The only thing I’d add to the other very good replies on here is to your last bulletpoint. Good faith and “civility” are not necessarily the same thing. Tensions run high around here sometimes because “downvote and move along” is not only against our ideology but our downvotes are also disabled for the same reason. In a lot of situations asking someone to “act civil” or “be nice” are akin to gaslighting. As MLK Jr. said “Peace is the presence of justice, not the absence of conflict”.
That said “fuck off and read this book” is the worst of the “bad faith” you can expect here, whereas in an alt-right instance you can expect to be dismissed with a slur if you go against the grain.
We also (thankfully) have much less of this than a lot of other leftist communities. People are usually willing to explain, for instance, how reductive a term like “authoritarian” is rather than just dropping a link to On Authority.
I appreciate that a lot and am blown away by the effort people have put into this thread. I find it to be pretty classist to just tell people to “read a book”. Certainly it makes sense if you feel like someone is interested totally trying to play devils advocate/suck emotional labor out of you but I have definitely seen it in response to more well meaning questions.
The only thing I’d add to the other very good replies on here is to your last bulletpoint. Good faith and “civility” are not necessarily the same thing. Tensions run high around here sometimes because “downvote and move along” is not only against our ideology but our downvotes are also disabled for the same reason. In a lot of situations asking someone to “act civil” or “be nice” are akin to gaslighting. As MLK Jr. said “Peace is the presence of justice, not the absence of conflict”.
That said “fuck off and read this book” is the worst of the “bad faith” you can expect here, whereas in an alt-right instance you can expect to be dismissed with a slur if you go against the grain.
We also (thankfully) have much less of this than a lot of other leftist communities. People are usually willing to explain, for instance, how reductive a term like “authoritarian” is rather than just dropping a link to On Authority.
I appreciate that a lot and am blown away by the effort people have put into this thread. I find it to be pretty classist to just tell people to “read a book”. Certainly it makes sense if you feel like someone is interested totally trying to play devils advocate/suck emotional labor out of you but I have definitely seen it in response to more well meaning questions.