Stuff like "stupid, idiot, moron, dumb," you know the ones. If you’re insulting someone for their shitty garbage beliefs and all you can manage to come up with is ways to insult their intelligence, appearance, or other aspect about them that has nothing to do with their cruelty and shittyness, you should maybe reevaluate.

Just saw a thread on here where a user was stubbornly refusing to adjust their language when another user politely pointed out that it was harmful to our comrades as well, and the person refusing was massively upvoted and the comrade trying to explain why it was harmful was downvoted. Thought we were better than that

I'm not calling anyone out, just wanted to make a post explaining my feelings on it and that when stuff like that happens (not the intelligence based insults, I know its hard to switch, but getting insulted for asking people to avoid them) it hurts and makes me feel less welcome here </3

Using words like “You’re being ignorant” or “That’s a cruel belief” is actually more effective than just going “lmao idiot”.

If those are the words you actually mean to convey I'd say use them instead :)

Edit: if the reception this post got isn't a good proof that this is something this community needs to grapple with, I don't know what is.

  • Civility [none/use name]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Additionally, as I said higher up in the thread

    Aside from being a really shitty thing to do to someone mentally/emotionally in the context of trying to do self crit/ideological recruitment this has the effect of saying to them “you’re too unintelligent to understand communism so you’ll just have to do what I the smart person who understands communism” says and overall creates the impresssion that communism is for smart people only. Which is very damaging especially in the capitalist anglosphere where a lot of the working class have been told that the reason they’re poor is because they were too stupid to get a real job.