fail to understand that adversarial debate is not at all normal conversation.
while i absolutely do enjoy passionate discussions of politics with a few family members (cousins, aunts, etc…) and a few friends, but with randoms? almost never. randoms "debating" outside of actual experts? nah, not a chance.
and it’s super important to understand that most of the current divisive topics don’t have “one” correct answer. often they don’t even have a correct answer at all, but rather many valid ways to approach and from multiple foundational beliefs.
I think I was quite clear that I accept the 'endurance excuse'.
I was trying to make the point that the 'endurance excuse' is used as as an escape hatch way too often to silence the debate by people often with the consenus opinion that don't want to risk losing a debate.
In general I agree with you points.
