> I think you're very confused. The idea that rational people have to engage thoughtfully with irrational bigots is pure nonsense. It is not the duty or obligation of anybody to engage with those who hate them.
"Have to" and "obligation" in a general sense are things I try to avoid saying. They don't exist in my belief system, and I apologize if I mistakenly said otherwise.
What I'm saying is that if we want bigots to change, we can't just expect it to happen.
> The reason we get bigots in office by the way is not because trolls are banned. It's because powerful interested want bigots in office. Bigotry sells. It's very easy to screw people over if you can distract them by having them hate on some out group. It is naive to think that taking with bigots will change this.
I think you've confused cause and effect here. Some powerful interests certainly see bigotry as an end goal, but I think most powerful interests who support bigotry see it as a means to an end. As you said, bigotry is a distraction to achieve other goals. Bigots are easily manipulated if you don't care about bigotry: you just pretend to be a bigot and that gets you power, and then you can do what you actually want to do. If there were not bigots to be manipulated, powerful interests wouldn't push bigots into power.
> And here is the point: social change doesn't proceed through rational discussion. Never has, never will. Real change requires organization and solidarity and protesting and marching and uncompromising demands.
Organization and solidarity and protesting and marching aren't incompatible with rational discussion, and in fact none of these things work if they aren't a means of putting forward a rational discussion.
Modern protest movements need to read Martin Luther King's writings and understand what he really did. Every single protest he lead was carefully designed to make a point in the rational discussion of the time. The bigoted viewpoints of the time: that people of color were violent, dangerous, less intelligent, etc., were struck down one by one on public television by MLK's protests. Bigotry is based on lies, and MLK made it impossible for people not to see the truth. When bigots feared people of color would be violent, he showed them people of color peacefully being beaten. When bigots feared takeovers by blacks, he showed people of color only wanted normal things like sitting where they wanted on the bus and drinking from the same water fountains. He didn't simply try to talk over the people he disagreed with, he listened to their concerns and showed their concerns to be invalid.
Harvey Milk, as far as I know, didn't write about his tactics, but they are clear in what he did and said. When bigots saw homosexuality as a foreign, unusual, threatening thing, he encouraged people to come out so that bigots could see that gays were normal people all around them. When bigots saw homosexual culture as an invasion of their neighborhood, he showed it also brought economic benefits ("You don't mind us shopping at your liquor store." "We both pay taxes for your child's school").
Can you explain to me how you think protests work to change policy? If all they are is simply trying to yell your opinion louder than your opponent, why should people in power care? If protests don't persuade anyone, what's to stop everyone voting for the same people and getting the same bigots in power? If our only tool is escalation, they'll just escalate back, and they can escalate further because they have guns. :)
> If you want to waste time engaging with trolls have at it. You will find that these people have nothing but contempt for discussion and no interest in being swayed by logic. For the rest of us we have far better things to do and banning trolls and bigots is the obvious choice.
If by trolls you mean people who are saying inflammatory stuff to enrage people for their own entertainment, sure, engaging with them only entertains them.
But if you're talking about people who are just trying to live their lives and think that bigotry is the way to do that, I very much doubt you have tried talking to these people, because this has not been my experience at all. If you approach talking with someone about their bigotry as if they were a human, with compassion, and address the actual fears and hang-ups that cause them to be bigots in the first place, people do change. It doesn't always happen quickly or at all, but sometimes it does. And more importantly, I've never seen it happen any other way.