The other, less philosophical thing about it is that it's almost never used in the benign, self-reflection sense, and is usually just used to dismiss the viewpoint of people you disagree with on the basis of their race / sex / sexual orientation.
Which in turn leads a lot of smart people who aren't particularly confrontational to just avoid discussions about controversial or difficult subjects (even more than they would normally), when we could probably use more input from them and less from self-righteous, certitudinous idiots at the moment.
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"The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
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