“the futility of trying to change someone else’s mind in an online discussion.”
Rational people change their mind due to discussion. It happens to me, and I know I have sometimes changed other people’s mind with good arguments.
What seems to have been largely ignored in this discussion is that under California law a crime was committed when Mel Gibson was taped, and a court order was violated when the tape was made public. The lawbreakers should be prosecuted, as well as Gibson himself if he committed an unjustified domestic assault. His language in the tape, however politically incorrect, was not illegal. All the previous discussion about racism and slavery is rather pointless, because the relevant issues in this matter are the right to privacy, political correctness, and domestic violence.
I recall that Richard Nixon often privately referred to Henry Kissinger as ‘my Jew boy’ and with the ‘k’ word (the Jewish equivalent to the “n” word), while Kissinger privately referred to Nixon as ‘that madman,’ ‘our drunken friend’ and ‘the meatball mind’ People under stress says things in private that they don’t intend to be made public. Under California law even Mel Gibson was entitled to do that.
I have changed my position in online discussions on occasion, and have persuaded a few people that I was correct and they were wrong. That having been said, I would estimate that for every online conversation which ends in such a manner, there are (literally) thousands which do not.