If you leave, I won't feel guilty, because I'm done playing the pity party with people in general. Your leaving or staying will not affect my leaving or staying, so stick around. You might as well!

And btw, you should have regrets for what you said, or more specifically, the way you said it and made such a "thing" of it. You need not regret your ideology on the issue; that is fine, and was never a problem with me. It was the argumentative way you went about it, as I told you then. And the insults that invariably follow when such a heated argument about politics is started. You will never make me accept capitalism, or speak favorably of it. Too much in my life has happened for me to go back to championing that system. You need to accept that. I fully accept I will never make you feel different about conservatism, and that is fine. Your views weren't the issue. Your behavior and sudden, out of the blue lack of tolerance for my views--which you had little problem tolerating in the past when we were good friends (remember those days?)--was what the problem was.

You brought me not a single step closer to liking or respecting capitalism, and put a huge rift between us on a personal level by making the disagreement personal. Which it always becomes once the insults and personal attacks start, which always happens in such arguments.

As I said, you were not the sole cause of my leaving. But you helped make this place feel a lot less like home. It's one thing to deal with people who have been detractors and "opponents" from the start. But it's another thing altogether when your friends turn on you. I never came here to fight with friends every other day, for extremely long threads. I do not regret what I said to you either, nor the way I eventually said it, because you forced my hand.

Consider going back to accepting our disagreements on that issue and maybe we will get along better, just like during the days when we were friends.