Enough with the lower post shaming on DU

[ancianita]

117. I feel you. You are right. This is an important issue for DU to think over.

You hit on an important issue for this community. I think DU at large wants what you want.

One of DU's strengths is that it wants to be a safe space for thinking through political and social issues. Especially its newer members, which you are obviously not.

DU is not perfect, but it should also strive to allow for imperfections. DU struggles to be good at allowing a range of opinion.

To do better DU has to be better than what you recently experienced. People need to pause, and stop impulsive posting. Disagreeing doesn't give one a license to be rude or judgmental. Just to ask a simple "Why do you think this?" could improve others' understanding of a lot of posts.

DU'ers can't engage in credible public discourse in the larger arena of politics if posters exhibit habitual judgmental, purist, or passive-aggressively rudeness. I say "habitual" because sometimes everyone here has made a regrettable post.

On the other hand, we're living in coarse, vulgar, narrowly ideological times, in a political arena debased by coarse, vulgar attack rhetoric of the most manipulative and tribal kind. Sometimes a person can get "caught up" in it.

There probably isn't one of us who hasn't taken a turn in writing a judgmental or rude response to another; we've all taken our turns at posts we've regretted as impulsive or rude.

I just ask that you please give DU the same kind of break you ask of DU. I hope your opinions are better received in the future, or at least left to stand as they are.