I'm a very longtime Kossack, but I'm often out-of-step with some opinions on this site. Those who know me know how; the point of this diary is not to argue for my point of view.
The point is to help me think about how I can have disagreements with those who disagree with me in a less insult-spewing, pie-fighting manner.
Earlier today, I expressed a point of view in a recommended diary that, apparently, very few other people agreed with. That's fine. I don't expect people to agree with me. And I don't mind them arguing with me.
There are two things I do mind: first, being accused of threadjacking when I choose to defend myself from the people who are disagreeing with me; second, personal insults.
Now the latter are explicitly banned on this site. Recently, Meteor Blades has repeatedly said that they are HRable:
To repeat what I have often said, the key is that insults of all types are HRable. It doesn't mean that they HAVE to be HRed. Totally voluntary. Somebody who insults someone else and gets HRed for it shouldn't expect any relief form me. But users are warned when they UPRATE insults - because this encourages insulters to repeat their behavior.
I used to lob the occasional insult. But since this rule was brought to my attention, I've tried to cut back. And I didn't use any insults in the thread in question.
So when I started getting insults in return, against my usual practice, I HRed some comments that lobbed insults at me.
The result was a lot of uprating of the comments containing the insults...plus a slew of retaliatory HRings against me.
I've e-mailed MB about this and look forward to his helping clear up this mess.
It has reaffirmed my sense that HRs solve little; I look forward to returning to my usual practice of using them very, very sparingly.
But I'm left perplexed about how to deal with the underlying situation: we have many disagreements around here. And there's nothing wrong with that. But we should be able to do a better job of disagreeing civilly.
The situation I found myself in this morning--as the only person arguing an unpopular proposition--is a kind of extreme case. And let me stress again: I'm not wishing that those who disagreed with me would go away. I just want to feel that I can argue my side of such a case without being accused of threadjacking and without gratuitous name-calling.
(I've avoided even mentioning the substance of the political disagreement this morning because I don't think it's relevant. This is intended as a meta-diary about managing disagreements. I hope that conversations below will focus on that and not the substance of the other diary, which can be discussed over there.)
UPDATE (4:43 CDT):Meteor Blades says on the other thread that my HRs in question constituted HRing in a dispute and shouldn't have been given. I've removed them. He also says that people shouldn't have uprated the comments in questions, since each involved an insult. I assume, too, that the retaliatory HRs against me were in violation of the same principle I violated, since each was by someone involved in the original dispute. We'll see if any of them get taken down....