Ouch! That looks pretty hopeless. On the other hand, I have a friend with whom I had one conversation about politics during the Bush-Kerry election, and discovered he was a 24 karat nut job on politics. The next time we met, we sort of stared at each other shyly, as if each of us expected an attack from the other. But we talked about something else, and we've never discussed politics since.

We are both philosophers, and only see each other at conferences. We have a lot of areas where we agree and disagree in interesting ways, which gives us plenty of non-political things to talk about. He wrote a review of my book, which was critical in many ways. But he revised the review in response to some of my objections, and I acknowledged that some of his criticism were valid. So we can still communicate even when we disagree about other things, as long as we stay away from politics.