Face it TB, you're not going to make people who disagree with you go away, or change their minds, by reminding them every day how wrong they are. In fact, you will have just the opposite effect, you will turn people who have political opinions but rarely act on them into activists against you and your cause, and you will alienate moderates and force them into the other camp.

That I can turn someone into a hostile activist by showing them that they're wrong about something might say a lot more about them than it does about me.

I've been thinking about this a bit.

In "2001, A Space Odyssey," the beginning sees two tribes of protohumans--apes--meeting. They screech furiously at each other, jump up and down, wave their arms, and spin around. At some point, one tribe backs off slightly, and honor is satisfied. All head off to look for grubs under rocks, and things go on.

Then one day, Moon Watcher comes to the conflict, carrying a heavy bone.

I've been developing a theory on how people mostly "play" with politics, ideas and philosophies. They're comfortable as long as it's all discussed on the same level as opinions on which kind of pie tastes better. The screeching takes place, and everyone goes off, honor satisfied. No minds are changed, no questions actually answered, but it was never about changing minds. It was about self-validation and having a say in a decent public forum. Heck, I'm doing this for fun, too.

I've noticed that many people (everywhere, not just on the internet) hold certain views, but that their own behavior does not reflect how you would expect a person with those views to behave. This is all over the political spectrum, reflected most often in what seems to be rank hypocrisy. You can think of as many examples as I can.

They're not thinking about ideas. They're playing with them, or worse, simply professing them to "fit in" with their social crowd. And on the internet specifically, this is what you see for the most part.

"Bush is an asshole!"

"No, Clinton is an asshole!"

(All depart, satisfied, seeking grubs.)

Bringing facts into these discussions, or broaching the idea that maybe one side might be objectively right or wrong, seems to be breaking some unwritten rules. No wonder there's hostility.

During the 2004 election, it was okay to yell about how stupid Bush was, or even to respond about how stupid Kerry was. It was apparently Bad Form to start hauling up transcripts, military evaluations, and other evidence in these arguments. It's okay to wail about the disappearing polar bears. It's even okay to call the environmentalists "wackos" in response. Nobody wants to look at the biological studies on actual numbers of bears, and whether they're decreasing or not.

See how it works?

Tell me, when was the last time you ever saw someone pull up a graph, a paper, or a reference, and shoot me down with hard and specific evidence? Believe me, it's happened, and sometimes spectacularly. But not often. Is it because I'm right all the time? No, mostly it's because nobody really wants to go the the effort to try to prove me wrong, or even deal with the idea that there's a "wrong" in the discussion.