Thanks! Yeah. The thing is, by and large i tend to agree with much of the spirit of most "left" and "woke" ideas - we do need to be aware of things like racism, we need to be aware of injustices, but at the same time, the way you deal with people you disagree with is not to go and ban their thoughts, it's to engage with them. To me, freedom of speech should be non-negotiable whether you are a leftist OR a rightist or anywhere in between or even outside (whatever that would mean - that'd be damn cool!). Free speech is the prerequisite for the use of the human mind. The lack of free speech makes one a slave. I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

Forcing people to shut up doesn't produce genuine, lasting change, it just breeds resistance, and ultimately further dictatorship to suppress that resistance which then eventually, and likely after producing a bloody purge, is someday overthrown, and after that overthrow, things end up right back where they were, with all effort toward the original goal thus rendered unto waste. And I tend to think this attitude results from a form of lazy (I say this because I know I am susceptible to getting lazy in this regard and my memory for detail is not great to begin with) toward having to actually retain details, because making a nuanced argument very often requires pointing at specifics and details and if you don't retain a lot of such, it's easier to say "mmh mmh you're privileged!!!" instead of having to actually point out concrete examples of where someone's argument goes wrong. Of course, on the other hand, it doesn't help when so many don't want to listen to even that because their mind is made up, but that's why you don't spend much time on those people. You should keep going past them until you find the ones who do want to listen, and even when "just assessing" people, still you present them with a cogent case first, even if in a suitably abbreviated form. And it's not for the sake of the closed ones: it's especially for the sake of the ones you don't see and don't interact with who might be watching you and thinking about who they should trust more.

It's always the rational fence sitter that you have to think about. Never the flaming disagreeable you are so heated up about. Like with BLM. I'm very much in favor of the movement and its aims generally, but I KNEW that rioting against ordinary people was gonna turn a lot of heads the other way and, when it did (though thank goodness that we DID get some measure of justice for George Floyd!) I was NOT surprised at all. And YES, I understand MLK, "a riot as the language of the unheard" - that's the thing - I see both ends of it. It's true. It is. But at the same time you should also at least be considering who is really unhearing you and whether and how it might impact other people who otherwise might want to hear you. Even the ones targeted for the rioting - I'd bet dollars to donuts that specifically for rioter hitting a small community business the persons involved there are perhaps far more likely to be a potential ally than you might think, and then you just permanently made them a mortal enemy. It's almost never about the visible ones. It's always about the invisible ones.