I wasn't thinking of you as a fellow human being

Chris Carolan on why so many arguments collapse the second the other person is standing in front of you. Otherism only works at distance. It needs that person to stay a number on a screen, or a caricature. Put the actual human in the room and most of what you were saying goes out the window, not because anyone was argued out of it, but because the abstraction broke. Nobody ever says the sentence out loud, but Chris says it for them: I wasn't thinking of you as a fellow human being.