<i>You have been making moral assertions in your original post on how private businesses ought to act, in order to be considered &quot;good&quot;.</i><p><i>This is not fundamentally different in character than any other moral sermonizing of the past</i><p>I rather see this like the idea that business deals should be mutually beneficial, that dealings should be honest, and that companies should be transparent. You are free to disagree of course, but what I&#x27;m advocating is fundamentally about cooperation and mutual benefit. It doesn&#x27;t have to be moralizing, as it&#x27;s supported by the mathematics of cooperation and the non-zero sum game as well as by the lessons of the long arc of history.<p><i>Your position amounts to &quot;Everyone should be tolerated, except those whom I don&#x27;t personally like,&quot;</i><p>To be precise, my position is that everyone should be tolerated, so long as they behave civilly. This means they should be accorded the same rights as anyone else, and that those should be held sacrosanct, until it&#x27;s no longer practical to do so. This is how I&#x27;d like to be treated, so this is how I advocate how everyone else should treat people.<p><i>You even seek to arrogate intellectualism itself to your cause, implying that those who disagree with you are simply ignorant, unenlightened cretins who have not yet been properly educated.</i><p>I find that I never have to do that. Pretty much, those who are ignorant quickly reveal themselves to the world. There is objective truth and knowledge of real value. Ignorance is obvious to real experts. I&#x27;ve been on both sides of this equation. If one is prostrate to the truth, then rebuttals to opponents simply write themselves. Largely, they just consist of paraphrases or 1 or 2 logical steps.<p><i>Society is not perfectable, and attempts to perfect it through coercion have invariably resulted in suffering and oppression. There will always be jerks in the world, no matter how many kindhearted liberals generously condescend to try to convince them otherwise. The exact form of their jerkdom will simply change to suit the new conditions.</i><p>On this we agree. No person is God or an oracle or otherwise infallible. This is why acting quickly is often a bad idea and acting from outrage is especially so. This is why the working assumption should always be that one is never in command of all the relevant facts. Hence: due process.<p><i>You believe you have a mission to spread your views to society at large, to coerce others to adapt to your personal view of &quot;the good.&quot; That&#x27;s the problem. That sort of thing has always, always ended badly in history.</i><p>I&#x27;m against coercion. That&#x27;s my whole point. Don&#x27;t coerce -- Convince! Humanist values have always ended badly in history? The USA has problems, but there are many wonderful things it has achieved. I&#x27;m still betting on that horse.