I suppose that makes sense if that's the way you view things. I happen to enjoy small talk, now that I'm good at it. I really value the ability to have conversations with people I disagree with, because the last thing I want to do at this point in my life is shut off my opinions to change. (This might have to do with my age: I am neither old enough, nor smart or experienced enough to be right all the time, or even most of the time, and I know that.)

And yeah, if I think the other person is wrong, I want them to change their mind...but being amenable to changing my own mind in response to their arguments (if valid) works better than upfront confrontation. (I try not to make this true of myself...I don't want to miss out learning about someone else's worldview just because they're more confrontational than I am.)

If I'd been super polite they might have pretended to have a civil discussion with me for longer while having rather irrational thoughts going through their hide.

Agreed. I guess a lot of the time, I want to have a civil conversation for longer because a) I enjoy civil conversation for its own sake, and b) eventually I'll notice that they're having irrational thoughts and emotional reactions, and if I want to I can ease that into the conversation without necessarily provoking a confrontation. (I am fairly good at this face-to-face, but the subtle emotional cues don't carry through to online posting so much, which might be why "discussion can go wrong for unstated reasons." Face-to-face, the unstated reason would still be noticeably, if you're looking for it, long before the actual confrontation.

I'm not saying there's necessarily anything wrong with your way of doing things...just that it wouldn't work for me, because I hate confrontation and I would regard being flamed as a disaster...I have this annoying tendency to care about anything that anyone says to or about me.