Yes, I'm serious and I will tell you why. Wee Mama wrote a diary about making your case and how to have a civil discussion. I wrote my response and I will share it here.
The pyramid is an interesting take on how to have a discussion online, but I don't believe it is an accurate take on how discussions progress. Most times the discussions people are having around here start out at the top of the pyramid. People use their links and are cordial to each other. When the problems start arising is when the same people are presenting the same facts day after day week after week and no one on either side of the discussion is doing anything to change the other person's mind. At this point people wonder why the other person isn't agreeing with them. In an ideal world we would ask the person, they would answer and we would have gained some perspective as to why this person thinks about the issue this way and the two people would leave it at that and move on.
This is the crossroads of a discussion relationship. How do you let it go at "that" when you frequent the same site and talk about the same general topic(politics) and it usually involves a lot of what you agreed to disagree about in another thread. Do you just accept that person thinks the way they do and interact with them accordingly or do you continue to fight the same fight day after day week after week month after month?
I guess my point is your pyramid doesn't take into account familiarity with the people you are discussing things with. You can assign malice and intent if you are familiar with the person you are talking to. You can call them out for saying the same shit all the time. You can go after the tone because you are familiar with this person and how they usually come across tone wise.
I am of the belief that familiarity leads to contempt and we have some serious contempt floating around on both sides of this site. I don't know how to cure contempt.
I was wrong. We can do something about contempt. We can demand that Markos shut down his site. We can't stop ourselves from fighting, we can't stop ourselves from HRing nonsense, we can't stop the petty bickering we all know is stupid but we still do it. We need to be saved from ourselves.
So SHUT IT DOWN
Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Shut it down until after the new year. We are spinning our tires and we are beating on each other. We are not going to have the energy to fight next year when the Republicans need to be beaten. We don't need to shut the site down, but walk the fuck away, people.
GO BE A LEAF. TWIRL. JOIN IN THE HARMONY OF CREATION. STOP FLUSHING TOILETS. PLAY NINTENDO NUDE. SNORT SUGAR. BURN DOWN A WHOLE FOODS. BE YOU. JUST WALK AWAY