I can generally tell in a few seconds if a person online is worth engaging with or not.
I think it’s always helpful to remember that it’s important to engage with one’s intellectual and moral equals and superiors only; wasting time on your inferiors is almost never a legitimate or even remote entertainable or excusable use of your time.
Believe it or not, ‘snap judgements’ are your friend.
If the first thing someone says to you is a deliberate strawman or derailing tactic, there is very rarely any point continuing further.
Let the dead bury their dead, and don’t cast pearls to swine.
There are people out there who will continue to shriek before the very Gates of Hell that sex is an arbitrary social construct, Tony Blair had good intentions, Islamophobia is real, the Holocaust never happened, Communism is misunderstood, Bill Clinton never raped those women, and that humanitarian interventionists are morally superior to Nazis, Islamists and Marxists.
Is there really any need to waste your time or energy with such people?
Remember, these are all finite resources.
Use them wisely!
