You can't argue with a cloud - why the current Crimea/Iraq discussion sucks
The Iraq War and the Crimean War arouse a large amount of emotion reactions from people all over the spectrum.
These responses range from people who feel that the United States is an imperialistic warmonger who shouldn't lecture anybody to those who feel that the United States is a great company who made some mistakes, but who must continue to play a leadership role in the world.
Those are the two extremes, but there are positions everywhere along that spectrum, and that's only the first spectrum. You could also have a spectrum of what people feel about Putin and Russia right now. Or the spectrum of how people feel about the Iraq war (from hating it to really really really hating it).
The mind looks for patterns. The mind looks to divide things up into easily digested packets.
The easiest way to divide people up is between the people who agree with me and the people who don't agree with me.
I'm reasonably convinced that you could take any two DUers (for the most part), put them in a coffee shop and let them get on with discussing what they think the issues are and the discussion would probably be productive and reasonable. They might not end up agreeing, but they would at least understand each other's position. Because there's be one person there putting forward their opinion, and you'd get specifically to where the fault lines are - where the actual disagreement is.
But when you take the level of passions involved and the divergent opinions this subject engenders there are no fault lines - the lines of disagreement vary from person to person - and we have seen some fairly aggressive posts on both sides of the issue. So there's no way to actually get to the meat of the issue, because DUers have divergent views on where the meat of the issue is. And, as is traditional, there's a strong tendency to assume that someone who disagrees with you is just an ignorant or corrupt person; it's very hard to resist that temptation.
This is the sort of issue that . . . i don't know - there's a lot of discussion, but I'm not sure how much of it is productive discussion. That said, of course I'm in favor of everybody saying what they feel and oppose censorship of any kind.
Bryant