That was a very insightful and interesting piece, Cyrano.
I recently friended Marco on Facebook, actually, and was very surprised to find most of his posts are very political in nature - as are some of my friends on FB, all of whom are very vocal in their opinions of the current state of affairs. That's all well and good - it's perfectly within their rights - but what sucks is, I feel that were I to lay my own opinion down, be it an opposing viewpoint or devil's advocate argument, instead of turning into a discourse/civil discussion, it would probably turn into threats of violence and a flurry of unfriending.
Anyway that was the first thing I thought of when I saw this on the Front Page
TM, and was glad it wasn't in that vein.