this applies to every conversation with you and everyone else - i'm sorry if these conversations tend to escalate but i'm just trying to express my thoughts without my head getting ripped off.
I feel exactly the same way. Most of the time I am really making innocuous comments or asking a question. And I am
not the type to back down when I feel like someone is coming at me, which is why I'll respond 150% to that stuff.
I think all of us (here and in the western world) need to re-learn how to talk to people, how to have normal discussions, and how to be wrong and how to be right. I think that here, us on this forum, we've got a chance to actually do that. We're in control here, it's our space. Maybe we won't change the world, but we can change ourselves to be better equipped to deal with a world that just doesn't give a crap about trying to better.
We can do better and for the sake of this community, we should want to do better. But we've gotta re-condition ourselves to handle these conversations. Our governments and corporations and overseeing power structures have intentionally muddied the waters, conflated issues, and turned up the rhetoric such that over the last ten years, we've subtly all forgotten how to be people. This is a cultural problem afflicting most of our societies in one way or another. And it probably isn't going to get fixed and we're going down this path now and the future is kind of bleak. And to me, that's an existential crisis and I haven't been able to deal with it for years now.
But I could be content if our community was able to reel it back in and we could somehow be better than we have been. Because you're right, I
am trying to act like I'm above it all because that is what I aspire to. I want to be above it because I know it is possible, but it's not the kind of thing one person can do. A community needs to mobilize around this idea for it to work, otherwise you just have disparate actors throwing all of their energy into an angry void, making themselves less-willing to be helpful and tiring them out.
Solutions?
Make a new forum section for politics and get that crap out of Everything Else. Put it in its own space so it can be managed like the hydra that it is. You suspend people from posting in that forum if they go over the line to be able to lay down some sort of punishment that is effective, and we go on with our lives. Of course we still have the same level of free conversation, but it'll be easier to turn it off and separate it from more constructive or fun topics. It's hard to post something irreverent in the Off Topic Topic when you've got a weeks old argument clearly visible at the top of the same forum thread and it was made personal longer ago than you can recall.
