> I can only listen to so many people. It makes sense to focus my efforts on people who are going to provide the best return on my investment of time.
And those are the people who have plenty of resources to tailor their message to you because they are funded by some marketing department and therefore are easiest to digest?
> Meanwhile, absolutism, while not a proof, is a pretty powerful heuristic in the messy real world of economic policy.
A heuristic for what exactly? That you shouldn't consider an argument at all?
> And yes, this is also a human rights issue, but mostly in the same way that a food or housing shortage is a human rights issue: the roots are economic.
I am not sure I understand this point, and maybe you can explain, but I think DRM is much closer to privacy and control over your own life as far as its human rights aspects go than to lack of resources.
> Slavery in particular is a red herring. In almost any other question, compromise is the way to go, so bringing up the extreme case of slavery adds more heat than light.
I disagree. Because the concept of "almost any other question" doesn't really make sense. How do you partition the world into distinct questions that you then somehow count to determine what percentage needs a compromise as the answer?
The questions that you actually ask yourself are not useful for this, because you don't ever ask the questions where the status quo is something that you find acceptable and where everyone else agrees with you. But for anything that you think is perfectly fine in this world, you could easily construct a hypothetical world in which our current status quo would be deemed absolutist. So, arguably, everything that you are ok with as it is is actually an absolutist position and not a compromise. Whether something is considered absolutist has absolutely nothing to do with the merits of the demand itself, but only with how far out it is from the current mainstream consensus. As soon as the consensus shifts, there is nothing absolutist about it anymore.
Also, you can trivially transform any absolutist demand into a compromise by simply replacing it with a completely crazy demand. I, for example, advocate for killing everyone who has ever said a positive word about DRM. But I would be willing to compromise to only outlaw DRM for the future, so I am not an absolutist, right?
Also, how is it even relevant that it is in almost every other question when you are trying to determine whether it is in the case of this specific question?