Steelmanning is hard. I have gotten better at it, but it's kinda through empathy rather than analysis.
Abortion rhetoric is a shitshow of fallacies. Almost nobody is willing to slow down. And, yeah, the best part is that while failing to understand the other side's motivations they'll accuse the other side of lacking empathy.
I can handle the "trump funny" people, but anyone that genuinely likes Trump drive me batty. I don't think Trump has any ideals to hold onto to begin with, so it's all cult of personality shit.
With some exceptions, a lot of the anti-tax racist rednecks have been sidelined - the dinosaurs are dying. I went to the 2020 LP state convention because I was asked to, and I was really happy seeing the dudes that made me leave 16 years ago sitting at a table alone.
No, nothing has changed. And that was a good professor. I'm kind of in the place where we've picked metrics to decide when it's fine to let a life go so why can't we look at the other side and aim for a non-magical start.
The LP has pretty good social ideas. First electoral vote for a woman. First to include sex workers in the party platform. The NAP is interesting because both the left and right are down, we just define aggression differently.
With sane liability laws and a financial system that isn't built for large corps, a free market could work. Where business has responsibility for its actions and is rated based on customer liability vs assets. Libertarians don't want no regulation, they just prefer private regulation. Ancaps are kind of the same. So long as we keep trying to patch up our bullshit system instead of addressing root causes, we'll continue getting fucked.
I'm still kind of a libertarian. My anti-corp and non-propertarian leanings make me somewhat left politically, but I have strong ethics about helping each other and those that can't really help themselves. I just don't like using violence to make people do what I want.