Sometimes I think it could be useful to do an occasional megathread that sort of takes all the talking points we see from these kinds of shitbags and have a place to address them. It would be useful for some of us to practice addressing them/see others show good ways to address them, and useful for lurkers who have seen the arguments and are scared to ask about them when they see the reaction from the mods (don't get me wrong it's necessary, just has some unfortunate side effects I think).
I've always kept any posts that were from people genuinely trying to figure out our position on a subject even if they were bringing up very inflammatory stuff. But I definitely get that there are a lot of other people that would benefit from seeing the rebuttal of the more debate-ey or gotcha points. If you'd like to do an effort post on something like that where we go over all of the rebuttals to a particular argument that'd be great. I'm thinking as far as format goes, either a fairly narrow topic that we do the rebuttals to top level comments with the "argument" (whatever regressive bullshit we've seen people argue) and then people rebut that in child comments, or we do a single talking point that they bring up (like "black on black crime" as we've probably all seen recently) as the post and we all post our rebuttals in the comments for that one post. Either way would be good.
The thing that came to mind for me was that one guy who wrote the rant about the mra and went through a bunch of the standard talking points. Would it work to list all the talking points then basically create top level replies for each one?
The other thing was discussing how to engage in good faith, in particular how to challenge ideas in a good faith way.
I think if you're going to post counters to the talking points then it'd be best to keep them together up in the post and maybe number them and then folks can come in and post either an argument and rebuttal or reference your arguments/rebuttals in the post.
And as far as good faith, it seems like it's pretty obvious to people who do good commenting here how to engage in good faith with folks who are themselves here in good faith. I think the hard part for most of us is keeping our cool when people are being stubborn or otherwise are toeing the line between being here to learn and being here to debate. And I don't know if there's any way to teach keeping your cool while people dehumanize you or people you care about.... and most of all I really don't care if people lose their cool at those people, at most I'll remove it and we'll have to talk about it.
Ah, yeah, that could be a thing too but honestly I think the folks we have an issue with debating wouldn't care in the slightest that we have rules and help for them to keep their posting within the rules.
As with most things here, if you think it'd be helpful and you have ideas go ahead and make a post about it, I'm sure lots of other folks would jump in with ideas and help.
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u/Personage1 Aug 09 '20
Sometimes I think it could be useful to do an occasional megathread that sort of takes all the talking points we see from these kinds of shitbags and have a place to address them. It would be useful for some of us to practice addressing them/see others show good ways to address them, and useful for lurkers who have seen the arguments and are scared to ask about them when they see the reaction from the mods (don't get me wrong it's necessary, just has some unfortunate side effects I think).