I enjoyed the culture war thread. It was a place on the internet where there was a radical toleration of ideas, so long as they were given in good faith. Bans were frequent to those who broke the rules, and some ideas were morally repugnant. But when people made them, you were able to read a discussion, debate, and often refutation of their points, that focused mainly on ideas.

You had some weird people, with weird ideas, who found this to be a nice home. Often they were very smart, but had strange ideas on humanity, race, religion, politics, and knew they couldn't share them anywhere else. I, personally, enjoy trying to look through the world of all different types of filters.

In fact, I think it's important. While the mistakes of history are so obvious now, at the time plenty of smart and good people supported terrifying and cruel policies. The first step, in my opinion, to not making those mistakes, is to formulate a deep empathy for why they made them. For why you might have made the same mistake without the benefit of hindsight.

My best defense against this is to inoculate myself by reading and understanding a wide variety of strange ideas on the world.