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Antisuji comments on Politics Filtering and Higher Standard Discussions - Less Wrong Discussion
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I largely agree. But I strongly suspect that it's possible for some groups of people to have meaningful, productive discussions of political issues, even if they don't all agree. The difficulty is that this scenario is unstable: once any member of the discussion takes offense, uses their arguments as soldiers, or otherwise misuses words, it becomes next to impossible to back out and return to the previous level of discourse.
There are probably ways of making such discussions more stable, if not perfectly so. I for one would be curious to know what these are.
Even extremely reasonable people tend to use arguments as soldiers. Here a disability rights advocate Harriet McBryde Johnson recounts her discussions with the philosopher Peter Singer (I stumbled across it on Eliezer's facebook page). Both very intelligent and reasonable people, they were unable to come to any common ground to speak of, due to what seems like their inability to look for simple common issues they can agree on without triggering identity-based emotions and then build on them. I found it a really sad story.