A nice post. Sorry I missed it on the first go round.
I don’t think that people here are so much disputing the claim that civility has diminished in the past few decades as they are saying “So what?”
In other words, they don’t care. It’s fine with them. Where they think stupidity comes in is in criticizing it, failing to realize that greater civility would make their own lives both safer and more pleasant.
But of course civility requires discipline and discipline is anathema to permissiveness. The entire purpose of permissiveness is for people to be able to act however they want and everyone else be damned. So when someone comes along saying that it would be better if things were more civil, they get laughed at and derided and called stupid, when what the problem really is is that the people doing the name-calling simply don’t want to have to exercise the discipline that would be required if they were to behave with more civility.
A perfect example of this can be seen in all the wailing and hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth that went on around here simply because Ed Zotti decided to put a stop to vulgar name-calling in the Pit. The mere idea that people might have to discipline themselves rather than blurt out the first obscenity that comes to mind resulted in innumerable ATMB protest threads, two spin-off boards and the defection of many prolific longtime posters. (It should be noted that Ed, who is clearly not a dolt, was also called old-fashioned, stupid, a prude, dictatorial and most of the other insults that I come in for as well.)
So this is why I don’t mind when people around here call me stupid. I know that the real problem is that they just don’t want to have to act like grown-ups, but neither do they want to admit that, so they resort to calling me old-fashioned, stupid, a prude, yadda, yadda, yadda.
And my apologies, Loach. I know I said I was gone for the night, but since my absence seemed to result in little but making way for the trollery of Tenebras, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to jump back in.