All of those long, long, painful years arguing with the daycare kids my mom watched, having wars of words with bullies, debating with my teachers and co-workers and friends and enemies and family and strangers... getting called every name in the book, being the only one, standing alone in a hostile crowd, vocalizing the truth, and keeping my head high, even under extreme duress, threats, and ostracism. My entire quintessence, summed up in forty words of scintillating brilliance:
"It turns out that if you don't bother to explain precisely why certain ideas are bad, if you don't vigorously defend your own worldview, then you lose. Bad ideas spread; they quickly congeal into conventional wisdom-- and then you're done."
Thank you, Tucker.