You’re just asserting that it would would be hard -or rather you are asserting that I am clueless about how hard it is- but you don’t actually provide a reason why. This isn’t adding anything to the discussion other than your personal opinion, though it is shared by many others. (It bothers me somewhat that you can get instant karma just for repeating what everyone else here already believes.) I can easily imagine you making that exact same post about how it’s impossible to have a reasonable discussion about religion, in the counterfactual world where religion was the taboo here instead of politics, and everybody would simply be repeating that piece of received wisdom instead of actually considering the issue.
Why should it be any harder than creating a culture where any knee-jerk or overly emotional reactions to politics get downvoted, in exactly the same way that any other knee-jerk or overly emotional posts on any other subject get downvoted? I will freely yield that politics especially lends itself to knee-jerk reactions, but that just means we need to take greater care than with other subjects. It’s not a fundamentally different problem than the overall “how can we keep discussions civil” issue. I have read plenty of comments elsewhere where people maintain that “you can’t have a civil discussion on the internet, it’s the internet”. Without a reason why this should be nigh-impossible, I don’t see why I should take your or their word for it, however.
You’re just asserting that it would would be hard -or rather you are asserting that I am clueless about how hard it is- but you don’t actually provide a reason why. This isn’t adding anything to the discussion other than your personal opinion, though it is shared by many others. (It bothers me somewhat that you can get instant karma just for repeating what everyone else here already believes.) I can easily imagine you making that exact same post about how it’s impossible to have a reasonable discussion about religion, in the counterfactual world where religion was the taboo here instead of politics, and everybody would simply be repeating that piece of received wisdom instead of actually considering the issue.
Why should it be any harder than creating a culture where any knee-jerk or overly emotional reactions to politics get downvoted, in exactly the same way that any other knee-jerk or overly emotional posts on any other subject get downvoted? I will freely yield that politics especially lends itself to knee-jerk reactions, but that just means we need to take greater care than with other subjects. It’s not a fundamentally different problem than the overall “how can we keep discussions civil” issue. I have read plenty of comments elsewhere where people maintain that “you can’t have a civil discussion on the internet, it’s the internet”. Without a reason why this should be nigh-impossible, I don’t see why I should take your or their word for it, however.