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"A note: I firmly believe in giving people an "out" in public conversations and discourse. A way to save face and go "you know what, I done fraked that one up.""

This is an interesting point. One of the recurring insights of one of my favorite scifi series is that if you don't give someone a means to surrender or back down or retreat then don't be surprised if they fight tooth and nail to the last breath, because you haven't given them another option. While those books talk about it in the context of military strategy, I think it holds true in conversations as well: if you want to actually be able to convince someone — which you definitely don't always want to bother trying to do, for instance in the case of fascists or bigots or narcissists — then you need to offer them a route by which they can admit you are right and *be* convinced (so, not tell them they're irredeemably evil or whatever), perhaps even while saving some amount of face.