There are some thoughtful posts in threads like this one, as well as some that are not only thoughtless and dumb, but hateful as well.

After having read almost all of them in all the "national" political threads, I've concluded that not one single person is going to change their mind on which candidate they intend to vote for in November as the result of these exchanges. That's notwithstanding many carefully researched and well-written messages. We all "read into" the facts what we wish. We all seem to have convinced ourselves of our choice and are abominably inept in changing even one other person's mind. Whether that's the fault of the antagonist of the debate or the protagonist, who knows?

All we're doing is wasting time and bandwidth with these arguments as well as aggravating (at best, at worst maybe enraging) our neighbors. Think about it--would we enter into these debates if we went out to dinner with friends or neighbors or people we met on the town square? Or are we simply empowered to say this stuff because of the security and disguise provided by screen names and the internet?

Why are we bothering? Why are we wasting our time?