One of the things I chuckled at with this is the trope "we're all doing the best we can." I've had that line thrown and me by a lib/prog several times. All I can gather from it--when used as an argument, which it was--is that we're supposed to tolerate idiocy because the matters in question are complicated so any position should be respected. Naturally, by 'any' he did not include my positions. Mine were obviously wrong and intolerable.