"Its one of the reasons its hard to have political discussion online. You have to determine what the words your using mean, before you can start arguing the points. "

This notion isn’t one that’s new to me, but for some reason, the way you’ve phrased it here is evoking some interesting reflection for me: I think that some of my most productive online arguments have been when the contention is what words mean. For example, when a transphobic statement is made by someone who is actually just an oblivious cis person, I’ve found that a “semantic calibration” can get at the root cause of their problematic statement (the hard part is discerning whether a person is genuinely engaging in good faith vs. being an asshole with plausible deniability. I don’t always get it right, but people usually reveal quite quickly whether they’re worth engaging with).

There have also been times when I have had the outsider’s view of someone else’s discussion as involving people talking past each other by using the same words to mean different things. Sometimes, I’ve found it possible to wade into an ongoing discussion and diffused a lot of tension by clarifying these definitional problems.

On the flip side, it’s often not worth it to engage in political discussions online if it’s apparent from the outset that it would just be too much work to clarify everything because you recognise that you’re coming at the topic from a completely different direction than the person you’re considering talking to.

Yeah, that’s often the result (and like you, I also find this to be worthwhile nonetheless), but it depends on the context. Sometimes it plays out like this though (image below) and the trolling potential is glorious

This is well articulated. This dynamic is something I think of a lot, because as a cis woman, I often have a disproportionate level of social power in scenarios similar to this

They certainly seem keen to disown him. Bloody idiots

Based on what I’m hearing coming from the Democrats lately, I also feel like this could be argued it’s also Sanders trying to reconcile with his party (by showing them how fucking dumb they’re being by doubling down on their anti-left nonsense)