Sequitur brings up several different issues; I’d like to address just one of them here.
I think, if I’m interpreting Sequitur correctly, that he would agree with me that directly telling a person to “fuck off” is technically “rude,” but Sequitur argues that in some cases rudeness is justified.
One topic that we’ve really struggled with on the CoG forum is the expression of what we’ve called “righteous anger.” How, if at all, can someone express a justifiable grievance in a forum that requires “civil” behavior? Are we acting as “tone police” when we require civil language?
I started a separate thread about this on the Discourse Meta site, “Does civilized discourse entail tone policing?” which I think was a very interesting discussion, revolving around the CoC which Choice of Games and this forum both use. meta.discourse.org/t/does-civil … cing/50039
(I recommend that the moderators and Sequitur read it; it’s really quite good.)
In our case, we had a person belonging to a historically oppressed group expressing views like these about a group of people who has historically oppressed them (group “X”, where you could imagine it was referring to white people, men, or straight people):
- “In your last post, you did Y, which denigrates me. X people do that to me all the time”
- “I hate it when X people do Y to me”
- “X people are terrible because they do Y over and over again and show no sign of stopping”
We identified this as righteous anger, especially in case #1, where they were specifically calling out behavior that actually does denigrate them, and, in the same breath, tarring an entire group of people with that behavior.
Our CoC forbids “disrespecting any group of people” (including racism, sexism, transphobia, and other kids of bias), but I also have every reason to believe that the poster is absolutely right that X people denigrate them all the time. We would be picking sides (and we would be picking the wrong side) if we said, “you can’t say that X people are constantly oppressing you” when it’s absolutely true.
At CoG, we decided that we can allow for non-rude expressions of righteous anger but forbid expressions of hatred, e.g. “I hate X people because they oppress/oppressed me in the following ways: X, Y, and Z.” Hatred, we decided, is never righteous.
The gotcha is that “excessive” anger is indistinguishable from hatred, even if the anger is righteous. So there are limits on how anger can be expressed on our forum, even when it is righteous.
For example, we were clear that we wanted to uniformly forbid rude language targeted at individuals or identity groups, even when it was an expression of righteous anger.
But that doesn’t mean that we just delete any post that says “fuck you.” Usually we’ll edit rude posts to remove rude language if the rest of the post has a good point to make.
Neither is it acceptable to say “both sides have violated the CoC” when someone’s being attacked. As I said in the now-deleted “Take Take” thread, we are explicit that breaking the “don’t defend yourself or others” rule is inherently less bad than directly offending. We do take firm action against offenders, including temporary suspensions.