> The insidious nature of this question comes from the false representation as earnest, intellectual discourse. Many who ask it may truly believe they’re engaging earnestly, but their responses quickly reveal an angle more akin to religious police. ... Most vulnerable to this behavior are the intellectually honest + socially clueless, who engage in good faith, unaware of the pending social ambush.

My favorite thing about this enlightened centrist/individual thinker line to kick off with is it's almost universally used by people who have one or more abhorrent viewpoints in their back pocket, and the "social ambush" described here would be much better phrased as, well, disclosing what that is and just saving us all some time. I personally am deeply curious what beliefs Ashwin has been ambushed about.

If you have thoughts on how tax brackets should be constructed, or whether we should move to flat taxation, whether highway budgets should include beatification or whether that should be up to municipalities, what zoning restrictions are used for a given area, all that type of what should be politics, neither myself nor anyone I know would "ambush" you for those beliefs. Discussing and rounding out those kinds of issues is the foundation of how a Democracy works. We have to discuss them, and you should have opinions on at least a few of them, and you should share them! That's how it works. And for what it's worth, I can't fathom a situation I would ambush anyone over those sorts of issues. I might disagree, and I might ask for elaboration or perhaps suggest alternatives to what you want to do, but I wouldn't shame you for them.

If on the other hand you think horrible things that for some insane reason have gotten traction lately, like that putting tariffs on foreign goods is somehow going to bring back American manufacturing (it isn't), that some of your fellow citizens who might be gay, trans, both, or something else shouldn't enjoy a full set of rights under the law for whatever cockamamie reason you'd like to cite (they should), that children should be re-introduced to the labor market to bolster the amount of cheap labor available (they shouldn't), that the government should be doing genital inspections on children who want to play sports to make sure no one's "cheating" (stupid, horrifying, illegal in several ways) and I could go on, then yeah, you probably will find yourself socially ambushed. And you should be. That's how shaming works. That's what we have done to one another for thousands of years when we behave anti-socially: if you act anti-social, you are not going to have an easy time being social. That's, again, just how that works.

I of course don't wish that fate on anyone, I have been spurned from communities and it sucks! But I did survive that process and a number of those experiences, awful as they were at the time, shaped me into a better person overall with a more internally consistent and defensible belief system than the one I was indoctrinated into as a child.

And yeah, a lot of this is also just "political tribalism sucks!" Cosigned, 100%.