Stuff like "stupid, idiot, moron, dumb," you know the ones. If you’re insulting someone for their shitty garbage beliefs and all you can manage to come up with is ways to insult their intelligence, appearance, or other aspect about them that has nothing to do with their cruelty and shittyness, you should maybe reevaluate.

Just saw a thread on here where a user was stubbornly refusing to adjust their language when another user politely pointed out that it was harmful to our comrades as well, and the person refusing was massively upvoted and the comrade trying to explain why it was harmful was downvoted. Thought we were better than that

I'm not calling anyone out, just wanted to make a post explaining my feelings on it and that when stuff like that happens (not the intelligence based insults, I know its hard to switch, but getting insulted for asking people to avoid them) it hurts and makes me feel less welcome here </3

Using words like “You’re being ignorant” or “That’s a cruel belief” is actually more effective than just going “lmao idiot”.

If those are the words you actually mean to convey I'd say use them instead :)

Edit: if the reception this post got isn't a good proof that this is something this community needs to grapple with, I don't know what is.

  • RedStarLesbian [she/her]
    2·
    4 years ago

    Well, just to let you know, I’ve enjoyed seeing your posts on here since I’ve joined. Hopefully people here can become more tolerant to actual discussion because this sort of reaction will certainly dissuade other marginalized people from speaking up again. It’s really sad.

    • QuillQuote [they/them]
      4·
      4 years ago

      Thanks comrade :')

      and yeah, it's really disuading me from speaking up again. Just wanting to have a discussion about something that causes me and my comrades harm being met with derision and invalidation hurts so much. I've long said this place feels like home, so to have this happen cuts pretty deep

      Edit to add: as time has gone on and more people saw this post it got a lot better

      • hogposting [he/him,comrade/them]
        1·
        4 years ago

        It's hard to create a community around dunking on chuds and not have any collateral dunking consequences. I'm optimistic we can improve on this, though.

        • RedStarLesbian [she/her]
          2·
          4 years ago

          Yeah, I agree. I feel like the advent of the effort post label should be used as a signal to switch off the dunk tank brain and engage civilly from now on.

        • QuillQuote [they/them]
          4·
          4 years ago

          Oh me too! Our greatest weapon "post hog" for example skirts this issue completely after all :)

          Not to mention focusing our insults on the bad things these bad people actually do and think sharpens our analysis and critique, it's good practice for drawing out exactly why it's not just "mean" but actually Bad that these people do what they do. No one cares if you call someone stupid on the internet, so what rhetorical value does it actually server?

      • RedStarLesbian [she/her]
        1·
        4 years ago

        To be honest, it’s the same reason I never made an account and posted on the original subreddit. If you need to take a break to do some self care, I would recommend it.

        • QuillQuote [they/them]
          2·
          4 years ago

          I will comrade, thanks. But until then I'm going to keep pushing the conversation so someone else doesn't have to :)

          I'm really glad you made an account and post on here btw. I hope this thread doesn't make you second guess your decision. I'm happy you're here <3