YouTuber, ex-philosopher 
Business email: info@contrapoints.com
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It's not just a matter of my "talking to people who disagree." A lot of anti-SJW YouTube (just one example but a big one) has spent years leading nasty, personal campaigns to defame, hurt, and humiliate individual people in my community.
So anything I do to appear chummy with people who have behaved that way, or are publicly friends with those people, makes me look like an alibi. An enabler. An apologist. Someone, at least, willing to associate with people who have caused a lot of pain (& are in denial about it).
Now for me, personally, engaging those people isn't a big strain on my mental health. I find it helps—makes me safer online, even—to show up on those platforms & just be like "hi, I'm a human being, it's possible to have a conversation with me."
What is a strain, however, is feeling like I'm potentially betraying people who've put their trust in me and hurting people I don't want to hurt e v e r y time I do this.
It's a weird paradox, because I'm now in a situation where I could just choose to appear on pretty much any right-wing YouTube channel I want. I'm constantly invited to debates by everyone from centrist liberals to outright fascists.
Paradox because I now have the opportunity to do exactly what I wanted to do when I started. But I'm no longer sure it's the right thing to do.
The latest thing is I've been invited to do this #kilroyevent, which includes some people I like and have spoken with before, and at least one person who's an outright fascist.
This is an event that Richard Spencer is (I hope fruitlessly) trying to worm his way into—he's not doing well lately, and this would benefit him. Would it benefit me? For starters, it'd be a nightmare for my relationship with my audience.
Though it does annoy me that a lot on the left attack both 1. right-wingers for being in an echo chamber and 2. left-wingers who breach the right-wing echo chamber.
Personally, I wouldn't mind getting drunk with anti-SJW YouTube after hours and asking everyone what their deal is. What do they want? What are they worried about? What are their dreams?
But this decision is not mainly about my private thoughts and feelings. It's about how things look to spectators. And I don't know what to do, I'm never confident about these decisions anymore.
End thread. Stream of consciousness over for now. Gotta edit my fucking video.
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