I feel like Thomas was trying to contribute to this conversation by making an intellectually substantive on-topic remark and then you kind of trampled over that with vacuous content-free tone-policing.
It’s not content free! I gave a bunch of examples of useful heuristics for navigating discussions of tribalism in my other comment, and Thomas did the opposite of most of them (named groups by things they didn’t like rather than things they stood for, avoid carelessly reifying group attitudes, avoid needlessly relitigating old conflicts).
I also don’t think it’s tone-policing. It’s about how we talk about a subject that humans are pretty biased about. Seems about as tone policing as if I said “let’s try to discuss the problem from many angles before proposing solutions” and then someone came in and proposed solutions and I pushed back on that. There is real advice about how to discuss difficult topics well and it’s not all centrally free speech violations.
I think the thing Zack meant was content-free was your response, to Thomas’ response, which didn’t actually explain the gears of why Thomas’ comment felt tramplingly bad.
I see! That makes sense. I hoped it was clear from the surrounding context in the thread, but I will endeavor in future to link to my comments elsethread for reference.
I feel like Thomas was trying to contribute to this conversation by making an intellectually substantive on-topic remark and then you kind of trampled over that with vacuous content-free tone-policing.
It’s not content free! I gave a bunch of examples of useful heuristics for navigating discussions of tribalism in my other comment, and Thomas did the opposite of most of them (named groups by things they didn’t like rather than things they stood for, avoid carelessly reifying group attitudes, avoid needlessly relitigating old conflicts).
I also don’t think it’s tone-policing. It’s about how we talk about a subject that humans are pretty biased about. Seems about as tone policing as if I said “let’s try to discuss the problem from many angles before proposing solutions” and then someone came in and proposed solutions and I pushed back on that. There is real advice about how to discuss difficult topics well and it’s not all centrally free speech violations.
I think the thing Zack meant was content-free was your response, to Thomas’ response, which didn’t actually explain the gears of why Thomas’ comment felt tramplingly bad.
I see! That makes sense. I hoped it was clear from the surrounding context in the thread, but I will endeavor in future to link to my comments elsethread for reference.