Deceiving the ignorant is by some regarded as evil, but it is the demagogue's business to bolster up his position and to show that God's noblest work is the demagogue.

From This Constant Preaching to the Mob by Ezra Pound in Poetry, A Magazine of Verse, June 1, 1916.  

I am not a big fan of Pound but this topic is of interest.  The Age of Enlightenment citizen wants and should be open to everyone and all arguments.  On the other hand, time is limited.  How much time should you be willing to waste on someone making a tired and easily refuted argument on the off-chance that they might include some squirm of new evidence, some insight, some interpretation which might be valuable?  

But I do like that opening cannonade against time wasters.

Time and again the old lie. There is no use talking to the ignorant about lies, for they have no criteria. Deceiving the ignorant is by some regarded as evil, but it is the demagogue's business to bolster up his position and to show that God's noblest work is the demagogue. Therefore we read again for the one-thousand-one-hundred-and-eleventh time that poetry is made to entertain. As follows: "The beginnings of English poetry . . . made by a rude war-faring people for the entertainment of men-at-arms, or for men at monks' tables." 

Either such statements are made to curry favor with other people sitting at fat sterile tables, or they are made in an ignorance which is charlatanry when it goes out to vend itself as sacred and impeccable knowledge. 

"The beginnings — for entertainment" — has the writer of this sentence read The Seafarer in Anglo-Saxon? Will the author tell us for whose benefit these lines, which alone in the works of our forebears are fit to compare with Homer — for whose entertainment were they made? They were made for no man's entertainment, but because a man believing in silence found himself unable to withhold himself from speaking. And that more uneven poem, The Wanderer, is like to this, a broken man speaking: 

Ne maeg werigmod wryde withstondan 

ne se hreo hyge helpe gef remman : 

for thon domgeorne dreorigne oft 

in hrya breostcofan bindath faeste. 

"For the doom-eager bindeth fast his blood-bedraggled heart in his breast" — an apology for speaking at all, and speech only pardoned because his captain and all the sea-faring men and companions are dead ; some slain of wolves, some torn from the cliffs by sea-birds whom they had plundered.  Such poems are not made for after-dinner speakers, nor was the eleventh book of the Odyssey. Still it flatters the mob to tell them that their importance is so great that the solace of lonely men, and the lordliest of the arts, was created for their amusement. 

Pound rails against those who would argue that poetry is for entertainment.  Fair enough.  I have no particular intellectual dog in that fight but I empathize with his frustration.

I am similarly exercised when anyone rises to make the argument for Socialism or Communism for example.  Or for planned economies versus free market economies.  Or for those who argue that their passionate defense of equality of outcomes is not de facto an argument for Marxism.  Or those who wish to dispense with policing and the justice system in some insane infatuation with Social Justice.  

How do we remain open to nonsense without wasting time on nonsense.  An intriguing question.