The discussion of politics belongs in the bar

Well, if you agree with me then I know your hearts not in it. But that does mean we should just start going to the same bar. The personal practicality of avoiding a social faux pas doesn't outweigh the damage that is done to the general welfare of the nation by avoiding the discussion of politics. It is important to know how and where your friends and neighbors stand politically, so that you may be able to band together with your friends and neighbors to effect political change. And if, your friend is supporting a policy which does you harm, it's something that is just good to know. To remain mute on your political thoughts, and your religious beliefs might aid in making a first impression, but if the first impression does not include your politics or your religion, how is this first impression genuine? It would be better just to air all of these views up front, so to minimize the amount of bigotry that you could encounter as the person discovers that your political views differ and find them offensive. Your reasons for not discussing politics in a bar rely on the idea that the political discussion might break into a disagreement, heated argument, or a fight is likely caused by the belief that politics are not meant to be discussed at a bar. If discussion and political disagreements were more of a common place, it is likely that people might realize that there are more successful ways to discuss politics than yelling at each other. Other tactics of persuasion could be developed, as people realize that finding commonality, and building off of it is more fruitful than identifying differences and condemning them for it. If we keep our political views to ourselves, and absorb only the viewpoints that we like from pundits, and never learn how to discuss matters civilly with people that we disagree with because we never bothered practicing, we might as well just give up on democracy. Democracy kind of depends on the ability of arriving at a consensus, and if we can't arrive at a consensus, we might just be better off consenting to a governing body that won't allow the citizens of the nation to fight against their own interests while fighting each other on policies that don't matter that are usually used to define the political parties that have split apart the middle class, so that we don't discuss nor organize on the premises of the things that do matter. An aspect of Greek philosophy was that a man was comprised of two selves, the sober self and the drunken self. Effectively, if a decision was very important they thought about it, and decided the issue while sober, then drank to the point of drunkenness, and considered the issue again. Unless both selves agreed, the decision was not carried out. So, again, if you can't justify your views when you're intoxicated, you probably shouldn't hold those views. For our society to function, it requires discussion. We can't just rely on the relation of trivial things to each other so long as each of us has Also, in defense Sam Adams, he was just a drunk talking politics in a bar. Yes, he had a "Masters in Arts" from Harvard, but bear in mind that doesn't mean he didn't spend his later years in a bar. Much of his ideas and attitudes were developed from what he would have been exposed to in course work, which largely was classical languages, history, and literature. The Boston Brewery, which produces Sam Adams was started in 1985, and used a recipe created by the family in the 1860s in St. Louis and has nothing to do with the Brewery that Sam Adams briefly owned. His father ran a successful Malt house, which Sam Adams worked at after other business men in the town decreed him to be unemployable. At the death of his father, Sam Adams inherited the brewery, and all of his father's other assets and proceeded to quickly run the brewery into the ground. He was a perpetual debtor and owed huge sums of money, and yes, spent a lot of time in the bar. His good friend John Hancock literally bought him a new suit, and took him to Philadelphia with him. We've created some mythical figures out of the men who birthed us a nation, and have forgotten that happy people seldom change the world. It just doesn't bode well with many folks that a big influence on our Constitution, the drafter of the Articles of Confederation, and a leading proponent of secession was a failure at business, and a drunk. Some of history's greatest people have been professional drinkers.