I quite liked Sentry's post
here.
Not only is there a lot of faux outrage on GAF there is also a great deal of one-upmanship in being the most progressive and sensitive - which leads to a lot threads being derailed by the slightest opportunity to be holier than thou.
Again, this is nonsense.
There is no competition to be the most progressive or the most sensitive. As I said before, you are operating under the presumption that people do not actually take offense at what you say, so everything that they say can be preemptively dismissed as the complaints of posturing whiners. I do not know why you do this, but it prevents you from having any understanding of why people are responding to you in the manner that they do.
And as far as derailing is concerned, if you say something ignorant on the subject of a topic, and people call you out on that, that is not derailing the topic. Even if you had said something ignorant on something unrelated - for instance, if you say something racist in a topic that was originally about sexism and the subject changes because of that - if I were apportioning blame for the derail, it would rest at the feet of the person who said something ignorant.
If you want to say that the tenor makes it difficult to have a conversation, fine. If you want to say that the way that the anger is expressed is unproductive, makes people overly defensive and afraid to interact for fear of being dogpiled, sure. But there's nothing faux about it.
And typically, the ones being 'outraged' seem to get a lot of leeway in being rude and condescending towards the 'offending' poster.
Let's be frank here: When I read those arguments, yes, I do see posters being condescending and rude to one another. But this is not something that is particular to one side or another, and you are as guilty of those things as anyone else is.
Meh. Agreement or disagreement isn't the issue. Already formulating notions without attempting to honestly engage one another is, and goes against reasonable discussion. I think that it's become quite a bit of a problem, but that's for people like you to decide on officially, or whatever. It is affecting the quality of discussion in threads that hold the most potential for such, though.
Well, I think we all go into these threads at this point with already formulated notions about the people we are interacting with and the subject matter. I don't know if that's a problem in and of itself. If there is a problem it is simply an issue of tone. That said, while I (usually) don't have a problem not letting my anger show, I can't seriously blame people for becoming angry when I see what they are angry about. And personally, I think if everyone posted like me it would be
boring here, so I don't want that.
I would be interested in seeing less overt calling for bans, cheering it on, and so forth, but the anger to me is, well, usually understandable.
And your old-school tastes are just fine, Mumei-bro.
Thanks~