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.
For sure, it's hard to get these out of your vocabulary because they're so common and frequently used. And I'm certainly not saying that anyone who uses these is a bad person. For me the thing I've been trying to do is target the specifics of why whatever the person said or did (that I might want to call stupid or whatever) makes me want to insult them. If its because they're a chud who has a despicable lack of regard for human beings that aren't themselves, then point that out instead. Now not only are you shitting on a chud, but you're explicitly targeting why you are, and its a useful exercise in analyzing why the things we disagree with are things we disagree with. It'd make us better rhetorically, I think.