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To be fair, when someone seasons their arguments with invective like you stupid fuck, to me, it reduces their credibility as a party interested in learning or arguing in good faith.
There are consequences to conversing online like a typical COD gamer.
I'm not sure how that's relevant here.
There's a ton of highly-polarizing, hot-button political issues out there at the moment - trans rights, climate change, the republican party, et cetera et cetera.
Presenting those issues in a blunt or confrontational manner is virtually guaranteed to generate strong feelings; starting a fight over them would be trivially easy.
By any reasonable metric, you'd have to call those topics inflammatory. But is it useful or appropriate to ban discussion of them from the platform on that basis?
I hold that it is not. They are inflammatory because they are important, because people need to be talking about them and taking a position, because people should be trying to convince others to be on the right side of history.
If people have to self-censor just in case things could potentially get heated, because god forbid anyone care enough to raise their voice, all you're left with is celebrity gossip and fashion news - and that's exactly the kind of bland advertiser-friendly pap I thought we were trying to avoid.
Quite frankly if you aren't getting angry about important things, you're doing it wrong - and imho it just smacks of entitlement to play tone-police and refusing to hear a message because the phrasing isn't polite or the person saying it won't stay in their designated lane.
I'm not asking people to stay in their lane, which is about disregarding their opinion based on their own circumstances. But I think its possible to argue an opinion without adding ad hominem attacks (e.g. well, you're just an idiot ) or poisoning the well ( Anyone who disagrees with me is insincere about their convictions )
I assume you don't mean to imply the internet population on average is incapaalble of discussing serious matters without popping off like the Midnight Bomber What Bombs At Midnight. Granted I have a background in tech support but that should not be a step up from the average regarding basic civility.
First point:
Second point:
I'm one of the crazy, disaster-queer anarchist pinko commies defending the marginalized, and its usually the outraged privileged losing their shit and showing poor tone, in my experience. This might reflect more consistent value on the other side of loyalty before principle such as when they accuse us of snowflakery while at the same time taking offense when common behavior subjects them to ridicule.
You and I are on the same side, I think. And yes, while I can't fault someone for losing their cool when someone is suggesting they should be persecuted / annihilated / forced to follow a silly religious faith, I've found I reach more hearts and minds keeping my language civil, especially in the face of boisterous bigotry.
But then, I've also studied a bit, so my opinions and methods might be on more solid ground than most.
I'm with Natalie on this one (seriously, watch that video, all her stuff is excellent): there's merit in winning hearts and minds, and there's definitely a place for it - but you can't deradicalize all the bigots, and you don't need to. As per her example, there are still homophobes aplenty, yet gay rights have come an enormously long way in the last few decades despite their best efforts.
Solidarity and setting a baseline are just as important, and sometimes moreso. Punching nazis may not convince them, but it does empower others and give them some backup, and the Overton window can slide a bit from the impact. The right expletive in the wrong place can make all the dif ference in the world. You hold the line, and you be seen to hold it.
Not all sealions need feeding, not every argument should be dignfied with a response on its own terms, and emotion should not be disparaged in ethical discourse.
Ethics is just a system to predict outrage, and outrage is an emotional response to (plausibly generalised) threat perception. Lose the emotion, and you're left with an empty, inauthentic shell. And that's precisely what the bad actors want: they want an abstract parlour game they can disqualify you from, while they remain comfortably insulated from the stakes.
Fuck that, fuck them. I'm a 'drag the dead kids into the room where everyone has to look at them' kind of guy; I get tutted at on a regular basis from people who are offended by this, and honestly I'm good with that, because I get results anyway, in my line of activism.
That comes across as hugely condescending; I'm likely misinterpreting, but I'm not clear as to how.
I have watched it. And Sean's take, and Jessie Gender's. I followed the wizard game boycott as well as Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull's tour and debacle in Australia and New Zealand.
Normally I don't engage with those in the movement at all, (whether we're talking about the anti-trans movement in the US and UK or the white Christian nationalist movement and fascist takeover of the US federal and state governments). I am used to being confronted by them in response to a comment to a third party. And when hate or allegiance to the movement reveals itself, I feel obligated to confront it. Hate movements thrive when left unchecked to fester and grow.
That said, it wasn't my intention to brag, more I was pondering if my studies (of the Holocaust, for instance) have dulled its visceral effects on me so I may be expecting a degree of impartiality that isn't normal for most. I've predicted and grieved over the fascist uprising in the US back in the aughts, so today I see it as a near inevitability. We will have to be very lucky for the US to evade autocratic fascism during the next decade.
But it wasn't my intent to offend, and I get it if you want to assume I'm as incorrigible as much of the internet. My own disposition is neither cheery nor sociable.