Discomfort

To expand on this and this, after giving it some more thought I think what really bothers me is not so much disagreement (which is, after all, an unavoidable aspect of interacting with other people at all) as the tone that tends to accompany it at Unfogged.  It really does seem like the place is full of people who are determined to be gratuitously mean to each other as often as possible, even over the smallest and least important differences.  I can understand this to an extent in arguments about politics and other contentious areas like religion and gender roles, where many people have strong opinions and are naturally inclined to express them vigorously, and I deal with that mainly by just not reading the political threads.  What I don’t understand, though, is why certain people (okay, usually B, but not just her) feel the need to adopt that same angry, contemptuous tone when arguing about totally trivial matters of personal taste.  The original argument in that thread, about mangoes, is a good example of this.  Though this sort of thing, I now realize, is meant entirely in fun, I just can’t understand how someone could find it fun.  To me it just feels like wildly disproportionate cruelty to anyone who expresses a contrary opinion, no matter how innocuous or mildly phrased, and it creates an atmosphere where people (okay, me, but there are probably others) are afraid to express their opinions on even the most anodyne subjects for fear of being screamed at for hundreds of comments.

This is, I am realizing, really all about tone rather than substance; I’m not uncomfortable with strong differences of opinion being expressed, as long as they are expressed civilly and respectfully without any needlessly inflammatory language.  Since preferences about conversational tone are obviously matters of personal taste that differ wildly from person to person, I don’t want to suggest that people change their tone for the sake of my feelings, and I also realize that there’s a problematic gender angle to complaining about women being “uncongenial” or whatever (although I don’t intend this to be a gendered complaint, it’s nonetheless true that the main person who irritates me this way is a woman).  This is, of course, reminiscent of some very unpleasant arguments about tone and gender at Unfogged in the past, and I don’t want to reopen those wounds.  It’s just that the confrontational tone and attitude that seems to prevail over there most of the time is deeply alienating to me, and it makes commenting there pretty unpleasant much of the time.  Which may not be a big issue for most people, but it’s a problem for me because I do like the group there and I’d like to be able to have calm, respectful discussions about interesting topics with them, and Unfogged seems to be an increasingly poor place to do that.

Some people in that thread suggested that the stuff I was complaining about is actually good for the conflict-averse, because it provides a safe venue in which to become more comfortable with conflict.  There’s a certain amount of sense in that, but as I pointed out in response, it’s not clear to me why Unfogged should have to be used that way even by people who don’t want to toughen up.  I’m not unfamiliar with conflict; I work in a law firm, so I deal with conflict all day, every day (from the perspective of an observer rather than a participant, to be sure, but that’s just analogous to reading a thread rather than commenting on it).  Reading Unfogged is what I do in my free time, and I don’t like having to deal with the same things I tolerate at work when I come over there.

I don’t really have a coherent argument to make here; I’ve just been thinking about this a lot lately and I had more to say than I could really fit into a comment thread at Unfogged.